Native Son - Richard Wright [5]
Wright also understood fully (as Faulkner showed he himself understood in his novels Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, both published in the 1930s) that there could be no truly probing discussion of the subject of race in America without extended reference to questions of sexuality and miscegenation. After his arrest, Bigger Thomas is falsely accused of the rape of Mary Dalton, a crime obviously worse than murder in the minds of some whites; however, Wright took pains to show that the rape of Mary Dalton was indeed a possibility with Bigger. In material expurgated by the Book-of-the-Month Club (but restored in this edition of the novel) Bigger responds sexually to a newsreel that shows Mary and other apparently wealthy, carefree, young white women cavorting on a beach in Florida. In a scene that particularly appalled the Club, Bigger and a friend masturbate soon after in the movie house. Bigger essentially rapes his girlfriend Bessie before killing her. Wright makes it clear that Bigger’s harsh upbringing has left his sexuality contaminated with feelings of aggression and violence toward women, black and white. Because the sexuality of white women is flaunted in movies and magazines but absolutely forbidden to black men, Bigger and men like him sometimes develop a potentially murderous fixation on these women. Rape may then acquire the illusion of being a political act; but the underlying threat to women is real and deadly.
Much of the composition of the novel came almost spontaneously, especially after Bigger had committed his crime, because the relationship of the white police to the black male was a story absolutely familiar to Wright and indeed to the black community as a whole. A windfall also came to Wright in May 1938 when a case similar in crucial respects to Bigger’s in Native Son broke in Chicago. That month, Robert Nixon, a young black man, along with an accomplice, was arrested and charged with the murder of a white woman beaten to death with a brick in her apartment in the course of a robbery. Securing virtually all the newspaper clippings about the Nixon case, Wright used many of its details in his novel. These details included copious examples of raw white racism, especially in depicting the black defendant as hardly more than an animal. (Confessing to an earlier murder of a woman with a brick, Robert Nixon was also implicated in the similar killing in Los Angeles of a woman and her young daughter. He was executed in August 1939.)
Although the Nixon trial material helped Wright, he was still left with the supreme problem of creating a fictional narrative with so brutalized and limited a character at its core. In a way, this was the same dilemma that faced all the major naturalist writers—for example, Stephen Crane in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets or Frank Norris in McTeague; but Wright’s difficulties were more severe, because it is hard to think of a central character in all of literature who is less likable than Bigger Thomas. With other blacks, Bigger is bullying, surly, treacherous, and cowardly; with whites—understandably, to be sure—he is wary and deceitful. How could Wright expect such a character to hold his novel together, and hold his readers’ interest?
Rather than dismiss Bigger’s inner life as unworthy of artistic attention (or social and political attention), Wright set out not simply to recreate its principal features but to allow these features to prescribe the form of his novel. He worked hard to evoke and dramatize the sordid, unstable reality of his main character’s inner life, which matched