People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria Ministry

Higher Education and Scientific Research

University of 8 Mai 1945 / Guelma ‫ قالمة‬/ 1945 ‫ماي‬8‫جامعة‬

Faculty of Letters & Languages ‫كلية اآلداب واللغات‬
Department of Letters and English Language ‫قسم األدب واللغة اإلنجليزية‬

Option: Literature

Different Psychological Manifestations of Violence in

Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)

A Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Letters and English Language in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master in Language and Culture

Board of Examiners

Chairwoman: Miss. M BOUREGAA. (MAA) Université de 8 Mai 1945/Guelma

Supervisor : Mrs. I SAIDIA. (MCB) Université de 8 Mai1945/Guelma

Examiner: Miss. S MOUMENE. (MAA) Université de 8 Mai1945/Guelma

Submitted by: Supervised by:

Chayma MEZACHE Mrs. Imane SAIDI

Imene GUERFI

June 2022
I

Dedication

We dedicate this work to

Our Families who have been our source of inspiration who continually provided their moral,

spiritual, emotional, and financial support.

To our mentors, friends, and classmates whose untiring support assistance, and

encouragement have made possible the fruition of our efforts.

II

Acknowledgments

First of all, we thank Allah the Almighty for enlightening our way and enabling us to bring

this humble work to light.

Writing our dissertation is a very exciting experience full of challenges. Therefore, there are

some special people that we would like to thank for their assistance and support during this

process.

Infinite thanks and gratitude go to our supervisor Mrs. Saidia Imane for her guidance and

advice. Our special thanks go to the examiners for their precious time and effort to read this

work.

We would also like to thank the teachers of the Department of English in Guelma who

contributed to our learning process throughout this year for their great effort, help, and

guidance.
III

Abstract
Throughout history, African American writers restricted their novels only to racial violence

denying the existence of any other type. It was through Richard Wright’s masterpiece, Native

Son that the different forms of violence in African American society are thoroughly covered.

Therefore, the current study attempts to investigate the multiple facets of violence exercised

on and by the African American community through analyzing the major psychological

motives behind them. Relatively, this research examines the different levels of violence

manifested in the novel by Africans themselves, not against the whites only, but against their

own people as well. In this sense, Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, is not restricted to

racial violence. Rather, there are other manifestations of violence in the novel that needs to be

tackled. Also, the study attempts to understand the character’s motivations behind violence

via psychology. Sigmund Freud’s theory will be used to better understand the character’s

violent acts.

Key words: Violence- African American literature- Slave Narratives- Whites- Blacks-

Psychoanalysis
IV

Table of Contents

Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………..I
Acknowledgment…………………………………………………………….………….……II
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………III
Table of Content…………………….………………..………………………………..……..IV
Introduction…………………………………….…………………………….………………...1
1 Chapter one: Theoretical Background ................................................................................ 5
1.1 The Multiple Facets of Violence: ................................................................................ 5
1.1.1 Violence in Literature………............................................................................... 8
1.1.2 Different Psychological Manifestations of Violence ......................................... 10
1.2 The Fanonian’s View of Violence ............................................................................. 14
1.3 The Appearance and Development of the African American literature .................... 18
1.3.1 Slave Narratives ................................................................................................. 21
1.3.2 Slave Narratives’ Common Patterns .................................................................. 23
1.4 The Antebellum African American Literature .......................................................... 25
1.5 Postmodern African American Literature ................................................................. 26
1.6 African American Literature during the Harlem Renaissance .................................. 28
1.6.1 African American Writer’s Double consciousness ............................................ 30
2 Chapter two: Richard Wright in Native Son ..................................................................... 35
2.1 Author’s Biography ................................................................................................... 35
2.2 Synopsis of Richard Wright’s Native Son: ................................................................ 37
2.3 Thematic Aspects of Violence in Native Son: ........................................................... 38
2.3.1 Racism in Native Son ......................................................................................... 39
2.3.2 Fear ..................................................................................................................... 42
3 Chapter Three: Different Psychological Manifestations of Violence in Native son…….45
3.1 Violence as the Main Aspect in Native Son .............................................................. 45
3.2 Different Manifestations of Violence in Native Son ................................................. 47
3.2.1 White Colonizer vs. Black Colonized Forms of Violence ................................. 47
3.2.2 Black People vs. Black Forms of Violence ........................................................ 52
3.2.3 Gender-based Forms of Violence ( Male vs Female) ........................................ 61
3.3 Analysis of Thomas Bigger’s Character .................................................................... 67
General Conclusion………………………………………………..………………………….73
Work Cited
Resumé
‫الملخص‬
1

Introduction
Behind every successful writing is a very strong motive or purpose. In his essay “Why

I Write”, George Orwell lists four major reasons for writing, the fourth of which is political

purposes. He explained: “desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s

idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free

from political bias” (05). Writers write out of a need to share their experiences of injustice,

oppression, and inequity and expose them as they really are to the world hoping for change.

African American literature, as a post-emancipation phenomenon appeared in the United

States, and was shaped in the form of novels, poems, and plays, that had emerged for the

same purpose.

African American literature emerged in the 18th century in parallel with the

construction of the United States when its citizens enjoyed total freedom and owned slaves. It

was the conditions of slavery that led to the appearance of a genre of writing called Slave

Narratives. However, despite all the dehumanization and mistreatment African Americans

were subjected to, black writers produced many notable works of fiction in African American

history.

As African American literature developed throughout the centuries, it served different

purposes. The one common purpose was always to serve as proof of the brutality of slavery

and the racial segregation that African Americans had to struggle with even after

emancipation. The issues of race and tension of color pushed African American writers to use

their talent to establish a place for themselves in this community, to present African

Americans as humans and individuals not as a property of whites, and most importantly, to

create a powerful impact on the minds of the readers and bring change by establishing a new

area that embraces black people altogether.

2

Themes such as violence, racism, and fear represent the heart of the African American

literature. In fact, African American writers usually include sensitive topics in their writings

as if they speak directly to the reader’s emotions in order to have their attention and

sympathy. This literature is not meant to please white audiences, but to raise their awareness

of the dehumanization of black people. Whatever manifestations it takes, violence is a never-

ending cycle in which those who have the power, i.e. the Whites use all possible means:

physical, emotional, sexual, psychological, spiritual, cultural, etc. to oppress the ones who are

in the position of losing power, i.e. the Blacks. As violence breeds violence, there had

emerged two different categories: the one practiced by the whites and the one practiced by the

Blacks.

African American writers have written since the late 18th century with the purpose of

addressing the terrible sins of whites against blacks. However, their writings were only

restricted to one type of violence which is the interracial one; in most cases writers

stereotyped the white violence against the Blacks to produce victims, while the black violence

against the Whites to produce heroes. Unlike the other African American writers, one

prominent writer, Richard Wright, was unconcerned with black subjectivity. In his

masterpiece, Native Son, he tackles the different levels of violence that structured the society

they survived in.

Richard Wright, a novelist, short story writer, and poet, is an African American writer

who wrote about racial issues. In his first published novel, Native Son, he tells a story of a

black boy who murders two girls because he was driven by rage and anger instilled in him by

the oppressive society which has circumscribed his life to the borders of the South Side of

Chicago slums. Richard Wright, as any other African American writer, had used violence as a

major theme in his works including Native Son, for which he had been heavily criticized.

What people and mainly critics fail to grasp is that the violence practiced by blacks is nothing
3

but a mere reaction to the white violence experienced through the oppressing conditions that

the African Americans had endured in northern America.

The novel, Native Son, appeared as a perfect portrayal of racial discrimination during

the 20th century and its manifestations. It shows the struggle of being an African American in

the 1940s. It did not only reveal the injustice of that time, but also the serious problems

between the oppressors and the oppressed where neither side could see the other as human

beings with wants, desires, and faults of their own. Richard Wright’s Native Son is considered

one of the most important violent and revolutionary works of African American literature. His

explanations of criminality and racism continue to be a source of concern for critics in African

American culture and around the world.

Therefore, this dissertation is conducted with the aim to investigate the different

psychological dimensions of violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son. In addition, the study

will attempt to examine Freud’s theories in the analysis of the characters by applying his

theories to the protagonist of the case study. Furthermore, an analysis of the themes and forms

of the text will prove that Richard did not limit his novel, Native Son, only to racial violence.

Beyond this concern, Wright sheds light on various other aspects of violence and their

manifestations on the main characters of the novel. This paper is conducted to showcase the

other different levels of violence that he manifested in the novel.

Structurally, it will be built upon three main chapters. The first chapter will serve as a

theoretical background to the subject matter. It will deal with the concept of violence in

literature and its different psychological dimensions. Here, a close insight will be made on the

psychoanalytic approach, specifically Freud’s theories on violence to analyze the psyche of

the characters. It will also discuss the Fanonian’s view on violence. In addition, the chapter

will provide a historical background of the appearance and development of African American
4

literature, which presents the history of their people through slave narratives. In addition, the

chapter will also cover African American literature during the antebellum and postmodernism

periods. Further, it will explore the development of African American literature during the

20th century in which the Harlem Renaissance played a remarkable role in the appearance of

new concerns in black literature.

The second chapter will include an overview and a thematic study of Richard’s Wright

Native Son. It will be briefly devoted to aspects of Richard Wright’s life and works. Also, it

will shed light on the main themes displayed throughout the novel that led to the protagonist’s

violent actions.

The third chapter is an analysis of the same novel yet in terms of violence. The various

levels of violence manifested in the book will be revealed in this chapter. Then, the focus will

shift to the protagonist’s violent scenes that will be approached through psychoanalysis and

referring to social, cultural, and economic factors as well to portray the changes the

protagonist went through throughout the novel.

5

1 Chapter one: Theoretical Background

From its beginnings to the present, from one decade to another, African American

literature has taken on different dimensions and addressed several important themes. The

representation of the tragic past of Africans, i.e. the legacy of slavery, was the main concern

of anti-slavery literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. Then, with the emergence of the

Harlem Renaissance, the focus of African American literature shifted from describing

people’s experiences and escapes from slavery, which was autobiographical, to advocating for

the abolition of segregation and racism. Henceforth, this chapter starts with an overview of

the term violence in literature and its psychological dimensions based on Freud’s

psychoanalytic theories. Then, it investigates Frantz Fanon’s point of view on violence.

Moreover, it provides a historical background of how African American literature saw the

light of day and flourished, leading to the emergence of the slave narrative genre and its key

features. Further, the chapter gives an insight on the antebellum and postmodern African

American literature. Finally, it provides African American literature during the Harlem

Renaissance moving to the concept of double consciousness experienced by African

American writers.

1.1 The Multiple Facets of Violence:

In his foreword to World Report on Violence and Health, Nelson Mandela asserts that

“the twentieth century will be remembered as a century marked by violence” (I). In other

words, cruelty and inhumanity have become an integral part of human characteristics.

However, the 20th century has done so to such an extent that words are helpless to describe the

ongoing massacre that is part of this century’s history. It may not be known for its great

industrial revolution, but it is known for the invention of ever more efficient weapons of mass

destruction that facilitated the eradication of human life.

6

Etymologically, the word violence is derived from the word of Latin origin “violentia”

which means “vehemence”, an intense and passionate force (Bufacci 194). The World Health

Organization (WHO) declares that violence is “The intentional use of physical force or power,

threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that

either result in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm,

maldevelopment or deprivation” (5). This means that violence has various consequences. It is

not restricted to physical damage, but also leads to psychological harm to the individual and

the community as a whole.

Moreover, several scholars have provided different definitions of violence. One of

many is the American pragmatist, John Dewey, who argues that “energy becomes violence

when it defeats or frustrates purposes instead of executing or realizing it. When the dynamite

charge blows up human beings instead of rocks, when its outcome is waste instead of

production, destruction instead of construction, we call it not energy or power but violence”

(246). Dewey’s definition emphasizes the fact that only actions that bring destruction and

harm can be turned into violent acts, i.e. actions are counted as violent only when they are

intentional.

Furthermore, Thomas Foster contends in his book, How to Read Literature Like A

Professor, that “Violence is one of the most personal and even intimate acts between human

beings, but it can also be cultural and societal in its implications. It can be symbolic, thematic,

biblical, Shakespearean, Romantic, allegorical, transcendent” (100). In this vein, Walters &

Parke both view that culture determines violence, that is to say, people choose violence over

those who come from a different cultural environment (5).

7

Jamil Salmi, a Moroccan education economist, explains that any action that violates

people from their human rights or deprives the realization of a basic need falls under social

violence (17). In this regard, Nelson Mandela asserts

Violence thrives in the absence of democracy, respect for human rights, and

good governance. We often talk about how a ‘‘culture of violence’’ can take

root […] It is also true that patterns of violence are more pervasive and

wdrespread in societies where the authorities endorse the use of violence

through their action. (I)

The reasons why some countries suffer from violence are mainly related to the lack of

democracy, security, and law enforcement that does not respect human rights. In addition, the

public’s distrust in state institutions to protect citizens and provide justice is the reason for the

culture of violence. A society built on a stronger culture of violence and weaker authorities is

therefore more likely to experience armed and violent conflict.

Robert Audi, an American philosopher, proclaims that a violent act can be either

physical or psychological stating that

Violence is the physical attack upon, or the vigorous physical abuse of, or

vigorous physical struggle against, a person or animal; or the highly vigorous

psychological abuse of, or the sharp, caustic psychological attack upon, a

person or animal; or the highly vigorous, or incendiary, or malicious and

vigorous, destruction or damaging of property or potential property. (59)

That is to say, real violence is an act of aggression that involves physical force and is intended

to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something. It is also any act that causes psychological

harm to a person or animal. Destruction of property can also be considered an act of violence.
8

Consequently, Audi’s definition emphasizes on the fact that violence has countless of

psychological dimensions.

Overall, violence is the deliberate cause of real physical harm or injury on people as

individuals or a community. It is one of the human behaviors that characterize the twentieth

century. From the above definitions, it is clear that violence is not limited to physical

violence, but has a broad range of connotations and consequences that can lead to

psychological damage, rights violations, deprivation, and even death.

1.1.1 Violence in Literature

As far as literature is concerned, violence has always been a quite debatable topic to be

tackled. In literature, the theme of violence has constantly been depicted and symbolized

primarily to show the underlying conflicts in all social relationships and the human motives

and passions. In order to explain the meaning of violence in literature, real-life events need to

be analyzed because the main purpose of literature is to portray reality in a dramatic, effective

and perhaps fictional way. To do this, authors may also choose certain characters and settings

that have strong similarities with people or experiences that are familiar to readers.

In his book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster asserts “Violence is

everywhere in literature. We’d lose most of Shakespeare without it, and Homer and Ovid […]

much of Milton, Lawrence, Twain, Dickens, […] and on and on” (107). By admitting so,

Foster points out that several writers would be nowhere if they did not integrate the theme of

violence in their works. This shows the high status of violence in literature. In other words,

violence serves various motives in literature. Literary authors aim to go through people’s

interests by depicting violence as an undeniable reality, which in turn helps the reader to

understand and perceive it.

9

In Violence in Literature: an Evolutionary Perspective, Joseph Carroll, a literary

scholar, assumes that writers deal with the idea of violence with the aim to get a deeper

understanding of human nature. Nevertheless, people have different concerns. Therefore, it is

a challenge to uncover the motives for using violence in literary works (33). He later adds:

Violence in literature has no inherent valence or significance. Violence can be

heroic, triumphant, cruel, vicious, or fertile and ineffectual. The value attached

to any particular instance of violence derives from occasions and

circumstances, the motives of characters, the author’s attitude toward the

depicted characters, the author’s general outlook on life, and the responses of

readers. (36)

Hence, Carroll suggests that violence can imply good as well as bad intentions; these

intentions are determined by the author’s motives and life’s experiences that are plainly

mirrored in the characters. Moreover, Foster persists that acts of violence in literature are

almost always symbolic of a larger form of suffering, claiming that violence falls into two

categories: one when a character harms himself or another character; one when the harm is

caused by the writer themselves (102).

Consequently, it is safe to say that there is a strong relationship between violence and

literature. As authors’ literary works are more likely a reflection of their inner conflicts and

experiences. Simultaneously, Writers try to portray in their novels and poems the real events

that their community, and sometimes they themselves, experienced and how much violence

they were subjected to. By addressing the issue of violence, their narratives sound purely

realistic; they can reach a wide audience and ultimately lead to change.
10

1.1.2 Different Psychological Manifestations of Violence

From the Renaissance to the middle of the twentieth century, European colonial

powers invaded and dominated a considerable part of the world. Throughout this long period

of history, colonialism exhibited various ideologies. The encounter between the native

populations of colonized countries and European colonists resulted in “the most complex and

traumatic relationship in human history’’ (Loomba 8). This lengthy traumatic relationship

had a profound impact on both the colonized and the colonists’ psychologies, profoundly

influencing their perspectives on themselves, other peoples, and the world at large. The

colonial experience contaminated the cultures and identities of colonized people. Even long

after independence treaties were signed (Robertson 303).

Violent events may involve either psychological harm or actual physical injuries, or a

combination of both. However, threats of violence may represent a larger psychological

burden than actual physical violence, as psychological effects usually are not limited in time.

Through experiencing psychological violence, the victims often suffer from depression,

anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicidality, substance abuse (Friborg et al

2-3).

Colonialism is a long-term process in which individuals from one territory establish

colonies in another, and the dominating territory takes full control of the colonized life. The

purpose of colonization was usually to raise profits or economic benefits by exploitation, to

grow authority through land appropriation, or to expand religious realms while demeaning

and subjugating indigenous peoples. Thus, the colonizer positions himself as intellectually

and culturally superior to the colonized. The colonial agenda within psychiatry has been

exposed for enforcing its social, cultural, and political goals based on white, Eurocentric,

male, neoliberalism. While demeaning all what is indigenous and utterly repressing their
11

identity. The Western methods organize the knowledge produced in a way that silences and

excludes the history/voice and identity of the oppressed Colonial Western psychiatry (Joseph

4-5).

The current social, psychological, and health illnesses that have been imposed on

indigenous people “belong” to settler society (Dupuis-Rossi 110). Prior to the invasion and

occupation by colonial invaders, indigenous elders from various nations taught us that there

were structures and protocols to deal with unstable behavior when it manifested. However,

illnesses such as schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, suicidality, etc. were non-existent before

colonization. These are the devastating effects of genocidal violence ( Dupuis-Rossi 111).

Colonialism locates the pathology within the indigenous nations rather than

acknowledging the negative effects of psychological violence on the latter’s mental health.

The DSM diagnosed the colonial violence’s impact as a personal deficit. These psychiatric

diagnoses assigned to the violence victims a label connected with individualized disorders

such as personality disorder, anxiety disorder, or depression. Rather than acknowledging the

disorder of colonization, the impact of continuous colonial violence on one’s mental health is

completely ignored. Thousands of years of peaceful coexistence have been erased from these

places. Indigenous resistance to colonial aggression has been disregarded for hundreds

of years. Their psychological struggle is very normalized and this is yet another manifestation

of ongoing colonial psychological violence ( Dupuis-Rossi 111-2).

The chaos and brutality of colonization have impacted all Indigenous people in one

way or another. Beginning with the mere confrontation and coexistence with colonialism, up

to dealing with new circumstances imposed by the latter, stating: poverty, homelessness,

discrimination, stereotyping, police brutality, and the list goes on. All of the above leads to

the creation of a heavy psychological burden that makes functioning practically impossible.
12

The disease of colonial brutality inscribes itself on their spirits, and it is the basis of their

marginalization, alienation, disorganization, and instability leading to their psychological

torment (112-3).

Individuals subjected to the brutality and desecration of psychological violence can

experience it at the most vulnerable time of their lives as children. As a result, disturbed

youngsters in conflict areas become hostile and violent not only against the settlers and their

police forces but also against their families. A study undertaken by Strathclyde University in

Glasgow, Scotland, questioned 3000 schoolboys from Northern Ireland and discovered that

the majority approved of violence and grew highly accepting of it. But they also formed a

sense of rejection towards their country; many of them expressed a desire to leave when they

were older (Leavitt and Fox 17).

Literature makes use of culture, religion, and politics to explain certain events or

provide comprehensible arguments for ambiguous character behavior or plots. To accomplish

this purpose, literature has largely been subject to psychology. In order to create authentic

work, authors employ approaches related to psychology to analyze writings. He defines it as a

crucial tool to dive deep into the meanings of any literary work (Aras 251).

One of Sigmund Freud’s theories is the unconscious. It was crucial to comprehending

the mind of the twentieth century by providing significant theories for how these unconscious

impulses are manifested. According to this hypothesis, the human mind is divided into two

parts: the conscious side which is the awareness of the self, and the unconscious side which

we can only access to throughout indirect ways such as dreams or neurotic symptoms. He

assumes that much of the mental life is unconscious, and it is the part of our brain responsible

for forging one’s character and behavior. He adds that much of our behaviors are directed by
13

our unconscious mind not by our free will as we might believe (Cherry 7). Julie Rivkin argues

that:

His discovery was that the human mind contains a dimension n that is only

partially accessible to consciousness and then only through indirect means such

as dreams or neurotic symptoms.The unconscious as he called it, is a repository

of repressed desires, feelings, memories, and instinctual drives, many of which,

according to Freud, have to do with sexuality and violence. (Rivkin and Ryan

389)

Repressed urges, sentiments, childhood experiences, and impulsive drives are all stored in the

unconscious. These suppressed desires and emotions might find their way out through dreams

and other methods. When Freud attempted to present more explanations, he focused more

attention on the effects of sexual depravity and violence on the human psyche. He believes

that sexual suppression and being subject to violence leads to unjustified behavior. To put it

another way, Freud resumes that the unconscious regulates behavior.

Things that individuals tend to temporarily forget are mostly alarming, painful, or

shameful experiences. As a result, these events are cleansed and utterly erased from

one’s consciousness. According to Freud, in the neurotic, these strong unappealing impulses

and sentiments, are basically expunged and erased yet temporarily for they still exist in the

unconscious mind, they are to be restored later. The instinct responds by seeking satisfaction

through repression which is a defense mechanism. The latter will cause the ego to protect

itself from the renewal of the repressed desires. Freud looked at repression as the chief reason

behind the neuroses, and the understanding of repression is the key to the psychoanalysis

analysis (Ntara 3).

According to sociologist Fanelli Alexander, Freud attempted to ground his theoretical

notions in literary criticism by publishing Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming And many
14

other works. Some of his psychoanalytical theories were based on dream interpretation and

childhood memories. In one of his best works The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud explains

the insights we can retrieve from analyzing one’s dreams, all of the masked desires the fears

manifests in one’s dream (Fanelli 33). He also explained his theory of personality where he

divided the brain to three components: the id which is the unconscious and biological part

responsible especially for sexual desire, the superego in the conscience guided by morals and

principles, and the ego which is guided by logic and reality. The three components interact

and conflict in order to shape the personality. Theories of childhood experiences and the

Oedipus complex are extremely influential. Psychoanalytic literary criticism may all use

Freud’s theories to gain more understanding of the ambiguous literature. Psychoanalytic

literary criticism looks for the influences of all three parts of the mind in literature (Stangor

and Walinga 7-9).

The biographical background of a writer plays a significant role in understanding the

literary message conveyed by its creator. Putting it within a Psychoanalytical frame will help

scholars and critics grasp the conditions of those writers. Freud argues for instance that the

characters employed by the author reflect a lot about his mental and psychic state. Like his

background, childhood memories, relationships, and life experiences. Psychoanalysis also

includes detecting the author’s motives and the meaning beyond the use of specific symbols.

Freud’s theories were too extended that his psychoanalytic literary criticism analyzes both the

form and content of the work in relation to the author’s psychology and biography (Aras 252).

1.2 The Fanonian’s View of Violence

Frantz Fanon’s perspective on violence and how it affects individuals stems from his

personal experience. Being born in the capital of the French colony of Martinique, Frantz was

raised as a colonial subject. In France, he attended medical school and received psychiatric

training. He joined the French army in World War 2 and it was right after this experience that
15

he wrote his first masterpiece Dark Skin, white Mask which was published in 1952. Later, he

was appointed as a psychiatrist in Algeria, where he eventually joined the revolution against

the French. In his book, Fanon describes both the positive and negative aspects of violence.

His most famous and contentious remarks concern the cathartic and self-actualizing effects of

violence on a colonial or oppressed subject (jha 359-360).

According to Fanon, violence can be derived from the racialized view of the superior

white man, who frequently imbue their subjects with notions of backwardness, barbarism, and

lack of rationality. They thus dehumanize their subjects to the point of “turning him into an

animal” (Fanon140). Since the dehumanized subjects will not respond to anything, it becomes

natural for the colonizer’s superior race to use violence in different contexts. Violence was

used as a tool for maintaining power and imposing the authority of the colonial regime over

their subjects: “their first encounter was worked by violence and their existence that is to say

their exploitation of the native by the settler was carried on by the dint of a great array of

bayonets and cannon” (Fanon 36).

The term Violence was tackled by the author in a variety of ways. For instance, Fanon

used the word violence and force interchangeably in his writing; “between the oppressor and

the oppressed everything can be solved by force” (jha 360). His definition of violence

includes all forms of political compulsion, as it includes physical or psychological harm,

aggressiveness, and coercion. Fanon on the other hand placed a high value on violence.

According to him, it is through violence that man can create himself. Revolutionary violence

liberates man’s consciousness and gives birth to a new man (360).

No gentleness can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy

them. The native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler
16

through force of arms. When his rage boils over, he rediscovers his lost

innocence and he comes to know himself in that he creates his self. (Fanon 21)

It is only in and through violence that the dehumanized subject becomes a human being again,

frees his soul, and liberates his conscious. As a psychiatric, Fanon argues that violence can be

employed as a catharsis. Violence serves as a healing force in the process of getting rid of the

feeling of humiliation and inferiority complex of the oppressed. As put in Fanon’s own words

At the level of individuals violence is a cleansing force it frees the native from

his inferiority and from his despair and inaction it makes him fearless and

restores his self-respect. (94)

Fanon states that “the catharsis experience” is basically the act of the colonial subjects

stepping up to free themselves using violence. The term “Catharsis” was defined by Oxford as

The process of releasing and thereby providing relief from strong or repressed emotions.

Releasing the accumulated pressure of aggression and oppression throughout violent

intervention. Only by this violent intervening event that the feeling of self-loathing and

denigration can fade away. Thus, they can restore their sense of who they are. With this being

said violence is a type of catharsis that allows the oppressed to reach their final self-

actualization (Pallas 5).

Thus the native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same

as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more

value than a native’s skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the

world in a very necessary manner…for if, in fact, my life is worth as much as

the settler’s, his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me, and his voice

no longer turns me into stone. (Fanon 45)

17

Another reason why Fanon embraces the violence’s effects is that he believes it plays a

massive role in unifying the natives towards their common goal. Solidarity comes right after

liberating one’s consciousness. It is the key to overthrowing the colonial grip. To quote Fanon

The practice of violence binds them together as a whole since each individual

forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence

which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning.

The groups recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible.

The armed struggle mobilizes the people. It throws them in one way and in one

direction. (93)

Violent moments strengthen the idea of solidarity and instill in the individual’s consciousness

the idea of the common destiny and collective history. The journey does not top with the

deconsolidation, where violence was used to fight oppression. Rather, it extends to the

reconstruction phase where it will be used again to fight against poverty, illiteracy, and

underdevelopment (jha 361).

When violence is used in taking the national liberation, the natives are their own hero

their own liberator. They recognize that the violent struggle toward national independence

raises their political and general awareness leaving a smaller scope for the demagogues to

rise. As fanon calls it “illuminated by violence” (jha 361-2). Colonized People can choose

their new reality they are no longer the creation of history. It is in this way that revolutionary

violence raises consciousness and awareness about social truth. Accordingly, decolonization

is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes nothing of its legitimacy to any

supernatural power; the “thing” which has been colonized becomes man during the same

process by which it frees itself (Fanon 36-7).

18

Frantz Fanon’s depiction of the positive and bad outcomes of colonial violence on

individuals is very significant. Violence has the ability to be liberatory and cathartic in the

sense that it permits a colonial subject to be free and build a positive new identity after

experiencing colonialism for a long time. However, violence, on the other hand, has negative

consequences. The most evident effect of violence on individuals and their families is

physical and mental harm. Fanon emphasizes that the damage done by the colonizer is not

limited to physical violence, as the colonized individual lives in an environment where

violence is constant, multidimensional, and diffused into everyday life (Pallas 6). Finally,

violence will create frustration and confusion for people who try to rebuild their identity, the

psychological trauma of living in terrifying conditions for so long makes the process of

reclaiming oneself again extremely challenging (Oranlı 9).

1.3 The Appearance and Development of the African American literature

There was literature before the Civil war, but most of it did not survive. According to

Barbara Stanford: “Before the Civil War, most of the black literature was oral literature:

songs, poems, and tales produced by slaves to help them cope with plantation life” (qtd in

Cunha Maciel 10). This oral tradition was known by all slaves and played a major role in the

formation of African American literature. When Africans came in touch with Christianity for

the first time, they found in the rituals of the bible some resemblance to their own situation

like stories of freedom and slavery. Though the religion is the same, Africans managed to

have their own specialized worship behaviors; as a result, the whites found them strange and

scary, so they forbid them from any religious meeting. To make the work in plantations more

fun and to forget the endured pain and hardships, slaves used to sing songs known as “negro

spirituals” or “spirituals”. According to an article published by the Library of Congress “A

19

spiritual is a type of religious folksong that is most closely associated with the enslavement of

African American people in the American South” (Cunha Maciel 10). In a description of the

black slaves’ songs, Harry T. Burleigh writes

Their [songs] worth is weakened unless they are done impressively, for through

these songs breathe a hope, a faith, in the ultimate justice and brotherhood of

man. The cadences of the sorrow invariably turn the joy, and the message is

ever manifest that eventually deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses

the soul will come, and man – every man – will be free. (10)

It was believed that some of the Negro spirituals had hidden purposes like helping slaves

escape the evils of slavery in the south and reach the north. The spirituals did also help the

blacks by inspiring and giving them the sense of courage and confidence to pursue their

freedom. Frederick Douglass recalled that the plantation spiritual “Run to Jesus” had first

suggested to him the thought of making his escape from slavery. When slaves sang “I thank

God I’m free at last,” only they knew whether they were referring to freedom from sin or

from slavery”. (Andrews 693). Although the oral tradition was very rich, written literary

works by African Americans were very poor.

African American writers started publishing their literary works during the 18th

century. The hard conditions of slavery are considered the main reason behind the shift from

oral to written expression. Africans felt the need to express themselves and speak out against

the inhumane and brutal circumstances they endure every day. “We black people tried to write

ourselves out of slavery, slavery even more profound than mere physical bondage. Accepting

the challenge of the great white Western tradition, black writers wrote as if their lives

depended upon it…” (Cunha Maciel 08). Starting from the 18th century till nowadays,
20

Africans produced the most qualified and notable works which consisted the African

American literature and contributed to the formation of American literature. African

American literature can be defined as “a literature written by, about, and sometimes

specifically for African Americans” (African American Literature). William L. Andrews

defines it as well as a “body of literature written by Americans of African descent” (Cunha

Maciel 6).

The terrible sins of slavery, equality, racism, segregation, freedom, culture, and

discrimination are the most tackled themes and issues by Africans through their literary

works. It appeared during the 18th century with early prominent writers like poet Phillis

Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, and orator Frederick Douglass. Then, it developed through the 19th

century with the appearance of the Harlem Renaissance and continues nowadays with ground-

breaking works by the most famous and acclaimed writers like Walter Mosley, Toni Morison

and Maya Angelou. African American literature has evolved through time; before the

American civil war, African writers devoted their works to merely addressing the terrible sins

of slavery by producing a literary genre called slave narratives. Later on, with the rise of the

abolitionist movement, there was a huge demand for a shred of evidence for the atrcities the

blacks went through; as a result, many African American writers provided their works as an

eyewitness for the damage caused by slavery on Africans. However, in the 20th century and

late 19th century, the focus of the African American literature shifted to speaking against the

racist attitudes, stereotypes, and racial segregation the enslaved blacks suffered from. Slave

narratives which constitute a big part of the African American literature are one of the

prominent forms of literary expression that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries and gave

an account of the brutalities of slavery (Graham and Jr 51).

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1.3.1 Slave Narratives

At the beginning of the 18th century, African American writers thought that it is high

time to start addressing the continuing inhuman practice of slavery; as a result, a literary genre

called slave narratives came into being. Slave narratives are “an account of the life or a major

portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave

personally” (Andrews pp 1). In other words, it is a type of literature, mostly consisting of

stories told by slaves or ex-slaves and mostly written by the slaves themselves or passed

orally and written by others. Additionally, the narratives portrayed the cruel methods by

which the blacks were captured, separated from their families, and sold as slaves.

Indeed, James Olney asserts that slave narratives “may be understood as a recollective/

narrative act in which the writer, from a certain point in his life- the present-, looks back over

the events of that life and recounts them in such a way as to show how the past history has led

to this present state of being” (47). In the same vein, Sharon Monteith maintains that slave

narratives are “One of the new genres that the United States contributed to the literary canon

is the slave narrative, the autobiographical account of a former slave’s life once he or she has

escaped to freedom” (26). As a matter of fact, both Olney and Monteith argue that slave

narratives are a literary genre used purely by fugitives or prior slaves to describe how severe

and brutal the slave life was.

Moreover, John Sekora believes that “the journey back in the study of black American

life has of course always led to the narratives, long recognized, notwithstanding their

diversity, as chronologically and psychologically the ground upon which later black writing is

based” (482). Indeed, slave narratives are an indispensable part of African American literature

in particular and American history in general. Therefore, Oualdah Equiano and Philis Wheatly

are considered the pioneers of the slave narratives, along with Frederick Douglass, Harriet
22

Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Richard Wright and many

others who set the ground for the African American literature (Olney 65-72). Besides,

Monteith approves that slave narratives were very popular; Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of

the Life of Frederick Douglass sold 30,000 copies; the narrative by William Wells Brown saw

four editions in its first year in addition to other narratives that were translated into many

other languages (26).

Subsequently, these narratives were not written with the purpose of focusing on the

individual lives of slaves as known internally and subjectively. Rather, the focus is on slavery

as an action experienced by blacks. In this sense, Onley states “The lives of narratives are

never, or almost never, there for themselves and their own intrinsic, unique interest but nearly

always in their capacity as illustrations of what slavery is really like” (51). In the same

context, John Sekora states “slave narrative is far different from the creation of a self, and the

overarching shape of that story is mandated by persons other than subject. […] what Douglass

calls “the fact which I felt almost everybody must know” (509). The narratives, then, are

personal life experiences that reflect the suffering and unbearable conditions to which the

entire community was subjected.

All in all, the dehumanization and violent mistreatment of whites towards African

Americans putting them in the most horrible, ugly, and inhumane conditions, pushed African

Americans to rise up and address the misery and violent actions of white Americans and

create a new literary genre, slave narratives. The latter became the voice of reality for slaves

in particular and blacks in general. Slaveholders kept whitewashing the image of slavery and

showing it to the world. As put in Sekora’s words “in moral terms the slave narrative and its

heirs are the only histories of American slavery we have. Outside the narrative, slavery for

black Americans was a wordless, nameless, timeless time. It was a time without history and

time without imminence” (512). Most of the influential and celebrated literary works of this
23

period in the United States were slave narratives written by African American writers. Since

the events described are factual and realistic and were really experienced by the author, this

ultimately hits the reader directly in the heart.

1.3.2 Slave Narratives’ Common Patterns

Like any other literary genre, the slave narrative has certain characteristics and motifs

that define and distinguish it. Ifeyinwa Genevieve Okolo and Remi Akujobi summarize slave

narratives’ patterns into some elements. According to them, the narratives represent vivid

scenes of violence and terror to satisfy the public’s hunger for sensation. They describe life in

the South. They serve as propaganda weapons during the period of slavery abolition (58).

In his book “Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives”

Frances Smith Foster states:

The plot of the nineteenth-century slave narrative is informed by the Judeo

Christian mythological structure on both the material and the spiritual levels.

The action moves from the idyllic life of a Garden of Eden into the wilderness,

the struggle for survival, the providential help, and the arrival into the Promised

Land. In addition, the plot of the slave narrative incorporates the parallel

structure of birth into death and death into birth which also distinguishes the

Judeo-Christian myth. (84)

In other words, the slave narratives are chronologically divided into several phases. The first

phase is when the narrator loses his innocence, as he is brought from the state of the safe

zone, as Smith puts it, the Garden of Eden, to the state of evil, where he learns about and

realises life in slavery. Second, it is the point at which the slave begins to leave slavery and

seek the path to his freedom. The third phase describes the getaway to freedom. Here the
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narrator describes all the pitfalls, the ups and downs he experienced on the way to freedom,

and finally the stage when he successfully achieves redemption and freedom.

According to Olney, the most distinguishing characteristics of slave narratives are that

they include portrait of the narrator, epigraphs, poems, newspaper clippings, anti-slavery

essays or speeches, etc… (49). In the same context, Foster states that “slave narratives were

presented as non-fiction. Prefaces, letters of references, affidavits, new clippings, copies of

legal documents, or other materials were published with each narrative to assure the reader of

its validity (x). This means that the African American writers are trying to show what was

done to them by providing concrete documents or evidence of the validity of their statements.

Besides, Foster continues that these writers tended to rely on simple and direct language in

their writings to meet the needs of their audiences; “slave narratives were didactic writings”

(3, 4). In other words, because of the illiteracy of many blacks at the time, the writers use a

simple style to meet the expectations of their audience. Therefore, the majority of slave

narratives’ titles have the subtitle of “Written by Himself or Herself” (Morrison 89) for

African American writers who wanted to prove their recognition and authorship to white

readers via a well-written literary work.

Furthermore, Toni Morrison argues that all slave narratives are written with the aim to

highlight two main things “One: This is my historical life - my singular, special example that

is personal, but that also represents the race. Two: I write this text to persuade other people -

you, the reader, who is probably not black - that we are human beings worthy of God's grace

and the immediate abandonment of slavery” (86). Thus, the main purpose of these narratives

is that the narrator can reflect the voice of his race through his individual life story, and that

these people, like all other people, deserve to live their lives away from segregation.
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All African writers investigated the same issue through their stories, and sought to

serve one common principal; thus, the themes and the plot of the story lines are always the

same since writers came from the same conditions. Hence, it serves a purpose, namely to

show the evil and reality of slavery and slaves’ striving for freedom. In this vein, Olney

claims that narratives share the same theme, content, and form. The theme is the real suffrage

from slavery and the urge to eradicate it; the content is a series of vivid scenes and events that

the reader through them will see and sense the psychological, physical, and spiritual damage

caused by slaveholders; “the form is a chronological, episodic narrative” (53).

However, despite the fact that slave narratives share the same narrative features and

themes, they have some differences related to the writer’s own experience, personal life and

public recognition; “a white Unitarian minister claimed that despite certain differences in

slave narratives, the story that the formerly enslaved ones had to tell had a universal value –

these were stories of human struggle, stories of enslavement that actually proved to be stories

of the essential importance of freedom, and they were stories “calculated to exert a very wide

influence on public opinion” (Miniotaitė 10).

1.4 The Antebellum African American Literature

African American literature, as the name clearly defines itself, is the literature; prose,

poetry, plays, music, novels... written by people of African descent in the USA, who ended up

in North America mainly via their ancestors who were brought as slaves in the 17th century.

It's nearly impossible to separate African American literature from American history because

the latter is a narration of what black Americans lived in racist America.

The term African American literature has always conjured with it some canonical

names such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, Dubois, and many others. Many

may think that the reason that these bold names are put under the category of African
26

American literature and not only American literature is that they were Africans born in

America. However, the reason is much more complex. The birth, as well as the evolution of

this genre, was from within the wombs of an oppressive and racist society. Thus, the

narratives that came to birth documented the tragic history of African American victims who

fought against horrific slavery and racial segregation in America (The British Library).

Although, since 1970 African American writers have received widespread recognition,

this literature has been nationally as well as internationally acclaimed since the late 18th

century. Prior to the Civil war, African American literature focused mainly on slavery and

freedom as well as religion and human conflicts. The period from 1845 to the Civil war have

witnessed the birth of what is called abolitionist literature which was mainly anti-slavery

literature. Books, pamphlets, poetry, newspapers, and many other forms were African

American writers’ way to fight against slavery and call for abolition. During that period,

there was a huge demand for literary works which accurately depict the horrors of slavery,

sexual abuse, inhumane workload, family separation, and the cruel segregation of the

American society against the enslaved blacks. This genre became a political tool that African

Americans used to sway sentiment against slavery and call for the abolition of slavery as well

as to show that African Americans have a mastery of language that allows them to write their

own history (Graham and Jr 34).

1.5 Post-Modern African American Literature

The African American literature has deep roots that go back to the 18th century when

the United States came into being. In the mid-twentieth century, a new cultural movement

known as postmodernism emerged. This new phenomenon emerged to distinguish itself from

the preceding movement “modernism”. Whereas Hutcheon asserts that postmodernism did

not appear as a mere contradiction to the previous movements for postmodernists cannot
27

totally refute modernism; however, they can question its beliefs. In other words,

postmodernism comes as a successor to modernism ( Ficza 5). Postmodernism is

characterized by paradox, humor, pastiche, and more. In the same vein, Dubey denotes that

postmodernism is “characterized as a postindustrial society or a new stage of “multinational”

or “disorganized” capitalism” (17).

Additionally, Dubey says “The 1970s marked a decisive turn in the African-American

literary tradition, when the emancipator promise of urban modernity was widely felt to have

been exhausted” (4). It means that the 1970 brought a change in the literature of African-

Americans because those who were freed from slavery and had been promised that they will

be equal to the white man in rights turned out to be unable to be reached; thus, their literature

was directed towards this unkept promise. He asserts that postmodern African-American

writers convey not only the dwindling credibility of racial representations existence but also a

sharp distrust of printed literature (6). He adds that although Postmodern African American

writings call on representing racial difference, they are generally far from tackling the

particularities of African American lives (7).

Hogue entails that almost no postmodern African American female writer represents

postmodernism similarly to their Caucasian counterparts. They do not tend to neglect the

discussion of racial and sexual values in their literary works. Instead, victimization,

inferiority, and devaluation of the Other as a result of racism and sexism are a major concern

for them (7)

Postmodern African American literature is the literature written by black people of

African descent living in America (Okolo and Akujobi 10). It emerges as a reaction to modern

literature, patriarchy, white supremacy, Western reason, and other Enlightenment ideas. Some

see it as continuity to modern literature, others see it as a criticism of the failure of modern
28

ideas to achieve their aim. Dubey points out that their literature is at the heart of

postmodernism. He states “it is difficult to write about late-twentieth century U.S culture

without taking on the term postmodernism which, without a clear consensus about its

meaning circulates widely as a periodizing concept” (17). In fact, postmodernism brought a

noticeable shift from modernism at the social, cultural, and economic levels.

1.6 African American Literature during the Harlem Renaissance

The period of the Harlem Renaissance, also labeled The new negro Renaissance, is

supposed to be the Golden Age of African American literature; “It is a movement in music,

art, literature, and politics from the early 1900s to 1940s, emphasized the importance of

freedom- political, economic, social and artistic - for African Americans” (Smith and Jones

163). The Harlem Renaissance was a turning point in African American culture. New York

was the heart of this influential movement. The Harlem district attracted talent and

intellectuals from all over the world and served as the symbolic capital of the new African

American culture. It was considered the center of African American life.

At the beginning of the 1900s, African American life was shaped by a couple of

aspects, most notably the depression which redefined the African American political and

economic life. During this period, the demand for human rights increased. African American

soldiers risked their lives for freedom in World War I, but they were not treated equally in the

United States. Another major aspect was the Great Migration when 7 million African

Americans moved from rural southern states to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West. They

were mainly focused on the largest cities in the USA like New York, Chicago, Washington,

and so on. At a time when those cities had a central influence over the United States (Graham

and Ward 256- 260).

29

Indeed, the Harlem Renaissance laid the ground for African American Literature. The

main reasons behind this cultural blossoming were the popularity of pan-Africanism among

influential African American thinkers such as Du Bois. It encouraged a dynamic real

awakening of arts, music, and literature. In fact, music was a dominant aspect of the Harlem

Renaissance movement, which gave rise to blues and jazz, the most popular musical genres of

the time (Okolo and Akujobi 95- 98).

In the same context, Graham asserts “painters and poets, jazz musicians and blues

singers, actors and orators, dancers and composers, poets, playwrights, and novelists all

crowded in night clubs, lecture halls and salons which justifies Langhe’s celebration of the era

as a time when the negro was in vogue” (257). In other words, Jazz becomes very popular

among whites which contributed to the emergence of Negro Vogue in The American

community. At the time when blackness was seemingly coming to vogue, the cultural shifts

that define the era were mind-blowing for a society that has long devalued blackness and the

black community (Varlack 237). The eminent writer of the Harlem Renaissance is

undoubtedly Langston Hughes, who broke away from white poets’ way of writing and wrote

in the rhythmic meter of jazz and blues (Okolo and Akujobi 98).

In short, The Harlem Renaissance is an undeniable era in which Blacks produced

literary and artistic innovations. This movement grew out of the intolerable living conditions

of African Americans in the south, which caused many blacks to emigrate to northern cities

like New York City, specifically in the Harlem district, when jobs occupied by whites were

vacated and replaced by blacks during the First World War. Nevertheless, Harlem

Renaissance writers were able to create their own distinctive forms that influenced the

spiritual meaning of the black life experience in a time of accelerated change. African

Americans sought to break the concept of the Negro from white stereotypes and show the

world what a black man could do and achieve.

30

1.6.1 African American Writer’s Double consciousness

Originally, the term was coined by W.E.B Du Bois as a theoretical tool it reveals

psycho-social divisions in any society. Du Bois engaged throughout his long career in the

attempt to understand both the socio-historic conditions facing “Black folk” in the American

twentieth century and to show the impacts of those conditions on the consciousness and

“inner world” of the human beings subject to them. He mainly focused on the black American

experience because of their racialized oppression in a white-dominated society (Graham 272).

it is a peculiar sensation this double consciousness, this sense of always

looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the

tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his

two-ness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled

strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone

keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois 02)

Du Bois maintained the need to gain self-consciousness to merge his double selves into a

real and more authentic self. Throughout the merging process, he does not wish either of the

two selves to be lost nor does he wish to Africanize America. However, he would still not

bleach his Negro blood for white America’s sake because he believes in the message that

his blood carries. Du Bois persists that a man can be both a Negro and an American without

being cursed, and without having doors of opportunity slammed in his face (Du Bois 02).

In the words of Stephen Dedalus, in Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

goes forth “to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the

smitty of my soul the uncreated consciousness of my race” (Graham 275). “Creating the

consciousness of my race” The expression conveys different meanings for both white and

black fellows. Euro-American Modernism was self-consciously experimental, obsessed with

31

developing new forms of expression to represent radically new forms of human

consciousness. Likewise, the modernist self-expressions represent a profound sense of

fragmentation and alienation, variously understood in political (Marxist) or psychological

Freudian terms. Since early times African American writers confronted hard life conditions;

as a result, black modernists knew psychological and social alienation. Far from being a new

experience, fragmentation was uprooted from black people’s lives, it shaped their

geographical, cultural, and linguistic homes while they were always forced to adapt to the

white world (275).

Double Consciousness lead to the appearance of new stylistic approaches like

“Masking” which was developed during slavery as a survival strategy. It was a coded form of

communication; the approach relies on a shared understanding of the ironic distance between

image and reality. It brought a wide range of new aesthetics added up to the modernist

fascination with ambiguity. African Americans developed a wide range of literary strategies

for self-expression in the presence of the white, it was double voiced, that is, based on

manipulation of linguistic motifs and poetic images (260-1).

African-American modernism worked out the crossroads of cultural traditions. The

distinctive aspect of them is that it brings together both horizontal experience (social

relationships and political pressure) and vertical experience which is psychological

(complexities of consciousness). Texts of crossroads Modernism attempt to uplift the two

modes of awareness so they can stand against the white supremacist culture which denies

African American humanity (262).

The double consciousness played out not only in the black-white relationships but also

in the African American community. It was manifested in gender sexuality, class, and color.

Black feminists have introduced their concept of the triple consciousness. Black women not
32

only have to see themselves through the lens of blackness and whiteness but also through the

lens of patriarchy. In her pamphlet Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female, she claimed

that capitalism was the direct forbearer of racism because the system was indirectly a way to

destroy the humanity of black people. In any society where men are not yet free, women are

less free because we are further enslaved for being African American and women. We are

enslaved by our sex (the triple consciousness and the black woman).

Many African American women turned towards feminism in their fight against

oppression because there was more awareness. During the 19th century, black women poets

like Georgia Douglas, and Anne Spencer, playwrights like Marita Bonner, novelists like Nella

Lorsen Fauset tackled in their womanist discourse matters of equality between men and

women, it was a necessity in order to reach an adequate understanding of the black society.

They focused on the internalization of white supremacist notions of color like favoring light-

skinned women, Wallace Thurman’s “the blacker the berry” 1929 and Nella Larsen’s

“Passing” 1929, discussed the ways in which double consciousness can distort their personal

intimacy. Gay and bisexual black writers were also active during the Harlem renaissance but

they did not express their homosexuality in their themes (Graham 264).

Black writers were aware of the double consciousness, it provided them with a central

theme and structural principle, writings like Jessie Redmon Fauset’s “There is Confusion”

1924 which gave a classical description to the black men’s struggle while writing and Richard

wright’s “Black Dog” 1945 which depicted other relationships dimensions within black

society. Joyce pound, Virginia wolf, and William Faulkner created new kinds of books setting

the model for African modernists by using black vernacular material (folklore, music...) and a

mixture of prose and poetry like in T. S Eliot’s the waste land 1922.
33

A masterpiece of African-American modernism was James Weldon Johnson’s novel

“The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” 1912 whereby he redefined the possibilities of

the African American vernacular. The commercial success of Johnson’s musical collocations

with a member of black musicians including his brother Rosemond Johnson Elaborated the

representation of black life and language, whereas in his poems he was connected to black

equality and the black rights to full citizenship. In his poem “Fifty Years” 1917:

This land is ours by right of birth

This land is ours by rights of toil
We helped to turn it to virgin earth
Our sweat is in its fruitful soil. (Sutori 2)

Double-consciousness is an idea that comes from W.E.B. Du Bois in his book, The

Souls of Black Folk, explains how people of color often have to learn to

navigate their own culture while also learning to navigate the institutionalized systems of the

dominant culture. The playwright of this adaptation adds a character into the play,

“The Black Rat”, who speaks the inner thoughts of Bigger, which are often very different than

the ones he speaks. The Black Rat symbolizes, in many ways, this idea of double

consciousness.

Literature, as perceived by the early African American authors was regarded as a

weapon and the writer as a combatant. It was a way to achieve self-definition, belonging, and

self-esteem in a community that denied them equal status with the whites. As a matter of fact,

whites in North America feared not only the revolutionary power of the physical violence of

African Americans but also the power of their intellect. As a result, the Blacks were legally

prohibited from obtaining any form of literacy. However, African American writers refused to
34

remain silenced and decided to speak out against all forms of subjugation and injustices

producing a series of distinctive literary accounts known as slavery literature or slave

narratives.
35

2 Chapter two: Richard Wright in Native Son

Richard Wright, as Debbie Levy claims, was the most famous African American

writer in the United States. In addition to Black Boy, Native Son is considered as one of the

most best-selling books (12). This chapter will attempt to provide an overview of the author’s

profile and a summary of the novel’s major events as well. Also, it will discuss the themes of

the novel in relation to the major theme, i.e. Violence and how they impact the novel’s

protagonist.

2.1 Author’s Biography

Richard Nathaniel Wright is a novelist and short story writer. He was born in Natchez,

Mississippi. His grandparents were slaves. He is the son of Ella Wilson, who was a teacher,

and Nathan Wright, who was a sharecropper. His father left him when he was young. Due to

his poor condition, he dropped out of high school and started looking for a job; the author of

Native Son escaped his native land searching for a better life (Levy 13 - 25). So, he moved to

Chicago. After working in unskilled jobs, he got an opportunity to participate in the Federal

Writers’ Project. In 1932 he joined the Communist Party and in 1937 moved to New York

City, where he became editor of the communist Daily Worker in Harlem. In 1942, he left the

party because of restrictions on the freedom of blacks to protest racial discrimination and

injustice. (Britannica.com)

Richard Wright’s first work is entitled Uncle Tom’s Children (1936). Besides, he

wrote The Outsider (1953), Black Power: A Record of Reaction in the Land of Pathos (1954),

White Man, Listen! (1957), and The Long Dream (1958). Moreover, the pioneer African

American author’s notable works are Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1945)

(Britannica.com).
36

Native Son was Richard Wright’s best work. The book immediately made Wright a

major author and a spokesman for the situation of African Americans (Levy 11-2). Wright’s

novel portrays elements of the poverty, conflict and fragility that black people still experience

in America. Wright managed to reflect this situation in Native Son through the characters.

Richard Wright is now ranked with African American luminaries such as Zora Neale

Hurston, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. His two books, Native Son and Black Boy, are

recommended in high schools and universities across the country. A Father’s Law, his last

unfinished work, was recently published posthumously. He died in 1960 (Wright 349).

2.2 Synopsis of Richard Wright’s Native Son:

Native Son by Richard Wright is a book that clearly recounts how can oppression, fear,

and aggression turn a person into a murderer. By the time the book was published, fugitive

slaves witnessed the most horrible living conditions in a racist and oppressed society. Wright

had the urge to show through his literary works the terrible consequences of racism, violence,

and dehumanization imposed by the whites on the black people

The novel is about a young African American boy, twenty years old, from Chicago’s

Black Belt called Bigger Tomas. He lives a miserable life with his family in one room where

they share life without privacy, freedom, or respect. Bigger shares a kind of homosociality

with his gang of friends that is based on pride, fear, resentment, and violence. In order to

support his family, he takes a chauffeur’s position with a rich white family.

Bigger’s first task at the Dalton’s is to drive their only daughter Mary to the university.

On their way, they pick up her communist boyfriend Jan Erlone. After spending a long night

in the town and heading back home, Bigger was forced to carry Mary to her room for she is

too intoxicated to make it upstairs. After putting her in the bed, Bigger stays there for a while
37

excited by the idea of his presence in the room of a white girl. While he is trying to kiss her,

her blind mother suddenly enters the room and he panics. Fearing being caught, Bigger

chokes Mary with a pillow to keep her quiet, unconsciously killing her. Bigger gets rid of her

body by beheading her and putting the corpse in the family’s basement furnace. Taking

advantage of her disappearance, Bigger tries to blackmail the family by composing a ransom

in which he tries to frame Jan and engage his black girlfriend, Bessie.

After being exposed, Bigger flees with Bessie and hides in the empty buildings

catching news from the newspapers and the voices of people. Out of fear of betrayal, Bigger

kills Bessie in a monstrous way after raping her. Finally, he is caught after a long chase and

put in jail. Bigger is defended by a Jewish communist lawyer, Max, who tries to argue that the

social and moral reality experienced by the African Americans is the main reason behind their

aggressive behaviors. while the prosecutor, Buckley, tries to emphasize that Bigger’s

blackness is the reason behind his bestiality. Despite Max’s consistent attempts to save

Bigger’s life, he was sentenced to death.

The novel is divided into three parts. The first part which is “Fear”, introduces in

detail the main character, Bigger Thomas. His family life, street culture life, and daily

routines were thoroughly portrayed. In this part, Wright introduces to the readers the

personality of this black boy who resents the passivity of his own people and struggles to

endure a life that is the source of rage, fear, and violence. He describes the torments which

Bigger is struggling with and that are beyond his control and ability. It is in this part that

Bigger is introduced to the world of the whites by meeting the Daltons and inadvertently

killing their daughter.

In the second part, “Flight”, Bigger undergoes many events from pretending that

nothing happened to consciously killing Bessie and finally being accused, caught, and put in
38

jail. Bigger challenged the whites and wanted to win the battle. In this part, all his thoughts

and choices are clear to the readers, and it is obvious that fear is controlling most of his

behaviors.

In the last part, “Fate”, the story is taken inside the court where Bigger’s trial is

happening. The whole judicial system is presented, Max attempted to speak before the whole

black people not only Bigger. This court episode gives the readers’ insights about how can

words fully picturize the already described way of life and panic. The trial depicts how a

black teenager is turned into a monster by the racist population who already decided his

destiny before hearing the final verdict of the court.

Wright employs characters and settings that provide a vivid portrayal of the economic

and psychological effects of racism and violence. Native Son is considered as a third-person

limited narrative situation. One may say that it is the voice of the central character, Thomas

Bigger. The others are the flat characters because they do not change in the novel, just Bigger

who is considered as a dynamic character. Whereas white folks may consider as foil

characters because they are the enemy of Bigger. Back to the settings Wright attempt to

portray racism, fear, and violence in his novel as his main themes. These themes are vividly

introduced to show the struggles of Bigger Thomas with poverty and racism throughout the

book.

2.3 Thematic Aspects of Violence in Native Son:

In writing Native Son, Wright used various themes throughout the novel. These themes

were indeed treated in such a way to represent how they influence and affect the protagonist’s

state of mind and ultimately manifest to create a violent character.

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2.3.1 Racism in Native Son

It should be noted that Wright wrote his novel, Native Son, during a time of conflict

between blacks and whites, a time when there are different racial forms in American society

and in the world at large. In fact, racism, as a violent act, is one of the main themes of the

novel. In America, there is a line between blacks and whites. Blacks are not allowed to dwell

with Whites in private or in public.

Indeed, Wright has succeeded in portraying racial discrimination in the novel. The

novel begins with an alarm clock awakening Bigger’s family. The alarm clock is symbolic of

the urge that Bigger in particular and Blacks in general have to wake up and break their

silence in the face of American persecution.

“Let us kill them all. They are not human. There is no room for them all” (Wright 311).

“Down here in Dixie, we keep Negroes firmly in their places and we make them know that if

they so much as touch a white woman, good or bad, they cannot live.” (Wright 311).

The rats and the white cat in Wright’s novel have different connotations. After the

Alarm scene, Wright opens the novel with a rat in Bigger’s one-room house. The rat is a

symbol of miserable and poor living conditions. Rats are usually found in poor houses, and in

this context, they are the houses of Blacks. However, a rat is rarely to be found in the houses

of Whites. They invade houses that have holes and garbages.

“How in hell do they get so big?”

“Eating garbage and anything else they can get.” (Wright 17).

However, Mrs. Dalton’s white cat represents the luxurious life of American society and white

supremacy. Thus, Wright portrayed Bigger as a worker and Mary Dalton as a capitalist.

Racism in this novel, however, affects not only blacks, the oppressed, but also whites,

the oppressors. In this sense, Bigger’s psychological damage is due to the constant racist and
40

oppressive acts to which he was subjected throughout the novel. Additionally, Bigger

proclaims that he cannot achieve his dream of becoming an airplane pilot because African

Americans are not allowed or encouraged to receive even basic training in Chicago. This

shows that African-American people are being deprived of minimum and basic rights simply

because they are black. The harmful effects of racism extend to the white population as well.

Many white characters in the novel, such as Britten and Peggy, become victims of the

racist actions of whites themselves. Wright tries to show that the sense of white superiority is

nothing but weakness, as Bigger manages to avoid suspicion of his Mary’s murder. In his

novel, Wright uses Bigger as a symbol for an oppressed black man who commits murder

crimes to get rid of the feeling of oppression (Takeuchi 66).

In addition, the mass media plays an important role in the portrayal of American racial

discrimination in Native Son. The film that Bigger visits give a taste of the luxurious and

glamorous lives of white people: “Though the Negro killer’s body does not seem compactly

built, he gives the impression of possessing abnormal physical strength. He is about five feet,

nine inches tall and his skin is exceedingly black. His lower jaw protrudes obnoxiously,

reminding one of a jungle beast” (Wright 221-222). In this scene, the whites are portrayed as

attractive, cultured, and civilized, in contrast to the blacks, who are depicted as savages from

the jungles of Africa.

The voice of the commentator ran with the movement of the film: “Here are the

daughters of the rich taking sunbaths in the sands of Florida! This little collection of

debutantes represents over four billion dollars of America’s wealth and over fifty of

America’s leading families…” (Wright 38). What Wright was trying to convey here is that

only rich white people have the opportunity to appear in movies.

41

“In order to buy a magazine and go to the movies, he would have to have at least

twenty cents more. “Goddammit, I‟m always broke!” he mumbled” (Wright 50). In the

previous example, Bigger needs more money to buy a magazine. The high price of the

magazine shows the buying power of whites as opposed to blacks. This means that it is

produced only by whites and for whites.

A newspaperman wrote about Bigger’s terrible crime when they found out he had

murdered Mary Dalton. They insulted him with many different cruel words, especially the

word ape:

“Kill’ im!, lynch’ im!, that black sonofab***!”

“They let go of his feet; he was in the snow, lying flat on his back. Round him

surged a sea of noise. He opened his eyes a little and saw an array of faces,

white and looming”

“Kill that black ape! (Wright 216)

A crime committed by a white person is never comparable to a crime committed by a

black person, especially when the victim is a white American. Therefore, the reaction of the

press and all the people calling for him to be killed is not because of what happened, but

because of who is responsible for it; it is his black skin color that has caused all this media

hype.

2.3.2 Fear

The theme of fear in Native Son is an important one that runs throughout the novel.

Fear and panic are evident in the feelings of Bigger's family when the rat enters their room:
42

…the tiny one-room apartment galvanized into violent action. A chair toppled

as the woman, half-dressed […] scrambled breathlessly upon the bed. Her two

sons, barefoot, stood tense and motionless, their eyes searching anxiously under

the bed and chairs. The girl ran into a corner, half-stooped and gathered the hem

of her slip into both of her hands and held it tightly over her knees. (Wright 15)

The fear is also shown in the fact that Vera is afraid of the rat after Bigger has

killed it.

“Bigger laughed and approached the bed with the dangling rat, swinging it to and fro like a

pendulum, enjoying his sister’s fear.”

“Bigger! Vera gasped convulsively; she screamed and swayed and closed her eyes and fell

headlong across her mother and rolled limply from the bed to the floor”(Wright 18).

“The rat’s belly pulsed with fear. Bigger advanced a step and the rat emitted a long thin song

of defiance, its black beady eyes glittering, its tiny forefeet pawing the air restlessly” (Wright

17).

Although Bigger is stronger than the rat, he is afraid the rat might escape and be free.

On the other hand, the whites’ fear of the blacks is undeniable and leads them to exercise their

authority over them. In the same way, Bigger is also afraid of the white community. The fear

between Bigger and the rat is thus based on mutuality, just like the relationship between

blacks and whites, which in Native Son is based on mutual fear.

Fear is also clearly shown in Bigger’s fear when he tries to rob a white man’s shop. He

is not afraid of the robbery itself, but of the fact that the owner of the shop is a white man. He

has never robbed a white man before. In addition to that, although Bigger is overwhelmed by

fear throughout the novel, it is a feeling he does not like to face. In fact, he prefers not to think

about his own sense of fear: “But he kept this knowledge of his fear thrust firmly down in
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him; his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his

consciousness” (Wright 46). Bigger tries to overcome the thought of his fear, and so this fear

sometimes leads to anger and violence against those who cause it in the first place.

Another major display of Bigger’s fear was the murder of Mary, which landed him in

custody: “It was not because he had thought any the less of Bessie that he had forgotten her,

but Mary’s death had caused him the most fear; not her death in itself, but what it meant to

him as a Negro” (Wright 261). The reader learns throughout the story that Bigger’s greatest

fear was not the act of killing itself, but the person he killed, a white woman. This means that

crimes in America are handled differently depending on who and to whom the crime was

committed. All in all, Bigger’s overwhelming sense of fear is the main motive for his two

crimes and it is the one that evokes violence in him.

Richard Wright, as the American writer Arnold Ampersand proudly claims, was

“perhaps the most significant and influential African American author of the Twentieth

century” (Matthews 02). Through describing and analyzing the whole existence of black

people as an oppressed nation, he was the one who opened doors that were once closed for

African American writers. James Baldwin, Wright’s most insistent contemporary critic,

admits that he viewed Wright as his “spiritual father” and Wright’s work as “a road-block in

my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself”

(Matthews 02).

There is no doubt that Wright was among the first American black writers to protest

white treatment of blacks, notably in his novel, Native Son, in 1940. The novel became a

bestseller and received great success by selling more than 2000 copies a day. The masterpiece

established Richard as the spokesman for African American struggles. He depicted the life of

the Negroes with all the oppression and atrocities they undergo in the slums of Chicago. The
44

novel highlights American society’s responsibility for the violence practiced against blacks

and stresses the consequences that must occur as an end to these acts (Rinehart 165).
45

3 Chapter Three: Different Psychological Manifestations of

Violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son

There is no doubt that Wright was among the first black writers in America to protest

the treatment of blacks by whites, especially in his novel, Native Son (1940). His literary

works received a lot of criticism concerning his concentration on violence and attracted many

analysts. However, the major concern of these critics and analysts was the manifestation of

interracial violence in the novel, ignoring the other types that Wright explicitly described in

detail. This chapter is an analytical one; it is an analysis of the different manifestations of

violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son and a proof that the novel was not restricted only to

interracial one. Further, it aims at showing the changes in Bigger’s character from a

psychological perspective taking into account some cultural and social factors as well.

3.1 Violence as the Main Aspect in Native Son

Richard Wright’s life was not different than that of any other African American. In

1908, Wright was born in South America where the violence of slavery continued under the

tremendous discrimination of the Jim Crow regime and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan

lynchings. As a child, he was taught to submit and endure racism and segregation in order to

survive. Growing up, he had seen his father abandoning the family for not being able to feed

nor protect them from white injustice, his uncle being lynched for nothing but being black,

and his mother struggling to make a living. After his mom’s sickness, Wright was shifted

from one relative to another and then he was moved to an orphanage but spent much of this

time in bars, clubs, the streets, and the railroad (Patrick 4). In December 1927, he escaped the

brutality of the south hoping for better economical possibilities in the north; however, his

hope was undercut as soon as he arrived in Chicago. Life in the north was not different than

that in the south and the injustice of the white society followed them even there. The newly
46

arrived southerners were forced to live in the poorest neighborhoods called the black belt

where they struggled to assert their humanity (Rinehart 175).

Violence has been a matter of question in American society for decades. In this novel,

Richard Wright accuses the white society of oppression and emphasized the psychological

impact of violence on African Americans, receiving praise, as Irving Howe wrote “for

bringing out into open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have

crippled and may yet destroy our culture” (Moore 665-9). Wright used the character of Bigger

in Native Son to depict the collective psyche of suppressed poor urban blacks, including

himself, who found themselves living in the poor slums of the black belt of the American

north during the 1930s. Also, to demonstrate how the white violence, practiced against Blacks

since the beginning of slavery, forced them to unconsciously become violent back.

The novel Native Son presents the negative impact of violence on the psyche of

African Americans; it shows the results of racial oppression on the behaviors of blacks.

Violence plays a fundamental role in the works of African American writers. The reason for

its use, as most authors explain, is that it is the only means to establish justice and give power

to the oppressed minority. Violent behavior is of the psychological need to get rid of

oppression, sometimes violence is merely a natural response to violence, and the latter may

impose heavy mental and psychological disorders on its victims.

Violence is one of the most important emotions in Native Son. Violence was

manifested in different ways throughout the novel; the most important is the violence of black

people against their own skin, of white society and the police against Negroes, and violence

against female characters of the novel. Violence was portrayed as a psychological state of

mind hunted by anger, hatred, and oppression. It is clear that Bigger Thomas, the novel’s

protagonist, turned into a violent person as a result of his environment and its influence upon
47

his personality. Enduring and witnessing the daily oppression, racism, and miserable

conditions, have negatively affected his state of mind and shaped his aggressive behaviors. As

a result, Bigger is considered as a tragic victim of implacable social forces (Van Hoose 1).

Despite all, nothing would happen in the novel without the violence of Bigger

Thomas because it is the driving force behind the protagonist’s actions; it is also a motivator

that pushes him to commit murder crimes. The hostile violent act extends to include almost all

characters surrounding Bigger. Beginning with his behavior towards his mother, as well as

towards the rest of the Thomases, the circle of victims of violence widens to include his male

friends and even his girlfriend Bessie, to whom the most terrible act of violence occurs,

ending with her death (Takeuchi 58).

The Psychologist Brock Bastian describes cognitive responses to violence as cognitive

deconstructive states. It involves emotional numbing, reduced empathy, violent reaction, and

absence of logic (Bastian and Haslam 297). Bigger experiences the symptoms of cognitive

deconstruction as the result of white people’s violence, its impacts are manifested even in his

most intimate relationships: “I wasn’t in love with Bessie … I don’t reckon I was ever in love

with nobody … You had to have a girl, so I had Bessie” (352). Bigger became indifferent as

he lost empathy towards people, he can no longer truly hate nor love. He never considers the

impact of his actions (Gee 15).

3.2 Different Manifestations of Violence in Native Son

Violence invades almost all literary work of Black American authors where white

violence against blacks produces a victim and black violence against whites produces a hero.

Richard Wright had often been subject to criticism because of his heavy preoccupation with

such violence in his writings and was sometimes accused of promoting violent acts through

his novels. However, as Patrick Wilmot argues in his work The Role of Violence in The Works
48

of Wright and Fanon “these critics failed to understand that this violence is not the creation of

either writer but is derived from the violence that structures the society they lived in” (02).

Indeed, what was ignored in the criticism of Richard Wright’s Native Son was the fact that

Wright was born and raised in an oppressive and racist society which means that he, himself,

was the product of violence and he needed to put into words the experience he shared with his

black fellows to the world.

3.2.1 White Colonizer vs. Black Colonized Forms of Violence

White violence against Blacks dates back to the early slave days and continues

through the Jim Crow regime in the south to the dehumanizing injustice of a white society

that followed southern blacks who fled to the north hoping for a better life. Black Americans,

especially new arrivers from the south, were the most affected by the great depression of the

1930s; they were subject to extreme racial, economic, and political violence. Living in the

miserable slums of the black belt, they shared rooms infested with rats and roaches and could

hardly afford the rent or food. They were denied the opportunity for school or employment

and excluded from the social, political, and economic spheres of life. Perhaps the most

expressive way to describe the white regime that Blacks survived, whether in the south or in

the north, is that it was a system that punished them for their mere existence; an existence

suppressed by irrational violence by white racist society (Ellis 3).

What critics have missed in their readings of Native Son is that these brutal social,

cultural, and economic factors were the real motive behind Bigger’s aggression (an imaginary

character that represents black Americans of Chicago’s black belt) and a major agent in

shaping his character. Lewis’s reading of violence is worth taking into consideration:

“Violence is fundamentally a form of dehumanization; any effort to create a human place in

response to violence is inevitably caught in a swirl of continued violence. This is because

49

inhumanity, dehumanization, forces human beings into unavoidable cycles of action and

reaction and dirties everyone’s hands” (Ellis 06). Bigger, as any other American black male or

female, was “prevented from realizing his full potential as a human being and excluded from

full and equal participation in civil and political society” (Ellis 07). According to the

Frustration-Aggression hypothesis, Freud explains that based on the causal relationship

between frustration and aggression, we can interpret that the violence committed by the

Blacks is unconscious and inevitable in its nature. It was the frustration of being denied the

least rights as human beings and the opportunities to realize their dreams that provoked the

Blacks’ aggressive behaviors.

However, Biggers’ violence is different. Bigger does not represent the typical

protagonist of earlier African American fiction. Considered passive by the whites, he chooses

to take full responsibility for his actions to prove his consciousness. Bigger consciously

claims his humanity and manhood in a racist culture of terror. Kadeshia L. Matthews in her

article Black Boy No More; Violence and The Flight From Blackness in Richard Wright’S

Native Son argues that “Wright appears to innovate that violence is necessary for manhood

that makes Bigger so new”; an idea that is deeply embedded in Western civilization (Fllis 03).

Manhood or being a man in the United States is commonly associated with having certain

rights, privileges, and control over property and womens bodies; things that are closely

aligned with being white (Matthews 03). In white culture, Blacks, males, in particular, have

been unfairly denied all the already mentioned privileges; thus, their manhood and

masculinity. “The masturbatory act” between Bigger and Gus in the theatre displays a way to

liberate themselves from white control (Ellis 14). and an attempt to assert themselves and

regain their violated humanity or masculinity. The “stealing from whites” is another scene in

which Bigger and his friends challenge the white rule and consciously seeks self-assertion in a
50

white dominant society. For Bigger and his friends, the challenge of robbing a white-owned

store represented phantasmal liberation from white domination (Ellis 10).

The murder of Mary was the central event of the story. It was a perfect illustration of

how a victim of violence can become violent himself, whether consciously or unconsciously.

The act of killing itself was an accident caused by the violence that held the society together

with whites on top and blacks at the bottom. Bigger gets drunk Mary into her room and into

her bed. Filled with orgasmic pleasure, he starts approaching her body with hesitated yet

desirous touches until he panics and kills her when her blind mother suddenly enters the

room. Bigger’s sexual approach to Mary, full of hate, fear, and desire for white women, was

a way to assert his lost masculinity; however, the interruption of Mrs. Dalton prevented his

assertion. Bigger killed Mary because he had no choice. It was the white racist society that

made him believe that “no matter how non-racist his employer is, he would have dismissed

him, or even have him arrested if he knew he was alone with his daughter in her bedroom”

(Wilmot 05).

Although it is true that the murder was an accident, Bigger decided to accept it and not

feel guilty about it. Unlike the traditional African American characters, Bigger here is not

seeking to prove his blackness but rather to prove his humanity through accepting his

consciousness. Wright explains that Bigger had advanced to this stage when he decided to

accept the consciousness of his individuality as a result of the violence he committed and his

confrontation with death. Before, he had been an object of unthinking white rage, the sub-

human incapable of taking responsibility for his actions, because of the violence which

pervaded and defined his existence: “I didn't want to kill! Bigger shouted. But what I killed

for, I am! It must have been pretty deep in me to make me kill!” (Wright 453).
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Throughout the novel, Wright puts great emphasis on the social environment and how

it influenced the development of Bigger’s character. The white violence against blacks had

been deeply rooted in Black people’s consciousness to the extent that the notion of darkness

and whiteness became a racial marker and a dominant concept within their thinking (Van

Hoose 02). Wright excessively used imagery to portray this idea in the novel that it is

impossible to depict all of them here. The novel starts with the Thomas family in a dark room

hunting a big dark rat. It was not until a sudden burst of light entering from the window that

they were visible (wright 05). Another similar imagery is represented in the movie theatre

where Bigger and Gus were roaming the street under the sunlight and then entered the dark

theatre room to find their seats, and it was not until the light of the projector hit the screen that

they could see the movie (Wright 29). These imageries show how whiteness and blackness

are perceived inside Bigger’s mind reinforcing the idea that the Whites overpower the Blacks.

In Bigger’s mind, Whiteness and blackness were associated not only with the appearance of a

person’s skin or with the social structure only but also with visible lightness and darkness

(Van Hoose 08).

Suddenly...the door behind Mrs. Dalton filled with a flowing white presence. It

was Mrs. Dalton, her white eyes held wide and stony, her hands lifted

sensitively upward toward her lips, the fingers long and white and wide apart.

The basement was lit up with the white flash of a dozen silver bulbs. (Wright

201)

From the description of the presence of Mrs. Dalton’s whiteness to the more abstract forms

as white snow and white sunlight to the white light of the camera flashes. Wright succeeded

to take the reader into Bigger’s head and provide an understanding of how he perceives these

signs and the power that they have in determining his attitude.
52

3.2.2 Black People vs. Black Forms of Violence

Wright through his novel, Native Son, succeeded in showing that there are other

multiple manifestations of violence that existed in the Afro-American societies besides the

racial, Black vs White. A significant form of violence present in the book is the one issued by

the blacks against their own people. Bigger, the major character of Native Son, clearly

exemplifies this form of violence. He hated his living conditions as much as he hated the

Whites. Bigger lived in a world where he was completely alienated and detached from any

kind of relationship whether with his own people, the folk culture, the whole south, or the

religion. He rejected the whole south, and more precisely, the whole Black Belt for the brutal

and inhuman way of living forced on them by the whites, and the passivity and cowardice of

his own people. The black life in the south represented void, lack, negation, and nothingness.

This is clearly stated in the book when Bigger confesses to Jan and Mary that “he grew up in

the South and has only been in Chicago about five years” (Wright 71).

Four people living in one tiny room suffering from poverty, lack of privacy,

hopelessness, humiliation, and dangerous conditions due to the apartment’s disrepair and

unsanitary is what Bigger suffered from every day, and no wonder that he is “sick of his life

at home” (Wright 22). Bigger despises his family as much as he despises the Whites:

“Goddamn! He wanted to wave his hand and blot them out. They were always too close to

him, so close that he could never have any way of his own” (Wright 88). He fully recognizes

that “His family was a part of him, not only in blood but in spirit” (Wright 234); however, he

still feel of too much aversion and shame towards them. His family is hopeless, weak, and

submissive whom he shares with the “world without spaciousness” (Matthews 15). It

unconsciously pushed him more toward becoming an aggressive person while he is trying to

assert his humanity and masculinity.

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Bigger sees his mother who is supposed to be a role model for him as “defeated,

wanting nothing more from life than what the Whites are willing to offer. Mrs. Thomas, with

her constant talk of death, seems old before her time” (Matthews7). She is a religious, weak

and passive woman who accepted the fate and injustice imposed on her by the Whites and did

not work hard for the betterment of her life. For instance, in the opening scene when Bigger

kills the big black rat and tries to scare his sister with it, Mrs. Thomas’ clear weak personality

becomes evident for she collapses from weeping. Throughout the novel, she is shown as the

powerless, feeble, and nagging mother who keeps denigrating and emasculating her son. She

even kept blaming him for their poverty and despair: “We wouldn’t have to live in this

garbage dump if you had any manhood in you” (Wright 19).

His brother, buddy, on the other hand, is just a “soft and vague […] aimless, lost […]

like a chubby puppy” (Wright 95). Vera is no different from them; she represents the foolish

young version of her mother. As a result, his resentfulness to his mother’s attitude, constantly

bulling his sister, and almost killing his buddy is clear evidence of his hatred towards his own

people, and his strong desire to “wave his hand and blot them out” (Wright 100). Bigger’s

feelings went beyond frustration and annoyance for the toxic family dynamic he experienced.

Even thinking about them caused him significant emotional distress. He rejects their way of

living, and wants to establish his own new life far from them; he even rejects Bessie’s desire

to be by his side. Eventually, Bigger becomes an angry, shameful, and violent man for the

nothingness of the black life, the lack of hope, identity and purpose that his family, in

specific, and the blacks, in general, suffer from.

According to Freud’s theory of childhood memories, it is psychologically proved that

one’s personal development is related to the early events of his childhood. Hostile childhood

experiences including poverty, maltreatment, constant crucial criticism, or the death of a

parent increase the risk of developing mental health problems. Bigger’s father was killed by
54

the whites when he was very young. Growing up without a father, he developed a very tough

and self-destructive personality. He felt the responsibility of replacing his father and

supporting his family. As a result, Bigger adopted two-sidedness, he is firm among his family

and own people and submissive among the whites. He becomes violent and destructed in his

struggle to balance between the two personalities. The absence of a father greatly affected

Bigger and he became a melancholic person. Someone who has “incorporated a lost love

object into the ego through an unconscious identification with it. This identification, Freud

argues, enables the ego to take on attributes of that object and preserve the object within the

very structure of the self” (Takeuchi 4). He identified his melancholic personality with losing

his father. Bigger’s complicated feelings towards his father, a big love mixed with hatred for

not being there for him affected his perception of relationships.

Bigger did not have any hopes, ambitions, or pathways to live a meaningful life, have

a decent job and accumulate wealth. Wright states that Native Son is “the story and the

psychological portrait of a young Negro who lives in the black ghetto of Chicago,

unemployed, with all roads closed and with the constant logical temptation to escape the law”

(Schotland 16-17). When he starts his new job at the Daltons, he witnesses the vast gap

between his life and theirs and confirms his belief that living in the south is like living in jail:

“This was much different from Dalton’s home. Here all slept in one room; there he would

have a room for himself alone. He smelt food cooking and remembered that one could not

smell food cooking in Dalton’s home; pots could not be heard rattling all over the house. Each

person lived in one room and had a little world of his own. He hated this room and all the

people in it, including himself” (Wright 93).

Bigger is as distant from his family and black folks as he is from their religion. He is

totally ignorant of the various religious traditions and spirituals practiced and repeated by his

mother. He despised black people and considered them an act of cowardice, humiliation and
55

submissiveness. This is clearly evident in different moments throughout the novel, for

instance, when Bigger was hiding in one of the empty buildings, he kept hearing a singing

from a nearby church

The singing filled his ears; it was complete, self-contained, and it mocked his

fear and loneliness, his deep yearning for a sense of wholeness. Its fullness

contrasted so sharply with his hunger, its richness with his emptiness that he

recoiled from it while answering it. Would it not have been better for him had

he lived in that world the music sang off? (Wright 205)

The song is providing a sense of fulfillment, “a center, a core, an axis, a heart which he

needed” (Wright 205), yet Bigger’s ignorance of the religious spirituals made him

misunderstand the passage: “the music sang of surrender, resignation. Steal away, steal away,

Steal away to Jesus . . .” (Wright 205). This song has a history for it had been used by the

slaves to “voice their hopes for freedom in the afterlife, but also to signal their plans to seize

freedom (Matthews 10). Bigger wants to enjoy his life to the fullest in the present time and

not after his death; therefore, he rejects going to the church and be a religious man as he sees

it as a place for “whipped folks” (Wright 280). those passive people who accepted their

defeat. Wright illustrates in the last part of the novel and in another scene Bigger’s rejection

of his own people and religion when he yells in the preacher Reverend Hammond’s face

I told you I don't want you! If you come in here, I'll kill you! Leave me alone!'

… Bigger ... caught the steel bars in his hands and swept the door forward,

slamming it shut. It smashed the old black preacher squarely in the face,

sending him reeling backwards upon the concrete. (Wright 267)

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His violent reaction is another sign for not wanting to have any kind of relationship with the

Black people or their religion, and for his exigent desire to raise his hand and blot them out.

At the end Bigger changed and reached the state of mind he desired though he was sentenced

to death.

The only intimate relationship that he had with his own people is with his black

girlfriend Bessie, yet Bigger sees her as just a body to fulfill his sexual desires. Their love is

built on Bessie’s sexual compliance to Bigger in a complete silence. When she tries to have a

normal relationship with him that is built on communication, understanding and sharing, he

wishes to be able to “swing his arm and blot out, kill, sweep away the Bessie on Bessie’s face,

and leave [her body] helpless and yielding before him” (Wright 120). In the end, Bigger

fulfills his wish by raping and killing her in a monstrous way. The act of rape, smashing her

face and throwing her body out of the building proves that he thinks of her as just a body

(Matthews 9). “Yes, that was what he could do with it, throw it out of the window, down the

narrow air-shaft where nobody would find it until, perhaps, it had begun to smell” (Wright

195). Bigger sees his killing of his girlfriend Bessie as a survival act “It was his life against

hers” (Wright 195). He believes that she does not deserve to live for the void and purposeless

life she has, “Thus it is not Bessie’s knowledge that compels him to kill her. She becomes the

victim of his murderous rage because Bigger recognizes the pathetic compass of her life,

which entails “long hours, hot and hard hours [in] the kitchen of the white folks” (Matthews

9).

Besides Bessie, Bigger did have different unique relationships with his friends Gus,

Jack, and G. H, “for through them he may be connected to the street culture of urban black

males” (Matthews 11). However, they were not such close and deep relationships, for he still

felt alienated and separated from her world. Bigger sought to assert his masculinity and

manhood denied him in the white oppressed world by constantly taking out his fury and
57

aggression against his friends for “signifying and street culture provide a space where Bigger

can claim verbal and physical authority denied him in the white world” (Matthews 11).

Bigger and his friends were desperate and poor to the extent that they robbed their

own black people. Wright states that “They had always robbed Negroes. They felt that it was

much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never

really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes” (Ellis

10). In stealing Bigger and his friends enjoyed the pleasure of challenging the whites’

oppression; however, robbing their own people is nothing but a sign of “Bigger’s detachment

from and disregard for black communal harmony” (Ellis10). In attacking his friends, Bigger

tries to assert his empowerment, masculinity and self-worth. His violent behaviors constitutes

both hypermasculinity and fearlessness “for it frees Bigger of his inferiority complex and

functions to restore his self-respect” (10). However, such behaviors threaten their

homosociality and the harmony of the black community. In the poolroom scene Bigger takes

out all his anger against his friend Gus by humiliating and emasculating him for he questioned

his inability and fear to go through the robbery:

Lick it, Bigger said, his body tingling with elation. Gus’ eyes filled with tears.

Lick it, I said! You think I’m playing? Gus looked round the room without

moving his head, just rolling his eyes in a mute appeal for help. But no one

moved. Bigger’s left fist was slowly lifting to strike. Gus's lips moved knife;

he stuck out his tongue and touched the blade. Gus’s lips quivered and tears

streamed down his cheeks. (39)

Bigger dehumanizes and feminizes Gus by putting him under his body and forcing him to lick

the knife which resembles his penis; the whole scene symbolizes the act of fellatio. Bigger
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through this behavior tries to assert his power and fearlessness over Gus. Consequently, his

friends fear and resent him rather than respecting him; however, after killing Mary he feels

“cut off from them forever” (Wright 111). The physical and sexual violence are the only ways

available to Bigger to regain his manhood and masculinity. This form of violence present

among black men is discussed by Mercer in his analysis:

the kind of power acted out in the brutal violence of rape and sexual abuse is,

in fact, a further expression of powerlessness, as it does nothing to challenge

the underlying structure of oppression, but only passes on the violence of the

dominant white male, via the psychic process of internalization, into the black

community and onto black women [and men], their oppression at the end of the

chain of colonial violence. ( Ellis11)

Bigger and his friends desperately neglected their fears by playing tough, yet this will never

help them to get free from their psychological discords. Bigger’s brutality in murdering his

girlfriend Bessie and assaulting his friend Gus are among his destructive violent behaviors

through which Bigger is “able to gain consciousness, restore his self-respect, and assert his

humanity” (Ellis 6). Bigger became free when he broke the shameful connections to his black

people, family, Bessie, and friends.

The Whites are considered the main reason behind Bigger’s hatred of his blackness.

They made him feel the difference between his dark black skin and their white skin, his

inferiority and their superiority ( Schotland 4). Bigger’s blackness is the reason behind all his

troubles; he accidentally kills marry for the fear of being caught in her room and directly be

accused as black people are not supposed to be with the Whites in one place. Moreover, the

mob groaned and sentenced Bigger to death before even listening to the court’s final verdict

for Bigger is a Negro, and it is crystal clear that he committed those crimes. Even Buckley
59

and the press could easily describe Bigger as a rapist and monster, for he is just a black boy

from the slums of Chicago. Throughout the novel, Wright kept using the two terms black and

Negro to “emphasize on Bigger’s dark skin, which Bigger is exceedingly conscious of when

in the presence of white people” (Matthews 16). He depicted what it is like to be a Negro in

the no Man’s land. Placing a great emphasis on the darkness of his characters and associating

it with violence, submission and terror proves his “unconcerned with blackness subjectivity”

(Matthews 3).

Bigger struggled to prove his manhood rather than his blackness which is why he

“marshals only violence, repeatedly rejecting both the black domestic space and black people

in his project of self-creation” (Matthews 4). Through violence he manifests his rejection of

his blackness “That is, at the moment they create themselves through violence, as men,

Wright’s heroes simultaneously reject blackness, as represented by the black family/

community and black cultural practices, in favor of a presumably more encompassing

identity: first, American and, ultimately, man.” (Matthews 7). Bigger seeks to prove that the

widely believed idea that the Black people are not always conscious of most of their deeds is

nonsense. He admits and takes the full responsibility of his criminal acts as his only way to

self-realization and consciousness; as his lawyer, Max calls it “an act of creation” (Wright

400). Bigger is taking out all his aggression against his own people regardless the kind of

relationship and connection he has with them; he even considers the act of rape “not what one

did to women” (Wright 190), but rather as the “hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of

living day by day” (Wright 190).

Bigger saw violence towards his own people and the whites as his only way out of the

desperation and oppression he lived. He represents the native Frantz Fanon is talking about in

his book The Wretched of the Earth, only violence "frees the native from his inferiority

complex and from his despair and inactivity: It makes him fearless and restores his self-
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respect” (Wilmot). He is restricted and imprisoned in the black belt, as a result, “the dreams

of the native are always of muscular prowess; his dreams are of action and aggression. The

native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor”

(Matthews 15). Violence is the only mean of self-liberation, livelihood and manhood. Fanon

describes the native son who is just as Bigger as “a product of the colonial encounter, and he

can only recreate himself as a man through decolonization” (Matthews 13).

What amounted to Bigger’s aggression and hate is the sense of not fully belonging to

neither the black world nor the white one. Wright highlights his resemblance to Bigger in

suffering from a nationalistic complex: “Bigger was attracted and repelled by the American

scene. He was an American because he was a native son, but he was also a Negro nationalist

in a vague sense because he was not allowed to live as an American. Such was his way of life

and mine; neither Bigger nor I resided fully in either camp”. Bigger inhabits a “No-Man’s

land, hovering unwanted between two worlds between powerful America and his own stunted

place in life” (Schotland 5- 6).

Bigger explains that he acts violently for it is a must and part of his personality that he

cannot control, he tells Max: “I hurt folks’ cause I felt I had to; that’s all. They was crowding

me too close; they wouldn't give me no room” (Wright 355). His environment made him

always feel that one day he will do something terrible, he tells Gus that he believes “like

something awful is going to happen to me . . . Naw; it ain’t like something going to happen to

me. It’s . . . It’s like I was going to do something I can’t help . . .” (Wright 22). He represents

the native that fanon describes as someone who knows “from birth […] that this narrow

world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence”

(Matthews 15). In the first scene where Bigger kills the big black rat Wright gives us the first

image that symbolizes Bigger himself, the image “reinforces the fact that the violence in

Bigger is a product of the violence around him” (15). His crashing of the black rat symbolizes
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his violent behaviors toward his own people, fanon states that Bigger “first manifests this

aggressiveness which has been deposited in his bones against his own people” (15).

3.2.3 Gender-based Forms of Violence ( Male vs Female)

Subsequently, and as a result of Bigger Thomas’ conditions, the only answer to

manhood was through violence. He became a violent young man with a pathological

personality; female characters received the lion’s share of Bigger’s violent outrage. Bigger

justifies his murder crimes against Bessie and Mary as an act of self-creation. Murder gave

power and ownership over the victim: “Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel

responsible for his life—possessive, even. You know more about him than his father and

mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his

life” (wright 38). Through violence, Bigger breaks free from all the racial and social

restrictions that held him from fulfilling his manhood. the protagonist of the novel Bigger

Thomas ends up committing brutal killings as he seeks to escape oppression, in both instances

the killings give rise to a sense of newfound freedom and fulfilled manhood (Guttman 171).

In this novel, the writer describes the relationships between the protagonist and the

female characters. both black and white women bear the consequences of violence, he

distinguishes two types of violence exerted on the female victims for there is a wide

difference between the motifs behind the acts of killing and even between the way the black

and white women were portrayed. In America, it was crucial to protect the sexuality of white

womanhood, for white women were stereotyped as the inaccessible symbol of white power

and capitalism. The position of white women in American society restricted the interaction

and regulated the behavior of black men in their presence; the myth of Black rapists terrorized

the black community with the threat of lynching. While the antithesis was black women were
62

stereotyped as the easy and accessible symbol of the uncivilized. By emphasizing the

protection of white women’s chastity, womanhood totally ignored black women (171-2).

Bigger Thomas was conscious of the way black males were conceived by the white

society, yet he had a burning desire to possess the unattainable white female body which

symbolizes the system that oppressed him. He was eager to break the taboo and avenge his

oppressed blackness. In Bigger’s first meeting with Mary, she asks him whether he is a part of

the union or not. Bigger notices her interest in political activism right away, he felt that Mary

refuses to be the American humble, passive virgin. Rather she is pushy, sexual, and

aggressive. Bigger thinks,

in all of the white women he had met […] there was always a certain coldness

and reserve; they stood, their distance and spoke to him from afar. But this girl

waded right in and hit him between the eyes with her words and ways”. (Wright

67)

Mary’s behavior Presumably leads to her brutal death because she violated her given place.

And she broke the boundaries between the two worlds.

Mary was presented as a superficial character influenced by her communist lover Jan

who encourages social relations between races. Mary insists on ignoring the traditional

physical distance between black and white by sitting in the front seats of the car with Bigger,

Bigger has never been this close to a young white woman before, “Never in his life had he

been so close to a white woman. He smelt the odor of her hair and felt the soft pressure of her

thigh against his own” (77). Mary’s every word and action aroused Bigger’s desire. He was

fascinated by her softness and mostly by the economic and social power for which she stands.

On their way to a communist party she told Bigger “am on your side” reminding him that

although she is on his side, they come from totally different worlds and levels which evokes
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opposition in Bigger. Then she continues with her naive and degrading words to Bigger about

how she wants to “go into these houses […] and just see how your people live” (79) “I want

to know these people. Never in my life have I been inside of a Negro Home Yet they must

live like we live. They’re human […] There are twelve million of them”

The attempts to erase the distance between the two worlds fail. Mary reminds Bigger

of how different they are; she reminds him of his blackness and she triggers his rage, turmoil,

and emptiness. He felt like disembodying himself and her “Suddenly he wanted to seize some

heavy object in his hand and grip it with all the strength of his body and in some strange way

rise up and stand in naked space above the speeding car and with one final blow blot it out—

with himself and them in it” (Wright 80). When Bigger carried Mary while drunk to her room,

he manipulated her body so that it seems as if she is responding to him “He eased his hand,

the fingers spread wide, up the center of her back and her face came toward him and her lips

touched his, like something he had imagined.” (96). Mary represented the white’s

untouchable symbol of wealth and power. Bigger could not tolerate his desires towards her,

he felt the urge to act, to recognize his manhood and identity by killing the symbol of

America’s wealth. Bigger was drowning in confusion and mixed feelings, the white American

girl provoked both his sexual and violent desires. He admired and desired Mary but he could

not separate his dream of possession from hatred: “But she was beautiful, slender, with an air

that made him feel that she did not hate him with the hate of other white people. But, for all of

that, she was white and he hated her . . . And, too, in spite of his hate for her, he was excited”

(82). In killing her, he acts out both of these impulses.

Mary was objectified by Bigger; He used her as a weapon to find himself thus his

voice: “He wanted suddenly to stand up and shout, telling them that he had killed a rich white

girl, a girl whose family was known to all of them He took away her life in his way of self-

realization “I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill
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for ’em” (429). The verdict that Bigger gives to himself about his deeds was that “feel all

right” about it (429).

While on the other side, the second female character Buddy was both treated and

described differently. When Buddy tells Bigger that Bessie has been talking of marriage now

that Bigger has a job, Bigger’s response was silence, he rejects the thought of domesticity

with her (104). Bigger knew that Bessie had warm feelings toward him and he fully took

advantage of her emotions to satisfy his physical and emotional needs as a man. He was

sexually using her; he was neither in love with her nor fond of her personality. She was silent

and sexually available and she made him feel at peace; however, when she questions his

actions and motives, he wishes he could “swing his arm and blot out, kill, sweep away the

Bessie on Bessie’s face, and leave her body helpless and yielding before him” (140). Bigger’s

sexual intercourse with Bessie allowed him to blot out his oppression. The fact that Bessie too

was blotted out by Bigger reveals that the peace and comfort that Bigger gains from their

lovemaking are not a peace shared with Bessie rather she was merely an object to fulfill his

desires. Bessie’s desires and actions meant absolutely nothing to him; it was simply a matter

of what he wanted. When Bessie showed unwillingness to engage in sexual intercourse with

Bigger he gets more excited. He is more aroused by her standoffish behavior; Bigger does not

really mind her rejection he was intending to satisfy his desire either way. “He wanted to kiss

her again, but deep down he did not really mind her standing off for him; it made him hunger

more kneely for her” (114).

Bigger even uses Bessie’s body to imagine his interrupted rapprochement with Mary:

“He placed his hands on her breasts just as he had placed them on Mary's last night and he

was thinking of that while he kissed her” (134). Thus, Bigger realized his sexual fantasies for

Mary through his penetration of Bessie’s body. Later, when he forced himself on Bessie he

wanted to show her “huge warm pole of desire” (23). Bigger was thinking of Mary; his
65

unconscious effort was to prove his masculinity before the white woman he had always

desired, and that was once out of his reach. On the other hand, Bessie offered him something

more than this fantasy she was honest, real, and promising “willingly dragged into a warm

night sea to rise renewed to the surface to face a world he hated” (135). Yet, Bigger was a

sadist, he enjoyed Bessie’s pain over his committed crime, and her terror about him being

caught “he felt the worth of himself in her bewildered desperation” (148).

Bessie’s murder was not necessary; He could just easily have escaped without telling

her the details of Mary’s murder or his destination (Function of Violence 16). Therefore, It

was not the fact that Bessie was aware of his secret that compels him to kill her, she became

the victim of his rage because her pathetic life did not mean much, and he was persuaded that

no one would feel the absence of that black girl unless her corps started to stink “Yes, that

was what he could do with it, throw it out of the window, down the narrow air-shaft where

nobody would find it until, perhaps, it had begun to smell” (235). Unlike the previous murder,

which was almost an accident, Bigger was conscious of his decision of killing Bessie, he

disregarded her resistance and raped her. Bigger’s thoughts after the rape make clear that he

thinks of Bessie merely as a body.

A thing to be disposed of, Bigger’s murder of Mary Dalton can be interpreted as a

necessary means for creating a new self, yet his rape and murder of Bessie suggest a male-

centric narrative that represses and silences the black female voice. Bigger was the product of

frustrated manhood that ultimately seeks expression in a violent sexual assault. The

objectification and stereotyping of women are seen throughout the novel through Biggers

violent tendencies against women are often the result of misogyny, patriarchy, and the need to

assert their feeling of power and control over women in their lives (Takeuchi 56).
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In his novel, Wright disassociates his female characters from their stereotypical

sexualities. Mary is portrayed as dangerously unconventional. While Mary will stand in with

either Bigger or Jan, Bessie unlike the usual stereotype of the black woman stands off from

Bigger; she is cold just like a white woman should be. Bessie, however, does not remain

sexually distant once Bigger offers some money which reflects badly on her character, Bigger

was sexually aroused by Mary, the symbol of white wealth and power, and Bessie likewise is

aroused by money. Wright denies society’s image of black women being presumed unrapable

because of being promiscuous and the white woman is presumed sexually cold because of her

inherent chastity (66). Instead, Native Son shows how both Mary and Bessie represent how

violence against black and white women in 1930s America takes crucially distinct forms.

There has been a fabrication of stories about white women being raped while ignoring the

actual rapes of black women. In the case of Mary, Bigger is restricted to certain behaviour due

to the power that her statue beholds. He feels “strange, possessed, or as if he were acting upon

a stage in front of a crowd of people” (Wright 79). However, Bigger feels free and invisible as

he rapes Bessie knowing that those in power don’t care about people like him.

Finally, the difficulty in evaluating the role of women in the novel is a consequence of

Wright’s decision to limit the book to Bigger’s consciousness; therefore, we cannot represent

what Bessie or Mary felt, so the reader’s understanding is limited to what Bigger

communicates. This is another way of erasing the female voice for the survival of black men.

In Native Son, the women suffer the worst forms of violence. Certainly, the violence Bigger

commits against his gang, Jan, and the resentment he feels towards his family cannot be

dismissed, yet the victims of real physical violence in this novel are women. Both black and

white women are exploited, raped and killed in this patriarchal society because they are

women and not just because they are black or poor (Guttman 186).
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3.3 Analysis of Thomas Bigger’s Character

Claudia Tate states “Wright read widely in psychoanalysis, and he used his

understanding of its tenets in his writing” (94). Hence, studying Richard’s Wright Native Son

from a psychoanalytic perspective is a must; one cannot do a psychoanalysis of the novel

without mentioning the psyche of the protagonist, Thomas Bigger, and the changes he has

undergone throughout the novel that have made him what he has become. As put in the

physiatrist Louis Graham’s words “there is no question that Richard Wright’s Native Son is

Bigger Thomas’ novel and that Wright places major emphasis on the social, cultural, and

economic influences in the development of Bigger’s character”(19). Thus, to understand

Bigger’s state of mind, one should look at the various elements that shaped his character

In the opening scene, his mother blames him for the family’s poor status: “We

wouldn’t have to live in this garbage dump if you had any manhood in you” (Wright 8). For

them, manliness means being financially stable. For a black man, however, it is simply

impossible to get a decent job in a white society. Therefore, Bigger’s failure to function as a

man and bring stability to the family creates a sense of guilt (Harris 65). Fury is observable in

Bigger’s attitude toward his mother (Takeuchi 58): “He hated his family because he knew that

they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he

allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives […]

So he held toward them an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a

curtain” (Wright 20).

Indeed, Bigger, as Mathews states, is a “child of violence” (281). He wants to live the

life and have the rights that every white man has, he wanted to become a pilot, but he cannot

realize his dream in American society which, in return, makes him a violent man; “Bigger is a

product of the violence around him” (Mathews 281) In this sense, Lingdi Chen states that
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“they’re Black men [...] they have little chance to get an education […] Since Bigger was

born, he has been deprived by the society ruled by the whites of the right to choose and he has

been ordered to live in the established situation”(1).

In fact, Bigger’s social influence in the construction of his character dates back to the

murder of his father in a riot in Mississippi (Wright 75). His father was killed by Whites

which in return creates a sense of hatred in Bigger against white people (Takeuchi 57). Here,

Freud emphasizes that melancholia is directly associated with the loss of love (58). As the

protagonist Bigger is our concern, it is quite clear that he has a lack of love and tenderness

from his parents since a young age; his father left him and was killed by whites, and his

mother as well did not compensate for the loss of his father’s love. Instead, she was so cold

and harsh with her child to the point she wished she did not give birth to him. Hence, the love,

care, and compassion that Bigger was deprived of are fundamental in the creation of his

character.

Moreover, Wright maintains that Bigger was “constructed by social, economic, and

psychological forces beyond his control” (3). Besides, Freud claims that a melancholic person

tends to direct his anger toward himself, the ego, rather than others (24). In this sense, Bigger

is “toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew that the moment he allowed what his

life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else.

So he denied himself and acted tough” (Wright 10). Sara Schotland argues that “Bigger is a

violent young man with a pathological split personality” (3). In this sense, Wright describes

Bigger’s social life as Fanon calls “a world cut in two and occupied by two different species”

(437) there two worlds, white and black, which are physically separated. “There are black

schools and white schools, black churches and white churches…” (Fanon 437). Therefore,

Bigger’s dichotomy in two words creates a pathological split in personality. Bigger was both
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an American citizen, for he is a native, and a Negro, for he was not permitted to live the life of

an American (Schotland 4).

Freud’s statement “the ego can kill itself only if [...] it can treat itself as an object” (30)

is depicted in Bigger’s and Jan’s scene shaking hands and calling each other by their first

names (wright 65) provokes anger in him. He “felt that he had no physical existence at all

right then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to a

black skin” (wright 66). In this context, Freud argues that a melancholic person usually feels a

sense of “an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a

grand scale” (24), and ultimately results in self-castigation. Bigger’s thoughts about whites

can be summarized in this quote: “Every time I get to thinking about me being black and they

being white, me being here and they being there, I feel like something awful’s going to

happen to me” (Wright 28). Therefore, Bigger’s urge to rape and kill Marry “results from a

kind of outrage with the white world” (Harris 83). Marry’s murder made him feel equal to

white people.

“Rape was not what one did to women” (Wright 190). For Bigger, rape is never a

crime. Rather, it is an instrument of resistance against the oppressor. In his desperation,

Bigger seeks to find in sexual control and possession of women a means of violent resistance

to oppression (Takeuchi 66). Bigger justifies his actions as a rebellion against the whites. He

never had a guilty conscience about his actions: “He had killed many times before, only on

those other times there had been no handy victim [ … ] he felt that all of his life had been

leading to something like this”(Wright 94). So the urge and intention to kill were internal, he

just did not find the “circumstance to make visible or dramatic his will to kill” (wright 94).

After he killed Mary, a feeling of freedom came over him, because he was out of the

circle of the accused: “They might think he would steal a dime, rape a woman, get drunk, or
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cut somebody; but to kill a millionaire’s daughter and burn her body?” (Wright 99). The idea

that black people “had never done anything, right or wrong, that mattered much” (Wright 93)

does not apply to Bigger anymore, for he has perpetuated “a supreme and meaningful act”

(101), and ultimately he has “created a new world for himself” (Wright 198), a world in

which he can achieve the manhood he has dreamed of all his life. For Bigger, a Negro can

achieve the quality of manhood only through violence. Murder, for him, is a means of self-

identification and the creation of masculinity. Besides, the action of killing the two women,

Max claims, is “an act of creation” (wright 308). Indeed, Bigger identifies himself as an

American male only through the conformity of violent acts that comes with the rejection of

blackness (Mathews281).

Bigger’s sexual desire for both Mary and Bessie immediately turns into a desire for

murder. Wright elucidates that “Bigger does rape and when he does so he is in the same state

of mind that he is when he kills Mary” (Guttman 186). Max could not understand Bigger’s

mixture of feelings between hatred and sexual desire toward Mary. When he tries to explain

to Bigger that Mary was being kind to him, Bigger replies

“Kind, hell! She wasn’t kind to me!” “What do you mean? She accepted you as another

human being”.

“Mr. Max, we’re all split up. What you say is kind ain’t kind at all. I didn’t know anything

about that woman. All I knew was that they kill us for women like her. We live apart. And

then she comes and acts like that to me” (Wright 275). Therefore, Mary poses a serious threat

to him, and her kindness would bring him nothing but harm and even death.

Bigger’s famous saying “what I killed for, I am” (326) […] reveals the process of the

substitution of political desire for sexual desire. Having been identified as a black rapist and

having become that rapist, Bigger killed for the right to have what white men have—white
71

women”(Guttman191). Bigger, ultimately, justify his crimes. He was raped and killed

because he was black; for him doing wrong was the right thing to do. He thought that this was

the best way to prove himself as being not less valuable than white men.

In a passage worth quoting at length, Wright explains why Bigger has committed his two

crimes:

But there were always two factors psychologically dominant in his personality.

First, through some quirk of circumstance, he had become estranged from the

religion and the folk culture of his race. Second, he was trying to react to and

answer the call of the dominant civilization whose glitter came to him through

the newspapers, magazines, radios, movies, and the mere imposing sight and

sound of daily American life. (Wright 333)

One of the main motives for Bigger’s actions was thus direct contact with the

Americans, who indirectly influenced his state of mind through their media and mass culture,

and eventually led him to reject the culture of his group

For Bigger, manhood in a white society can only be achieved through the acquisition

of violent qualities. However, as Mathew argues “those around him will only read that

violence by inserting it into the already existing narrative of the black rapist” (295). This

violence that brought Bigger back his manhood is also what took away his freedom and his

life. Mathews continues on to say “Bigger is indeed a native son, but as the closeness of his

first name to the epithet Nigger implies, his blackness renders the American manhood he has

achieved unrecognizable precisely because it is a manhood that depends on the maintenance

of racial difference” (Mathews 295). Indeed, Bigger’s dream of living a life as a white man

and possessing the rights of a white man is unattainable.

72

Through the chapters of the novel, one may see that violence concerned of both black

and white, and it influenced both of them. Multiple forms of violence were issued by the

whites to control the blacks and make their life unbearable. On the other hand, the blacks

reacted with their own kind of violence to show their unwillingness, disapproval and

intolerance of the terrible way of living imposed on them by the whites. Thus, violence

expressed against the oppressed will react on the oppressor. Indeed, Wright throughout his

novel depicted the different manifestations of violence that other writers did not implement in

their literary works. He invites us to reflect on the relationship between black American

conditions of oppression and violence as an outcome, and he stresses the fact that assuming

one’s gender identity is easier when it is not already raced.

Subsequently, Social, cultural, psychological factors played a major role in

influencing and shaping the personalities and minds of the blacks. Bigger, Native Son’s major

character, is an evident example of how can the environment shape one’s state of mind and

consciousness. The novel depicts to what extent can racism, poverty and frustration implants

the seeds of violence and crime in individuals as the only solution to escape oppression and

self-hatred. The oppression threatens the aspirations for livelihood and manhood; thus,

violence becomes a necessary rebellious and existential act.

73

Conclusion

Many fugitive slaves escaped the south heading to the north based on the belief that

they would live a decent life and enjoy their full rightful freedom. However, the north

welcomed them with crucial racism, violence, discrimination and segregation. They lived a

void and miserable life in a part of Chicago which was named the Black Belt where they

witnessed the most terrible and inhuman living conditions. The north was an environment in

which they were suppressed, humiliated and neglected of the least human rights.

Subsequently, the rationale behind the push in African American literature was

recognizing that decades of disfranchisement, through racist and stereotypical depictions of

blacks, had greatly damaged the perception of the black community in the United States and

Global cultural imagination. In an effort to increase readers’ awareness and to ensure a record

of these abuses for posterity, they hold a mirror to the face of white society highlighting their

inaction or complicity in the violence. Black intellects had to compose a work that could

speak directly to the black masses, for they have been excluded from involvement in the

creation of history. For this, African American literature emerged during the 18th and 19th

century with the aim to depict the tragic history of African Americans through the use of the

literary genre namely slave narratives. The latter are personal life experiences of ex-slaves

that reflect the suffering, violence and unbearable conditions to which black people were

subjected in America. Also, the Harlem Renaissance, which is referred to as the Golden Age

of African American literature, played a major role in the appearance of new concerns in

black literature.

The issue of racial violence has always been the concern of contemporary African

American writers. In addition to this obvious concern, Richard Wright is an author who has

become an important voice for the poor conditions and ugly reality of black people in
74

American society. In his novel, Native Son, he highlights several other aspects of violence and

its effects on the novel’s main characters. It submits a meaningful vision of identity formation

based on the violence and all the social, political, and psychological factors to which the

protagonist was exposed. As a result, the exposure to violence sabotages his behaviours which

is plainly expressed in his aggressive actions and committing two murders. Henceforth, it is

safe to say that Richard Wright has ultimately attempted and succeeded in portraying the

manifestations of this violence through symbols and imagery that elevate his novel beyond a

mere depiction of racial issues and propaganda.

75

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83

Resumé

Tout au long de l'histoire, les écrivains afro-américains ont limité leurs romans uniquement à la

violence raciale niant l'existence de tout autre type. C'est à travers le chef-d'œuvre de Richard Wright,

“Native Son”, que les différentes formes de violence dans la société afro-américaine sont couvertes de

manière approfondie. Par conséquent, la présente étude tentera d'enquêter sur les multiples facettes de

la violence exercée sur et par la communauté afro-américaine en analysant les principaux motifs

psychologiques qui les sous-tendent. Relativement, notre recherche mettra en lumière les différents

niveaux de violence manifestés dans le roman par les Africains eux-mêmes, non seulement contre les

Blancs, mais aussi contre leur propre peuple. En ce sens, nous émettons l'hypothèse que la violence

raciale n'est pas au cœur de Native Son”de Wright mais il y a d'autres manifestations de violence dans

le roman qui doivent être abordées. La thèse sera divisée en trois chapitres : Le premier chapitre,

purement théorique, traitera du concept de violence en littérature et de ses dimensions psychologiques.

Une attention remarquable est consacrée à l'examen de la littérature afro-américaine des XVIIIe et

XIXe siècles, qui dépeignait l'histoire tragique des Afro-Américains à travers le genre littéraire, à

savoir les récits d'esclaves. Il explorera également le développement de la littérature afro-américaine

du XXe siècle dans laquelle “The Harlem Renaissance”a joué un rôle remarquable dans l'apparition de

nouvelles préoccupations dans la littérature noire. Alors que le deuxième chapitre sera une vue

d'ensemble et une étude thématique du roman. Le troisième chapitre analysera les différents niveaux

de violence trouvés dans le roman à travers l'utilisation de théories littéraires de la psychanalyse.

Mots clés : Violence- Littérature afro-américaine- Récits d'esclaves- Blancs- Noirs- Psychanalyse.
‫‪84‬‬

‫الملخص‬

‫على مر التاريخ‪ ،‬حصر الكتاب االفريقيون األمريكيون رواياتهم على العنف العنصري فقط متجاهلين وجود أي نوع آخر ‪ .‬كان ذلك‬

‫من خالل كتابات ريتشارد رايتس و ابرزها تحفته " االبن االصلي" التي قد تطرق فيها إلى مختلف أنواع العنف في المجتمع االفريقي‬

‫االمريكي‪ .‬لهذا‪ ،‬ستحاول دراستنا الحالية التحري عن اوجه العنف العديدة التي مورست على و في المجتمع االفروامريكي‪ .‬و هذا عن‬

‫طريق تحليل و معالجة الدوافع النفسية وراء هذا االخير ‪ .‬حيث ان بحثنا هذا سيسلط الضوء عن المستويات المختلفة للعنف المتداول‬

‫في الرواية بواسطة األفارقة أنفسهم ليس ضد البيض فحسب‪ .‬بل على خالف ما يضنه الجميع‪ ،‬العنف ضد شعوبهم أيضا‪ .‬في هذا‬

‫المضمون‪ ،‬نحن نفترض أن العنف العنصري لم يكن محور رواية رايتس‪ .‬بل ان هنالك العديد من العنف الممارس في الرواية الذي‬

‫وجب معالجته‪.‬سيتم تقسيم هذه االطروحة إلى ثالثة فصول‪ .‬الفصل االول‪ ،‬نضري بحت‪ ،‬سيتعامل مع مفهوم العنف في األدب و ابعاده‬

‫النفسية‪ .‬لقد كرسنا اهتماما خاصا للفحص في االدب اآلفروامريكي خالل القرنين الثامن و التاسع عشر و الذي صور التاريخ‬

‫المأساوي األمريكيين األفارقة الذي أدرج تحت األدب المسمى ب روايات العبيد‪ .‬كما أننا أيضا توسعنا في تطور االدب االفروامريكي‬

‫للقرن العشرين الذي لعبت فيه نهضة "هارالم" دورا ملحوظا في ظهور اهتمامات جديد بأدب السود‪ .‬في حين أن الفصل الثاني‬

‫سيكون لمحة عامة و دراسة موضوعية للرواية‪ .‬اما عن الفصل الثالث‪ ،‬فقد كرس لتحليل مختلف مستويات العنف الذي وجد في‬

‫الرواية من خالل استعمال نظريات التحليل النفسي‬

‫الكلمات المفتاحية‪ :‬عنف ‪ -‬أدب أمريكي أفريقي ‪ -‬روايات عبيد ‪ -‬بيض ‪ -‬سود ‪ -‬تحليل نفسي‬