Richard Wrights novel, Native Son A stark naturalistic vision of American society Essay Example For Students

Richard Wrights novel, Native Son: A stark naturalistic vision of American society Essay In Richard Wrights novel, Native Son, Wright uses the theory of naturalism to describe race relations in America. Looking back on his youth, Wright remembers vividly, the struggle against poverty, fear and racism, which are also the themes that are explored in this novel. Wrights description of his protagonists story reflects his own experiences in America. Wright remembers his fathers desertion of the family, coupled with his mothers crippling illness, which left her and her two sons in poverty, and which made Wrights early years unhappy ones. Growing up in Mississippi, Wright felt isolated and rebellious against authority. He left school after completing the ninth grade because he believed that the schools programs were irrelevant to a black boys future. Bakish 5. Self-taught following his graduation and embittered by segregation and racism, he was drawn to the naturalistic novels of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. In his hometown of Mississippi, Wright was often denied jobs because white workers felt threatened. Bakish 6. Perhaps hoping to move from rags to riches, Wright migrated north to Chicago in 1927 at the age of 19, and then to New York in 1937, but the situation was no different. Wright learned that Chicago and New York were no better than Mississippi. He came to the north to break the tragic cycle of his life in the South, what he found, however, was continuing enslavement. Bakish 31. Because Wright chose to deal with the experience he knew best, Native Son is an exploration of how the pressure and racism of the American cultural environment affects black people, their feelings, thoughts, self-images, in fact, their entire lives. Wrights attraction to naturalism comes from his instinctive recognition that his own life as an American black man was so closely reflected in naturalistic fiction. Naturalist doctrine assumes that fate is something imposed on the individual from outside. The protagonist of the naturalist novel is therefore at the mercy of circumstances rather than of himself. Furst and Skrine 18. Naturalistic writers study people by their natural instincts, passions and the way their lives are governed by forces of environment and heredity. The recurrent imagery of naturalism is drawn from the animal world. Human beings, are, in Emile Zolas phrase, human beasts, characters that can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. So, naturalism abounds in the law of struggle for existence. Furst and Skrine 16. According to the naturalist, man is an animal whose course is determined by his heredity, by the effects of his environment and by the pressures of the moment. This conception robs man of responsibility for his actions. His actions are inescapable results of physical forces and conditions totally beyond his control. Furst and Skrine 18. Through characterization, symbolism and the setting Wright reveals his protagonists fate as a black man in society. Wright, in keeping with the features of a naturalist novel, populates his novel with characters from the lower class, the uneducated and the unsophisticated. Bessie, Bigger, Gus, The Thomas etc Since their daily life is commonplace and ordinary, the novel infuses qualities associated with the heroic such as acts of violence, and passion which involve sexual adventure which culminate in desperate moments and violent death. Pizer 12. Wright begins Native Son with the grotesque scene of Bigger chasing and killing the rat prowling his familys one-room, slum apartment in Chicagos Black Belt. This action is ironically symbolic. The rat characterizes the social environment in which Bigger is forced to exist. In How Bigger Was Born, Wright asserts that the environment supplies the instruments through which the subject expresses itself. Racism is the instrument that controls all aspects of Biggers life- his home, school, job, friends, the church, the police, the court, and the media. So, the violent death of the rat, symbolizes the economic forces that oppress the poor. It also foreshadows Biggers violent efforts to break out of the physical and mental rattrap his life has been. Bakish 31. Bigger was not born a violent criminal, but became one in the unforgiving world of racism and poverty in American society. Bigger experiences physical and psychological alienation from his family and friends as a result of the unfavourable traits in his personality. These traits evolved out of the inner frustrations and rage caused by his exclusion from the larger society around him. Brigano 145. Hence, the environment shapes Biggers consciousness. Bigger also develops a fragmented psyche. In How Bigger Was Born, Wright indicates that white societys negative perceptions of blackness cause Bigger to feel he was something to be hated; his black skin was a badge of shame. Bigger felt uncomfortable in their presence. As a result, when the relief agency offers Bigger a job as a cha uffeur to the wealthy Dalton family, he fears walking through the white section of the city. It is only with his gun and his knife at his side does he feel on equal footing with the white world. Shakespeare, Richard II: analysis of Richard as a king EssayWhen faced with danger, Bigger lashes out just as an animal would. Although Mr. Dalton has periodically converted his profits from the rents into magnanimous contributions to various Negro institutions, Wright establishes that bourgeoisie capitalists engage in such seemingly humanitarian deeds in order to discourage revolt and to appease their own feelings of guilt. Through Mr. Dalton Wright is exposing white hypocrisy. Brignano 77. Similarly, Mrs. Daltons blindness is a symbol of the failure of whites to see blacks as anything but criminals. It is true that Mrs. Dalton cannot see Bigger in the room, but if she could have, she would have been blind to the reason why he was there. The racism that black people endured in the 1930s was not a figment of Wrights imagination. Popular culture displayed negative perceptions of African Americans and perpetuated these through magazines, propaganda, and motion pictures. Bigger himself, used these stereotypes imposed on blacks to escape the repercussions of his murder of Mary Dalton. Bigger reasons that since he is supposed to be a stupid black boy, he would never be expected to commit such a daring act. Therefore, he implicates Jan Erlone in the murder by signing the ransom note Red, because he knew that the Communist party was hated in the society. Further, he acts out the white-assigned role of the stupid black boy, on the morning after the murder, by sitting and waiting for his breakfast. Wright employs the omniscient narrator in this framework by revealing Biggers thoughts: who on earth would think that he, a black timid Negro boy would murder and burn a rich white girl and then sit and wait for his breakfast like this? Wright 91. Through Wrights graphic descriptions of the details of Biggers crimes, Bigger is portrayed as a naturalistic victim caught in an environmental trap. Bloom 65 It may be argued that Bigger was just in the wrong place at the wrong time; a victim of circumstances, for if Mary had stuck to the plan and gone to the lecture at the university she would not have gotten drunk, if she had not been drunk, she would not have had to be carried to her room. If Bigger had not taken her to her room, he would not have had to hide from her mother. If her mother had not come in, he would not have had to put the pillow over her face, which led to her suffocation. Nevertheless, like the rat, overpowered by societal forces stronger than himself, Bigger is doomed to die a violent death for his crimes. However, the murders gave Bigger a strange sense of satisfaction. For the first time in his life, he has defied the legal, social and moral concepts of the society that oppressed him. The murders awaken in him, a new concept of himself. Racism was nothing new in the 1940s. Racism was everywhere, even in the so-called fairness of the American justice system. Wright did not even have to make up the hypocrisy of American justice; he just used actual court cases, like the 1938-39 case of Robert Nixon. Nixon was charged for killing a white girl during a robbery, which did not stray too far from Bigger Thomas story. Through Biggers lawyer, Boris Max, the hypocrisy of the American justice system was highlighted. In Biggers defense, he cited a case where, rich white boys, clearly guilty of kidnapping and first degree murder had escaped the death penalty, but the lawyer sees that Bigger has no chance in this bigoted society. Bakish 38. Through the defense summation in Native Son, Wright indicts the society that has contributed to the development of Bigger Thomas. The tripartite division of the novel-Fear, Flight and Fate reveals the stark realities of African American experience in the 1940s. They lived in fear of white rule, as a result they were always running away, but no matter what they did or where they went, their fate was already decided . From the foregoing, it is clearly evident, that the use of naturalism allowed Wright to present an unbiased account of American social and class relations through the eyes of an ignorant character whose world of poverty, despair, and frustration turn him into a killer. Moreover, since his protagonists experiences reflect his own, Wright is able to use his naturalistic style to objectively record his own experience without distorting it to suit conventional morality and standard literary tastes. So it can be said that Native Son is a stark naturalistic vision of American society.