Making His Own Medicine: Frederick Douglass' Self-Iconization As Cure for Cultural Duality

by Gerald Michael Rolfe


The African-American auto-biographical narrative is, among other things, a lesson in how one comes to terms with conflicting identities. While today we celebrate the diversity associated with our many “hyphenated-Americans,” we must still recognize that these Americans often face conflict between their cultural heritage and the dominant cultural milieu. For African-Americans, these conflicts have been especially troublesome. Those descended from African slaves have had to rebuild their heritage while simultaneously attempting to define and redefine their place in racist America. This process of cultural reclamation is, however, problematic to the individual. As Ronald C. Hall says, “the demands placed upon the individual by a black community reacting to the realities of racism often run counter to the needs of that individual in search of self-hood. This emerging identity is, therefore, both shaped by its community and at odds with it” (36). The result is a dual influence upon identity so difficult to integrate that W.E.B. DuBois described it as “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (45). Even those African-Americans whose Americanism began after the Emancipation, immigrants from around the world who usually arrive with cultural roots intact, are nonetheless dismayed when they discover that they, too, must come to grips with the mark slavery has made upon America. Not only do they face the stigma that racist American culture has forced upon African-Americans, but they must contend with the social pressures imposed by their ethnic community as well. In reading the stories written by African-Americans about their own lives, as well as the fiction informed by their cultural experiences, we discover that reconciling Americanism with Africanism is an elemental dilemma in self-identification.

It seems ironic, then, that the one narrative deemed to be the prototypical African-American autobiography is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Even putting aside the issue that African-Americans like Olaudah Equiano had written auto-biographical narratives long before Douglass (therefore casting a shadow on any claims to proto-typicality for Douglass’ work) there is still something noticeably different about Douglass’ narrative, something that makes it atypical as a work of African-American autobiography. While it is true that Douglass was known in his time as “ the ‘representative colored man’ of the [slave narrative] tradition” (Gates 47), this does not explain why historians later “seized upon Douglass’ life and works as subjects and as primary sources” (48). Frederick Douglass was a compelling man, and his legacy is more than worthy of our efforts to learn about it, but given the direction of African-American narrative in the time since his death, he can hardly be called a “primary source” of that tradition. Whereas subsequent autobiographical efforts by African-Americans have almost universally dealt with, to one degree or another, the problem of dual identity, Douglass obliterated this duality within himself, choosing instead to describe his life in much the same manner as Benjamin Franklin -- “as a model of American individuality and initiative” (Frederick 1747). The conclusion we might draw, then, is that it is not Douglass’ typicality as an African-American that forms the impetus for the enduring success of his narrative in American culture, but rather, the singularity of his Americanism, and the “success” he achieved in purging himself of his African identity in order to assimilate into the mainstream racist culture.

Twentieth-century African-American narratives, both fiction and non-fiction, are repeatedly suffused with the themes of community, roots, racial pride, and alienation from the dominant white culture. Their style is most often realistic, but many-textured nonetheless, and evoke feelings that have parallels in music. From the pathos of the blues and the anarchic spontanaiety of jazz, to the yearning sensitivity of soul and the outrage of gangster rap, African-American music, as an extension of the cultural narrative, is exemplary of the rich variety of experience that nonetheless is conveyed realistically, and that often springs thematically from the artist’s racial identity. Frederick Douglass’s narrative, then, far from being a prototype, is instead a conscious act of erasing his African-American duality. It is a narrative that, while being quintessentially African-American in its subject matter (unavoidably so, given the circumstances of Douglass’ life), is thematically about the creation of a single, heroic self. Douglass is not bound by a sense of duality -- in fact, rather than embracing his cultural heritage, his entire raison d’etre becomes a mission to transcend his racial identity, and to fight for a world where racial distinctions themselves become irrelevant. For example, upon noting that he takes great pride in the accomplishments of other African-Americans, Douglass said this was “‘not because I am a colored man, but because I am a man . . . I have no more reason to be proud of one race than another’” (Moses 81). As such, comparisons between Douglass’ narratives and African-American narratives that came later must be done with the realization that Douglass himself considered any distinctions according to his race to be meaningless at best, and “a positive evil” at worst (Moses 81).

Identity

Frederick Douglass was born a slave, the son of a slave woman and a white plantation superintendent. Douglass was not emotionally connected with his parents, and this may go far to explain the ease with which he eventually transcends, at least internally, his own ethnicity in the act of creating self. Douglass relates the conditions of his birth with a matter-of-factness that some would say denies the emotional debilitation he must have felt at having been deprived of the greater part of familial love. Regarding his feelings toward his mother, upon her death Douglass wrote, “Never having enjoyed . . .her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger” (Narrative 1758). It is not difficult to imagine that one who can feel no remorse over the passing of his mother, because she was a stranger, would similarly not mourn long over his own conscious decision to put his ethnicity to rest. Douglass, who was deprived of the nurture of his mother, who was stripped of any connection with an African cultural heritage, did not value his roots. This ambivalence toward his roots also can be seen in what Douglass says about his father: “The whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose” (1758). Douglass looked at his parentage as nothing more than the terms and conditions of slavery. While this rootlessness, enforced as it was by an inhumane institution, may be touchingly sad to us today, it was not so to Frederick Douglass. Rootlessness was, however, a crucial influence upon his identity, an integral part of how he ultimately came to define himself as an American. In a country populated by immigrants who, in striving for a new life, had turned away from their roots and toward a limitless horizon, Douglass was, ironically, ideally situated to create an identity that very much embodied the self-reliant, individualistic American. Through the act self-liberation, Douglass embraced the very values that ostensibly lay at the heart of American ideals.

Philosophically, Frederick Douglass was a rational man who believed in the importance of the individual. An Enlightenment thinker, he lived in an age when Enlightenment principles transformed the material world, bringing an explosion of innovation and wonder. Despite our present-day popular disdain for 19th-century American capitalism, and despite the ease with which we now pass negative moral judgments upon upon those who built our present materialistic culture, the fact remains that more was done to alleviate human suffering in 19th-century America than had ever been done previously. Recognizing this, and seeing it as affirmation of the Enlightenment philosophy he embraced, Douglass proclaims:

The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe. It makes its pathway under the sea, as well as on Earth. Wind, steam and lightning are its chartered agents . . . The Celestial Empire, the mystery of ages, is being solved. (“Fourth” 1722).

This personal philosophy was based entirely on the idea that man was supreme among the creatures of the world and that, through science, it was possible to know the nature of the universe and of God. Essential to the pursuit of knowledge, however, is liberty. To know the boundless universe, one must not be bound by slavery of any kind. Toward liberty, then, Douglass directed his young heart and took on his oppressor. bell hooks is only half right when she points out that Douglass “did not feel his manhood affirmed by intellectual progress . . . but when he fought man to man with the slave overseer” (90). It is true that Douglass defines the moment when he fought with Covey as “the turning point. . .[that] rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within [him] a sense of [his] own manhood (Narrative 1788). But hooks should have pointed out that this was only a starting point for Douglass, that before he could gain affirmation by intellectual progress, he had to gain the rudimentary freedom necessary for intellectual pursuit. One would be hard pressed to look at the entirety of Douglass’ life and not see that he gained affirmation for his manhood in abundance -- through his children, through his efforts as an abolitionist, as a fighter of discrimination against blacks and women, as a writer, and as a husband. By securing his own freedom first, Douglass was able to go on and fight for the rights of all individuals against oppression, and in this he was true to his principles throughout his life.

In that Frederick Douglass was a self-emancipated slave as well as a rational thinker in the mode of the Enlightenment, he personified the ideal American. In a country that supposedly flourished self-reliance, liberty, and freedom, Douglass was that country’s ideal son. Still legally a slave, and a fugitive, Douglass spoke to a crowd in Rochester, New York on July 4th, 1852, where he affirmed his belief in the ideals upon which America was founded -- “The principles contained in [the Declaration of Independence] are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost” (“Fourth” 1707) -- even as he was implicitly criticizing the hypocrisy of an America which allowed slavery even as it professed to great principles. Nothing is more “American” (unless we include the accumulation of great wealth) than standing on principle against an oppressor and against great odds. A country born of its own righteous insolence, the United States encouraged men like Douglass, even if it did not expect those men to be non-white. Of great Americans, Douglass said:

In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests. They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men, but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance, but that they knew its limits. They believed in order, but not in the order of tyranny. (“Fourth” 1708)

He was speaking of the American revolutionaries of 1776, but Douglass stood there as a man who had built himself on that model. As such, before the crowd whose country sanctioned slavery, the antithesis of its own ostensible ideals, the slave had claimed the moral high-ground, and seized the conscience of many in the nation. Douglass asserted himself before the country -- standing in defiance of unjust laws he stood instead for a higher law, and in that he was entirely, ideally, an American.

A fitting contrast to Douglass’ narrative is the essay “Notes of a Native Son,” by James Baldwin. Much of the difference between the two is exemplary of the differences between Douglass’ and most other African-American narratives of the twentieth-century. James Baldwin was born in Harlem, the son of a Baptist preacher and a home-maker. While his feelings for his mother seemed benignly filial, Baldwin’s relationship with his father was something else again -- it defined him utterly. Looking at that relationship, we can see the roots of Baldwin’s identity formation, and how Baldwin used those roots to reach for nourishment deep into the rich soil of his heritage. After his father’s funeral, Baldwin writes, “All of my father’s texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. This was his legacy, nothing is ever escaped” (“Notes” 113). Baldwin believed that his own identity was inextricably bound with those who had come before him, and his father was the direct link to that heritage. Unlike Douglass, this caused Baldwin to confront the duality of African-American existence, a duality he refused to relinquish, though it haunted him for the rest of his life.

At the end of his essay “Many Thousands Gone,” Baldwin concludes with what could easily be construed as an indictment, albeit a tacit one, against Frederick Douglass’ conscious decision to transcend his ethnicity. Baldwin criticizes what he calls “the dream of all liberal men, a dream not at all dishonourable, but, nevertheless, a dream” (45). He is referring to the dream held by many, most notably, perhaps, Martin Luther King, Jr., of a “color-blind” society. So convinced is Baldwin that the roots of African-American experience are integral to individual identity that he insists all efforts to transcend one’s ethnicity are tantamount to destruction and cultural homicide. As he says of the assumption that color-blindness is the key to a better way of American life:

This assumption once accepted, the Negro in America can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality, the distortion and debasement of his own experience, surendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity and which make themselves manifest daily all over a darkening world. (45)

Baldwin insists, again and again, that the duality must remain with the African-American, not only proclaiming the inseverability roots, but claiming American identity as well. When all is said and done, Baldwin says that “Negroes are Americans and their destiny is the country’s destiny” (“Thousands 42). If that is the case, then, it would seem that a man like Frederick Douglass is an anomaly in the African-American experience.

According to Baldwin, Frederick Douglass simply could not have been. Or perhaps, Baldwin would say, Douglass’ life was lived in an attempt to escape that which proved to be inescapable. There is some evidence to that. After all, Douglass spent much energy trying to throw off the fetters of racial labeling. In Wilson J. Moses’ essay, “Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized Writing,” we learn that “by 1889 [Douglass] was openly speaking against ‘the cultivation of race pride,’ saying, ‘I see in it a positive evil’” (80-81). Moses notes that, for all the success Douglass realized as a public figure, he owed much of that success to his origins as a slave and an abolitionist, and was thereby “able to achieve only a partial literary emancipation, and he was fated never to attain any public image beyond that of a racial writer and spokesman” (81). So Douglass, the self-made man, wrought in the image of Horatio Alger’s finest heroes, did not escape his ethnicity anymore than the transcendentalists could escape their flesh.

Gerald Michael Rolfe

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “Many Thousands Gone.” In Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1984, 24 - 45.
---. “Notes of a Native Son.” In Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1984, 85 - 114.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In American Literature, vol. 1. Ed. Emory Elliott, et al. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1991, 1750-1812.
---. “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol 2. Ed. Paul Lauter. Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1990, 1704 - 1723.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet, 1969.
“Frederick Douglass.” In American Literature, vol. 1. Ed. Emory Elliott, et al. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1991, 1747 - 1749.

Gates, Henry Louis. “Wheatley to Douglass: The Politics of Displacement.” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 47-65.

Hall, Ronald C. “The Limitations of Community in the Autobiographies of Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” Parnassus, Vol. 6, Spring 1996: 36 - 41.

hooks, bell. “Reconstructing Black Masculinity.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992, 87 - 113.

Moses, Wilson J. “Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass and the Constraints of Racialized Writing.” In Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 66 - 81

Roses for the Playwright: Acknowledging Aphra Behn's Feminism in The Rover

by Gerald Michael Rolfe


“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn . . . for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” --- Virginia Woolf, 1929


Whenever we ask of a particular person, “Is she a feminist?” it always begs the preliminary question, “What is a feminist?” After all, when persons as politically diverse as Andrea Dworkin, Camille Paglia, and Ariana Huffington all call themselves feminists, it is apparent that there is some flexibility in the term. If we are to determine whether or not Aphra Behn was a feminist, then, we need to define what we expect of her. Given that her world is essentially alien to our own, we must also be careful not to imprint our own narrow cultural presumptions in seeking the answer. Even the most righteously militant of feminist voices today would find themselves in treacherous straits were they to navigate in Behn’s culture. Any value judgments we make, then, cannot ignore the very different society for which Aphra Behn wrote.

We might take an extreme route. We might say that a feminist would not place her characters in a setting that mirrored her own sexist patriarchal society, that such a placement was capitulation to the male oppressors in that society. But if we say that, we are just punishing Behn for the misfortune of being born in a society that kept women down. We cannot discount her historical circumstances which, for better or worse, were a paradigm within which she had to work if she was to achieve success. Alternately, we could accept a more relaxed standard, one that would have Behn be a feminist simply because she succeeded at a “man’s job” in a society that did everything it could to keep a woman from succeeding at anything professional. But this would deprive us of Behn’s point of view, and would be a patronizing assertion that just because she achieved success she must have believed in feminist principles. It could easily be argued that the existence of successful anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly contradicts such assertions. Instead, we should do Behn the honor of reading her words. Perhaps the fairest thing to do would be to identify fundamental feminist principles, principles essential to anyone’s definition of feminism, and look to see how Behn’s characters either advance or inhibit those principles in the course of one of her plays.

If upon nothing else, all feminists agree that women either are, or should be, equal participants in society. Gender equality, then, is a principle we will assume to be fundamentally feminist. Many women assert that a belief in gender equality alone makes one a feminist. But there are many notable others who say that activism is essential. They believe that one must be an active participant against, or a vocal critic of, the forces which oppose gender equality. If we use this latter standard, we can satisfy advocates of both viewpoints, because activism certainly presupposes belief. When observing Aphra Behn’s characters in The Rover, then, we find the theme of gender equality as well as activist tendencies. Behn creates strong female characters who interact with weak male characters. The women are not only equal to the men, but they are actually superior. Likewise, her women are activists. They control the action in the play, and they are critical, both implicitly and explicitly, of the patriarchy that controls them. To know Behn’s characters is to know her heart and mind on the subject of gender equality -- the characters in The Rover are proof that Aphra Behn was a pioneering voice in the struggle for the rights of women.

One of the most apparent aspects of Behn’s feminism, from the standpoint of characterization, is the fact that The Rover’s male characters are unsympathetic stereotypes. From Willmore, the irrepressible rake, to Blunt, the crude and not very amusing country bumpkin, Behn mans her drama with ‘good ol’ boys’ in order to make fun of the ways of men in her society. Even the ostensible hero, Belvile, is ultimately a reprobate who would eschew his humanity in favor of going along with the other men in a vile crime. When Florinda is in danger of being raped, Belvile is ironically unwilling to help her. Because of his supposed loyalty to the patriarchy (whose marriage rules he nonetheless subverts in secret), Belvile does nothing. Instead he frets -- “Yet if I hinder ‘em, I shall discover all” (108). Belvile cares more for appearances among his precious network of men than he does for the woman he supposedly loves. In that, he is the stereotypical dog-of-the-pack, the man defined more by his place in the patriarchy than by anything residing in his own mind. None of Behn’s men are whole -- none of them possesses the will to act against the system, even when they find it abhorrent.

The only thing the men in The Rover do, in fact, that is not directly linked to their habits of fraternal ‘groupthink,’ is pursue the mindless urgings of their libidos. Where Behn’s women affect the plot through their exercise of reason, or at least through a sincere passion rooted more deeply than lust, the men are epitomized by Willmore, who behaves like a sperm cell. His motive is lust, and his manner is urgency. Willmore’s entire philosophy, such as it is, is revealed in his attempt to seduce Florinda in the garden where he begs, “Prithee, dear soul, let’s not play the fool and lose time---precious time . . . Why, thou mayst be free with me: I’ll be very secret. I’ll not boast who ‘twas obliged me, not I; for hang me if I know thy name” (66). Behn is not catering here to the male facility to enjoy anonymous sexual encounters, she is making fun of it. Willmore’s dialogue throughout is a parody of the carpe diem poems so popular at the time. But even here he is lying to achieve his ends. After all, the value of a sexual encounter to the rake is not just in the having, it is in the telling. There are bragging rights to be gained, the opportunity to strut before one’s fraternal brothers and tell them you got “all the honey of matrimony, and none of the sting” (52). The women, ultimately, are most prized as tools to achieve and maintain status among the men. And so, Behn is not seduced by her rake. She is here to expose him, and the patriarchy which supports him. Surely she has no romantic illusions as she has Willmore tell Florinda that even were he to rape her he would not be punished because “a judge, were he young and vigorous, and saw those eyes of [Florinda’s] would know ‘twas they gave the first blow, the first provocation” (67). Blaming the victim, it would seem, has been with us for a very long time, and Behn wants her audience to look and judge for themselves.

Behn plays the activist because she brings forth these stereotypical behaviors in order to criticize them, not to idealize them. Willmore is consistently foiled in his attempts to bed “virtuous” women, while his success with Angellica is made fun of by rendering it farcical. Everyone in Behn’s audience surely could appreciate the ironic absurdity of the testicularly-motivated male’s fantasy come true, where the aloof and indifferent courtesan not only falls for her suitor, but pays him to boot. It is easy to imagine the raucous Restoration audience, especially the women, roaring with laughter over that one. Blunt, too, is foiled in his attempt to rape Florinda. Though a woman who was not the property of other men was considered a whore, and therefore fair game for the rapacious, Behn does not satisfy this base violence. While a male playwright would probably also not have satisfied his bumpkin in this manner, at the very least he would have had Belvile dash to the rescue. Behn cannot bring herself to do even that, so convinced is she that the bonds of fraternity are stronger than the professed adoration of young men seeking their love object, an object they value for sexual reasons only. Instead, Valeria must save her kinswoman from the hostile force posed by men in a group. Where Belvile is ironically rendered impotent by his association with the patriarchy, Valeria is able to easily control the relentless male procreative impulse, represented here by the pursuing Don Pedro, with a diversion. Behn’s women, as always, are stronger. The men are so weak that they will even abuse the women they love rather than transgress their own archaic fraternal codes, codes which themselves encourage the abuse of women.

The primary code of action, and of central importance to these male characters, is the code of “honor.” For Behn, the pursuit of honor provides numerous opportunities for humor -- but it is humor with a bite. Because the women in the play are subjected to cruelty and commodification as a result of the male pursuit of honor, Behn criticizes the notion, along with its concomitant double standard, by making fun of it. Behn is so adept that she even manages to bring humor into the potential gang rape in Act V. In what we are to regard as a typically male way of resolving disputes, the boys all draw their swords to see whose is the longest -- the winner gets to be the first to rape Florinda. The sexual metaphor is blunt, and funny, at least on the surface. Again, it is the farce that Behn uses in order to lighten a serious situation. But the subtext is a very different thing. Where honor is that which requires the comparing of phallic symbols in order to establish position within the patriarchy, it becomes a thing to be ridiculed. How even more ridiculous to think that these fellows would continue to draw swords to resolve disputes more than once -- we would expect they might know who has the longest sword after the first draw, rendering the procedure moot. But it is Behn’s joke. She too thinks male bluster in pursuit of honor is something to be laughed at. Laughed at, that is, if it weren’t for the fact women’s lives are destroyed under the practices of such folly. If it is not funny, then, it is at least something to be made fun of.

It is not by accident that Don Pedro ends up drawing the biggest sword. Here, Behn is criticizing the commodification of women. Because Don Pedro owns Florinda according to his code of honor, he also owns and controls his sister’s sexual being. To Behn, this is not so far removed from rape itself. When he is chasing his disguised sister in order to rape her, Don Pedro says “As if I did not know ye, and, and your business here” (109). The line is highly ironic -- he does know her business because it is his business, that is, he is in the business of selling his own sister as sexual property. Behn would have us know that this is the ugly essence of arranging a woman’s marriage -- the father or brother is no better than a pimp and, like a pimp, he may as well be helping himself to what he offers on the open market. It is not, at its root, a pretty picture, and it is not supposed to be. Don Pedro, being a man of highest honor, is “better bred than not to leave her choice free” (109). Again, the dramatic irony is that he has prevented Florinda from exercising her freedom of choice in perhaps the most intimate aspect of her being, her sexuality. In criticizing this, Behn is way ahead of her time, and arguing against a mindset that is still common in the world today.

As one-dimensional and shallow as are the male characters in The Rover, we know it is not for Behn’s lack of facility with her craft, because her female characters have spirit, personality, and depth. It is they who move the plot where it must go, and they who aim the brainless compulsions of the men toward something resembling an acceptable resolution. Even Angellica, who plays the scorned woman, is more than just a stereotypical female reactionary -- she is a character, in fact, who initially has all the societal sensibilities of a man, but who becomes feminine again through her ability to love. It is this contrast between the characterization of men and women that makes the strongest argument in favor of Behn’s feminism.

It is difficult to say who is more compelling, Angellica or Hellena, but the latter is certainly the play’s heroine. Hellena is strong from start to finish. As to her brother’s assertion that she shall enter the convent (so he may be rid of the worry of her as a sexual commodity) she is self-assured in her aside: “Shall I so? You may chance to be mistaken in my way of devotion. A nun! . . . No, I’ll have a saint of my own to pray to shortly, if I like any that dares venture on me” (13). It is Hellena who is in charge of Hellena’s sexuality. No brother will force her into celibacy, and no rake will convince her to surrender her chastity prematurely. And it is not because she is cold or indifferent. On the contrary, Hellena is as lusty as any of the men who inhabit the play. In fact, we glimpse the depth of Hellena’s desire when she says to Willmore, “He that will be satisfied with one kiss will never die of it” (123). Here we smile at the rake being upbraided by the virgin for the fact that his passion is a trifle compared to her own -- more masterful Behn irony. And Hellena’s comments are not reserved simply to her own circumstances. At the beginning, we see where she, and through her, Behn, stands on the issue of arranged marriage. The image Hellena draws of such marriages is clear: “…the giant stretches itself, yawns and sighs a belch or two as loud as a musket, throws himself into bed, and expects you in his foul sheets” (12). The reason for such unappetizing imagery is because Behn finds the arranged marriage distasteful, and Hellena, as her heroine, serves her as a most outspoken detractor of the practice.

Angellica is, like Hellena, a woman who controls her own sexuality. In a world where it is the men who commoditize and market women, Angellica is nearly unique in that she markets herself, and yet remains above the label of “whore.” That she so easily acquiesces to her own commoditization is not a derogation of her, but it is again a criticism of her society. Angellica is strong because she meets the male world on her own terms -- she recognizes the only aspect of her being upon which she is allowed to profit, her sexuality, and then exploits it to procure her survival. Unfortunately for her, she has become hardened, deciding that “inconstancy’s the sin of all mankind, therefore nothing but gold shall charm [her] heart” (35). It is in this state that Angellica’s attitudes toward sex mirror those of the men in the play. The difference for her, however, is that she succumbs in short order to the “general disease of [her] sex . . .being in love” (35). Where none of the men ever grow out of their inclination to objectify and commoditize, Angellica becomes a whole woman again. She throws away all thoughts of herself as a product, and merely strives, upon an albeit misguided passion, to complete a union of love with Willmore. We are left to think it is Angellica’s loss and Hellena’s gain that Willmore is finally to wed Hellena, but given Behn’s propensity for irony, she could not have helped thinking privately that Angellica ended up with the better part of the bargain.

Behn’s women overshadow her men because Behn herself had a feminist conception of men and women. She recognized the gross injustices of her time, recognized that men expended an extraordinary amount of energy either pursuing women to use them, or keeping them in their place so that other men would not use them without first paying a price. But she must have also recognized that she was not entirely outside that reality. Like Angellica, Aphra Behn was an entrepreneur, an independent woman operating in the perilous waters of the male economy. Also like Angellica, she would most certainly have adopted some male attitudes in the process. We can therefore criticize Behn for what we perceive to be her catering to the male point of view. We can say that because her rake gets the girl in the end, and because certain distasteful societal notions about rape were exposed during the play, that Behn was just a patsy to the ubiquitous patriarchy. But to do so, we would have to be as unjust as her sexist society. We would have to ignore her wit and ironic humor, and we would have to ignore that her female characters care about one another, and are not merely trying to scratch each other’s eyes out as they compete for men.

No doubt Behn could have created men who controlled the plot, men who were more than hormones and clever pub platitudes spouted to impress their buddies. But she didn’t. Instead, she gave us Hellena, who told about the evils of arranged marriage, and who scrambled with her own healthy libido far away from the cloistered confines of the convent. She is the autonomous female will, the one that demands that dealing with her “‘tis but getting [her] consent” (122) -- but what a revolutionary concept that was in a world where only male consent had the status of law. Behn also gave us Angellica, who demonstrated the price a woman has to pay in order to survive in a world where men make women the stuff of barter. Angellica is equal to men in the game of buying and selling sex -- equal, that is, until she regains her humanity by remembering that “were [Willmore’s] fortune as large as is [his] soul, / [He] shouldst not buy [her] love” (45). And finally, or perhaps primarily, Behn gave us Florinda, the innocent abroad in a world that despises and abuses innocence, a woman who would have been raped by nearly every man in the play at one time or another if not for some fortuitous intervention. Florinda represents simultaneously that icon of purity and virtue that the men strive to possess, as well as that quality, innocence, that their possession ironically destroys. A such, Florinda elicits our sympathy as much as her tormentors arouse our contempt.

In contrast, Behn gives us men who are hardly worth the energy expended by her heroines to secure them in matrimony. The ineffectual Belvile would do best not to have daughters himself, because one suspects he will not be able to protect his “merchandise” when the bidding war begins subsequent to their puberty. His love lacks conviction, at least so far as going against the rules of patriarchy is concerned. Willmore is submitted as evidence that although rakish men are charming, and catchable, that they remain irredeemable and not to be trusted. His character does not develop so much as it succumbs to Hellena’s superior strength. Blunt and Frederick are the paltry scraps left over, with nothing at all to recommend them to womankind other than that one supposes they must somewhere, at some time, have had mothers. As we leave Blunt, he is still malevolent and vengeful, wishing “‘twere lawful to pull off . . . false faces that [he] might see if [his] doxy were not amongst” the otherwise merry assemblage (127). That Behn was purposeful in her characterizations is evident by our strong feelings either for, or in Blunt’s case, against them.

Given this contrast between male and female characters, it is not difficult to see where the playwright’s sentiments lay with respect to women in her society. Not only did she think them and portray them to be the equals of men, she created them to be better than the men under whose injustice they suffered. We should not be fooled into a false condemnation of the playwright. Just because she easily assimilated the forms and conventions of Restoration drama does not make her a dupe of the patriarchy that these plays often celebrated. It is often necessary for one to work from within various institutions if one is to effect change. Behn had legitimate criticisms to make regarding the lot of women in 17th and 18th century Europe. As such, she was able to reach a wider audience with her criticism by draping it in the familiar garb of the contemporary theatre. Outspoken women of her time were most often ignored, or regarded as mad. Behn’s genius was in her subtlety, in her ability to walk the fine line of humor and in so doing to expose the injustice she perceived. In this way, she was an active proponent of feminist principles while avoiding the vilification of those in power, and while reaching the widest possible audience for her message. In this she was exemplary of the satirical sensibilities of her age, but what is more, she was quintessentially a feminist, believing in gender equality, and practicing an activism to promote that equality. And just as importantly, Behn herself exemplified the principles of feminism by the example of her life, and by her success despite the odds against it. As such, Aphra Behn was a feminist by anyone’s definition, and is worthy of our respect and admiration for her social consciousness, her wonderful abilities with the pen, and finally, the strength of her own very abundant character.





Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. The Rover. Edited by Frederick Link. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.
Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol 2. 6th ed. Edited by M.H. Abrams, et al. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1993, p. 1961.

Hurry Up Please It’s Time / Hurry Up Please It’s Time

Catching the Midnight Lightning-Bolt Out of Wasteland Station

by Gerald Michael Rolfe

Foundation

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” -- Frederick Douglass

Richard Wright was a man who wrote from his experience. He knew slavery because he saw its reflection in the eyes of his four grandparents (Fabre, Quest 1). He knew poverty as an empty belly and as time spent at an orphanage when first his father, and then his mother’s money, ran out (Toppin 476). Injustice was a blurry white menace in the jealous Southern night, a force that murdered his successful uncle with mocking impunity -- hatred was the white faces of tradesmen who threatened Wright away from a career in the optical field simply because he was black (Toppin 476-477). Young Richard developed a rising bitterness even while living among devoutly Christian relatives, and his attitude toward blind acceptance of authority was rebelliousness (Fabre, Quest 5). His innate intelligence would not allow him to assume the role of subservient negro menial. Instead, the youthful Wright became enamored with books, and he became adept at writing. Inspired by, of all people, H.L Mencken, Richard began to read books that Mencken mentioned in his writings, and in the process he developed a growing facility for social critique (Toppin 477). In the course of aiming a critical eye at his own society, Richard became disillusioned with American democracy and capitalism, and he embraced communist ideals, ideals he felt certain would bring justice to black Americans. In this frame of mind, Wright moved to New York in 1937, determined to apply his talents to writing full-time, and his energy toward effecting radical social change. (Toppin 477)

Once in New York, Wright completed work on the novel he had been writing throughout the depression, a novel which has since been dubbed a “landmark” in American fiction. In Native Son, Wright created a character, Bigger Thomas, who simultaneously embodied the white stereotypes of the black male (“nigger” and “Uncle Tom”) as well as Wright’s own deepest feelings about what it meant to be a black man in racist America. The work was an instant success, and it was called the quintessential “protest novel.” On its surface, Native Son seems to be a straightforward protest against the injustices and moral hypocrisy of white America, its democracy and its capitalism. While this is undoubtedly the general purpose and thrust of Wright’s novel, Native Son contains a deeper thread of conscious inquiry, one whose roots are almost wholly philosophical. Though Wright most obviously wrote his novel in an attempt to stir up indignation at injustice and social blindness, his book is also a personal inquiry whose questions and themes are on a plane with all those novels generally deemed to be of the “Waste Land School,” after T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.”

Through Bigger, we can see young Richard Wright struggle with his own quest to understand reality -- the questions he asks are fundamental musings on human relationships, spirituality, and truth. While deep answers are not forthcoming in the static, deterministic universe of Native Son, the questions are indicative of what drove Wright forward. Underneath all the circumstances in Richard Wright’s life, beneath the heavy burden of labor in the murk of a racist society, there thrived a human spirit that ultimately refused to relinquish optimism. It was this spirit that drove Wright away from the hidden shackles in the Communist Party USA’s closet, that impelled him toward the freedom of expatriation, and that finally urged his leap into the boundless possibilities of existentialism. Like the lamenting mantra of Eliot, Wright’s novel looks at society with profound regret -- and yet there is, at the core of each artist’s work, a human heart that beats relentlessly like that of Petronius’ Sybil. In the Sybil, the opening image of Eliot’s poem, we see a lifeforce that will not succumb to even the gravest despair, that exists despite its own desire for death. The same power maintains Bigger in a similar state of deformity. Oppressed into a hulking fraction of his possible self by an intolerable society, Bigger’s lifeforce manifests itself perversely as murder. Neither the Sybil nor Bigger desires the life they lead, yet they are nonetheless driven to live from the ticking depths of their beings. This is what the state seeks to extinguish in Bigger Thomas, and what made the creation of Bigger an inevitable result of Richard Wright’s own immense will to exist and thrive and question his universe.

Fog

“Democracy is a form of religion, it is the worship of jackals by jack asses.” -- H.L. Mencken

“Liberals can understand everything but people who don’t understand them.” -- Lenny Bruce

There is an epidemic of blindness in Native Son. It afflicts those who embody the worst of human characteristics, as well as those with the best intentions. I t is a disability embraced by those who use stereotypes to usurp justice, and it is the weeping confession of those who do harm while trying to help. Reigning supreme over this kingdom of the blind is the white blur herself, grand matriarch of the uncomprehending society in which Bigger treads, Mrs. Dalton. Wright uses the blindness metaphor lavishly, inculcating the reader with the idea that society copes with the reality of its crimes by creating edifices of denial. Conservatives blind themselves to fact that blacks are human beings. Liberals blind themselves to their own complicity in the perpetuation of images of white superiority. Meanwhile, black men and women blind themselves to their wretched lot by embracing Christian values of self-sacrifice, or by escaping into a whiskey haze. Bigger’s relationship to this blindness does much to reveal Wright’s personal quest for knowledge and is why, apart from symbolic representations of blackness and whiteness, blindness is the dominant metaphor in Native Son.

When Bigger is in flight from the long arm of white “justice” he is comforted, even amused by the fact that those around him are blind to his guilt. Wright shows us how both conservative and liberal attitudes toward the black man work to promote their respective cases of blindness in a conversation between Mr. Dalton and private detective Britten. Britten says to Dalton, “you see ‘em one way and I see ‘em another. To me, a nigger’s a nigger” (Wright, 154). Britten is the classic hardcase for the status quo, thinking of Bigger as a “nigger” but believing so deeply in the superiority of whiteness that, though acknowledging Bigger’s potential as a troublemaker, he thinks the boy is too intimidated by white society to have killed Mary. When Mr. Dalton replies, “But he’s sort of a problem boy. He’s not really bad” (Wright, 154), we are hearing the flip-side of the same racist coin. Dalton can not possibly understand the forces at work in Bigger’s heart and mind, the forces which destroyed his daughter. He looks at Bigger and sees not Britten’s “nigger” but the ever obsequious “Uncle Tom.” Wright despises both stereotypes, and sees them as co-conspirators in the system of white oppression. Both work their insidious evil upon the consciousness of American society, and Bigger takes refuge in the wide open spaces where their prejudiced eyes cannot see.

Bigger’s family and his girlfriend Bessie are also blind. After killing Mary, Bigger sees his family in a new light, feels “in the quiet presence of his mother, brother, and sister a force, inarticulate and unconscious, making for living without thinking, making for peace and habit, making for a hope that blinded” (Wright, 102). T his is a revelation to Bigger, this knowledge that in order to maintain some semblance of inner peace, people would accept only those things from outside themselves which matched their expectations, their needs -- blindness as prescription for pain. Bessie used whiskey to blind herself to the drudgery of being a servant, “and Bessie’s whiskey was his mother’s religion” (Wright, 226). Wright, who was not blind, looked at the world through Marxist lenses, and knew that “religion . . .was the opium of the people” (Marx, 481). Religion demands a suspension of our perceptions to the extent that those perceptions contradict the objects of our faith. Wright has no use for such blind faith, because he sees all around him what it has done to his black brothers and sisters. Even as Bigger feels the seductive power of the preacher’s private sermon in his jail cell, he knows that it is not for him -- “he had killed within himself the preacher’s haunting picture of life even before he had killed Mary” (Wright, 264). Bigger can not embrace the opium of the blind masses because he, like Wright, has eaten from “the tree of knowledge” (Wright, 264). To eat that fruit, to believe fervently in the stark images of pain and injustice that flood one’s own perception, means that one can never return to the solace of blindness. And yet Bigger does not want that solace, and hates anyone, even his mother, who takes refuge in its darkness.

Bigger sheds his own blindness only after accidentally killing Mary. He sees then how the act itself has liberated him from the determinist’s trap, the belief in the negation of the efficacy of one’s own will. However perverse Bigger’s feelings of elation after the accident in Mary’s bedroom, they are an understandable phenomenon in one who suddenly realizes that “the feeling of being always enclosed in the stifling embrace of an invisible force [has] gone” (Wright, 142). Where Bigger has been trapped in a blind world, unable to see the forces swirling around him, suddenly he is “living, truly and deeply, no matter what others might think, looking at him with their blind eyes” (Wright, 225). Bigger ironically becomes Tiresias -- having looked at life from within, as an oppressed pawn of the white ruling class, and without, as a destroyer of the white man’s most cherished “possession”, he achieves, with his act of destruction, a more penetrating gaze upon the human condition. Like Tiresias, who alone sees the entire substance of Eliot’s vision in “The Wasteland,” Bigger, both victim and victimizer, moves beyond all other characters in his quest for life’s deeper truths, becomes the seer “throbbing between two lives” (Eliot, 218). He is an agent, then, for Wright’s own quest for a meaningful understanding of reality.

Wright uses Bigger in his own search for truth, uses the questions that come from Bigger’s unique perspective to help him grapple with the myriad notions careening in his head as he confronts life as a young black man. Whether wondering about the insane predicament of an oppressed minority in a democracy that sanctions only the tyranny of the majority, or musing upon a potential connection between human beings that reached beyond thick, prison walls, Wright charged Bigger Thomas’ soulful introspection with his own inquiries on the human condition. Critics and readers have pointed out that Bigger is much more self-conscious than one would expect of a youth in his position, but that it is because it is Wright’s consciousness that fills Bigger’s head with these notions (Reilly, 394). It is this combination, the merger of Wright’s consciousness with Bigger’s unique perspective, that Wright then uses in order to probe into various questions of social and metaphysical significance. And it is evidence of Richard Wright’s enormous energy and intellect that even as his “protest novel” endeavors to open the eyes of a profoundly blind society of white racists, he keeps his own eyes scanning the wide horizons of human knowledge and experience for intimations of fundamental truths.

Fissure

“The aim [of the protest novel] has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe.” -- James Baldwin


“Wright’s forte, it seems to me, was in reflecting the intricate mechanisms of a social organization, its functioning as a unit.” -- Eldridge Cleaver

Richard Wright wrote Native Son when he was a member of the Communist Party, USA. He held a strong belief, at that time, “that the Communist Party had the means to end oppression” in America (Reilly, 396). Wright was drawn to the persuasive arguments of Marxist-Leninist theory, had the intelligence to apply those theories to his experience, and delivered his conclusions in the speech by Bigger’s attorney, Mr. Max. But Wright was not driven by polemical motivations, his raison d’être was not in the battle itself, but in the knowledge to be gained in the process. It is no wonder that Wright became disenchanted with a party that was as rigid in its adherence to structure and orthodoxy as any fascist system of government, that finally turned on him when he refused to exorcise himself of his own “personal vision of life” (Reilly, 396). Amiri Baraka had it almost correct when he said, “Wright was, even more than [Langston] Hughes, influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology, though Wright’s individualism and idealism finally sabotaged him” (Baraka, 319). What Baraka considers self-sabotage, James Baldwin sees as salvation -- ironically, Baldwin does not, in the end, allow Wright that portion of individualism that transcends his own racial identity. Still, it is Baldwin’s insistence upon the black American as an individual, along with the insistence of others that Wright was a spokesman for his race, that must be looked at together in order to see Wright as the entire human being that he was.

James Baldwin characterizes the experience of being a black American as having to struggle under the burden of a dual identity, of being both a “social negro” and a “human negro”. He argues that to understand Bigger solely in the mode of the protest novel, as a warning to white society, is to negate the human part of black identity. He fears we will buy into the stereotypes that Wright criticizes. Baldwin is concerned, he says, because “Native Son does not convey the altogether savage paradox of the American Negro’s situation, of which the social reality which we prefer with such hopeful superficiality to study is but, as it were, the shadow” (Baldwin, “Thousands” 42). Eldridge Cleaver, in his ad hominem diatribe against James Baldwin in Soul on Ice, wants to ignore this dichotomy of black life. Cleaver, who seems to be under the very spell he casts as Minister of Propaganda for the marxist Black Panther Party, views everything in terms of the social. Like Baraka, Cleaver abhors the anarchic force of individualism. Like the blind people who inhabit Native Son, Cleaver only sees that which tends to corroborate his own narrow vision. That is why Cleaver is so vehement in his attack on Baldwin, because Baldwin “has a superb touch when he speaks of human beings, when he is inside of them -- especially his homosexuals -- but he flounders when he looks beyond the skin” (Cleaver, 106). What lies “beyond the skin” is the social, the institutional, that which is readily systematized by Cleaver’s communist ideology. This is what he worships in Wright, what he somehow does not understand that Wright abandoned in the 1940’s. This is what Baldwin will always insist is only half of the equation. Both Baldwin and Cleaver, however, underestimate the fire burning in the belly of the man who created Native Son, and both are blinded to some facets of Wright’s genius by their own particular biases and concerns regarding the social aspects of Wright’s work.

When Eldridge Cleaver takes it upon himself to sing the praises of Richard Wright, he unwittingly does Wright a disservice. By insisting that the value of Wright’s work is in “his profound political, economic, and social reference” (Cleaver, 105), Cleaver sells short the moral philosopher who holds court in Bigger’s head. By looking at Bigger solely as a symbol of “political, economic, and social” forces acting upon and being acted upon by blacks, Cleaver misses the psychological intrigue of a latter-day Raskolnikov, and fast-forwards to the place where he can hear his own dogma erupt passionately from the lips of Mr. Max. Eldridge Cleaver is not interested to know that Richard Wright’s radicalism transcends communist ideology, because Cleaver is one who values the ideology precisely because of its authoritarian potential. Like Maulana Ron Karenga, who says that “art must reflect and support the Black Revolution, and any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid” (Karenga, 478), Cleaver believes in art only for its utility as a tool for propaganda. Cleaver talks about “the artist, whose duty is to tell us the truth” (Cleaver, 105) as if duty is somehow not inimical to the very process of artistic creation, as if duty is anything other than the fascist whip of the slavemaster to the mind and soul of the black American artist. Wright left that kind of attitude behind because it required submission to Communist Party discipline (Toppin, 477). In Richard Wright’s own words:

There is . . . beyond the boundaries of imperious politics, a common ground upon which we can stand and see the truth of the problem . . . Out of what vision must an artist create? The question seems vague but when it is conceived in terms of political pressure from Left or Right it has vital meaning . . . . I hold that, on the last analysis, the artist must bow to the monitor of his own imagination, must be led by the sovereignty of his own impressions and perceptions (Wright, Twice 258).

While Wright maintained many of the ideals that first attracted him to the Communist Party, his artistic spirit was not the stuff to be kept in bondage, his need for freedom too deeply held, and his sense of injustice, no matter from what quarter, too acute. For all his abilities in social analysis, Wright was foremost an artist, an individual driven from within toward a muse only he could see.

James Baldwin could easily have embraced Wright’s existential imaginative energy if only Baldwin had not dotingly ground upon an axe of dubious origin. From the time he wrote “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” until he rests his case with “Alas, Poor Richard,” Baldwin seems to labor under the weight of his own initial disappointment over Native Son, and his fear that the American public will see Bigger as a affirmation of their own prejudice against black men. In his essay, “Many Thousands Gone,” Baldwin makes a valid criticism of Wright’s novel when he says, “Native Son finds itself at length so trapped by the American image of Negro life and by the American necessity to find the ray of hope that it cannot pursue its own implications” (40). It is not difficult to agree with Baldwin that Wright is not able to answer Bigger’s myriad social and metaphysical questions given the environmental determinism and gross stereotyping at work in the novel, however that is hardly a reason to stereotype Wright himself forever after as a purveyor of negative black stereotypes. But this is what Baldwin seems to have done, and what drove a wedge between Wright and Baldwin that was to endure until death made that wedge irrevocable.

Baldwin delivers his estimation of Native Son when he says, “the failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended” (“Protest” 23). One is hard-pressed to imagine why the normally sensitive Baldwin is so blind to the purpose which motivates Wright. Surely he understands that Wright uses gross stereotyping in order to condemn the practice, and to show how it condemns black Americans. It might be that Wright’s images of black and white are too utterly close to the same images which filled Baldwin’s childhood nightmares, when he “discovered the weight of white people in the world” (“Notes” 88). Perhaps Native Son touches too closely to the source of anguish that made the teenaged Baldwin want to “do something to crush [the] white faces which were crushing [him]” (“Notes” 96). More likely, however, it is the fact that Bigger’s isolation from all the other black characters in the novel creates a “climate, common to most Negro protest novels, which has led us all to believe that in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse” (Baldwin, “Thousands” 35). Baldwin is acutely conscious of his connections to his ancestors and to his family, and it is no wonder that he views Bigger’s existence as inimical to his own perceptions of black existence. What Baldwin fails to take into account, however, is that portion of Native Son’ s thematic landscape that is common to its time, that exists beyond the narrower question of race and racism. “The Waste Land” stretched across the vast expanses of creative imagination in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and one might expect that Richard Wright was as intimate as were his contemporaries with various portions of its terrain. Baldwin, for all his deeper knowledge of the individual, for all his warnings to “the Negro in America” that he should not “acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality” (“Thousands” 45), insults Wright by judging his work entirely within the context of his race, as if a black man could not also be struggling with issues that went beyond his blackness. Baldwin fails to heed one of his own most important lessons, and though Richard Wright wrote Native Son as a protest against racist America, Baldwin underestimates the philosophical searcher who pondered much more than matters of race.

Both Baldwin and Cleaver looked at Wright and evaluated him according to his relationship to his social circumstances, that is, as what Baldwin would have called a “social Negro.” Cleaver, who devalues the individual at every turn, is at least consistent. Baldwin, on the other hand, with his more complex definitions and expectations of what a black artist should be, should have known better. He should have recognized and acknowledged that what motivated Wright, what constituted the substance and the heart of the man, was the force of his imagination, the anarchic human consciousness that transcended everything but that he was made of flesh and blood and bone. Wright’s skin, because it has to be considered, was still secondary to the personality within that created Bigger Thomas. Where Native Son is a novel of social protest, the personal story of Bigger Thomas within that novel is one of human bondage within the ugly, grinding gears of social machinery. We do not shed tears over the abstract notion of oppressed masses, but we do feel a lump in our throats as the condemned Bigger lies in a bunk and moves his lips “in a whimper of despair” (Wright 381). It is this human sympathy that Wright directs from his imagination into ours, and that has nothing whatsoever to do with race -- and everything to do with being a human being.

“Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.”

“A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Wolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.” -- T.S. Eliot, 1922


“Is this living?
Is this living here lost living?
Is this living here wondering why we have no future,
Enduring with our nerves the dread drone of our days,
Dreaming of a past irretrievably gone,
And feeling the dull breath of death in the wan flow of time?” -- Richard Wright, 1934

It is not necessary to argue that Native Son is, first and foremost, a work of protest literature -- this seems obvious enough on its face. Neither is it essential to argue that Richard Wright intentionally infused his novel with “Waste Land” themes -- he probably did not. Rather, it is enough to say that those themes are readily at work in Native Son, and to acknowledge their existence in both the novel and Wright’s own consciousness. It is this aspect of Richard Wright’s craft that points to the universality of his voice, to the human being behind the black man’s eyes. When we see that Wright was afflicted with the same intellectual understanding, and its concomitant dismay, as was Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Eliot, and others of the “Waste Land School,” we are finally able to relieve him of the burden Baldwin could not. That is, when we understand Richard Wright in the larger context of his humanity, not divorced from but perhaps made more piquant by his blackness, then we can see his work as a valid expression or exploration of human -- not just black -- experience. It is then that we can all hear, as human beings, our own inquiries into the nature of metaphysical reality as they are spoken from the lips of Bigger Thomas. It is then that we can rise above Cleaver’s love of dogma, break through Baldwin’s personal blindness over the man he loved like a father (Standley 101), and see that Bigger discovered, albeit too late, the same answers that Eliot posited in his remarkable poem.

Where the course of Bigger’s consciousness is initially defined by power, either that which white society wields over him, or that which he attempts vainly to wield over Gus or Bessie, it is in jail that Bigger first learns to evaluate life based on criteria other than power. In what Baldwin describes as “that lamentable scene in which Jan, Mary’s lover, forgives him for her murder” (“Thousands” 40), Bigger’s deterministic world is jolted by an act of charitable giving that defies the cold logic of power. Jan, as if hearing the command “Datta,” becomes the voice that wonders, “What have we given?” (Eliot 402) Bigger achieves a revelation as “suddenly, this white man had come up to him, flung aside the curtain and walked into the room of his life” (Wright 268). There, in “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender” (Eliot 404), Jan exposes the naked core of his humanity and offers Bigger, for the first time, the sight he has long lacked, the knowledge that there exists a level of connection not black nor white nor defined by power, but simply human. It is by Jan’s act of forgiveness that Bigger finally sees and feels his own humanity. Though he feels it “as a stab of remorse” (Wright 268) for having killed what Jan loved, this human connection is something profound, something “which an age of prudence [or even killing done in blindness] can never retract” (Eliot 405). While it is easy to cast a cynical eye upon Wright’s inclusion of Jan’s act, to see it merely as a contrivance for the sake of communist dogma, one cannot ignore the underlying principle, that Jan’s act of forgiveness is a sacrifice of sorts on Bigger’s behalf. Neither would Baldwin (who laments the scene because it is the white liberal, and not Bigger’s black family or friends, who finally makes the human connection) discount the importance of altruism in matters human. Jan’s act is the essence of giving, what Eliot prescribed, in part, as a cure for the emptiness in “The Waste Land.” It is likewise part of the cure for Bigger’s condition that Wright feels is essential in order that Bigger may die having finally lived.

Once the veil of blindness has been lifted from Bigger’s eyes, he is drawn into the universal human consciousness that he first glimpsed in Jan’s act of forgiveness. Though Bigger has resigned himself to the inevitability of his execution, he does not resign himself to death. Bigger instead is Eliot’s speaker who seeks “Dayadhvam.” Bigger wants to “trust bare, naked feeling” -- he “would not mind dying now if he could only find out what this meant, what he was in relation to all the others that lived” (Wright 335-36) Like Eliot’s speaker, Bigger has “heard the key” (Eliot 412) that has locked him into his prison cell, that has confirmed his isolation from others. And yet, also like Eliot’s speaker, Bigger knows that to feel along with others is what has been hidden from him his whole life, is what is necessary if he is to live before he dies. When “at nightfall, aetherial rumours / Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus” (Eliot 416-17) there is at work the same spiritual tension and optimistic yearning that impelled Bigger as “he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open,” searching for the electric shock of “other hands connected to other hearts” (Wright 335). We see it again when Bigger remembers “with gratitude the kind, impassioned tone” of Mr. Max’s speech on his behalf (Wright 382). The meaning of Max’s words were not important, but the feeling, the spiritual vibration of sympathy between two human beings aware of each other’s humanity, was what motivated Bigger in his last moments on Earth -- “once more, before he died he wanted to talk with [Max] and feel with as much keenness as possible what his living and dying meant” (Wright 382). Dyadhvam, sympathy, even if it could only “revive for a moment a broken” Bigger, was enough in the end to make Bigger believe that he had been part of something worthwhile, that he had been human, that his wasted life need not have been an entire waste after all.

Bigger Thomas is, throughout Native Son, a character who is out of control, who is shaped by his environment and by the actions of those around him. The narration is filled with references to how others “make him feel” (Wright 44). While killing gives Bigger the illusion that he is in control, that he is master of his own feelings, he remains the pawn of forces outside himself until the end. I n the final scene, we see Bigger struggle for something like self-control as he explains to Mr. Max that he killed for a reason. Bigger, who was formerly paralyzed with fear and the inability to communicate, is finally able to laugh at the irony that he must believe in himself though he is going to die. Bigger takes over the conversation in his cell, struggles in order to gain some control over his own situation, insists in anguish that he murdered for a good reason. In the end, the image Bigger wants to leave with Max, and the world, is the one where he is in full control of himself. Damyata: “In order to walk to that chair [Bigger] had to weave his feelings into a hard shell of either hope or hate” (Wright, 333). Having relinquished hate and hope, Bigger yet has discovered his will, has discovered the existential throbbing heart of Richard Wright. It is this will that says, “I’m all right, Mr. Max. Just go and tell Ma I was all right and not to worry none, see? Tell her I was all right and wasn’t crying none” (Wright, 392). This will is little in comparison to the deterministic forces that are snuffing Bigger out, and yet it is something that is essential to Richard Wright’s growing existential awareness. Bigger is able, finally, to smile “a faint, wry, bitter smile” (Wright 392) having found, at long last, a tenuous grip upon the “sail and oar” (Eliot 420) of his life. It is very little, and it is not enough for the reader, and yet it will be enough to guide a self-controlled Bigger, with dignity, down the terrible, long walk to his execution, where he will ride a current of vicious lightning into oblivion.

Finitude

“The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” -- Percy Bysshe Shelley

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
-- T.S. Eliot


Bigger’s end is not satisfactory in any measurable way, and yet it contains the seeds of hope that are characteristic of Wright’s optimism. Yes, Richard Wright hammered away at the great white edifice of injustice that kept the black man and woman in ghettoes. Certainly Wright screamed at the complacency and ignorance of white racist America by creating, or rather recreating, horrific images of lynchings and tar and featherings and Klan rallys. But Wright also sensed the prevailing winds which blew shape into the sails of so many lives, black and white alike. He felt the same trepidation and despair that other intellectuals felt in a “modern” world, a scientific world bereft of spiritual meaning, and with a dearth, therefore, of hope. And yet Wright was possessed of an artistic sensibility that refused to accept a world without hope. He had a vision that, even while creating the world of Bigger Thomas, made him create in order that that world would not be the sum total of black American experience. Bigger was that part of Richard Wright’s own heart that he sacrificed to the American public so that others might be spared suffering. Creating Bigger was an act of giving, a demonstration of human sympathy, that was precisely the kind of act that Eliot would prescribe to quench the meaningless, arid heart of “The Waste Land.”

One does not accuse Wright of buying into and perpetuating the mythical black stereotypes when one also reads and understands the dedication to his mother at the beginning of Native Son. It says, “To My Mother, who, when I was a child at her knee, taught me to revere the fanciful and the imaginative” (Wright 4). Wright used stereotypes, but he did not perpetuate them, and he certainly did not buy into them. He transformed them with his facility for the “fanciful and the imaginative” into Bigger Thomas, a character who simultaneously embodied ugly stereotypes and the universal searching voice of humankind -- a character who, despite the extremity of his situation, tried to cope with his feelings of alienation while also trying to understand his human nature and the nature of the world in which he lived. Wright was an individualist, a believer in human freedom and dignity, and one who recognized that in the oppression of masses lived the aching hearts of individual men and women and children. Far from doing black Americans a further injustice, far from reducing “all Americans to the compulsive, bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe” (Protest 20), Wright instead claimed his rightful place as an artist, and distilled the abstract arguments against racism into the tears and the frustrations of one lost man. That even white readers are able to feel compassion for a fictional black killer, and that Bigger’s plight remains hauntingly poignant a half century after the novel was written, is testimony to Wright’s ability to tap into the universal constants that connect us all through our humanity. T hat we hear echoes of “The Waste Land” in between the lines of social protest in Native Son is testimony to the fact that Wright was as much a man of his times as he was of his race. Ultimately, though, Wright was the imaginative force of his own making, a man who prodded the limits of his own consciousness in an effort to understand the truths which all of us seek as we come to grips with what it means to be human.

Gerald Michael Rolfe





Works Cited

Baldwin, James. “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” In Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983, pp. 24 - 45.
---. “Many Thousands Gone.” pp. 24 - 45.
---. “Notes of a Native Son.” pp. 85 - 114.
Baraka, Amiri. The Leroi Jones / Amiri Baraka Reader. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.
Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land.” In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2, 2nd ed., edited by Paul Lauter. Lexington: D.C. Heath & Co., 1994, pp. 1447 - 1462.
Fabre, Michel. “Richard Wright, French Existentialism, and The Outsider.” In Critical Essays on Richard Wright by Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982, pp. 182 - 198.
---. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973.
Karenga, Maulana Ron. “Black Art: Mute Force Given Form and Function.” In New Black Voices: Criticism.
Marx, Karl. In Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1992, p. 481
Reilly, John. “Afterword” in Native Son. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 393 - 397.
Standley, Fred L. “ . . . Farther and Farther Apart”: Richard Wright and James Baldwin.” In Critical Essays on Richard Wright by Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1982, pp. 91 - 103.
Toppin, Edgar A. A Biographical History of Blacks in America Since 1528. New York: McKay, 1969, 1971, pp. 475 - 479.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
---. “Richard Wright to Antonio Frasconi--An Exchange of Letters. In Twice a Year, vol. 12- 13 (Fall-Winter), 1945.
---. “Rise and Live.” In The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973, p. 115.