Native Son: key quotations from 'Fear' Flashcards
“The two boys kept their faces averted while the mother and sister put on enough clothes to keep them from feeling ashamed.”
How does the description of the Thomas family’s living quarters introduce the idea of social determinism, described by Andrew Warnes as the way “certain social conditions produce certain human personalities”?
The family’s poverty, shown in the way they can only afford to live in a one-room flat, is presented as a source of shame in the way individuals are denied the basic privacy enjoyed by the majority of the population. It creates great tension within the family unit, and thus hinders, for the black community, the basic values that hold a society together: trust, respect, personal integrity. The shame, and the need to collectively pretend they are not feeling it (the “conspiracy against shame”), fuels Bigger’s anger against the economic oppression and injustice of white establishment power.
“The rat’s belly pulsed with fear… Bigger took a shoe and pounded the rat’s head, crushing it, cursing hysterically..”
In what different ways is the rat episode thematically significant?
By presenting their accommodation as infested, Wright develops further the idea of social determinism by presenting the gulf in economic circumstances between the majority of the black and white communities. Bigger’s anger in killing it is shown to be a reaction to the injustice of this, and also foreshadows his later violence towards both Mary Dalton and Bessie. The episode also indirectly foregrounds the hypocrisy of the Dalton family who present themselves as philanthropists helping out the poor black individuals such as Bigger, but who actually perpetuate the existing socio-economic segregation by controlling the housing market through their ‘charitable’ foundation. In addition, the event is ominously symbolic of the trajectory of Bigger’s fortunes as the novel progresses, while depicting how the white law enforcement officers see black criminals like Bigger as little more than vermin.
“He looked at the poster: the white face was fleshy but stern; one hand was uplifted and its index finger pointed straight out into the street at each passer-by. … At the top of the poster were tall red letters: IF YOU BREAK THE LAW, YOU CAN’T WIN!
…[Bigger’s response to this image of Buckley, the State Attorney, is] ‘You crook…you let whoever pays you off win!’”
Themes developed by the image and Bigger’s reaction?
The size of the image deliberately represents the intimidating power of the law, with the accusatory finger suggesting what Warnes called “the atmosphere of inevitability” that Wright created around Bigger’s path to criminality; it is as if he has already been singled out to commit crime by his economic circumstances, and the foreshadowing of later events bears this out: Buckley becomes the attorney prosecuting Bigger later in the novel. Bigger’s response reflects the perception amongst socially disenfranchised groups, particularly the BC (black community), that the capitalist society of America was inherently corrupt.
“These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger- like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a faraway, invisible force.”
How does this description of Bigger (p.58) develop Wright’s Marxist presentation of his antihero’s character?
By using natural imagery evoking the gravitational pull of the moon on the seas, Wright presents Bigger as a character who has little or no control over the forces shaping his life path and behaviours; it develops the idea of social determinism through suggesting that it is the injustices of the wider prejudiced, oppressive, capitalist society that are acting on Bigger’s instincts, in conflict with the contention of modern critics (and the playwright Paul Green, who teamed up with Wright in 1941 to adapt ‘NS’ for the stage), that the individual must acknowledge responsibility for their own actions.
“We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail. Half the time I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knot-hole in the fence…”
Bigger’s complaint to Gus, P.50: how might this be interpreted in terms of the novel’s key themes?
Wright uses a series of oppositions to suggest causality between racial division and lack of material wealth/ opportunity, and similes to indicate Bigger’s feelings of social exclusion/alienation, made worse by being able to see the unattainable advantages whites enjoy. By presenting a character railing against the bourgeois privilege of his oppressors, Wright attempts to force his white readers to “accept their complicity in the misery of this American underclass” as Caryl Phillips put it, although many in 1940 would have dismissed Wright as using his character to pursue his overtly communist literary agenda.
P.77 “He felt strangely blind”/P.78 Bigger’s realisation that Mrs D is blind/ P.87 Peggy’s details of Mrs D’s background & rel. with Mr D… “Mrs Dalton’s the one who’s really nice. If it wasn’t for her, he would not be doing what he does. She made him rich. … Of course, he made a lot of money afterwards out of real estate. But most of the money’s hers. She’s blind, poor thing.”
What does the motif of blindness suggest about (a) the gulf of opportunity and education between races, and (b) the naivety and hypocrisy of white philanthropy towards the BC?
(a) Bigger’s ‘strange blindness’ is due to the high register language of whites that he does not understand. Wright’s implication is that bourgeois white society habitually alienates the BC through choosing to use this “different language”, aware that the gulf in educational opportunities between races means they can exploit the ignorance of any black people within earshot. Any ‘opportunity’ that self-styled philanthropists such as Mr Dalton offers to underprivileged black people is often limited to menial work such as driving; Bigger’s predecessor at the Dalton’s, Green, may have risen to a “job with the government” through attending night school, but Bigger “was not going to any night school”. By giving this insight into Bigger’s resistance to white didacticism (=patronisingly trying to give people moral instruction) , Wright draws attention to the way the Daltons’ ‘success stories’ in their philanthropy are just the talented tip of a disaffected iceberg. The majority do not distinguish themselves as Mr Green did.
(b) We also learn that Mrs D’s blindness appears to symbolise her unawareness of her husband’s exploitative nature, using her money to build a reputation for philanthropy that Wright implies is just a smokescreen for capitalist ventures in real estate, which also perpetuates the tacit ‘Jim Crow’ segregation (in all but name) of the housing in Chicago.
• P.83 [After Mr Dalton tells Mary to leave Bigger alone when she starts harassing him about being in a union] “The girl turned and poked out a red tongue at him. “All right, Mr Capitalist!” She turned again to Bigger. “Isn’t he a capitalist, Bigger?” Bigger… did not know what a capitalist was.”
Here Mary Dalton attempts to endear herself to Bigger through exaggerated lip-service to communist rhetoric…what does our introduction to Mary suggest about her ‘blindness’? What point might Wright be making about the nature of some American communist sympathisers in the 1930s?
Mary’s blindness to the true nature of the gulf of inequality between races is shown in the naive assumptions she makes about Bigger’s knowledge of/interest in the communist cause. On p.96, when she proposes the drive out into the town, Wright gives readers a blunt insight into Bigger’s opinion of the ‘Reds’: “He didn’t want to meet any communists. They didn’t have any money”, indicating that Bigger is aware of their disdain for capitalist society but doesn’t share it: he is pragmatic, a realist, and has not had the education to detach himself from his poverty in order to reflect on the wider economic causes of his predicament, and thus embrace communism; he just reacts to irresistible economic forces that determine his thoughts (see slide 5), and sees socially unjust outcomes as so inevitable that his warped morality can only try to prioritise the one he would be least shamed by: “he felt it was alright for a man to go to jail for robbery, but to go to jail for fooling around with reds was bunk.” While presenting this socially deterministic view of Bigger (and the wider disaffected section of young black male society he represents) Wright also levels a criticism at the way communism was used as a fashionable ideological ‘badge’ of rebellion amongst young privileged whites like Mary Dalton: her presentation as petulant and childish underlines this, and chimes with the often exaggerated, hysterical rhetoric the American communist party was publishing in the early 1930s, for example labelling new President Roosevelt a “fascist dictator” when in truth his New Deal policies followed sensible, socially inclusive ideals that tried to tackle the poverty of the Depression. See http://www.visionandvalues.org/docs/ Kengor_Great_Depression_and_American_Communist_Party.pdf
p.98 [in response to Jan’s attempts to speak to Bigger as an equal-‘Don’t say ‘sir’ to me’- and Mary’s over-friendliness] “it was a shadowy region, a No Man’s Land, the ground that separated the white world from the black that he stood on. He felt naked, transparent; he felt that this white man, having helped to put him down, having helped to deform him, held him up now to look at him and be amused. At that moment he felt towards Mary and Jan a dumb, cold, inarticulate hate.”
Here Wright presents Bigger as a victim of a society so deeply divided by the fault lines of historical racism that there is no hope for Jan and Mary’s naive idealism to connect with him across the rift; he sees white society as sharing culpability for his plight and cannot find any conciliatory emotion, as the war imagery implies. If he were to admit their philanthropic intentions as genuine, however misguided, he would be exposing himself to attack. He harbours a deep-seated resentment towards a white society he sees as responsible for his ‘deformity’, his inability to forge an individual identity of which he can be proud. Contextually, in his presentation of Bigger, Wright was trying to reflect a type of disenfranchised individual who transcended national and cultural boundaries: in his introduction ‘How Bigger was born’ he writes “I was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of Bigger in America and Bigger in Nazi Germany and Bigger in old Russia. All Bigger Thomases, white and black, felt tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical and restless.” The popular uprisings in the latter two countries in the second and third decades of the 20th century were partly reactions against the complacent bourgeois attitudes of the former ruling classes, and Bigger’s ‘hate’ in this episode, equally, echoes that rejection: he hates, instinctively, the similar bourgeois social platform that allows the likes of Jan and Mary to flirt with communist attitudes, even though he cannot express it. As Wright continues in the same essay cited above, “The difference between Bigger’s tensity and the German variety is that Bigger’s, due to America’s educational restrictions on the bulk of her negro population, is in a nascent (=just forming) state, not yet articulate.”
P.106 [Jan is speaking to Bigger in the black diner: Bigger has just admitted ‘he doesn’t know’ how he feels about his Dad getting killed when he was a kid; Jan is encouraging him to join the communists in order to stop such injustices.]
‘You’ve read about the Scottsboro Boys?’
‘I heard about ‘em.’
‘Don’t you think we [the Communist Party] did a good job in helping to keep ‘em from killing those boys?’
‘It was all right.’
Bigger’s non-committal response shows Wright’s purpose of presenting Bigger as a “product of a dislocated society”, part of a “civilization which…contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance.” (Quotes from ‘How Bigger was born’ again.) He feels no solidarity with others suffering similar or worse prejudice than he is, suggesting that for all the advances in black cultural identity made during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s (described by black writer Alain Locke in 1926 as “Negro life…seizing its first chances for group expression and self determination”, when the “New Negro” transformed “social disillusionment to race pride”), young blacks in Depression-era Chicago still felt economically and culturally stranded. Empathy and solidarity are necessary for a sense of community and social cohesion to grow, but such emotions cannot be felt or offered if individuals do not like, or feel they even have, their own sense of identity. Bigger “was something he [himself] hated” while talking to Jan; as Wright puts it in the intro, Bigger’s self-identity “is still in a state of individual anger and hatred”, due to “the effects of American oppression, which has not allowed for the forming of deep ideas of solidarity among Negroes.”
Bedroom murder scene: p.116-119
(a) “He tightened his fingers on her breasts, kissing her again, feeling her move towards him. he was aware only of her body now; his lips trembled.”
(b) “He turned and a hysterical terror seized him, as though he were falling from a great height in a dream. A white blur was standing by the door, ghostlike.”
(c) [After realising he has accidentally murdered Mary Dalton] “The reality of the room fell from him; the vast city of white people that sprawled outside took its place.”
(a) By presenting Bigger’s impulsive difficulty in restraining sexual arousal Wright is deliberately provocative of his white readers’ latent racism re: false stereotypes of black men’s lack of sexual restraint, and of their fear of rape, the most scandalous, taboo act a black man could commit against a white woman in the fevered 1930s context of the Scottsboro Boys’ trial. Wright continues this provocation, presenting Bigger very much as an anti-hero during his subsequent grisly attempts to dispose of Mary’s body. By showing his character’s callous pragmatism through narrative focalisation (“He saw a hatchet. Yes! That would do it”) he implies, perhaps, that the daily social opprobrium young black men are surrounded by ultimately drains them of compassion and moral rationality; the hysteric, ‘fight or flight’ reptilian brain takes over, and their life becomes entirely reactive (as opposed to proactive.)
(b) and (c) The structural significance of Wright’s earlier reference to the Scottsboro boys becomes clear: the reaction of white society to rape, or the circumstantial suggestion of it, is fresh in Bigger’s mind and his ‘terror’ reflects this. His murder of Mary is thus shown to be socially determined, attributable, principally, to his wild fear of inevitable condemnation for rape, whether guilty of it or not, if found in Mary’s bedroom; there is no chance of contesting such an accusation, and both the reference to Mrs Dalton as a supernatural force-“ghostlike”- as well as the sudden widescreen depiction of the threat the social context presents to Bigger if caught-“the vast city of white people that sprawled outside”- serve to reinforce this idea.
