Native Son: key quotations from 'Flight' Flashcards
“He had murdered and had created a new life for himself. It was something that was all his own, and it was the first time in his life he had had anything that others could not take from him.” p.135
Wright’s presentation of Bigger’s feelings uses paradox to reflect the warping of morality effected by generations of racial oppression: taking a white life gives him “new life”, as if he is living out the parasitical role that white society habitually attributed to blacks post-emancipation, i.e. since the 1860s. The traditional, morally ‘right’ ways of living offer no rewards for young black youth in the 1930s and the only routes to empowerment involved criminality. However, the Communist Party USA did become known as “the only party that took racial equality seriously” (Adam Fairclough) and offered many young black men- Wright included, briefly- a more constructive platform for resistance. By presenting Bigger as indifferent to this (“Communists didn’t have any money”) Wright further compounds what he saw as the insidious, corrupting nature of the prevalent capitalist society determining the moral isolation of his particular demographic.
“The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted. They would never know.” p.136
Bigger’s thoughts here advocate his philosophy of surface conformity in order to be able to transgress social and moral boundaries with impunity; a reaction to the 1930s’ all-pervasive prejudice and oppression. Comparable to Gatsby’s ‘respectable’ drug stores fronting his illegal boot-legging business, it indicates how achievement of ambition or progress for those disadvantaged through race and/or poverty (arguably both handicaps apply to both Bigger and Gatsby to differing extents) relies on embracing corruption. Even Bigger’s naivety (‘they would never know’) echoes Gatsby’s hopes of reconciliation with Daisy.
“[of his mother and siblings] There was one way of living they preferred above all others; and they were blind to what did not fit.” p.136
Here Bigger’s warped morality is further developed by Wright showing how he sees virtue and common consensus re: right and wrong as ‘blindness’, and a ‘preference’ in lifestyle; it also develops the ‘blindness’ motif originated earlier in the Daltons’ blindness to how their ‘philanthropy’ is actually hypocritical and damaging to the black community. Bigger’s accusation of his family being blinded by their moral idealism is comparable to Gatsby’s blind idealism re: recapturing Daisy’s love.
“There were rare moments when a feeling and a longing for solidarity with black people would take hold of him…but that dream would fade when he looked at the other black people near him… he felt there was too much difference between him and them to allow for a common binding and a common life.” p.144
Wright articulates Bigger’s sense of isolation from his own race in terms of his deep frustration at the “mute tribute” they pay to the “great natural force” of white oppression that keeps them living within “certain limits” (quotes from earlier on p.144). He sees them as complicit in their own subjugation and cites the need for “a black man who would whip all the black people into a tight band”, ripe for revolution, echoing “Hitler [or] Mussolini”, caring not “whether these acts were right or wrong”, wanting only “possible avenues of escape.” (p.145) Bigger’s desperation, as well as his naivety, is portrayed through the reference to extreme abuses of power in the 1930s’ world political context, and prompts Baldwin’s later criticism that Bigger’s portrayal fails to “redeem the pains of a despised people [i.e. the Black Communities of 1930s America] but reveals… nothing more than his own fierce bitterness at having been born one of them.” While Wright is trying to convey the idea that Bigger is a typical product of this divided 1930s Black society, Baldwin rejects this ‘representational’ idea of Bigger’s character.
”..he had a big package in his arms so wet and slippery and heavy that he could scarcely hold onto it and he wanted to know what was in the package and he stopped near an alley corner and unwrapped it and the paper fell away and he saw- it was his own head…” p.194
This dream of Bigger’s is described at the point where Mary is still ‘missing’, he is still trying to incriminate Jan and is considering the ransom note. It is one of a number of examples of Wright’s use of Gothic literary tropes that present Bigger as a victim of circumstance, his criminality pre-determined by white society. This dream might be interpreted as a prefigurement of his own inevitable death, a development of his killing of the rat at the start of the novel, condemned by the society that ‘created’ him, with the head symbolising a subconscious merging of crime and punishment: his killing of Mary and his own later execution. Chris Baldick said of American literature’s fascination with the Gothic, “America regards itself as an enlightened civilisation that has escaped ancient forms of tyranny…[but still] has to go back and revisit its moment of separation from its dark past.” Here we can see Wright subverting this idea by using gothic tropes to emphasise how, for the black community, American society is still connected to its dark past; indeed the present is not much brighter, as Bigger’s dream could be said to represent how any rebellion or attempt to escape the tyranny of the present results in them being criminalised or killed.
“‘You going to do what I say?’
She wrenched herself free and rolled across the bed and stood up on the other side. He ran round the bed and followed her as she backed into a corner. His voice hissed from his throat:
‘I ain’t going to leave you behind to snitch!’
‘I ain’t going to snitch! I swear I ain’t.’
He held his face a few inches from hers. He had to bind her to him.
‘Yeah; I killed the girl,’ he said. ‘Now you know. You got to help me. You in it as deep as me! You done spend some of the money…’” p.209
As well as physically entrapping Bessie, Bigger traps her into complicity with his crimes. James Smethurst comments on how “Wright’s novel is filled with allusions to the..landmarks of the gothic: premonitions,..prophecies [Bigger’s mother], returns from the dead, skeletons [Mary D], ghosts [Mrs D], confinement, doubles, premature burial [Bessie]…” Here we see Bessie as Mary’s ‘double’, about to be actually raped and murdered where Mary nearly, but didn’t quite, suffer the same at Bigger’s hands; his double confinement/trapping of her culminates in her premature ‘burial’ as he throws her down the shaft, from where [we learn later] there is evidence she tried to escape before death. Baldick also says “the gothic..revels in the glamour of deviance, [and] being outside the orthodox frame of behaviour”; this is clearly evidenced in Bigger’s sense of triumph at killing Mary, and by using the gothic ‘doubling’ with Bessie’s later experience, Wright also draws attention to the plight of black women in the 1930s.
“‘Bigger, please! Don’t do this to me! Please! All I do is work, work like a dog! From morning till night I ain’t got no happiness. I ain’t never had none. I ain’t got nothing and you do this to me.” p.210
Bessie’s protests reflect the general predicament of black women in 1930s USA, and according to Andrew Warnes her character was contextually influenced by the blues singer Bessie Smith, whose death in a car crash in 1937 would have coincided with Wright’s creative gestation of ‘Native Son’: just as Smith’s lyrics include lines such as “all night and I laid and groaned….It’s all about a man who always kicked and dogged me ‘round…”, Warnes notes that “Bessie Mears’ speech repeats the classic blues tendency to forswear egotism and elevate self-pity into a category of dissent, allowing the autobiographical ‘I’ to stand for…all working-class black women.” So although the novel attracted fierce criticism from feminist writers such as Sylvia Keady, who in 1976 wrote that “most of Wright’s female characters are…childlike, whimpering and stupid…[with no] characteristics of mature human mentality”, arguably Wright was reflecting the lot of women in his community as he observed it first hand, and was subtly drawing attention to the injustices they suffered.
“Rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a wall and one had to strike out… He committed rape every time he looked into a white face.” p.258
“He rode roughshod over her whimpering protests, feeling acutely sorry for her as he galloped a frenzied horse down a steep hill in the face of a resisting wind, ‘don’t don’t don’t Bigger’.” p.264
In presenting Bigger’s interpretation of the word ‘rape’, Wright challenges the white paranoia regarding black sexual predation that had been proliferating since the publication of the racist novels of Thomas Dixon in the early 1900s (specifically ‘The Clansman’, which depicted blacks as animalistic rapists) and that also had infected 1930s society in the context of the long-running case of the Scottsboro boys, a story that was used by the media to inflame prejudice. This was a time when the Depression had already exacerbated racial tensions through now-poor whites having to compete directly with blacks for jobs, and white society was weaponising rape accusations to beat down black resistance to their oppression. In this context, Wright’s deliberately provocative redefinition of the term is understandable, but feminist critics such as Claire Eby condemned it as “profoundly disturbing.. in its erasure of violence against women”, a view that many modern readers will share, given Wright’s euphemistic description of Bigger’s subsequent rape of Bessie (second quotation) which diminishes the horror of the violence through its use of a metaphor redolent of masculine pioneering heroism.
