Interior Ghosts : The Double Bind Confinement in Richard Wright’s Native Son
| Autoři | |
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| Rok publikování | 2023 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | As Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) became to represent late American urban naturalism, the influence of the gothic genre on the novel – used to figure social conflict and anxieties – further accentuates the novel’s focus on individual terror rather than wider social forces. The ambiguity of using elements of the gothic bend the sociological realism of the text, and the political consciousness and development related to the African American culture associated with the rural South and urban North reveal further notions of Du Boisian double consciousness. As W.E.B. Du Bois noted, “the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man.” The beast stereotype conveyed in the novel’s central character Bigger Thomas gets set in the era of massive Black disenfranchisement and legalized Jim Crow where the alienation of an individual from the white majority explores not only Bigger’s internal detachment from the folk culture his mother embodies and from the Black American politicians of the Chicago’s South Side, but also his external projections of self-hatred manifested in torture, rape and murder. The American gothic becomes an appropriate genre for the marginalized as it shifts to an interior ghostly presence where the figure of the devil, as Richard Devenport-Hines argues, “needs to be let loose, and likes the letting.” The paper works with Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein metaphor and subsequent imagery of the haunted psyche of the monster combined with the United States as the monster-making machine in its racialized social stratification and inequity. The environmental inequalities between the urban gothic landscape of the poor South Side where Bigger’s family lives and the affluent white neighborhood where Bigger works reveal discrepancies within Bigger’s understanding of home and belonging. The paper explores to what extent Bigger attempts to interpret and control diverse environments; within the gothic, his erratic behavior resulting from uncontrollable elements of systemic racism are projected onto various objects or intertextual allusions to other literary works. Due to the confinement of African Americans within the white power structure, the supervision of the mob- rule is argued to make an understanding of the system impossible as the dread of solitary secret selves induced by mass culture challenges narratives and ghosts of the past. |
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