SOURCE: D'Itri, Patricia A. “Richard Wright in Chicago: Three Novels that Represent a Black Spokesman's Quest for Self Identity.” Midwestern Miscellany 4 (1976): 26-33.

[In the following essay, D'Itri cites Wright's first three novels as examples of works that address the progression of self-awareness in the life of black Americans.]

Richard Wright is most widely recognized as a literary spokesman for the alienated Afro-American. His first three novels treat a progression of self awareness in the Black American's stultified existence. Transplanted from the south to Chicago, the culturally deprived male protagonists stand outside the social mainstream and view the world from a repressed and alienated outsider's perspective. Nonetheless, Wright's fictional quest for self identity stands within larger twentieth century American literary traditions. He was strongly influenced by Theodore Dreiser's techniques of realism and naturalism as well as by John Steinbeck's description of the underdog in American society. Within traditional literary frameworks, Wright dons masks that represent thinly veiled autobiographical perspectives in some cases. In others they are sometimes a second, fictional self that is not strictly autobiographical but rather the author's effort to discover and proclaim his own identity.¹

In a way more direct than is true of most important modern authors of fiction, Wright's heroes were in naked honesty himself, and not imaginary creations that served merely to express his complicated personality.²

Saunders Redding notes this close correlation between Wright's life and work, and Dan McCall contends that Wright's major achievement is the determined ability to explore his own individual suffering and create from it crucial examples of “what all the long centuries mean.”³ Wright's fiction, then, is a sustained attempt “to lift the fires of his life into the mind so that the numbness might then out and let me feel the pain.”⁴ Wright also frequently acknowledged the self exploratory orientation of his fiction as in 1953 when he told William Gardner Smith that writing “would always be a way of thinking aloud over issues—posing the problems and the questions as to their solution—posing them only, not answering them.”⁵

For this purpose, Wright's protagonists probe what Charles Glicksberg calls the elusive and ungraspable secrets of the personality, the conflicts that go on between sensuality and spirit, good and evil, matter and mind, the world and consciousness.⁶ The perpetual becoming in this dialectical play of opposites prevents the protagonist from arriving at a point of finality or rest. Thus, Wright's characters are trapped in the interplay between polarities of black and white, the self and society, and the psychological dimensions of tension and relief, pride and defeat.

Wright's heroes embody Glicksberg's description of a predominant twentieth century fictional protagonist, the underground man who dwells masochistically on his sense of inferiority and the injuries he has been made to suffer. This protagonist is a mixture of submissiveness and vindictiveness, of humiliated impotence and assertive pride. Irrational and spiteful, he acts against his own best interests: he is a rebel who defies the categories of reason. He is Bigger Thomas, and he is Richard Wright.

As Wright's heroes epitomize this subculture, they can be juxtaposed against protagonists like Sinclair Lewis's George F. Babbitt, who embody conformity to pre-dominant social standards. Moreover, Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths and Steinbeck's Joads are on the economic lower rungs of the social ladder but still part of the white community. On the other hand, Wright's leading characters are denied entrance into the larger society not only because of their race but also because of a sense of alienation, lack of employment and other deprivation, commission of a violent crime, psychological stultification, or a desire to reject their old identity. Therefore, they must search within themselves for purpose and meaning. Cultural repression and individual frustration, thus, prevent them both from joining the larger social establishment and from forming a separate culture.

Wright's chief strength as a novelist was his ability to explain the excluded black protagonist to the larger American society. And certainly the initial shock and subsequent acclaim accorded to Native Son stemmed, in a large part, from the recognition of a long present but previously silent voice in the society. Wright's ability to distance himself sufficiently from this subculture to describe it to others made him distinctive.

Wright primarily wrote for a white audience because black people already know what it is to have uncertainty as a way of life, “of living within the present moment and letting that moment suffice as a rationale for life and death.”⁷ Wright contended that longstanding cultural and psychological repression developed a separate and unsatisfactory stunted identity in the Afro-American. At the end of Native Son Bigger's Communist lawyer, Max Boris, pleads for understanding of this subculture.

Rather, I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million people. I beg you to recognize human life draped in a form and guise alien to ours, but springing from a soil plowed and sown by our own hands. I ask you to recognize the laws and processes flowing from such a condition, understand them, seek to change them. If we do none of these, then we should not pretend horror or surprise when thwarted life expresses itself in fear and hate and crime.⁸

Wright's first three novels are devoted to explaining this mentality to the white society and to freeing the author from it to explore alternatives, the topic of his next two novels. A pattern of frustrated black identity can be traced if the sequence of Wright's first three novels is reversed. Black Boy explains the child's conditioning to racial tension, frustration, and stultification. Native Son recounts an adolescent's violent explosion out of such frustration, and Lawd Today describes the “adjusted” black adult who manages to avoid such an eruption and adapt to the twilight life of his environment with a brutal, stunted existence. In the order that the novels were written, Richard Wright comes to grips with facets of his own personality as an adult and in their childhood origins.

As all of the novels originate in the same basic identity, many standard elements are duplicated among their plots. All of the protagonists are male; all have a sense of alienation and isolation; all were emotionally oriented by dominant mothers, usually with little male influence; all reject religion and other commonly accepted values; most of them achieve a sense of awareness of themselves in relation to society through violent crises, usually an accidental death for which they often assume the guilt; and many of the protagonists arrive at their new awareness too late to profit from it. From a dramatic standpoint these elements are most successfully interwoven in the three novels about adolescents (Native Son, Black Boy, and The Long Dream) whose social and psychological perspectives develop together. The other three novels about adults (Lawd Today, The Outsider, and Savage Holiday) are dramatically less well integrated. Wright's need to find an external order with which to explain what seems like a chaotic existence led him to attempt to account for human behavior on the basis of psychology, philosophy, or politics with the formulas of Freudianism, existentialism, or Marxism. And these abstract explanations weaken the portraits of Wright's psychological captives. But social and psychological dimensions and their abstract explanations contribute to the evolution of Wright's individual perspective whether they add or detract from his literary stature.

The format and point of view of Wright's novels are determined by the protagonists' reactions toward a generally hostile environment. The hero-victims observe the dominant social forces through a vision that has been psychologically conditioned and crippled by these forces to the point where the protagonists react violently as the only means to assert themselves. Wright's heroes begin and end their quest for identity in a dehumanized sphere below the predominant social norms, and their individual limitations are reflected in Wright's description of Bigger Thomas:

… resentful toward whites, sullen, angry, ignorant, emotionally unstable, depressed and unaccountably elated at times, and unable even, because of his own lack of inner organization which American oppression has fostered in him, to unite with the members of his own race.⁹

Wright's characters have such a desperate striving, combined with such intense fear and frustration, that they often achieve just the opposite of what they strive for. Instead of finding identity and community, they extend their alienation and isolation. Furthermore, the desperate struggle does not enable them to recognize the same needs in others. Rather, they are detached to the extent that they can deny or even kill other persons, often with little or no recognizable motive. In their insecurity and alienation Wright's heroes attempt to balance their psychological and social goals for immediate personal fulfillment. They believe in no absolute values here or in an after life. But within the framework of the war between the individual's efforts to find self identity and society's efforts to restrict the fulfillment of that quest, Wright explores problems of economics, social status, personal pride, family interrelationships, and the American cultural heritage. But the protagonists' hopes are thwarted by social pressures to the point where they often regress into fantasy. Reality is determined by tension, frustration, and fear until the only alternatives are escape, death, or submission to the dominant culture.

II

Wright's early but last published novel, Lawd Today, is the final section of his biography of the Afro-American man trapped outside the American culture. This novel about a black postal worker embodies some autobiographical elements. Like the author, Jake Jackson's identity is jeopardized by his displacement from a rural southern culture to the unfamiliar and impersonal northern city. In the North his personality is fragmented by fear, not of instant death as in the South, but a submersion in an uncaring social order.¹⁰ The novel is Wright's attempt to grapple with the reality of this problem as his protagonist tries to avoid it. Jake uncritically accepts all of the current black middle-class values. Thus, his energies are directed toward denying the realities of his situation. However, this results in a distinction between what Jake knows and what he wants to believe. Occasionally, then, self hatred and racial deprecation surface in moments of “bitter lucidity, resentment, and self-pity.”¹¹ Jake's frustration is expressed in sensual escape and brutality. In the day's time that the novel spans, Jake fights with his wife, borrows money at the post office to pay for her illness, spends much of it on food and liquor, and has the rest stolen by a black prostitute and her accomplice. Jake returns home penniless and further in debt whereupon he beats his wife in frustration. The day is also Lincoln's birthday, and events of his career blare over the radio occasionally in an ironic contrast because Jake is clearly enslaved despite the Great Emancipator.

Bigger Thomas, the famous protagonist of Native Son, is also dominated by fear and dread of the white society. And he tries to avoid facing this reality, but violence breaks the pattern and alters his awareness. Bigger has been psychologically conditioned by a dominant mother, by racial tension, and by economic need. He rejects the beliefs with which most black people avoid confronting the frustration and hopelessness of their dilemma. Thus, he cannot be satisfied with “either his mother's religiousity, his sister's Y.W.C.A. virtue, or Bessie's whiskey; all seem to him evasions of reality.”¹² Wright's subsequently written explanatory essay “How Bigger Was Born” notes that this evasion is necessary for the submissive members of a minority group because they are shaped as well as oppressed by the majority. The outsider reacts to the dominant civilization's incentives and prizes because his consciousness received its tones and timbre from the strivings of that civilization. The outsider's behavioral patterns are based on the environment which supplies the instrumentalities through which the organism expresses itself, “and if that environment is warped or tranquil, the mode and manner of behavior will be affected toward deadlocking tension or orderly fulfillment and satisfaction.”¹³ Thus, members of the minority group react to the values that they recognize and accept but cannot attain in various ways ranging from outright blind rebellion in Bigger Thomas's case to a sweet, other-wordly submissiveness. Wright's heroes reject the religion and folk culture of their race and, in turn, are rejected by the majority whose goals they seek. Thus, they form a distinct identity wherein they are able to see their own victimization without illusion.

At the beginning of Native Son Bigger Thomas is consumed by fear and hatred of the whites who cause his suppression. Because he cannot act against them, he directs his hatred and hostility toward the black people around him, first toward his family and then toward his friends. As he is denied admission into the mainstream of American society, he feels alienated from members of his own subculture as well. Bigger is obliged to create his own ethics and meaning in existence, a natural existentialism replaces traditional values, restraints, and civilized modes of behavior. But denial of these larger social values leaves Bigger with a negatively oriented psyche. He lacks any positive affirmation. For example, Bigger's dreams show a fear of falling, and his desires are expressed with the recognition that they are unlikely to be fulfilled, as when Bigger longingly says, “Them white boys sure can fly.”

In his account of Bigger's creation, Wright says he formulated Bigger's changing perspective toward society as a complex snarl of psychological, emotional, and social interrelationships. The first psychological level is the intimate personal consciousness and core of being which differs with every person. Wright says, “I had to deal with Bigger's dreams, his fleeting, momentary sensations, his yearning, his visions, his deep emotional responses.”¹⁴ And on a larger emotional level that, Wright contends, is shared by all men, Bigger reflects the objectless, timeless, spaceless element of primal fear and dread. Wright calls this first fear a reflex urge toward ectasy, complete submission, and trust. From this fear springs religion and faith in government, but in Bigger's case the primitive fear and ecstasy are naked, “… exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faith would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstances.”¹⁵ Within these various dimensions Wright tried to show how repression affects Bigger's psyche, his relationships with other black people, and his role as a native son who is both part of and alienated from the American society. Bigger inhabits a No Man's Land between powerful America and his own stunted place in life. Similarly, the author inhabits a No Man's Land wherein he interprets Bigger for the larger society; and his own personality is woven into the portrait of Bigger Thomas.

As I contemplated Bigger and what he meant, I said to myself, “I must write this novel, not only for others to read, but to free myself of this sense of shame and fear.” In fact, the novel, as time passed, grew upon me to the extent that it became a necessity to write it: the writing of it turned into a way of living for me.”¹⁶

Wright draws out his own emotions in Native Son. Like Jake Jackson, Bigger Thomas is initially unaware of the motivations to which he is conditioned. He represses from himself the knowledge that he is destined to bear endless days of dreary poverty, abject humiliation, and tormenting frustration. Bigger knows that if he admits this reality, his recognition could result in an act of violence. “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.”¹⁷ As Bigger blinds himself to the reality of his condition in the same way that Jake Jackson does, Wright suggests that blindness frequently limits social and psychological awareness of reality. As Mary Dalton's blind mother is in the same room but cannot see Bigger accidentally smother her daughter in terror that he might be discovered, Mary and her boyfriend Jan are also blind when their misguided efforts to be friendly only humiliate and antagonize Bigger. And after Bigger kills Mary, he relies on the blindness of white policemen not to suspect him because they view him as an ignorant black boy who is incapable of such a crime.

Bigger's behavior is dictated by preconditioning to guilt and fear. After Mary is dead, he insists on accepting responsibility both because of his previous unconscious acceptance of the possibility that he could commit murder and because he has gained a new confidence in himself. The violence has helped overcome some of his fear and dread and, in this sense, was a positive act. Bigger diminished the White Terror from an all encompassing fear to a fragmented obstacle whose parts he can see more clearly. A portion of the veil of blindness has been torn away.

Despite Bigger's new sense of self consequence, he is still an outsider without moral responsibility, and he murders Bessie despite her willingness to help him. After his capture Bigger continues to develop a more positive orientation toward humanity through conversations with his lawyer. Bigger finally concludes that all black people are locked in isolated little cells although they want to reach out to other people.

For the first time in his life he had gained a pinnacle of feeling upon which he could stand and see vague relations that he had never dreamed of. If that white looming mountain of hate were not a mountain at all, but people, people like himself, and like Jan—then he was faced with a high hope the likes of which he had never thought could be, and a despair the full depths of which he knew he could not stand to feel.¹⁸

With his loss of alienation Bigger relaxes even as he contemplates his walk to the electric chair. Ironically, he longs to find his own place in this newly constructed picture of human relationships just when the white society demands his death for a murder committed in his previous terror-ridden existence.

Although terror and dread are also prevalent in his next novel, Black Boy, a mature perspective distances the point of view from the boy's psyche as events are recollected. The author looks back on the development of tensions in childhood that could produce the rebellious adolescent Bigger Thomas or the frustrated adult Jake Jackson.

In the semi-autobiographical Black Boy, young Richard Wright displays a quiet pride and what Dan McCall describes as a “spare, survivor's integrity, poised on the edge of despair.” Thus, Richard's psychological stance emerges through the combat between his inherent values and those imposed by his family and the society, particularly toward racial tension and the related family subjugation, frustration, and poverty.

From his early childhood recollection of his mother's beating him senseless for setting the house on fire, the mood of recollected tension, terror and deprivation is conveyed. As in Wright's other novels the mother is the major influence on the boy's character, and he is torn between empathy for her suffering and a need to assert his own independence. The result is an emotional freezing that limits the boy's ability to feel deeply about another person.

My mother's suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread, the meaningless pain and endless suffering. Her life set the emotional tone of my life, colored the men and women I was to meet in the future, conditioned my relation to events that had not yet happened, determined my attitude to situations and circumstances I had yet to face.¹⁹

On the basis of his recollection of this early stage and subsequent experiences, the protagonist contends that his own psychological deprivation is paralleled in other black people who lack a depth of emotional capability because they are denied economic, social, and emotional fulfillment.

Young Richard's early conditioning to anxiety and tension is reinforced by other family relationships to the extent that at an early age he says “I was already so conditioned toward my relatives that when I passed them I actually had a nervous tic in my muscles.” Richard disagrees with his family over traditional religious values that he does not accept, the fact that the Seventh Day Adventists' Church service conflicts with his efforts to find a job on Saturday, and his awakening interest in sex and literature. But the predominant tension of his life eventually stems from racial discrimination.

Wright traces the process of racial conditioning from early childhood when the young boy assumes that a white man has beaten a black boy because he is the boy's father. Richard's inherent dignity is offended that any human being should beat another, but no racial identification is involved. Because his Granny is near white and because he does not go into the white community to seek employment until he is an adolescent, Richard's conditioning to racism is late; and he finds himself ill equipped to play the role expected of black people by the white society. For example, when he applies for a job with a white family, the housewife asks if he steals; and he laughingly replies that he would be foolish to tell her if he did. Her shocked response teaches him that he must assume a pose of naive innocence to conform to the expectations of white people.

Richard's mother is evasive when he asks questions about the segregated lines of people at the railroad station and other racial discrimination, but she cannot hide the open terror with which she and his Aunt Maggie flee from Elaine, Arkansas, after white people have killed Maggie's husband to acquire his prosperous bar. Eventually, the racial conditioning is sufficiently complete until the boy refuses to sell his dog to a white girl even though he is so hungry and desperate for money that he will part with the treasured animal. Thus, racial tension dominates even physical need. Richard becomes tense when white people are mentioned, and he gloats when he hears that a Negro woman revenged her husband's death by killing four white men. Like Bigger Thomas, Richard resorts to fantasy to triumph over the white demon because he is helpless before it in the real world.

These fantasies were no longer a reflection of my reaction to the white people, they were a part of my living, of my emotional life; they were a culture, a creed, a religion. The hostility of the whites had become so deeply implanted in my mind and feelings that it had lost direct connections with the daily environment in which I lived; and my reaction to this hostility fed upon itself, grew or dimished according to the news that reached me about the whites, according to what I aspired or hoped for. Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast complex of emotions, involving the whole of my personality, would be aroused.²⁰

Whereas Jake Jackson tries to avoid facing reality and Bigger Thomas rebels, Richard Wright attempts to find a more satisfying alternative for the frustrating black existence in the South. He leaves an optical firm in Memphis because white employees refuse to train him, and he flees North in hopes of finding a more satisfying existence in Chicago. With this account of the childhood origins of social and psychological stultification, Wright's biography of the Afro-American is complete. Except for an abortive plunge into Marxism, a political alternative suggested at the end of Native Son, the only alternatives for the black American are death, despair, or escape. Since they are all unsatisfactory, Wright's later novels are attempts to explain Man's identity and reactions to his environment outside of a racial context. He ended his major role as a novelist dedicated to explaining black Americans to whites with the completion of the Chicago trilogy.

Notes

1. Charles I. Glicksberg, The Self in Modern Literature (University Park, 1963).

2. Saunders Redding, “The Alien Vision of Richard Wright,” Soon One Morning, Herbert Hill, ed. (New York, 1963).

3. Dan McCall, The Example of Richard Wright (New York, 1969).

4. Dan McCall, The Example of Richard Wright (New York, 1969).

5. Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright (Carbondale, 1969).

6. Charles I. Glicksberg, The Self in Modern Literature (University Park, 1963).

7. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York, 1966).

8. Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright (Carbondale, 1969).

9. Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born” Native Son (New York, 1969).

10. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York, 1966).

11. Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright (Carbondale, 1969).

12. Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright (Carbondale, 1969).

13. Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born” Native Son (New York, 1969).

14. Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born” Native Son (New York, 1969).

15. Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born” Native Son (New York, 1969).

16. Richard Wright, “How Bigger Was Born” Native Son (New York, 1969).

17. Russell Carl Brignano, An Introduction to Richard Wright (Pittsburgh, 1970).

18. Edward Margolies, “Richard Wright: Native Son and Three Kinds of Revolution,” Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth Century Negro-American Authors (Philadelphia, 1968).

19. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York, 1966).

20. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York, 1966).