Gothic or Anti-Gothic? The Naturalist Monster in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | When Richard Wright published his novel Native Son in 1940, the story of a twenty-year old Black man named Bigger Thomas living in Chicago in the 1930s United States sparked immediate controversy among Black American thinkers, including James Baldwin who wrote a 1955 counter-nonfictional collection of essays to further discuss his take on racial prejudice and discrimination as opposed to Wright’s writing choices in Native Son. While Wright’s novel presents an example of literary naturalism and was inspired by true crime narrative, its depiction of brutal murders of the main protagonist to great extent corresponds with literary strategies of the Gothic story, including its more suitable classification as an anti-gothic novel. The paper references Elizabeth Young’s study Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor when arguing that just as the tale of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Native Son signals both the ‘monster and monster-maker’; that is the interchangeable relationship where Bigger Thomas plays the role of the monster while the United States signifies both the monster-maker and the monster itself. Due to the nature of the genre of the text, the novel is not a Gothic tale per se; however, gothic elements are interwoven within the story and influence textual interpretation and receivers’ reception. To explain, American gothic narratives reference taboo subjects and repressed instincts which American society has deemed as dirty and deeply suggestive, paralleling thus its social stratification and consequently developed socioeconomic system built on capitalism and systemic discrimination of minority groups within said American society. Therefore, the more contemporary gothic reflections in Native Son contain fear of the Black body and stereotypes dating back to the times of slavery tied to Black men regarded as sexually aggressive, endangering the purity of the white race. The internal struggles of the protagonist present an inward view into the creation of the monstrous identity. Consequently, the paper shares James Smethurst’s view in declaring the novel as anti-gothic based on the harmful characterization of Black American communities which needs to be revised and abandoned. |
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