FUNCTIONS OF THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE NEW NEGRO IN NELLA LARSEN'S 'QUICKSAND' AND RICHARD WRIGHT'S 'NATIVE SON'
Lindley McGuire
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
August 2018
Committee:
Jolie Sheffer, Advisor
Kimberly Coates
© 2018
Lindley McGuire
All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT
Jolie Sheffer, Advisor
This project explores the emotional and geographic mobility of African Americans during the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance through a close reading of characters in Nella
Larsen’s Quicksand and Richard Wright’s Native Son. Using Alain Locke’s argument for the
New Negro, Louis Althusser’s understanding of ideologies and institutions, and Michel
Foucault’s notion of panoptic surveillance, I argue that Helga Crane and Bigger Thomas exhibit how African American characters were able to exhibit mobility and agency, or the lack thereof, throughout their texts. This thesis argues against representations of Quicksand as just the “tragic mulatta” trope and Native Son as strictly a protest novel. Through this thesis, I analyze how both of these novels work within intricate intersections of race, gender, and class to showcase the limitations to Locke’s New Negro status and the opportunities available to women and men of a certain class during the Great Migration. iv
This thesis is dedicated to all of the Helga Cranes and Bigger Thomases still fighting for equality.
The battle will be won. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank my family for the endless support. Riley – thank you for inspiring my love of literature and helping me to reach my potential. Liz- thank you for loving my brother, giving me a nephew, and always being there for me with advice when I need it. You’re the sister I never wanted but am so glad I have now. Dad- thank you for being there for me when I truly need you.
Mom- thank you for being my rock all of my adult life. Your love, encouragement, and support mean the world to me and I don’t know what I would do without you.
Next, I want to thank the two people who kept me sane these past two years. Kiera, you’re the best friend I didn’t know I didn’t have. Meeting you made this entire process even more worthwhile and I would be lost without you. Thank you for being my writing buddy, confidant, and Jumanji expert. Kyle, we have had many differences along the way and there have been many times when I’m sure we have both imagined killing each other. But, through it all you never let me give up faith in myself and that means everything to me. Thank you for being the first person I ever really felt like I could be myself around.
And finally to my committee, Jolie Sheffer and Kim Coates. Thank you for all of your guidance over the past year. Jolie, thank you for agreeing to work with me even though I did not put my best foot forward during our first class together. Thank you for looking past my personal struggles and seeing the potential inside of me. Kim, thank you for agreeing to work with me a little late in the game when you already had so much on your plate. Thank you for listening to my struggles and encouraging me. Thank you both for giving me unlimited advice, and for kicking my ass when I needed it but didn’t want it. This thesis would not be here without you two. Thank you. vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………..... 1
The Great Migration ...... 2
Chicago…………………………………………………………………………….. 4
Harlem...... 8
Mobility...... 10
A Return to Quicksand...... 12
A Return to Native Son ...... 16
Why is All of this Important Now?...... 21
CHAPTER I. “HELGA CRANE WAS AN INSIGNIFICANT PART:” NELLA LARSEN’S
QUICKSAND AS A PORTRAYAL OF THE SOCIETAL AND NEW NEGRO LIMITATIONS
ON AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN……………………… ...... 23 Framing Quicksand ...... 24
Life at and Departure from Naxos ...... 31
Harlem to Copenhagen ...... 40
Harlem to Alabama ...... 49
Conclusion ...... 55
CHAPTER II. “WE BLACK AND THEY WHITE:” RICHARD WRIGHT’S NATIVE SON AS
A PORTRAYAL OF POLICE ENFORCEMENT OF NEW NEGRO LIMITATIONS ON
LOWER-CLASS AFRICAN AMERICAN
MEN………………………………………………………………...... 59 Framing Native Son…………………………………………...... 60 vii
Blackness as “Bad” ...... 66
Working for the Daltons ...... 72 On the Run ...... 75
Capture ...... 78
Conclusion ...... 83
CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………...... 86
WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………91 1
INTRODUCTION
Barack Obama's presidency in 2012 was heralded as a turning point for African
Americans with optimistic outlooks and rejoicings of "Yes we can!" For the first time in
American history, a black man had been elected President which changed the course of our
Nation. Suddenly, it appeared as though the United States was becoming a Nation that cared more about the content of a person’s character and less about their skin. However, since
Obama’s election in 2012, racial tensions in the US have been rising with multiple senseless deaths of African Americans by white men. The once joyous cry of “Yes we can!” has now become a more hesitant, “can we really?” While the election of the first black President of the
United States was undoubtedly a huge historic moment for this country, racial tensions are reaching a new high in 2018. In the years leading up to Trump's Presidency, the Black Lives
Matter movement has risen as a result of the unfortunate and violent deaths of black youths and adult men such as Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray at the hands of white police officers. With these racial tensions rising higher and higher I find it essential to look back at the history of African Americans to understand how we have come to this and what we can learn by looking back. Police brutality is not a new trend, but one rising up from the early nineteen hundreds as white northerners had to enforce rule over the rising number of African Americans migrating into northern cities. As a way of looking back, I have chosen two texts to examine closely throughout this thesis: Nella Larsen's 1928 novel Quicksand and Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son. I have chosen these two novels as they represent important time periods in
African American history within the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, as well as their portrayal of paths for black women and men during this time.
2
The Great Migration
For this thesis, I am looking back primarily at the Great Migration of black southerners to urban northern cities. I am looking back at the Great Migration as this movement of African
Americans northward resulted in a ripple effect on political and social policies which are still affecting African Americans today. The Great Migration essentially begins in 1914 during World
War I. This date is imperative to the beginning of the Great Migration as World War I reduced the influx of European immigrants into urban cities, so factories in northern cities in the US began employing black workers. These new employment opportunities paired with the aspiration to leave the restrictive Jim Crow South led millions of black southerners to flee to northern cities. In The Warmth of Other Suns Isabel Wilkerson recounts the history of the Great Migration and sets up this rich history as such:
Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of
their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in
nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a
turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social
and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its
soul and finally lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises
made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the
country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s. (Wilkerson 9)
As Wilkerson points out here, this Migration changed the landscape of the country and set in motion the political and social order that still exists today. This movement northward laid out new freedoms for African Americans. They were suddenly free of the restrictive Jim Crow rules of the South and were no longer fearful of lynching around every corner. They also had access to 3
jobs they had not had access to in the South. However, these new freedoms came at the cost of new restrictions. The increase of black citizens in urban spaces resulted in stricter housing laws and eventually resulted in cramming families into small one-bedroom apartments. Educational opportunities, while parallel, were still not equal with the government drawing district lines to keep black children in poor school zones. These restrictions and unfair policies are some of the political orders that are still unequal and unfair to the minority citizens of the United States.
Some of these political and social orders resulted in negative side effects of the Great
Migration, such as the formation of black ghettos. Sociologists in the 1960s and 1970s began to look back at the formulation of these black ghettos and recounted the ghettos "had become havens of poverty, unemployment decaying housing stock, heroin addiction, juvenile delinquency, high homicide rates, police brutality, and riots" (Reich xxxvi-xxxvii). These same sociologists describe "the ghetto as tragic, enduring, perpetual, and hopeless places from which there was little escape" (Reich xxxvii). For these sociologists, it appears as if African Americans have simply traded oppressive Jim Crow laws for different forms of restriction in the North.
While this seems to be a dark and dreary view of the opportunities available to black southerners fleeing oppression for better lives in the North, many accounts refer to the northern migrant cities as the "fairyland," the "promised land," or even as a "mecca." Almost every account of the Great
Migration uses at least one of these terms to enforce this narrative of brighter horizons. C. Eric
Lincoln further enforces these narratives in his account of the Great Migration in The Negro
Pilgrimage in America where he states “labor recruiters from the North went South to recruit
Negroes to work in the defense plants, shipyards, steel mills, and packing houses. With railroad tickets in their pockets and glowing reports of freedom in the North to entice the hungry and oppressed Negroes, the recruiters helped thousands leave the South” (85). While most accounts 4
of the Great Migration cite employment opportunities as a primary reason for leaving their homes in the South, Lincoln demonstrates that northern white men were coming to the South to recruit black southerners for work. While thousands of migrants is a small number in the overall scheme of millions who moved north during this time, the notion that white men went to the
South to bring black men to the North is novel and crucial to this narrative of mobility.
This overarching narrative of the Great Migration is a keystone for understanding the two texts I have chosen to analyze within this thesis. The sheer possibility of new life, safety, job security, and new freedoms attributed to the Migration is a theme in both of these novels.
Quicksand reveals the story of Helga Crane as she desperately tries to find a life that she loves.
She tries to find this life in multiple locations, and despite never finding this life she never truly gives up hope that she will find it until the end of her novel. This hope that Helga has is the same hope that African Americans clung to when leaving the South for new opportunities. While
Helga seems to cling to these new freedoms and positive attributes of the Migration, Bigger
Thomas in Native Son is focused on the negative attributes and restrictions of the Great
Migration. He lives in a black ghetto in Chicago and never seems to experience the new freedoms or opportunities such as jobs and education. Bigger notes from the beginning of the novel that his biggest, and only dream the reader ever knows about, is to become a pilot but he cannot become a pilot because he is black. Both Helga and Bigger function within this grand narrative of the Great Migration, but Helga seems to function within more positive spaces while
Bigger functions within the negative ones.
Chicago
Bigger’s story of the Great Migration is wholly set within Chicago, which is where many migrants chose as their new home. Chicago’s role in the Great Migration is incredibly rich. This 5
history begins after the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915 which left “the Negro population without a spokesman at a moment when one was sorely needed” (Lincoln 85). While not all activists would agree that there even was a spokesman for the period, newspapers ultimately filled the void left after Washington’s death. Most notably, The Chicago Defender began a massive circulation and was “one of the main voices encouraging Negroes to leave the South”
(Lincoln 85). The Defender began reaching out to African Americans to advocate for Chicago as a better place to call home, often posting advertisements for jobs or housing in the area. After migrators began to settle in Chicago, they quickly exchanged letters with southern relatives and friends. The Urban League was a huge supporter of this movement. The League "received more than two thousand letters inquiring about the availability of jobs. Some merely asked what jobs were available; others stated a preference for certain types of employment and cited qualifications. By writing letters to these institutions or to relatives and friends, prospective migrants substantiated rumors and made plans" (Grossman 102). This interest in Chicago led to a massive influx of migrants into the area. Steven Reich refers to Chicago as follows:
No city was more central to the twentieth-century flow of African Americans
from the South than Chicago, Illinois. In 1910, before the onset of the first wave
of the Great Migration, fewer than 50,000 blacks lived in Chicago…sixty years
later a million blacks, most of whom were born in the South, resided there, nearly
one-third of the total population. By 1970 more blacks called Chicago home than
the state of Mississippi. (173).
This massive influx of blacks to Chicago led to increasing racial tensions. As more and more
African Americans were moving into an area that was not getting any larger, white landowners were forcing black families to live together. These cramped spaces, as well as arguments over 6
job security and employment opportunities between both races, led to these rising tensions on both sides of the racial divide.
These tensions boiled to the surface via almost daily shootings, bombings, arson, and turf wars of some sort and this climate led to one of the "worst race riots in American history" in
Chicago in 1919 (Wilkerson 341). These riots coursing through the city resulted in a need for change which culminated in a 672-page report called The Negro in Chicago which researched ways in which to alleviate racial disputes. This report uncovered that a lot of the violence before this riot was the result of white gangs infiltrating the Black Belt of Chicago. This report also uncovered that African Americans in Chicago paid outrageous amounts in rent for housing that was small, dilapidated, and faulty. African Americans also earned less than white men and women in jobs with little job security. Despite all of this "the commission's report was largely praised, particularly in the local press. In the subsequent decades of the 1920s and 1930s, there was no repeat of the 1919 riot. During this same time, however, the racial inequities described by the commission persisted, while the migration of African Americans to the North persisted"
(Reich 180). While the report was well-received, the government never enacted the proposed courses of action to help alleviate some of these tensions. This riot occurred twenty years before
Richard Wright's Native Son takes place and the climate left over after this race riot in the Black
Belt is where we pick up the story of Bigger Thomas in 1940.
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 is a dark and depressing spot on the mostly overwhelming positive outlook of the Great Migration and the opportunities that followed. The
Great Migration was a great opportunity for African Americans to move out of the South and create new lives with new opportunities and more safety. The Chicago riot and others like it showcase a more violent side to this migration, a side that is bleak but important. Allan Spear 7
opens Black Chicago with a recounting of the events leading up to this riot. This sets the tone for his work to be more depressing and unsettling than other accounts which opened their work with the positive notions of "promised lands" and "meccas." Instead of referring to the migration as a moment when blacks looked northward for new opportunities and safety, Spear states “the great migration destroyed the notion that Negro problem would remain a Southern problem and that northerners could simply allow southern whites to handle ‘their Negroes' as they saw fit" (129).
In Spear's bleak notion, the black southerners escaped the southern hold of Jim Crown only to have white northerners force them into northern ghettoes which were better than the alternative life in the south but were certainly not "promised lands" of opportunity. White southerners
“handled their Negroes” by stripping possibility and opportunity from African Americans, enforcing Jim Crow laws, and the daily threats of lynching. White northerners “handled their
Negroes” with increasingly strict housing policies, the structuring of black ghettos, and police brutality. The laws enforced by white northerners are the laws that Bigger must navigate throughout Native Son. As Bigger is walking through a white neighborhood for an interview, he begins an internal monologue, "suppose a police saw him wandering in a white neighborhood like this? It would be thought that he was trying to rob or rape somebody” (Wright 55). His immediate thought when walking through this neighborhood is not that he will be lynched or beaten at the hands of white citizens, but that police are watching him and will enforce their rule over him. He then says that if he is doing wrong by going in the front door to the house, “they could not kill him all they could do was to tell him that he could not get the job” (Wright 55).
This train of thought shows that Bigger understands that life is different in the north for black men. He will not be killed, only refused for the job. Bigger’s life in Chicago embodies these restrictions and negative aspects associated with urban life for African Americans. 8
Harlem
As Chicago is an important city in the role of the Great Migration and Bigger’s story in
Native Son, Harlem is another city which became a hub for African Americans and one that
Helga Crane spends time in Quicksand. The cultural flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance attributes to the movement to Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance saw the reclaiming of African and African American art as something more than minstrelsy and brought this art back to black ownership. This Renaissance was pivotal in the production of black poems, songs, stories, novels, and dance. In 1925, Alain Locke published his essay "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro" in the popular black magazine The Survey Graphic. This essay proved to be a “commercial sensation” selling “approximately thirty thousand copies of the special edition on March 1, 1925, and nineteen days later sold another twelve thousand copies, more than twice the regular circulation of any one issue of the magazine” (Jarrett 92). After the success of this essay and the
New Negro movement, Locke compiled other essays and writings of his own with others such as poems by Langston Hughes and Claude McKay with other works by Jean Toomer, Zora Neal
Hurston, and W.E.B. Du Bois, into one work titled The New Negro.
This work and concept of the “New Negro” is fueled by depictions of the “Old Negro of minstrel realism” as well as “the more current and equally racist portraiture of Negroes in early twentieth-century Anglo-American literature” (Jarrett 77). Locke describes this notion of minstrel realism as a starting point for his argument about the New Negro as noted in his introduction to The New Negro. Locke makes the argument that the New Negro has risen during the Harlem Renaissance; he is one who shakes off the stereotypes of the mammies, Uncle Toms, coons, and Jim Crows to become something new. Locke lays out the history of the "Old Negro" who had "long become more of a myth than a man…the Negro has been more of a formula than 9
a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or
‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized" (Locke
3). In Locke's view, African Americans had become stock characters and stereotypes who had to find a way to become more human and independent who no longer served only to be kept down or helped up. Locke then lays out a way in which he believes African Americans can achieve
New Negro status:
Therefore, the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults
and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of
seeming to be what he is not. He resents being spoken of as a social ward or
minor, even by his own, and to being regarded a chronic patient for the
sociological clinic, the sick man of American Democracy. For the same reasons,
he himself is through with those social nostrums and panaceas, the so-called
“solutions” of his “problem,” with which he and the country have been so
liberally dosed in the past. Religion, freedom, education, money –in turn, he has
ardently hoped for and peculiarly trusted these things; he still believes in them,
but not in blind trust that they alone will solve his life-problem. (Locke 11)
For Locke, this “New Negro” is aware of his faults and shortcomings but refuses to be defined by those shortcomings and as such refuses to believe that “religion, freedom, education, money” will be the sole savior of their lives. This notion as presented by Locke is present in much of the
African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance.
Quicksand and Native Son outline these New Negro possibilities as both Larsen and
Wright seem to understand the necessary steps to becoming a "New Negro," but the characters they wrote about are fundamentally unable to achieve this. Helga Crane is in search of a life of 10
safety, comfort, and happiness and in search of these things she lands in various places that offer her only one of Locke's solutions. She finds education as a teacher, racial freedom in Harlem, economic freedom in Copenhagen, and religion in Alabama. However, she is never able to combine any of these things in order to experience more than one of these solutions at a time which keeps her from achieving New Negro status. As a result, Helga is forced into typical
African American stereotypes by the men in her lives essentially keeping her grounded as an
“Old Negro.” In Native Son, Bigger is unable ever to have any of the solutions Locke lays out.
Bigger has an eighth-grade education, he has no freedom in the Black Belt, he stages elaborate plans to get money which never work, and he ignores and rejects any religious advances given to him. As a poor, black man Bigger does not have access to these things and he often dreams of a life where he is white and can have these things. He has a recurring dream of being a white pilot.
This dream would give him education, freedom, and money, but he is kept from this dream because he is black. Bigger's race results in white citizens enforcing stereotypes onto Bigger, and he ends the novel as an "Old Negro" who has been pushed into the violent, black brute stereotype.
Mobility
Nella Larsen’s 1928 novel Quicksand and Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son are well-known and received narratives of two distinct black experiences of the Great Migration.
The dates of these novels are important, as the Migration happened in two waves, the first of which ranges from 1915 to 1929 and the second of which ranges from 1940-1960. Each of these date ranges was sparked by a World War, with a ten-year slow-down in between due to the Great
Depression. Quicksand and Native Son were published just within the dates of the first and 11
second waves of this migration making them two important narratives to discuss when thinking through the Great Migration and the changing landscape of America as a result.
The notion of mobility itself is also of great importance to these two narratives. While the
Great Migration boasts the relative ease to which black southerners could flee the oppressive south, Quicksand and Native Son offer up unique understandings of mobility. Throughout this thesis, I will use the terms mobility and immobility to discuss emotional and geographic limitations and advantages as perceived by the main characters of both novels. This emotional mobility or immobility that I will analyze comes in the form of emotional range as exhibited by these characters. The protagonist of Quicksand, Helga Crane, shows stunted emotional mobility as she continuously cycles through the exact same emotions multiple times throughout the novel in a predictable way. Her cycle is as follows: happiness, contentment, discontent, and finally anger. After her predictable burst of rage Helga simply departs. Helga's subsequent departure is a link to her geographic mobility contrasted with her emotional immobility. Helga can move freely to different locations. Her movements are unpredictable and even illogical at times, but her emotions are always predictable. The reader knows that as soon as Helga reaches the angry outburst portion of her emotional cycle, she will soon pick up and move again, the only unknown factor is where she will be moving. Helga is a mixed-race woman of a higher class who has the resources to pick up and move throughout the novel. She begins the novel in Georgia, and then moves to Chicago, Harlem, Copenhagen, Harlem, and then ultimately Alabama. Moreover, wherever she goes, she finds herself in the same condition of emotional stasis. She never seems to demonstrate psychological growth.
In contrast to Helga’s geographic mobility, the protagonist of Native Son, Bigger
Thomas, has very limited geographic mobility, and yet exhibits extreme emotional volatility and, 12
eventually, growth. Bigger's emotions are large, unpredictable, and inconsistent. Bigger has moments of rage and violence, moments of critical introspection, quiet conversations where he releases his true inner thoughts, he screams, he cries, he is mad, and then overjoyed. As a contrast to his ever-changing emotions, Bigger is geographically limited to Chicago. Chicago was meant to provide opportunities to young black men like Bigger, but Chicago only provides
Bigger with problems. He has no access to good jobs, which leaves him with no funding to leave
Chicago. The housing market is unfair and racist and therefore Bigger, and his family are paying much more for their small apartment than they should. While black migrants see Chicago as the ultimate haven, it becomes Bigger's personal hell as his life unravels and he has no escape. These complications to mobility serve to complicate the narrative of the Great Migration further and as such these texts become increasingly important in understanding the opportunities available to
African Americans during these two waves of the Great Migration.
A Return to Quicksand as an Understanding of New Negro and Institutional Limitations on
African American Women
Quicksand offers a unique perspective of the experiences of a mixed-race, affluent, woman in the 1920s. Helga is well-educated, well-connected, and desirable. Her desire to find someplace where she feels comfortable and safe motivates her movements from city to city.
Helga’s movements are a result of either invitations to familial or social events, or Helga seeking out these events and connections. Her short visits turn into long-term relocations; however, she ultimately never finds the elusive safe space she is so desperately searching for. I argue that
Helga's behavior should be understood in light of theoretical understandings of paths available to black women, particularly black institutions that black women can work within. 13
Throughout the novel, Helga spends time in different institutions which on the surface will offer her safety, happiness, and comfort. Helga begins her novel as a teacher in Naxos, a parallel of Tuskegee, where she is at first happy. However, the longer she stays in Naxos, the more she realizes that educational "uplift" in Naxos is not truly uplift at all. She finds Naxos to be "a place of shame, lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, servility, and snobbishness” (Larsen 13). Helga describes Naxos in this way after she learns that Naxos is not educating young black men and women to become better versions of themselves, but rather to fit into the white man’s “pattern.”
Naxos is training their students to be able to take on jobs that white men deem appropriate for black men and women to have. Helga despises this and as a result despises Naxos referring to it as a “loathsome, venomous disease” (Larsen 18). With this rebuke of Naxos and all it stands for,
Helga departs.
Helga’s involvement with and departure from Naxos is reminiscent of Louis Althusser's notion of institutions laid out in his essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" wherein he explains how and why certain institutions appeal to subjects. There are two layers of institutions: ISAs and RSAs. Helga functions within ISAs which are Ideological State
Apparatuses. These are personal belief systems in place in institutions such as education and religion which influence subjects through his or her own beliefs. Althusser also lays out the notion of interpellation in which ideologies hail their subjects and invite them in under the illusion that the subjects are choosing these institutions on their own when in actuality subjects do not have a choice but to work within an institution. Aside from Helga’s participation within
Naxos, she also works within a religious institution as a preacher's wife in Alabama. Helga finds her role as a preacher’s wife as oppressive as her earlier role in Naxos. Helga exhibits geographic mobility between these two roles as she moves from Naxos in the South to Harlem, Copenhagen, 14
Harlem, and then ultimately back to the South in Alabama. However, despite this geographic range Helga begins and ends her novel in the same spot emotionally.
Helga's cycles of emotions are connected with her role in institutions as she follows the formula of the subject. A subject within an ideology and functioning in an institution is not supposed to think too logically about the institution and follow the rules laid out for him or her.
Helga at first embraces her institution as she is happy in her new role both as a teacher at Naxos and then later as a Reverend's wife in Alabama. Her happiness however always whittles down to simple contentment, and at that moment she begins to think more logically about the institution she is tied to as well as her place within the institution. The more she thinks about her situation, the angrier she becomes at the hypocrisy, racism, and sexism which is inherent in each institution she is a part of throughout the novel. This anger ultimately ends in an emotional outburst and then she simply leaves the institution altogether. Helga's inability to find a home and comfortable institution complicates Althusser's notions of institutions in regards to black women. Institutions are meant to provide subjects with the illusion that they will acquire the things they truly desire, but Helga's institutions fundamentally function to keep her from these desires. Helga never finds security, happiness, or comfort despite her search in many different locations and institutions and as such Althusser’s notions of ideology and institutions fail to account for the lack of opportunities presented to black women in the United States.
Helga’s characterization is also reminiscent of Locke’s notions of the New Negro as
Helga is an educated woman who attempts to shrug off stereotypes attributed to black women.
She spends some time in Harlem among other like-minded men and women, but ultimately
Helga does not enjoy talking about issues of race. Locke claims that for an African American to gain New Negro status he must look for combinations of religion, freedom, money, and 15
education to “solve his life-problem” (Locke 11). However, Helga is never once able to find a location where she can connect any of these things together. Larsen complicates Locke’s notion of the New Negro through Helga as Helga exhibits a well-educated, well-traveled, upper-class woman who is still unable to find a place where she can combine Locke’s solutions. Her male counterparts are able to do this as Larsen outlines the headmaster of Naxos, Dr. Anderson, as a man with freedom, money, and education. He is employed by the same institution as Helga, and they are of the same class, but his gender places him in a position that Helga simply cannot reach.
Since Helga is unable to reach New Negro status in each of the locations she moves to, she is forced into gendered and raced stereotypes by the men she associates with. Helga resembles two such stereotypes in Quicksand: the jezebel and the mammy. While Helga is in
Copenhagen, the white Danes perceive her as an exotic object and openly gawk at her skin and
“primal” beauty. She flirts with an engagement to a wealthy, white painter named Axel who has made a portrait of her that is highly sexualized and even refers to Helga as having “the soul of a prostitute” after she turns down his proposal (Larsen 81). In Copenhagen, Helga becomes the image of the jezebel who “does not require physical or emotional protection from men” but is able to shake off this perception as she has a predictable angry outburst and then leaves (Harris-
Perry). Helga trades her jezebel characterization for the mammy. Helga’s classification of the mammy is not in typical thought as a traditional mammy “was not a protector or defender of black children or communities. She represented a maternal ideal, but not in caring for her own children. Her love, doting advie, correction, and supervision were reserved exclusively for white women and children” (Harris-Perry). Helga shows this type of love and care to the black women 16
and children in the religious community in Alabama, and it is the only time in the novel she shows this type of affection. She remarks on her first few days in Alabama where her
young joy and zest for the uplifting of her fellow men came back to her…she
would help them with their clothes…There would be a sewing circle. She
visualized herself instructing the children, who seemed most of the time to run
wild, in ways of gentler deportment. She was anxious to be a true helpmate, for in
her heart was a feeling of obligation, of humble gratitude. (Larsen 110)
This may not be a white community or white children that Helga refers to, but she treats this situation as if she is the doting mammy to this community. However, by the time she has her own children she has lost all of this zest and when the fourth child “Helga had contributed to a despised race was held before her for maternal approval, she failed entirely to respond properly”
(Larsen 117). Helga’s husband and his parishioners force Helga into the role of the mammy who takes care of other children but not her own, and Helga’s unwillingness to leave her own children behind results in her inability to shake off this representation and move on again. Helga never becomes a New Negro and ends up trapped in a life reminiscent of stock characters and stereotypes. Through Helga, Larsen reveals the small opportunities available to black women and shows how the New Negro did not actually create new opportunities for black women.
A Return to Native Son as an Understanding of New Negro Limitations and Police
Governance of Poor, African American Men
While Quicksand offers a narrative in 1920 of Helga Crane weaving in and out of institutions and ideologies that are available to her as a black woman, Native Son provides a narrative in 1940 of Bigger Thomas coming to terms with the institutions and ideologies 17
available to him as a black man. Bigger is dark-skinned, very poor, and very oppressed. He is oppressed by his mother who seems to push decisions onto him, by the strict racial lines and boundaries in Chicago, and surveilled by the police and media. As Helga demonstrates how women are excluded from Locke's New Negro, Bigger demonstrates the ways in which lower- class black men are also excluded from New Negro status.
As a poor black man, Bigger is also unable and at times unwilling to combine religion, money, education, and freedom together. Wright uses Bigger’s classification as a lower-class black male to show the ways in which Bigger is shut out of opportunities provided to other
African Americans at the time. Locke envisions the New Negro as an African American male, but he never makes a class distinction about the New Negro. However, in order to combine things such as religion, education, money, and freedom Locke’s implied male subject would have to be of an upper-class. Bigger, at the age of twenty, has only received an eighth-grade education with no plans of continuing this education. As Wright points out in "How Bigger Was Born" many young black citizens did not receive formal education as "the white neighbor decided to limit the amount of education his black neighbor could get;" furthermore, Wright notes that
"those who strove for an education…enjoyed the financial fruits of it in the style of their bourgeois oppressors. Usually, they went hand in hand with the powerful whites and helped to keep their groaning brothers in line." Wright keeps Bigger from achieving these goals as the story of Bigger Thomas is not a story where a black man can join hands with his oppressors but a story of a black man who is consistently at odds with his oppressors. The white oppression of
Bigger functions as a way of taking away any freedoms he does have, and he ultimately ends up in jail, which is the complete opposite of freedom. Bigger lives in a one-bedroom “kitchenette” with his mother, brother, and sister and takes the job with the Daltons to help pay the rent, with a 18
small portion left over. He often enacts plans to gain more money including robberies of stores in the Black Belt and the ransom he asks for from the Daltons. These plans never work, and he therefore never has this access to money. Religion is the one thing that Bigger has access to throughout the novel, but he refuses to acknowledge this. His mother is very religious and Bigger turns her religious advances away whenever they come up. He accepts these religious advances when she comes to visit him in jail as a courtesy to her not because he believes. Bigger’s initial reaction to his mother telling him to pray is to just say “forget me, Ma” because he does not want to do her any harm. He finally tells his mother that he will pray although “knowing that his heart did not believe, knowing that when he died, it would all be over” (Wright 379). Wright notes the reasons that the many Bigger Thomases he has known in his life revolted was that Bigger “had become estranged from the religion and the folk culture of his race" (Wright, "How Bigger Was
Born"). The character Bigger Thomas is an amalgamation of many men that Wright knew throughout his life. Through these amalgamations, Wright argues that the men who become
Bigger Thomases become so through their estrangement from religion and their culture. The
Bigger Thomases of the world have to believe there is no other way out in order for them to act the way that they do. Wright strips opportunities out of Bigger’s world through strict governance, policing, and Bigger’s own beliefs to give the reader a real understanding of black life in urban ghettos. Bigger Thomas becomes a stock character when his back is against the wall and he has to act to save himself. In order to save himself, Bigger must take on the role of the violent black brute, a role which begins his downfall. He has committed multiple unforgivable crimes, and the media portrays him as a savage animal offering him no escape from this stereotype.
The media works together with the police force to enforce rules and strip freedoms from
Bigger. The media and police force, in turn, become RSAs in regards to the previously 19
mentioned Althusser essay. RSAs are Repressive State Apparatuses which are characterized by law, police, and the armed forces. These ideologies are not things that subjects are invited into, but rather things that subjects are forced to take note of and obey. In my thesis, I am adding the media to this list of RSAs. The media is generally seen as an ISA as it is not inherently repressive; however, in Bigger’s case the media is repressive and works in combination with the police force to further enforce stereotypes onto Bigger and strip away his freedoms. This stripping of Bigger’s freedoms keeps him from reaching New Negro status as the lack of freedom also represents a lack of economic and educational possibility. This leaves Bigger with only religious freedom which he has already refused and therefore strips away any chance Bigger has at becoming a New Negro.
Bigger's Chicago is a Chicago set ten years after the race riot of 1919 but with racial tensions still running high. Bigger is attempting to come to terms with the life he has in Chicago, a life where he cannot reach his dreams, cannot provide for his family, and cannot leave the
Black Belt as he does not have the funds to do so. Bigger's desire to achieve his goals results in his employment as a chauffeur for the Daltons, a wealthy, white family. Unfortunately, this job ends after the first night when Bigger accidentally kills the daughter of the man who has employed him. This death sets Bigger's story off into a downward spiraling account of a man trying to make the best of a bad situation. He attempts to blackmail the Daltons for money that will provide him with the means to leave Chicago. This plan ultimately fails, and then Bigger rapes and murders his black girlfriend as he cannot guarantee that she will not turn him in to the police. Bigger murders his girlfriend in a failed attempt to gain some sort of freedom in vain hopes of reaching New Negro status. He believes that if he kills her, he will be able to move more freely around the city and therefore be able to escape easily without her holding him back. 20
However, Bigger is ultimately captured and sentenced to death for his crimes after leading the police on a three-day chase.
Bigger’s capture fundamentally keeps him from achieving arguably the most important of
Locke’s solutions, freedom. Freedom is a solution in and of itself, but also ties into the other solutions Locke theorizes as they can be understood as educational, religious, and economic freedom. The police and media function in Bigger's world as a way of stripping away Bigger's already limited agency and freedoms. This police governance is in connection to the ways in which white northerners “handle their negroes” because of the Great Migration. Through Bigger
Thomas we see this in action through media and policing. The media portrays Bigger as an animalistic brute and publishes a map of the Black Belt showing where the police have searched and where they have not yet searched as they look for him. These media portrayals work with the police as a way of asserting dominance over Bigger. Since the police and media are working together to dominate Bigger, it follows that he will be under extreme surveillance. This surveillance comes in the form of Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon. The Panopticon can best be understood by using a prison as a metaphor. In the center of the prison, there is a large tower constructed so that whoever is inside the top of the tower can see all around him, but no one will be able to see inside the tower. The person inhabiting the tower will be able to see inside each of the surrounding cells at all times, but no one within the cells can see the guard within the tower.
The point here is that those who are being policed/surveilled can never be sure if the governing body is watching them or not. As a result, Foucault explains that "He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power, he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (Foucault 202- 21
203). The "deviant" body becomes responsible for his own governing and corrects his own behavior, regardless of who may or may not be watching him. This notion of surveillance allows the reader to see further how Bigger begins to govern himself throughout these moments and act the way he believes he should be acting, not necessarily the way that he wants to act. Bigger's subjection to extreme surveillance is a furthering of the notion of the RSAs that act upon him.
The police and media use these panoptic surveillance systems to observe, govern, and assert agency over Bigger. This is seen at the beginning of the novel when Bigger is "followed" by the eyes of a white man on a poster who relays a message that Bigger, and others, "cannot win." This is a political message that Bigger takes personally as an assertion that he cannot achieve his dreams. These notions of panoptic surveillance continue throughout the novel and Bigger attempts to take control of his own governance and even obtains residency on a water tower during the police chase. This moment offers Bigger a chance to be in the “central tower” of the panopticon, but Bigger as a “deviant body” is unable to legitimately obtain this position and ultimately is overpowered by the police – the true inhabitants of the tower.
Why is All of this Important Now?
What follows this introduction is a thesis in two chapters that aims to explore the ways in which the mobility of the Great Migration works to offer certain possibilities to African
Americans while seemingly not providing possibilities to others. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and
Richard Wright’s Native Son are two novels which highlight these possibilities or lack thereof.
Each novel presents its own complications to Locke’s notion of the New Negro as well as
Althusser’s notions of ideology and institutions. What should become apparent is that the possibilities through both the New Negro and institutions are only available to wealthy black 22
men. These possibilities are fundamentally unavailable to women, no matter how wealthy, and poor black men.
Aside from highlighting these complications, these novels also mention or take place in two incredibly important locations of the Great Migration: Harlem and Chicago. Both locations offer their own unique possibilities and hardships in the overall narrative of the Great Migration and the African American experience. Quicksand and Native Son offer two fictional accounts of possible experiences that African Americans can have during this time. While these two narratives in no way account for a complete understanding of the Great Migration or possibilities as a result of this movement, these two novels are published at critical moments during the migration and offer a female and male perspective. I hope that the following chapters will highlight some of the disparities of the early 1900s in African American life. I also hope to make a case for why it is important to be looking back on these texts in the current social and political climate of the United States. Racial tensions are surfacing to a new high, a high that is comparable to that of the Civil Rights Movement and even the Great Migration before that. As you read this thesis, keep in mind the names of the young black men and women we have lost to the hands of predominately white police as of late. Remember their names, remember their stories, and keep in mind any African American could be a Helga Crane or a Bigger Thomas, and our society has created these fictional accounts and real-life stories of loss. Just as Richard
Wright turns his story around on the readers to make them understand their own place in the creation of Bigger Thomas, I turn my thesis around on all of us, and I ask, how have we created this society and is it too late to fix it?
23
CHAPTER ONE: “HELGA CRANE WAS AN INSIGNIFICANT PART:” NELLA LARSEN’S QUICKSAND AS A PORTRAYAL OF THE SOCIETAL AND NEW NEGRO LIMITATIONS ON AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN The 1920s was a cultural and intellectual awakening for African Americans that resulted in numerous stories, books, poems, songs, and political movements. Nella Larsen was an acclaimed author of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing two novels and multiple short stories.
Her first novel, Quicksand, has been reviewed and critiqued numerous times since the publication in 1928. Many of these arguments surrounding Quicksand engage with Larsen’s personal background and how the work is semi-autobiographical, whereas others argue about the main character, Helga’s, mixed race and her journey to find a place where she belongs as she does not fit in with either white or black communities. Barbara Johnson states in The Feminist
Difference that “readers then and now have indeed read the novel as a dramatization of racial double consciousness, in the form of the all-too-familiar topos of the tragic mulatto” (37). This point is echoed by Jeanne Scheper in “The New Negro Flaneuse in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand” when she states the novel “continues to be interpreted in the vein of the literary genre of the
“tragic mulatta,” a melodramatic form in which the mixed-race character is seen as a split subject, tragically flawed by ‘nature’ and trapped in a narrative trajectory inevitably leading to rejection or death” (680). This reading of Larsen’s novel as a tale of a tragic mulatta is not surprising given Larsen’s own heritage as a mixed-race woman of Danish and African descent just like Helga. However, Scheper makes some moves towards disavowing this argument by stating “even when critics reject reading the novel as an example of the tragic mulatto genre, the novel continues to be read as inescapably tragic, requiring sympathy for a character that ultimately lacks agency, particularly creative agency” (681). While this is a move away from the tragic mulatto genre, the overall message of the novel is still tragic; and Quicksand is never read as a happy story because it is not. 24
Whereas critics tend to read Quicksand through the lens of the tragic mulatto, I argue that
Quicksand highlights the possible paths, or lack thereof, that are available to black women during the Harlem Renaissance and the ways in which these paths function to take agency away from African American women. Helga's race and gender provide her with access to roles in education, in religion, and as an exotic object. However, these roles do not offer Helga the agency and expression she wishes to have over her life as each of these roles requires her to be submissive and obedient. These roles are provided to Helga, not roles that she seeks out.
Throughout the novel, Helga is always either running from a previous opportunity or accepting a new opportunity that is provided to her. She never actively chooses her own paths these paths are always laid out for her.
Framing Quicksand
Quicksand is connected to two rich historical backgrounds that are relevant to both
Larsen’s construction of the novel as well as the way that Helga conducts herself throughout.
Quicksand was published in 1928, setting the novel just inside of the range of the first wave of the Great Migration as well as the Harlem Renaissance. The Great Migration was the migration of millions of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The migrants left their harsh lives in the Jim Crow South for lives of new opportunity and safety in the urban North.
Helga does not simply leave from the South to head north, but moves North, across the Atlantic, back to the northern United States and then back South. Her large movements happen once she has become discontent and dissatisfied with her new location and as a result, she sees no option but to leave. This departure as a sign of discontent is documented within the great migration as a sign of aggression, “oftentimes, just to go away is one of the most aggressive things that another person can do, and if the means of expressing discontent are limited, as in this case, it is one of 25
the few ways in which pressure can be put” (qtd. in Wilkerson 11). This notion of simply leaving or going away being a powerful form of expressing discontent is what Helga does throughout
Quicksand. Helga often holds onto her feelings of anger and discontent until they build up inside of her and she has no other option but to leave – and then she does so.
Helga’s ability to freely move is connected with the grand narrative of the Great
Migration; however, her story is also connected with the rich background of the Harlem
Renaissance. Alain Locke describes this movement of both the Great Migration and the Harlem
Renaissance as so, “with each successive wave of it, the movement of the Negro becomes more and more a mass movement toward the larger and the more democratic chance –in the Negro's case a deliberate flight not only from countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern"
(Locke 6). In Locke's view, this movement was not only a change in geography but a change in the mindset of the African American and this change brought forth some of the most prominent authors of the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke makes the argument that there is a "New
Negro" that has risen during the Harlem Renaissance who shakes off the stereotypes of the mammies, Uncle Toms, coons, and Jim Crows to become new and revived:
Therefore, the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults
and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of
seeming to be what he is not. He resents being spoken of as a social ward or
minor, even by his own, and to being regarded a chronic patient for the
sociological clinic, the sick man of American Democracy. For the same reasons,
he himself is through with those social nostrums and panaceas, the so-called
“solutions” of his “problem,” with which he and the county have been so liberally
dosed in the past. Religion, freedom, education, money –in turn, he has ardently 26
hoped for and peculiarly trusted these things; he still believes in them, but not in
blind trust that they alone will solve his life-problem. (Locke 11)
For Locke, this “New Negro” is aware of his faults and shortcomings but refuses to be defined by those shortcomings and as such refuses to believe that “religion, freedom, education, money” will be the sole savior of their lives. Locke’s New Negro argument is present in much of the
African American literature from the Harlem Renaissance. However, it becomes clear that the notions that Locke lays out for the New Negro are explicitly gendered and classed to only include upper-class black men. Locke states that the four solutions that are historically laid out for African Americans in the form of education, religion, money, and freedom are not enough by themselves and must be combined in order to raise the general African American to the New
Negro.
However, as seen in Quicksand, it is impossible for a black woman to combine these solutions. Helga only ever experiences one of these four solutions at any given moment and is never able to combine them because that combination is not possible within the roles and institutions provided to African American women in the 1920s. Helga, like Locke's New Negro, realizes that these solutions by themselves cannot offer her the life she wants or needs and she ultimately moves on to a new role with another solution. Therefore, Helga embodies both the freedom to leave as laid out by Dollard and the understanding that freedom, money, education, or religion cannot save her or offer her all that she needs. No matter where she goes she will never be transformed to Locke’s New Negro because she simply has no space to combine those four integral solutions within the roles offered to her as a black woman of a higher class. Larsen complicates Locke’s New Negro argument as she provides a female character who understands
Locke’s argument but can never achieve this New Negro status as Locke only accounts for an 27
implied male figure. Helga is contrasted with Dr. Anderson and Reverend Green who are both able to combine Locke’s solutions to transform into the New Negro. Dr. Anderson is the headmaster of the school Helga teaches at and as such combines freedom, education, and money whereas Helga only has access to education here. Additionally, Reverend Green is Helga’s husband at the end of the novel and combines religion and freedom in a place where Helga only has access to religion. These men serve as a further complication to Locke’s understanding of the
New Negro wherein only the black male figures can achieve this status in places where Helga simply cannot.
Larsen complicates not only Locke's New Negro argument but also the structure of mobility in two distinct ways. Larsen offers Helga as a character with extreme geographic mobility, but very limited emotional mobility. Helga's limited emotional mobility is intricately connected with her geographic mobility as Helga's emotions fuel her movements. As Helga begins her life in a new location she cycles through the same emotions, happiness/excitement, contentment, discontent, and anger. Once she reaches the point of anger she has an emotional outburst and then departs for a new location. While Helga's emotions are always the same and predictable, her geographic movements are unpredictable and widespread. The Great Migration is a narrative of mobility and Helga’s movements complicate the typical movements of the Great
Migration as she does not simply move from the South to the North. She moves from the
American South to the American North and then Trans-Atlantic to Copenhagen, then back to the
American North, and ending the novel in the American South. Quicksand further complicates the typical narrative of the Great Migration in that most African American southerners were fleeing the South in search of better opportunities, education, employment, or simply the illusion of more freedom. However, Helga is not leaving in search of opportunities; Helga does the opposite 28
and seems to flee from the opportunities provided to her. Helga takes on roles as a teacher, an exotic object of affection, and a reverend’s wife. Each of these roles only offers Helga one of
Locke’s four solutions at a time and never offers her the ability to combine multiple solutions so that she can reach true New Negro status.
Each time Helga leaves a place she trades one of Locke's solutions for another, leaves a comfortable living situation, and moves on to a place where she cannot be sure she will be happy. Helga begins the novel as a teacher in Naxos. In Naxos, she has access to education and at first enjoys her post. However, she soon realizes that Naxos' policy of uplift is one that molds students to fit into the white man's world. As she realizes this, she decides she cannot possibly stay in Naxos any longer, so she runs to some white family that she has in Chicago. Her uncle immediately turns her away at the request of his new wife leaving Helga poor and homeless.
Helga finds work with a “race woman” headed to Harlem. In Harlem, Helga is at first entranced by the freedom, the people, and the lifestyle, but soon enough the emphasis on racial freedoms and continuous talk of the “race problem” in Harlem begins to annoy her. The uncle in Chicago that turned Helga away sends her a letter with some money and a note saying she should visit family in Copenhagen, and she does so as a way of leaving Harlem. In Copenhagen, she believes she will be free of the “race problem” and will fit in with her white family and heritage. Helga seeks acceptance from her family as a half Danish half African woman; there she is treated as an exotic beauty and her every wish and want is completely taken care of. Axel Olsen, a prominent painter, asks for Helga’s hand in marriage, but she refuses. Helga runs from this life of money as she realizes that money and exoticism alone cannot provide her with what she needs to feel comfortable and safe. She returns to Harlem for a wedding hoping to get back in touch with her
African roots, but she immediately runs into people from her past and decides to leave again. 29
This is the moment where she meets Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green and agrees to be his wife and move with him to his religious community in Alabama.
Through this larger narrative it is clear that Helga’s movements are framed by familial connections she desperately wants to make as well as running away from opportunities that have been provided to her – education, artistic freedom, marriage and financial freedom – ultimately to end up married in a southern religious community. Helga's movements appear circular on a large-scale as she begins and ends her journey in the American South, but she has also worked through different gendered ideologies, and each of the four solutions typically applied to African
American lives in turn from education, to freedom, to financial freedom, and ultimately ending in religion. Helga both embodies and complicates the notions Locke’s New Negro. Helga leaves each of the institutions and roles that have been provided to her because each of them in turn only offers her one of the four solutions as mentioned earlier at one time. In the moment of flight from these roles, Helga embodies the teachings of the New Negro as she is not wholly trusting in these things to provide complete solace and refuge. However, Helga also complicates Locke's notion of the New Negro as Locke does not seem to account for female subjects in his implications. Helga is an active participant in each of the typical roles that African American women were allowed to take on from teaching to artistic expression in Harlem, to marriage and beauty, to religion and motherhood. However, each of these things could not offer Helga the solution to her "life-problem" because she can only embody one solution at one time. However, in contrast to her are two men who seemingly achieve New Negro status as they are able to hold positions and roles in society that offer them the things that Locke expresses and are able to achieve these roles simply because they are men. For instance, while at Naxos Helga only experiences education as a solution to her "life-problem," and she is contrasted with Dr. 30
Anderson, the headmaster of Naxos, who in his role is able to experience money, freedom, and education which allows him to rise to the status of the New Negro.
However, Helga’s movements are also framed by her involvement within extremely gendered ideologies and institutions throughout the novel. This notion of ideology is echoed by
Scheper, who notes that “as Crane enters different social environments, she is expected to conform to rigid notions of deportment and dress that signal specific class status…she appears to allow herself to be interpellated momentarily by different ideologies, cultural codes, and racialized fantasies of the communities she enters” (684). This idea of ideological involvement within institutions is a Marxist concept which was further theorized by Louis Althusser who believes that every person (subject) is involved within a complex system of ideologies whether they believe this or not. This system of ideologies and institutions is present in Larsen’s novel as she aligns each of Helga’s journeys through these various institutions with the four solutions to the race problem as outlined by Locke. Quicksand complicates Althusser's notions of ideology by presenting a black female character. Althusser's implied subjects are white and male and, through Helga, Larsen pushes back on Althusser to show that ideologies cannot offer black women the happy life he expects for subjects. Through Althusser's notion of ideologies, subjects are led to believe they will achieve their utmost desires, but Helga seems to understand she can never achieve her desires. Therefore, the institutions she becomes involved with cannot offer her the happiness she seeks. Through the combination of Helga’s movement through multiple racialized institutions and Locke's understanding of the New Negro, Larsen shows how there is no New Negro possibility for black women in this period. The only opportunities offered to women are not only racialized but also extremely gendered which adds an additional challenge to the ascent of the New Negro that black men do not have to consider. 31
Life at and Departure from Naxos
The novel opens with Helga in her dormitory at Naxos, modeled on the Tuskegee
Institute, where she is a teacher. The opening to the novel sets the tone for Helga's journey as the narrator states how much Helga likes her alone time at the end of a long day: "she loved this tranquility, this quiet, following the fret and strain of the long hours spent among fellow members of a carelessly unkind and gossiping faculty, following the strenuous rigidity of conduct required in this huge educational community of which she was an insignificant part"
(Larsen 1). This is the first impression the reader is given of Helga as she is represented as insignificant in her role at Naxos. This insignificance that Helga feels in Naxos is echoed in other places throughout the novel where she seems to feel as if she is unimportant and insignificant.
The narrator recounts Helga’s time in Naxos from her happy beginnings to her current discontent:
Helga Crane had taught in Naxos for almost two years, at first with the keen joy
and zest of those immature people who have dreamed dreams of doing good to
their fellow men. But gradually this zest was blotted out, giving place to a deep
hatred for the trivial hypocrisies and careless cruelties which were,
unintentionally perhaps, a part of the Naxos policy of uplift. (Larsen 5).
When Helga began in Naxos, she was proud and happy to be there; she was accepted into the institution, and she believed in it. Helga believed in Naxos despite the hypocrisies and cruelties she criticizes above. Helga is also at first understanding to the hypocrisies the administration placed on women in terms of dress, and social exchanges in addition to the hypocrisies embodied by the school as a whole given its “policy of uplift” which is in fact not that uplifting. Over time,
Helga begins to see these hypocrisies for what they are and sees that Naxos is training students to 32
maintain technical jobs and essentially stay in lower class positions – despite the Naxos “policy of uplift” which is supposed to be empowering for the students yet Helga refers to as “machine- like.” Naxos itself is supposed to be an institution that serves to provide a parallel educational system for African Americans. However, this parallel “educational” system only serves to provide manual training instead of intellectual development for students in order to provide them with opportunities outside of white institutions.
Despite the downfalls of this educational system, Naxos would still be held in high regard in the eyes of African Americans because of the opportunities that it would provide to the students, opportunities which they did not have before. In contrast to Helga’s disappointment in her role and position in Naxos, Larsen offers Margaret Creighton, another Naxos teacher, to the reader to show the proper response for the opportunity to work at Naxos. Margaret tells Helga,
“there’s no place like Naxos, you know. Pretty good salaries, decent rooms, plenty of men, and all that” (Larsen 14). While this may not exactly be a glowing endorsement of Naxos itself,
Margaret finds herself content at Naxos and the things it can offer to her, while Helga pulls away from each of these offerings and begins to despise the place entirely. Helga states early on that
Naxos has become more like a machine than a school, a machine to turn students into “the white man’s pattern” (Larsen 4). This notion of Naxos functioning as a machine is related back to the point that Helga makes about the hypocrisies of Naxos and the cruelties which are part of the
“Naxos policy of uplift.” The Naxos version of uplifting students is to function as a machine in order to produce African American citizens who function within the white man’s pattern essentially turning over their agency to whatever the white man deems is important for them to do. This “machine-like” educational pattern offers a moment in the text where Larsen complicates Althusser’s notions of ideology. While Althusser’s implied white male subjects 33
experience institutions which allegedly allow subjects to reach their utmost desires, this is not the case in Naxos. The students and teachers in Naxos are functioning within the institution in the way they are expected to, but Naxos will never be able to provide them with their desires. Naxos can only provide them life as cogs in the white man's machine.
Helga views Naxos as extremely oppressive for the same reason that others revere it as uplifting. Naxos is an African American institution filled with African American students and teachers who are functioning under the naïve idea that they are in control of what is happening in
Naxos. Helga's intuition about this particular naivety is seen when she comments on the white preacher who comes to Naxos and talks about how proud he is of the Naxos Negroes:
if all Negroes would only take a leaf out of the book of Naxos and conduct
themselves in the manner of the Naxos products, there would be no race problem,
because Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of them. They had good sense
and they had good taste. They knew enough to stay in their places, and that, said
the preacher, showed good taste. (Larsen 5)
This passage has two layers of meaning and frustration, the first of which being the gendered implications that this white preacher passes down in his message. This preacher suggests the
“Naxos Negroes” have good sense and good taste and a gendered reading of this passage tells us that at this moment he is speaking separately to the men and women in his audience. Men are generally associated with ideas and sense while women are generally associated with taste and manners. This association is also clear in the “rules” for the faculty at Naxos as it is made clear that women are to wear certain types of clothing that plays down the color of their skin and in many ways blends in with their skin tone which strips individual taste from the faculty members.
This dilution of taste and conformity to the strict rules on clothing and taste made sure that the 34
female faculty would stay in their place as simply one of many who does not stand out which ultimately "shows good taste." This message is additionally frustrating as it is extremely oppressive, this is a white man praising a group of African Americans for staying in their places, but he hides this language under the guise that these African Americans are doing such in “the finest school for Negroes anywhere in the country” (Larsen 5). Helga at first calls this speech degrading and enraging, yet later in her room the anger “subsided in amazement at the memory of the considerable applause which had greeted the speaker just before he had asked his God’s blessing upon them” (Larsen 6). At this moment, Helga realizes her place within this institution and in order to conform to it and accept her role she must not be enraged by this speech. She is only able to show her true emotions about this incident when she shrugs off all ties to this particular institution. Helga begins to resent this oppressive aspect of Naxos and the South in general and she rejects the institution and everything that it stands for.
Helga's rejection of Naxos leads to her decision to teach her class no longer. Margaret
Creighton comes to wake Helga up and wonders if Helga is sick, "Jim Vayle asked if you were sick. Of course nobody knew. You never tell anybody anything about yourself" (Larsen 13). This is not the first time the reader is made aware of Helga's disinclination to spend time with her colleagues as the narrator states that often at night teachers would roam the residence halls talking with one another and knocking on doors to socialize, but "at that time of night Helga never opened her door" (Larsen 1). Helga has isolated herself within her room, away from those who embrace Naxos and away from the rules that the administrators impose on the teachers. In this pivotal exchange with Margaret, Helga further denounces her role in Naxos by stating that she will not be teaching her class that day, to which Margaret assumes Helga is in fact sick: 35
No, Helga wasn’t sick. Not physically. She was merely disgusted. Fed up with
Naxos. If that could be called sickness. The truth was that she had made her mind
up to leave. That very day. She could no longer abide being connected with a
place of shame, lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, servility, and snobbishness. (Larsen 13).
At this point, Helga despises everything about Naxos and their supposed policy of uplift and casts resentment on the shame placed on the faculty for wanting better for their students, the lies the faculty must tell the students about the education they are receiving, and the hypocrisy of claiming a policy of uplift while inviting a white preacher to come and put everyone down.
During this small exchange with Margaret, Helga has fully realized her place within this racialized institution and vows to be part of this restrictive institution no longer.
This final denouncement comes when Helga meets with Dr. Anderson to announce her formal resignation from her post at Naxos, the last norm that Helga must rid herself of before she can be free. Dr. Anderson is the headmaster of the school and is rarely if ever seen by the teachers or students; however, he is the important figurehead and enforcing ruler of the school.
When Helga announces that she will be leaving he asks her why, to which she responds, “I hate hypocrisy. I hate cruelty to students, and to teachers who can’t fight back. I hate backbiting and sneaking, and petty jealousy. Naxos? It’s hardly a place at all. It’s more like some loathsome, venomous disease” (Larsen 18). In this speech, Helga expresses her resentment of everything that is wrong with Naxos, but most importantly she tears down Naxos as a literal institution by likening it to a disease. This speech is the final step in freeing Helga from her bonds to the institution as she has at this point expressed her disinterest in socializing with other teachers, her disinclination to keep her room and herself tidy to Naxos standards, her refusal to teach, and her refusal to uphold Naxos as an institution. 36
Despite her denouncement of all of these norms, Dr. Anderson uses his role as the enforcer of the institution to try and make her see the error of her ways, a tactic which almost works. He tells her that the things she hates about Naxos, such as hypocrisy, are evident in all communities and is something she will never get away from; furthermore, he tells her that Naxos needs more people like her, "people with a sense of values, and proportion, an appreciation of the rarer things of life. You have something to give which we badly need here in Naxos. You mustn't desert us, Miss Crane" (Larsen 19). At this speech, Helga was beginning to feel herself being brought back into Naxos and knew for certain that she would stay and beg for her position back.
However, Dr. Anderson took his pleading one step too far by telling Helga her value is evident in her breeding and dignity as a lady. Helga became furious at this notion as she is uncomfortable with her own mixed race and parentage and does not believe she belongs in the class which Dr.
Anderson has placed her. She tells Dr. Anderson that she has no family to which he responds,
"that doesn't at all matter, Miss Crane. Financial, economic circumstances can't destroy tendencies inherited from good stock. You yourself prove that!" (Larsen 20). Helga becomes irate at this statement and once again decides she will leave Naxos once and for all and denounces everything the institution, and Dr. Anderson, stands for in one last statement: "the joke is on you, Dr. Anderson. My father was a gambler who deserted my mother, a white immigrant. It is even uncertain that they were ever married. As I said at first, I don't belong here.
I shall be leaving at once. This afternoon. Good morning" (Larsen 20). Helga's entire journey is a journey to find belonging as she does not feel that she truly belongs anywhere, she is of mixed race placing her in the middle of white and black boundaries not belonging to either side and trying to find the place where she does belong. Naxos is a completely black institution, one 37
which she feels like she cannot belong to. With that, Helga leaves Naxos behind and moves on to her next journey of fulfillment and her next role as a subject within an ideology.
The movements that Helga makes within Naxos show a complete rejection of her role as a subject within this educational ideology that has interpellated her. As an African American woman there are few options or roles that Helga can take on in society, and education at Naxos is one of those – and seemingly one of the better ones. This institution is meant to provide opportunities for her as an African American woman and these opportunities were laid out by
Margaret earlier in the forms of men, good salary, and decent living spaces. However, Helga continuously bumps and chafes against each of these opportunities. She has the attention of the most eligible bachelor at Naxos, James Vayle and yet she thought on their engagement "bitterly," and she felt relief that when she left Naxos she would be ending their engagement, "at least, she felt no regret that tomorrow would mark the end of any claim she had upon him" (Larsen 8).
Helga's thoughts on her own financial situation are also given brief mention in these opening chapters as she recounts that her leaving Naxos will cause her some financial distress, she
"nevertheless rebelled at the unalterable truth that it could influence her actions, block her desires" and decides that she will not be kept in Naxos for the good salaries (Larsen 6). Finally, the last thing that Margaret outlines as great about Naxos being the dorm rooms for the teachers is also denounced by Helga as it is stated that she began to leave her room disorderly with
"books and papers scattered about the floor, fragile stockings and underthings and the startling green and gold negligee dripping about on chairs and stool" (Larsen 9). Helga chafes against each of the opportunities that this institution is meant to provide to her and instead turns them into negatives. Helga takes her engagement with the most eligible man in Naxos and is bitter about it and excited that her departure will end this engagement. She decides the decent salary is 38
not good enough and she trashes her living space. These supposedly good things about Naxos are all things that Helga takes and then responds to negatively and then runs as the narration states
Helga “had no talent for quarreling – when possible she preferred to flee” and flee she did
(Larsen 8).
Helga's fleeing from Naxos is not only interesting an integral regarding her association with the institution and ideological practices of Naxos but also within understandings of the New
Negro. As Locke points out, the New Negro has previously wholly relied on functions such as religion, money, education, and freedom to provide solutions to his "life-problem." However, the
New Negro now more fully understands that these things alone will not provide that solace to him as each solution individually will still cause him to be dependent on white men for the other three solutions. Helga, through her role in Naxos, has only been offered the function of education to provide her solace. She never mentions religion while in Naxos which implies that religion is not an aspect she has access to here. She openly states that the salary is not enough to keep her in
Naxos and she also criticizes the stringent rules placed on the teachers, students, and the dress code. Naxos does not provide Helga the ability to have freedom, money, or religion and only barely offers her education. Helga understands that she is unhappy and that she needs more than education, men, good rooms, and an okay salary to be happy; therefore, she leaves. Helga’s departure symbolizes her hope to rise to the New Negro and this is symbolized in her previous statement that she would not let her salary hold her in Naxos either as she knows that she needs more than that in order to be happy.
Helga’s unhappy beginnings throughout this first section of the novel are important to set the tone for the rest of her journeys. Larsen never gives the reader a view of Helga as a happy subject in Naxos; however, the narration does state that she at first taught here with "joy" and 39
"zest," but the reader only sees Helga truly perform her last few emotional points of discontent, rage, and departure. This initial dismissal of Helga’s role in Naxos reveals Helga as feeling insignificant, isolated, and miserable. Helga feels this way right up until she decides to leave
Naxos and have her final discussion with Dr. Anderson. After this outburst, Helga moves on to find her happiness and safety elsewhere. However, these cycles of happiness followed by unhappiness and discomfort repeat throughout the novel. I argue that Helga never actually leaves this headspace that she is in in Naxos and this emotional stasis is representative of her role as a subject within her ideologies. There have been many critics of Quicksand who become frustrated with Helga’s jumps in location. Johnson argues “Helga repeatedly reaches states of relative contentment…only to fall into depression again for no obvious reason. Chapter breaks often occur where psychological causation is missing. It is the lack of explicit precipitating cause that calls for explanation” (42). I argue that outside Helga is acting exactly as she is supposed to as a subject within an ideology who must leave once she no longer believes in or works within the ideology, and as such these “jumps” in narration are fully explained by her place as a subject in an ideology. Her emotional state is tied to her thoughts on whichever institution she is currently working within. As she begins in a new institution, she always believes it will be the thing that provides happiness and comfort to her and as such she feels happy and comfortable. However, as she spends more time within the institution and learns more about her role she becomes less convinced of her eventual happiness there and as a result becomes discontent. This discontent leads to her realizing just how racist or constricting the institution is and she then becomes overwhelmingly angry followed by her departure.
40
Harlem to Copenhagen
The first break in narration comes when Helga leaves Naxos for Chicago to connect with
Uncle Peter, her mother’s brother. Helga states early on that even though Uncle Peter was white he was the only relative “who thought kindly, or even calmly, of her;” however, upon her arrival
Helga learns that Uncle Peter has remarried a woman who is not as kind towards Helga and she is immediately sent away because of her black skin (Larsen 6). Helga then travels to Harlem and at first is entranced by all that Harlem has to offer her: lavish parties, freedom of expression, artistic creativity, and social connections. Upon first arriving in Harlem, Helga moves in with
Anne Grey, and she immediately remarks on Anne's home and fashion as beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. Helga goes on to say how happy she is in Harlem and "she knew it sprang from freedom, a release from the feeling of smallness which had hedged her in, first during her sorry, unchildlike childhood among hostile white folk in Chicago, and later during her uncomfortable sojourn among snobbish black folk in Naxos" (Larsen 43). This moment grounds
Helga's journey thus far into the framework of the Great Migration as Helga is happy and excited for her new freedoms after moving from the South to the North. Additionally, this moment also grounds her journey within the framework of the New Negro as Helga is experiencing Harlem at the moment when the Renaissance is in full swing and African Americans are expressing themselves more freely. This notion of freedom that Helga feels here hearkens back to Locke's notion of solutions for the New Negro, but unlike Locke's New Negro, Helga only experiences freedom here. She has just run from education in Naxos, she has stated just before leaving for
Harlem that she had "become bitter, distrusting religion more than ever," and upon arriving in
Harlem, she began to regard money as unimportant as she states "money isn't everything. It isn't even half of everything" (Larsen 31, 43). The only thing Helga remarks on as making her happy 41
at this moment in Harlem is her freedom, but as predicted by Locke, freedom is not enough and the very next line in the novel is “but it didn’t last, this happiness of Helga Crane,” and this unhappiness is likened to "her need of something, something vaguely familiar, but which she could not put a name to" (Larsen 43). As Helga's discontent is weighing on her, she receives a letter from the uncle who turned her away in Chicago. This letter contains five thousand dollars which Uncle Peter considers Helga's inheritance, along with a message that Helga should visit another Uncle and Aunt in Copenhagen.
Upon her arrival in Copenhagen, white Europeans are openly staring and gawking at
Helga’s exotic and foreign black skin. However, Helga does not mind these stares at the beginning as she does not believe that the stares are done in judgment, but rather stares out of curiosity, as the narrator notes, “in New York, America, Helga would have resented this sly watching. Now, here, she was only amused. Marie, she reflected, had probably never seen a
Negro outside of the pictured pages of her geography book” (Larsen 62). Helga’s hyperawareness of her skin is consistent throughout her stay in Copenhagen and begins quite early when on the day of her arrival, Helga’s aunt declares that Helga “must have bright things to set off the color of your lovely brown skin. Striking things, exotic things. You must make an impression” (Larsen 62). This notion of exotic clothing to emphasize the color of Helga’s skin is in direct opposition to the way Helga was required to dress while teaching at Naxos.
Administrators in Naxos enforced teachers to wear dull earth tones that would blend in with their skin instead of making them stand out. However, in Copenhagen, Helga’s aunt encourages her to wear bright colors to emphasize her skin and beauty. Helga’s exoticism plays a specific role for her Aunt and Uncle who had “determined the role that Helga was to play in advancing the social fortunes of the Dahls” and Aunt Katrina immediately began dressing and shopping for Helga. 42
Helga was made to try on dozens of gowns and then was taken to the jewelers where her Aunt and Uncle bought her large clunky jewelry for a dinner party that evening and as Helga walked down the street in her new jewelry she “felt like a veritable savage…This feeling was intensified by the many pedestrians who stopped to stare at the queer dark creature, strange to their city”
(Larsen 64). Helga remarks that she “felt like nothing so much as some new and strange species of dog being proudly exhibited” and Helga’s discomfort with her aunt parading her around ultimately leads to Helga’s understanding of her role in Copenhagen and her discontent in the situation.
The white Europeans Helge meets often remark on the exoticness of Helga's features; at the beginning of her trip the narrator remarks on how other Danish women view Helga. "True, she was attractive, unusual, in an exotic almost savage way, but she wasn't one of them. She didn't at all count" (Larsen 65). This particular notion of Helga "not counting" is the feeling that
Helga has been running from throughout the novel. At the opening of the novel the narrator describes Helga as an "insignificant part" of the environment in Naxos, but all she truly wants is to matter for something, and in Copenhagen, she does matter in terms of her skin and beauty, but that is it, and for now that works for Helga. Helga's aunt and uncle throw a party to introduce their friends to Helga, and at this party is a famous painter – Axel Olsen – who has come just to see Helga as he has heard about her unique beauty. Upon meeting Helga, Olsen stares at her for an almost uncomfortable amount of time before speaking in Danish to Helga's aunt. At this point,
Helga has no idea who this man is and can only pick out a few words in his speech "superb eyes .
. . color . . . neck column . . . yellow . . . hair . . . alive . . . wonderful . . ." (Larsen 65). Helga was unsure of what to make of this man who never spoke to her, and when her aunt later told her that
Olsen wants to paint a portrait of Helga she was in shock, 43
Then at last she laughed. It was too funny. The great man hadn’t addressed a word
to her. Here she was, a curiosity, a stunt, at which people came and gazed. And
she was to be treated like a secluded young miss…not to be consulted personally
even on matters affecting her personally? She, Helga Crane, who almost all her
life had looked after herself, was she now to be looked after by Aunt Katrina and
her husband? It didn’t seem real. (Larsen 66)
After this exchange where Helga realizes that she no one consults with her regarding her own affairs, she begins to feel excited about not having to worry about herself and is even "happy again. Happiness covered her like the lovely quilts under which she rested," It is interesting that
Helga is so enthralled by the concept of being told what to do, and talked over, by white people who are seemingly "in charge" of her. This interaction provides imagery related back to white slave masters and black slaves, which is exactly the type of control African Americans were looking to get out from under within the Great Migration. However, it just so happens to be the thing that Helga runs to instead of from bringing imagery of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade into the novel. Additionally, this notion of being looked after on all accounts brings back Helga’s notion of “not counting” while in Copenhagen. She is taken care of and told what to do and talked about in terms of her beauty, but her own ideas, thoughts, and opinions about her own life do not register as important to the white people who she shares a home.
The familiar unhappy emotions do not rise up in Helga all at once, for a while she enjoyed not having to think through decisions or be bothered with anything other than her appearance. However, Helga’s changing emotion and cycle into discontent becomes clear when the narrator states, “well into Helga’s second year in Denmark, came an indefinite discontent.
Not clear, but vague, like a storm gathering on the horizon” the narration continues and describes 44
Helga's personality as "growing restlessness and little mental insecurity," and then Helga begins questioning her life asking why she cannot be happy or even content in her decisions, and finally she is described as "growing [dissatisfied] with her peacock's life" (Larsen 75). The narrator uses this metaphor of Helga living a "peacock's life" in order to show further show just how little agency Helga has over her own life at this point. In Copenhagen, Helga is treated as a thing to be looked at for her exoticness and beauty, like a peacock, but she is not to be heard or listened to –
Helga very rarely speaks to anyone but her Aunt during her time in Copenhagen. These are incredibly gendered characteristics on display as Helga is essentially seen but unheard. Every decision about her life in Copenhagen from the clothes she wears to who she spends time with is decided for her so that she can be shown off as the exotic beauty that she is. These overwhelming feelings of discontent within a gendered society that Helga is experiencing in this moment are similar to those that she felt while in Naxos.
Just as in Naxos, Helga’s ultimate form of dismissal comes in one outburst that shatters her hopes of this location becoming a safe space where she can truly be happy. In Copenhagen, this outburst begins to build when Axel and Helga attend a circus wherein the last act is a group of African Americans dancing to tribal music,
pounding their thighs, slapping their hands together, twisting their legs, waving
their abnormally long arms, throwing their bodies about with a loose ease! And
how the enchanted spectators clapped and howled and shouted for more! Helga
Crane was not amused. Instead she was filled with a fierce hatred for the
cavorting Negroes on the stage. (Larsen 76-77) 45
This imagery of the performers at the circus brings to mind images of Josephine Baker and her own dances which critics and audiences described as "exotic." Baker performed in France for the first time in October 1925; Ann Cheng describes Baker's debut in Second Skin:
a woman entered the stage on all fours, bottom up, head down, wearing a tattered
shirt and cut off pants, a strange doll among bales of cotton and bandanaed
“bucks” and “black mammies.” With her hair slicked back in a shining armor and
her mouth painted in a minstrel style, this figure started to dance—and danced
like nothing anyone has seen before. With eyes crossed, buttocks quivering, legs
going every which way, that slim pulsating body on stage appeared part child,
part simian, part puppet on neurotic strings; then she retreated. (Cheng 4).
Baker herself is “celebrated as icon and decried as fetish, Baker has been viewed as either a groundbreaking performer or a shameful sellout,” and this description of her fits in almost exactly with the scene the narrator describes at the circus when the black performers come on stage (Cheng 39). The narrator describes the scene at the end of the performance where the
“enchanted spectators clapped and howled and shouted for more” these spectators being white
Europeans, while contrastingly:
Helga was not amused. Instead she was filled with a fierce hatred of the cavorting
Negroes on the stage. She felt shamed, betrayed, as if these pale pink and white
people among whom she lived had suddenly been invited to look upon something
in her which she had hidden away and wanted to forget. (Larsen 76-77).
The narrator then goes on to say that the incident left Helga "profoundly disquieted. Her old unhappy questioning mood came again upon her, insidiously stealing away more of the 46
contentment from her transformed existence” (Larsen 77). Helga’s questioning of her own contentment is a staple in Helga’s unconscious and something she does when she begins to denounce her role in an ideology.
Helga’s questioning of her contentment comes after a moment when her race is pointed out to her as a spectacle. The spectacle of black bodies at the circus and her reaction to it is comparable to the moment in Naxos when the white preacher comes to the school to talk about how wonderful Naxos is and Helga is enraged by his comments. There is some role reversal between these two moments as in Naxos a white man was preaching to an audience of black teachers and in Copenhagen, two black men were dancing for an audience of white Danes.
However, the spectacle remains the same and Helga's reaction to it all is discontent and outrage at the assumptions of African American life as laid out by these two spectacles. The white preacher may have been on stage in Naxos, but it was the audience of black teachers who were performing for him without even knowing it. This notion of performativity is intimately related to the Harlem Renaissance as black artists were writing, painting, acting, dancing, and singing in ways that they had not showcased before – but these performances were strictly for themselves and other African Americans. Black artists were no longer forced to perform for white audiences as typical minstrel characters like mammies, Bucks, or Uncle Toms; they could perform the way that they wanted to. However, for Helga in these two instances, it seems as if African Americans were still performing for their white audiences – knowingly or not. At this point, there is a mirroring between spectacle as audience and spectacle as performer, and in both cases the spectacle is black. Helga always begins to question her contentment within a new space before she denounces the ideology altogether and moves on to another on, thus showing the importance of blind acceptance of the rules and relations within an ideology. 47
Helga's final denouncement of her role in Copenhagen comes during a dinner party where Axel
Olsen proposes to Helga and she is shocked, and then disgusted. "She was too amazed to discover suddenly how intensely she disliked him, disliked the shape of his head, the mop of his hair, the line of his nose, the tones of his voice, the nervous grace of his long fingers; disliked even the very look of his irreproachable clothes" (Larsen 79). Helga very suddenly realizes how much she dislikes everything about Axel, particularly his class and race markers such as his hair and clothing, things she used to admire about him and dream about this moment of proposal and how happy it would make her. However, these thoughts and dreams happened before Helga began to think logically about her role and place in Copenhagen and how much she dislikes it. In the hopes of winning her over, Axel tells Helga that she has "the warm impulsive nature of the women of Africa, but, my lovely, you have, I fear, the soul of a prostitute. You sell yourself to the highest buyer," and at this remark Helga's contentment in Copenhagen completely unravels and she disregards her entire time in Copenhagen as a "peacock" and states "but you see, Herr
Olsen, I'm not for sale. Not to you. Not to any white man. I don't at all care to be owned. Even by you" (Larsen 81). This is a complete turn-around from the amazed contentment Helga expressed at being bought clothing and told what to wear and where to be and have all of her decisions made for her at the beginning of her stay in Copenhagen. This anger Helga experiences at Axel's remark is similar to the anger Helga presents in her conversation with Dr. Anderson in Naxos -- both men have appealed to or insulted Helga’s race and/or class in order to try and convince her to stay which is exactly what convinces her to leave. With this, Helga begins to think for herself again and decides that she is anything but content and happy in Copenhagen and must return to
Harlem as she has received an invitation to a wedding there and suddenly finds herself longing for America. 48
Helga’s departure from Copenhagen builds in the same way as her departure from Naxos where she begins content and happy, slowly becomes more and more discontent with her life, then becomes enraged, has some sort of emotional outburst, and then must leave. Helga considered her life in Copenhagen a “peacock’s life” wherein her only duty was to look beautiful and exotic and to be a talking piece for her Aunt and Uncle and help them climb social ladders.
Her enthusiasm to take on this role was contrasted by her enthusiasm to leave this role in the end when she realizes that Copenhagen is not providing her with the freedoms she truly desires either. While in Copenhagen, Helga recognizes herself as an exotic other in her exotic clothing and foreign customs; however, once she sees the African dancers at the circus and she feels ashamed she realizes that exoticness is not a commodity but rather a lifestyle. A lifestyle that she does not want to use to gain social favor in Copenhagen. This moment at the circus shatters
Helga's understanding of her life in Copenhagen for in that moment she begins to think about her situation and understands that she can never experience true freedom here as she will always be the exotic foreigner and nothing else. This, again, shows Helga bumping and chafing against the ideologies that are available to her during this time period, she has a nice life with her family in
Copenhagen and is given everything that she desires – but those material desires, while extremely important to her in Naxos, are not all that she requires any longer.
Helga’s realization that material desires cannot provide her everything she wants connects back to the New Negro and the understanding that money alone cannot solve your problems. Helga's first moment of happiness when she arrives in Copenhagen is expressed by
"the realization of a dream that she had…Always she had wanted, not money, but the things which money could give, leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings. Things. Things. Things"
(Larsen 61). These are exactly the things that Helga's aunt and uncle provided to her, and she 49
never even had to think about it as her new clothing and gifts were picked out by Olsen and "paid for by Aunt Katrina. Helga had only to wear them," and this is the "peacock's life" that Helga eventually grew tired of (Larsen 67). Her entire stay in Copenhagen is concerned with material things and exotic beauty, both of which are gendered, and nothing else is every discussed in this section. Helga’s rejection of Olsen’s proposal is even connected with this language as she tells him that she does not care to be owned by him. Thus, Helga's illusion about her life in
Copenhagen is shattered and she understands now that money alone cannot provide her with happiness and she returns to Harlem.
Harlem to Alabama
While in Harlem for the second time, Helga becomes enraptured by religion when she happens upon a church service when she is at her lowest point, crying in the street. At first, she finds the service and the way the people were yelling and singing out ridiculous, but then:
“gradually a curious influence penetrated her; she felt an echo of the weird orgy resound in her own heart; she felt herself possessed by the same madness; she too felt a brutal desire to shout and sling herself about” (Larsen 105). It was in this moment that Helga is “saved” and realizes her new dream is that of religious freedom and spirituality. This is the moment where Helga meets Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green and not much later they are married and Helga moves to his religious community in Alabama.
Helga defines her moment of religious acceptance as the moment she was saved, which is an accomplishment for her because she has been seeking a place of acceptance and refuge throughout the novel. However, instead of finding comfort in these places, Helga runs from each of them. When Helga first arrives in Alabama, “there was a recurrence of the feeling that now, at last, she had found a place for herself, that she was really living…This one time in her life, she 50
was convinced, she had not clutched a shadow and missed the actuality. She felt compensated for all previous humiliations and disappointments and was glad” (Larsen 109-110). Helga’s return to the South is a rejection of the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, and the New Negro as Helga has denounced each of them in turn. She leaves the freedom granted to her in Harlem twice, she returns to the oppressive South after being offered new opportunities and freedoms in the North, and in her return to the South, Helga embraces stock character stereotypes attributed to African American characters which are a direct contrast to the motives of the New Negro.
Locke lays out the notion that the “Old Negro had long been more of a myth than a man” and that this myth “has been a stock figure” he goes on to say that “for generations…the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden” and this depiction of the Old Negro is exactly what the New Negro is fighting against (Locke 3). So far throughout Helga's journey, she has been subject to each of these things. In Naxos she was explicitly told by the white preacher that "Naxos Negroes knew their place" in a way of keeping them down, Harlem exists as a way of black communities helping themselves up, and in Copenhagen, Helga was defended and worried over. Helga experiences and rejected each of those things only to wind up back in the
South clinging only to religion in the hopes of finding true happiness in an oppressive society.
As always, Helga is content and excited about her new journey as she sets out to help her community as she "was a person of relative importance. Only relative" (Larsen 109). Helga’s distinction of herself as a woman with only relative importance is another reiteration of the thing that has been bothering Helga throughout the novel where she was an "insignificant part" in
Naxos and "did not count" in Copenhagen. Here in Alabama, she has finally reached a position 51
of importance, even if it is only relative. Helga first sets out to help the women with their clothing, to start a sewing circle, and to teach the children “in ways of gentler deportment” which are all gendered actions (Larsen 110). She even thought she loved her husband as “she told herself, proud and gratified that he belonged to her,” this notion of belonging seems to be a reverse of traditional gender roles as traditional gender roles place women as goods to be owned by men – the same notion that Helga retaliates against in her rejection of Olsen, but here Helga is happy to be in possession of her husband, for now (Larsen 113). Helga also notes that her husband had taught her the ways of religion. Helga began to accept religion and her place in life:
“the possibility of alleviating her burdens by a greater faith became lodged in her mind. She gave herself up to it. It did help. And the beauty of leaning on the wisdom of God, of trusting, gave to her a queer sort of satisfaction” (Larsen 116). Helga is completely giving up her problems to a
God that she had never before believed in, and then she fully gives herself up to this religious ideology “faith was really quite easy. One had only to yield. To ask no questions. The more weary, the more weak, she became, the easier it was. Her religion was to her a kind of protective coloring, shielding her from the cruel light of an unbearable reality” (Larsen 116-117). Helga has stopped asking questions about her ideology and has seemingly accepted it as truth. This acceptance is a regression in Helga's character, as Helga is an upper class, well-educated, well- traveled, mixed-race woman who has given up on all of the things she has longed for throughout the novel. She has settled for an increasingly gendered existence as a wife and mother in a small, southern religious community praying to a God she does not believe in. This is also a regression regarding the New Negro as Helga only has religion in Alabama. She remarks on “teaching” children how to play and “teaching” women how to sew which is a step back in her previous 52
educational endeavors, the entire community is poor, and Helga has no freedoms as she must adhere to certain standards as the reverend’s wife.
As expected, Helga comes to resent and reject her choices, her faith, and those around her. The rejection immediately begins with Helga expressing her discontentment with the birth of her fourth child, "the fourth little dab of amber humanity which Helga had contributed to a despised race was held before her for maternal approval, she failed entirely to respond properly to this sop of consolation for the suffering and horror through which she had passed" (Larsen
117). At this point, Helga is passing all of her worries onto her new faith in God and trying to accept her place as a wife and mother, but she is no longer able to feel joy for her role. Not only that, but she also denies the reality of God's existence as "she couldn't, she thought ironically, even blame God for it, now that she knew that He didn't exist" (Larsen 121). Aside from the immediate rejection of her role in terms of motherhood and religion, Larsen presents Helga's rejection in the same way that she rejected Naxos at the beginning of the novel as she becomes increasingly unhappy and begins to express this discontent, at least inwardly.
Once Helga begins to acknowledge her discontent, she grows much stronger emotions about her life in Alabama as the reverend’s wife. At first, she notes being unbothered by his smell, clothing, and manners; it was a mild annoyance: “what did it matter that he consumed his food, even the softest varieties, audibly? What did it matter that, though he did no work with his hands, not even in the garden, his fingernails were always rimmed with black?” (Larsen 112-
113). However, as time passes on and she falls ill, she ascribes much stronger feelings to her place here and to her husband as well. She admits to praying for her husband’s death and that
“the thought of her husband roused in her a deep and contemptuous hatred” (Larsen 121, 124).
This disgust in her partner brings back the inner dialogue that Helga had with herself after Axel 53
Olsen proposed in Copenhagen, a dialogue in which she lists off all of the things about him that repulsed her. Axel and Helga's husband are complete opposites; the Reverend is black, lower class, and religious and treats Helga like a child-bearing machine, while Axel is white, upper class, and worldly and treats Helga like an exotic thing to own. With these two men, Larsen is showcasing the opportunities for black women during this time – both of which offer no sense of agency or autonomy over one's own life but the relieving of control to someone else. In addition to disgust in her husband, all of Helga's plans to help the women and children of the community began to slip away the longer she stayed in Alabama as "there was not time for the pursuit of beauty, or for the uplifting of other harassed and teeming women, or for the instruction of their neglected children" (Larsen 114). Helga even rejects the women and children of the community, of which she was previously so enthusiastic about helping, through the use of the words
"harassed," "teeming," and "neglected" (Larsen 114). Lastly, Helga's faith in God crumbles rapidly and vigorously as she comments on the traditional trust in God which "ailed the whole
Negro race in America, this fatuous belief in the white man's God, this child-like trust in full compensation for all woes and privations in ‘kingdom come'" (Larsen 123). Helga has likened the African American trust in God to that of a child trusting a mother; it is naïve. "How the white man's God must laugh at the great joke he had played on them! Bound them to slavery, then to poverty and insult, and made them bear it unresistingly, uncomplainingly almost, by sweet promises of mansions in the sky by and by" (Larsen 123). This dismissal of religion is a notion shared by the New Negro as within this message of religion there is also the language of slavery which is the opposite of freedom, and references to poverty which is the absence of money marking three of the four solutions to the race problem in the New Negro as unattainable.
Furthermore, this naivete that Larsen shows here in the religious community hearkens back to 54
the white preacher who visits Naxos as a symbol of white supremacy enforcing rule onto black subjects. This is the point in Helga's emotional cycle where she would have a rage-induced outburst and then depart from this ideology and her life within it; however, she can no longer do that as she now has children to worry about.
Helga’s submission to marriage and motherhood brings an interesting turn of events for her character as now that she must stay within this institution for her children. This gendered element functions as a way of complicating Locke's views on the New Negro as Larsen points out with Helga that black women at this time could not achieve this notion of the New Negro.
Black women can never experience true freedom as white onlookers, authoritarian figures, or husbands are always governing their bodies or thoughts or time. Helga's words are also governed as she is not allowed to express her true feelings of resentment openly. Her words of disgust and hatred are said only in her mind and must never be spoken out loud. This last phase of the novel is the only phase in which Helga fully commits to keeping her feelings in check and not expressing true rage or disgust out loud, and she does so because she must be seen as politically relevant in her role as the reverend's wife in order to stay near her children. This is a role she cannot easily step outside of or walk away from, and a life she must commit to no matter how much she hates doing so. Larsen ends this novel with Helga looking back on her past life and how "easy and pleasant" it is to "think about freedom and cities, about clothes and books…It was so hard to think out a feasible way of retrieving all these agreeable, desired things" (Larsen 125).
During this time, black women’s ability to achieve agency or freedom was limited to the roles open to them such as those in education and religion. Helga has instinctively run from multiple decent opportunities ultimately to end up trapped and forever thinking of a way to "escape from the oppression, the degradation, her life had become" (Larsen 125). Helga thinks of these things 55
and what her life has become and the reader is left with the understanding that there is nowhere else for Helga to go, she has exhausted all opportunity, and at that moment Helga “began to have her fifth child” (Larsen 125).
Conclusion
Helga has embraced, despised, and run from each institution that she has been interpellated into as a black woman because she finds them oppressive. As ideologies, institutions function in such a way that the subject must fully uphold all rituals and beliefs of the institution, and if he does not do so he is "wicked" (Althusser 127). "Indeed, if he does not do what he ought to do as a function of what he believes, it is because he does something else, which, still as a function of the same idealist scheme, implies that he has other ideas in his head as well as those he proclaims, and that he acts according to these other ideas, as a man who is either ‘inconsistent' or cynical, or perverse" (Althusser 127). Given this view of institutions, it can be said that they are inherently oppressive in that there is a set way that a subject is supposed to act within an ideology and if he acts in another way he is outside of this ideology and therefore inconsistent. These ideas on institutions are more complicated when black women are considered. Larsen complicates Althusser’s white male subject by revealing the institutions available to black women like Helga and how these institutions fundamentally fail to offer the lives of happiness they allegedly aim to do.
Larsen seems to argue this point through Quicksand as she has Helga run from each institution after developing her own ideas and thoughts about what is being represented by the institution itself. Helga's own free thought and role in ideologies is what gives her the reasoning to run from each institution. However, at the end of the novel, Helga has nowhere else to run.
Throughout her journey, she has been chasing social and familial opportunities and there are 56
none left, her ties are deeply linked within this religious community because of her children and she has burned all of her previous bridges. Helga has been following incredibly racialized and gendered opportunities, opportunities that were given to her and not things that she sought out.
She experiences a large range of geographic mobility through her opportunities provided to her through familial connections – these opportunities are somewhat greater than average African
Americans could count on at the time given her upper class and mixed-race background.
However, the opportunities that Helga follows are still deeply linked to lower class black opportunities at the time, such as teaching, marriage, and religion. Helga ends her novel as a quiet, submissive mother continuously giving birth who no longer has the voice to speak out against these oppressive institutions. Each time Helga was able to speak out and point to criticisms and hypocrisies in deeply racist institutions she did so right before leaving that space in search of a new one, and now she has nowhere else to go. Larsen is making the claim here that there is no space for black women to speak out about these hypocrisies and still feel safe and secure enough to stay within the system they are speaking out against.
Additionally, Larsen complicates Locke’s notion of the New Negro and shows how black women at this time cannot possibly achieve New Negro status as men always force women into stock character stereotypes in one way or another. Helga is able to reject the complete embodiment of the jezebel stereotype in Copenhagen when she rejects Olsen’s proposal, but she ultimately is stuck playing a Mammy to her own children. Helga is deeply unhappy as a mother and wife, yet she must maintain her illusion and appearance of happiness in the face of everything to protect her children. She is well-educated and of a higher class and should be able to transform into the New Negro having education and money already. However, throughout the novel, it becomes clear that Helga, like other black women at this time, cannot attain true New 57
Negro status and must remain as a stereotype of the Old Negro stuck in various racialized roles and institutions.
Helga Crane is subjected to multiple ideologies throughout Quicksand offers a unique insight into her temperament at any given moment. As a result of this insight, it becomes easy to see the recurring emotions Helga expresses throughout the novel. The narrator often points these moments out by using words such as "recurrence" and "continuous" to signal to the reader that the feeling Helga is experiencing is not new. There are two significant emotional moments that
Helga experiences in each of her new ideologies or homes – a feeling of happiness, belonging, and contentment that she has found her safe space to be at the beginning of a new journey, followed by feelings of discontent, anger, and unhappiness at which point she has given up hope of being safe in this place. These two feelings are constant in every place that she goes to, and
Helga ultimately ends her journey of discovery in the exact same emotional state she began it in
– throughout the novel she experiences unlimited geographic mobility provided to her by her family and class standing, but she experiences very little to no emotional mobility. Helga describes her last days in Naxos as disgusting and rousing "a deep hatred" within her in regards to the institution itself; this deep hatred is again expressed in Alabama as the narrator states "the thought of her husband roused in her a deep and contemptuous hatred" (Larsen 5, 124). Not only does the narrator use the same phrasing to describe Helga's temperament in the beginning and the end of the novel, but in an inner monologue, Helga herself states "her suffocation and shrinking loathing were too great. Not to be borne. Again. For she had to admit that it wasn't new, this feeling of dissatisfaction, of asphyxiation. Something like it she had experienced before. In
Naxos. In New York. In Copenhagen. This differed only in degree" (Larsen 124). Helga knows that she has experienced these emotions before, but she is unable to walk away from them this 58
time because of her children. She has moved all over the world, met numerous people who have changed her outlook on things, but she is never able to grow emotionally and remains in this state of discontent and hatred for her situation.
This emotional immobility that Helga experiences is inherently repetitive throughout the novel.
Larsen outlines Helga's emotions by her involvement within and denouncement of the specific ideology she is functioning within at the time. When Helga is a happy subject participating in her ideology, she is blissful and overlooks small annoyances to remain happy and content. However, the moment she starts to unveil the truth behind her ideology she is taking steps away from that ideology and this is when she becomes unhappy and angry which all leads up to one final outburst before leaving the ideology behind. This particular string of events happens no matter where Helga goes, until the very end when she is stuck in her religious ideology married to the reverend as she has children at this point and cannot physically move away from them. So at the end of the novel, Helga becomes physically and emotionally immobile due to her place within her ideology and her inability to move on from it even after she has unmasked the truth behind it.
The physical immobility that Helga experiences complicates the typical narrative of the
Great Migration. Helga moves out of the south to find new opportunities that the Great Migration promises to African Americans, but instead of being happy with these opportunities she remains in a mental state of an oppressive southern environment. Helga views each location and each institution as inherently oppressive and is never able to move past this. Ultimately, Helga ends up exactly where she started: in the south, under the rule of an oppressive man and an oppressive institution; however, this time she has no escape plan and nowhere else to go. Helga ends her story just as she began: depressed and hopeless, only this time she no longer has the physical mobility to change her environment. 59
CHAPTER TWO: “WE BLACK AND THEY WHITE:” RICHARD WRIGHT’S NATIVE SON AS A PORTRAYAL OF POLICE ENFORCEMENT AND NEW NEGRO LIMITATIONS ON LOWER-CLASS AFRICAN AMERICAN MEN
Nella Larsen’s Quicksand is a subtle yet important reaction against the racist institutions available to African American women in the 1920s; while Richard Wright is unapologetic and in his view of racist institutions in his 1940 novel Native Son. Richard Wright is perhaps one of the most controversial authors of the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote many books during this time, his most famous being a collection of short stories called Uncle Tom’s Children, the novel with which this chapter of this thesis is concerned, Native Son, and the largely autobiographical, Black
Boy. Native Son was published in 1940 and is in many ways a reaction to reader reactions to
Wright's 1938 novel Uncle Tom’s Children. Wright states that after reading the reviews of Uncle
Tom’s Children, “I realized that I had made an awfully naïve mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (How Bigger Was Born).
Native Son came about because of this moment, and Wright achieved this “hard and deep” novel through Bigger as Native Son does not leave room for white men and women to feel better about their own racism. Native Son is hard and unapologetic, and at the end of the novel, Wright turns the accusations white society throws on Bigger back onto the audience within the courtroom as well as the audience reading the book. While Wright’s novel has been regarded as a great depiction of African American life, essayist and novelist James Baldwin provides critiques
Native Son rather harshly. In his essay, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin makes the argument that Native Son is simply another standard protest novel of the time and does not produce original ideas or give way to transcendental thoughts, he states that Bigger’s problem is 60
that “he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth” (23). This criticism has become a popular argument against the novel as it is concerned with themes of violence, racism, and lack of opportunity. However, I read Native Son as a novel that reveals Bigger’s actions as a direct representation of his lack of agency within various racist institutions, as well as his reaction to the strict surveillance he is subjected to through these institutions. As a young, poor black male, Bigger’s agency is limited by the racist institutions and policies that are placed upon him in 1940s Chicago.
Framing Native Son
Native Son, like Quicksand in the previous chapter, invokes the narrative of the Great
Migration and presents a more typical narrative of the Migration. Wright himself was a migrant from Mississippi to Chicago during the Great Migration, and the entirety of Native Son is set in
Chicago. Chicago is an integral city in the history of the Great Migration as it became one of the hubs that many thousands of migrants moved to when fleeing the South. As a result of the large influx of migrants, Chicago became incredibly crowded and the migration forever changed the landscape of the city, a change which the reader can see beginning throughout Native Son. This change comes in the form of living conditions as white men forced migrants into small apartments that they sometimes shared with other families. Many times, large families were forced into one-bedroom apartments, such as the case in Bigger’s story. Bigger shares a one- bedroom apartment with his mother, brother, and sister. These small apartments were all kept on one side of town completely separated from the “white” side of town, and this distinct separation led to tensions rising between whites and blacks in Chicago. There were unspoken rules and boundaries that the black citizens were forced to live by as an extension of the Jim Crow South 61
and failure to follow these rules and boundaries often led to violence and multiple riots throughout the city; it was noted that "one racially motivated bombing or arson occurred every twenty days" (qtd. In Wilkerson 372). In addition to the arson and bombings, there were often shootings, riots, and turf wars taking place all over Chicago as new migrants were coming in by the thousands every day and pushing on the boundaries set forth by the white homeowners already settled in Chicago. Native Son is set in Chicago in the 1930s which is only eleven years after one of the “worst race riots in American history” due to building tensions between the races. This particular race riot occurred during the summer of 1919 when Eugene Williams, a seventeen-year-old black boy was swimming in Lake Michigan and accidentally crossed over an invisible line in the lake separating the boundary between the white and black beach. When
Williams crossed this line, white boys began throwing rocks at him, and he drowned. A police officer arrived on the scene, and the black crowd was demanding that he arrest the white boys for killing Williams. Instead, the officer arrested a black man due to one white man's complaint.
Tensions on both sides boiled and within hours a full riot was taking place on the streets in
Chicago: “all told, the riots coursed through the south and southwest sides of the city for thirteen days, killing 38 people (23 blacks and 15 whites) and injuring 537 others (342 blacks, 178 whites, the rest unrecorded) and not ending until a state militia subdued them” (Wilkerson 272-
273). This riot was the second in two years that erupted on the streets in Chicago and resulted in a demand for change by many citizens on both sides of the racial divide.
This need for change resulted in a 672-page report called The Negro in Chicago which was written by a “white-led, biracial commission set up to investigate the climate and circumstances leading up to the riots” the result of which was this large report setting out 62
guidelines for civil living between blacks and whites in Chicago. The report laid out recommendations such as
schools hire principles with an “interest in promoting good race relations”; that white
citizens seek accurate information about blacks “as a basis of their judgements”; that
restaurants, stores, and theaters stop segregating when they weren’t supposed to; that
companies “deal with Negroes as workmen on the same plane as white workers” and stop
using them as strikebreakers and denying them apprenticeships. (Wilkerson 275).
While the report was born out of good intentions, the council could not enforce their findings or recommendations as they did not have the authority to do so, and as a result “much of its counsel went unheeded…The South Side would become almost totally black and the North Side almost totally white” (Wilkerson 275). This deeply segregated, and tension-ridden Chicago is where our protagonist in Native Son, Bigger Thomas, calls home.
Bigger’s story and Helga’s story are opposite insofar as their gender. However, both narratives show the seemingly unavoidable paths that affect black men and women in this time.
Both novels also complicate Alain Locke’s concept of the New Negro. As pointed out in the previous chapter, this New Negro is one who is fighting back against previous stereotypes and stock characters. Locke’s premise of this New Negro relies on black men and women understanding that religion, freedom, money, and education cannot solve their problems independently but must be combined in addition to other things in order to rise to New Negro status. My discussion of Quicksand showed how Helga as a black woman was unable to rise above stereotypes to a New Negro status because a combination of freedom, money, education, and religion was not available to her. Bigger Thomas in Native Son further complicates Locke's theory as Bigger, as a low-class black male, does not have direct access to either freedom, 63
money, religion, or education. Bigger is uneducated, poor, extremely oppressed, and denies the religious tendencies his mother attempts to force upon him, which ultimately leaves him unable to obtain the solutions necessary to reach Locke’s New Negro status.
Bigger’s story and Helga’s story also showcase the different ways in which subjects are interpellated by ideology. In the previous chapter dealing with Quicksand, I discussed how Helga was performing as a female subject within what Althusser refers to as ideological state apparatuses (ISA) that prescribe gender, race, and class identities/behaviors. Helga performs the role of a teacher, an exotic object, and a reverend’s wife as she believes she will be able to find her true place of belonging within one of these ideologies, but ultimately, she does not do so. In comparison, we might productively read Bigger as an example of a black male subject who is more powerfully interpellated by repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) as he is seen as a violent, deviant, black man who must be repressed to be kept in line. In my observation of Quicksand and Native Son, it seems as if class and gender are very intimately tied to the types of ideologies
African Americans can engage with. Helga is shaped by her role within ISAs, notably education and religion, due to her gender, class, and ability to seek out these opportunities. However,
Bigger is of a much lower class and does not have the same opportunities afforded to him. He has not finished his education which significantly lowers his career outlook, and due to his lower class and race, he is automatically stereotyped as more violent than his peers of a higher class.
This violence and class place him under the rule of the RSAs, notably the police and media, who watch and govern his every move. Althusser classifies the media as an ISA as the media is not typically regressive. However, I interpret the media as presented in Native Son as an RSA given its repressive tendencies and ability to work with the police to govern and restrict Bigger’s movements. However, in the case of Bigger Thomas, the media is inherently oppressive. 64
Throughout Native Son, the only mentions of the media are in relation to Bigger's status as a poor black man or regarding his actual or alleged crimes. The media serves to paint Bigger as a violent, racist, jungle animal and in some cases works with the police to physically trap him within an area via maps within newspapers. These newspapers reveal that Bigger’s every move across the city is not only governed by the police and other white authority figures, but also by the media.
This close governance of Bigger by various institutions places him under literal and figurative surveillance throughout the novel. This surveillance is presented as panopticon which is a construct made famous by Michel Foucault. Foucault theorizes the panopticon by using a prison as a metaphor. In the center of the prison, there is a large tower constructed so that whoever is inside the top of the tower can see all around him, but no one will be able to see inside the tower. Around the tower, there are many individual cells where persons who need to be governed would be kept. The person inhabiting the tower will be able to see inside each of these cells at all times, but no one within the cells can see the guard within the tower. The point here is that those who are being policed/surveilled can never be sure if the governing body is actually watching them or not, and as a result, those who are policed begin to modify their own behavior or act in the way the governing body expects them to. Foucault explains that "he who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power, he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (Foucault 202-203). The "deviant" body becomes responsible for his own governing and corrects his own behavior, regardless of who may or may not be watching him. Wright's invocation of surveillance complicates Foucault's argument as Foucault does not consider race. 65
White governments always surveil and govern black bodies. They never have the liberty of knowing what it is like to not be watched; therefore, black men are always self-governing. This notion of surveillance and self-government is clear throughout Native Son as Bigger constantly feels as though someone is watching him. At the very beginning of the novel, he encounters a poster of a District Attorney with eyes which seem to follow him down the street which represents both the police and media watching him. White people further watch bigger within their houses, and eventually followed and chased by police and the media until he is ultimately placed in jail. This notion of surveillance in Native Son is a notion that has not previously been written about the way that it is within this thesis. In 2013, Mark Henderson published a dissertation titled “Staring Back at the New Overseer: Response to White Panopticism in the
Works of Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison” and within this dissertation Henderson makes the argument that Bigger Thomas is under the supervision of a “New Overseer” in this
New Jim Crow era and that places him within the panoptic ring of surveillance. Henderson calls back to slave narratives and notions to classify the New Overseer and make this argument.
However, in my thesis, I am building on this notion of surveillance, not regarding an overseer, but regarding panoptic surveillance to show how Bigger RSAs watch and govern Bigger.
Bigger's placement within this panopticon is always related to race, and often gender, as the moments where Bigger feels that he is being watched the whiteness of others and his own blackness is exemplified, as is his gender and violent tendencies. As a contrast to Bigger’s constant surveillance, the novel paints him as a character without the ability to watch or gaze upon others. He can only gaze on women and only when no one else is capable of gazing at the moment. There are three explicit moments in the text where Bigger finds himself capable of looking upon anyone in any meaningful way and in these three moments he is only capable of 66
gazing because his subjects are women and they are either, on screen, dead, blind, or passed out.
There is no other place in the text where Bigger is able to look back at his subjects further showing the point that Bigger is always seen without ever being seen as a docile body within the panopticon.
Bigger's subjection to this panopticon leads to the final framing of the novel and argument for this thesis – mobility. Bigger's novel ends with him locked in jail and ultimately headed for death, not so unlike Helga's novel where she is left in bed giving birth repeatedly and feeling her body and will weakening each day. Helga is incredibly geographically mobile in her movements to Chicago, Harlem, Copenhagen, and Alabama yet her emotions seemed to be stuck in the same cyclical pattern. Bigger, on the other hand, is almost completely geographically immobile. He not only feels stuck in Chicago, but he also becomes physically stuck in multiple places throughout the novel such as buildings in the South Side of town as he runs from the police, he becomes stuck on top of a water tower and is ultimately trapped in jail at the end of the novel.
Despite Bigger's limited geographic range, he experiences extreme emotional mobility. His emotions are larger than life, volatile, and unexpected at times. He experiences violent outbursts, introspective monologues of clarity, extreme joy, and sadness. However, as the novel comes to a close and his geographic space is becoming more and more limited, his emotions also become more limited. By the end of the novel, Bigger is in jail, and his emotions are small and quiet and introspective reflecting his new place in life as a prisoner with limited range physically and emotionally.
Blackness as “Bad” Bigger’s placement within a panoptic structure of surveillance is clear from the moment he steps out of his family apartment when upon hitting the street he immediately comes face to 67
face with a huge poster advertising a state attorney candidate. The poster shows a white face that is “fleshy but stern; one hand was uplifted and its index finger pointed straight out into the street at each passer-by” (Wright 15-16). Above the poster the words “YOU CAN’T WIN” are handwritten in red ink, which is a constant reminder to Bigger that he cannot do what he wants.
This poster also serves as a revision of the Uncle Sam “I Want You” image only this time instead of inviting participation the message is one implying that Bigger cannot participate. Bigger goes on to describe the poster as having: “one of those faces that looked straight at you when you looked at it and all the while you were walking and turning your head to look at it it kept looking unblinkingly back at you until you got so far from it you had to take your eyes away, and then it stopped” (Wright 16). This poster serves as an immediate symbol of how white men will stifle
Bigger’s dreams and shows Bigger's anxieties about being watched as he points to the eyes on the poster which follows him down the street.
Bigger and his friends often dream of a life where they are not constantly watched and can achieve their biggest desires. This dream of a different life is brought into the narrative when Bigger and Gus “play white” wherein they imagine their lives as white men unhindered by their blackness. Bigger’s dream of becoming a pilot comes into view with an exclamation of anger that he can never achieve this dream: “we live here and they live there. 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 knothole in the fence”
(Wright 24). Bigger, along with other black families, is kept in the Black Belt – the term Bigger gives to the South Side of Chicago – which is owned and leased out by white families who live in the North Side of town. This reference to the black side of town being likened to a belt is significant in that the sole purpose of a belt is to tighten around you and hold things in, it is 68
encircling, and sometimes even holds too hard. This strangling notion of a belt to describe the black side of town in Chicago is interesting as these black families are kept in uncomfortably small living spaces – tightened in on one another like a belt. The white men own the buildings within the Black Belt and allow the black families to live in these buildings and can also take away or invade these buildings at any moment they wish. In this way, Bigger cannot see across the line and he cannot see the white men who live across it, but he knows that line is there and he knows that there are governing white men on the other side of it. However, he also knows, as is made clear by the poster pointing its finger at him, that the white men can see him clearly.
Foucault’s panopticon speaks to deviant prisoners, but Wright reveals how Bigger is being
“seen” by a poster of a white man; he is not a prisoner he is simply black. It is also important to note that not only is Bigger kept at the periphery of the white side of town but because of the political and social climate during this time, Bigger is also kept from realizing his dreams, such as his pilot dream. Bigger is able to achieve his dreams in his imagination while playing "white" with Gus, but Bigger knows this will never happen for real and he is brought back to his real life where he cannot reach any of his dreams no matter what he does because he will always be black.
Bigger's classification as a black man affects not only his ability to assert his agency but also his ability to control his own gaze. There are three distinct moments in the novel where
Bigger is able to control his gaze and he can only do so because his subject is physically unable to gaze back at him, the first of which occurs after this moment of “playing white,” when Bigger and Gus go to the movie theater. These moments of Bigger’s control of his own gaze reflects the intersection of race, gender, and class at play controlling his actions. As a poor, black male,
Bigger's movements and opportunities are limited and he does not have much authority or 69
opportunity to gaze upon others productively. It is no coincidence that the only time Bigger openly gazes is when he is gazing upon women; as a black man he is low on the totem pole of respect and dominance but he is still above black women and women are still seen as sexual objects regardless of race. In fact, the most sexually explicit and motivated moment of the novel occurs in the movie theater where Bigger and Gus are watching a commercial with Mary Dalton.
Bigger and Gus begin masturbating next to each other in the theater while watching Mary on screen. At this moment, Bigger is not being watched as the room is dark so that even Gus cannot actually see what Bigger is doing and Mary is not truly present. This moment of in the theater invokes the idea of the gaze; Laura Mulvey states that "the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on the performer" (836). In this sense, Bigger – the spectator at the movies – is projecting his desires onto Mary and allowing her to receive all of his repressed feelings at that moment. While
Mulvey focuses on the male gaze in general, bell hooks writes on the black male gaze. She, like
Mulvey, relates this aspect of the gaze to the cinema and states that the white male structure interprets black male gazing as “raping” when done to white women and also “in their role as spectators, black men could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation” (hooks 118). This notion by hooks suggests that one of the only ways for a black man to gain a position of power is through his own gaze upon women; however, this position of power is only imaginary as the role of spectator provides black men with a “phallocentric” power. This phallocentric power is one that white men always have, but black men’s power is diminished by the white man, so they only have this power as a spectator. Wright demonstrates this white fear of the black male gaze when he depicts Bigger and Gus masturbating in response to Mary Dalton on screen. This moment of masturbation is, in essence, a violation of Mary 70
Dalton, and exactly what white men fear when they think of black men with their daughters. This fear of the black race is what Wright is playing with throughout Native Son when he places
Bigger within these moments where white men and women surveil him, and Bigger must act in a certain way to not be seen as a threat.
Throughout these initial moments in Bigger’s world, Wright strategically shows Bigger in locations where his race, gender, class, or some combination of the three affects the level of surveillance and hindrance which is placed on Bigger. Bigger complicates Foucault’s understanding of surveillance and power as Foucault is concerned with who has power and how this power works and does not concern agency or class, gender, or racial markers. Bigger is immediately placed within this panoptic structure of surveillance from the beginning with the
“YOU CAN’T WIN” poster which is placed so that it faces the Black Belt. This poster not only places Bigger within the panopticon of surveillance of black bodies by white men but also serves as a reminder of the police power looming over Bigger. This poster foregrounds Bigger’s race as an important factor of his character that will stop him from “winning” or achieving dreams as he is locked within the Black Belt being looked over by this white man. This initial surveillance of
Bigger by this poster comes full circle at the end of the novel as the candidate in the poster,
Buckley, is the same attorney who prosecutes Bigger at the end of the novel. This primary encounter with the poster is a symbolic representation of the Panopticon governing him and in turn, Bigger governing himself. The poster is only a representation of the governing force, much like the central tower is only a representation of the governing force in Foucault's Panopticon example. However, because Bigger is in a state of constant surveillance by the police and media, he learns to perceive himself as being constantly watched, which in turn causes him to govern 71
himself more harshly. Through this concept of the panopticon, Bigger is placed into the role of the docile body which must be governed.
Bigger is then further surveilled in relation to his race and class as Bigger and Gus play white and Bigger offers up the example of being in jail on the outside of the world which is a relation to the Panopticon structure of a jail. However, Bigger takes this panoptic notion of being visible but unseen a step further and proposes that he only sees the world through a peephole in a fence that he is not allowed to cross. This peephole distorts his view of the world, purposefully, so that he cannot fully see just like in “the peripheric ring [where] one is totally seen without ever seeing” (Foucault 202). This fence that Bigger cannot cross can be linked to the invisible yet acknowledged line drawn between the white and black portions of town. This panoptic structure highlights Bigger’s race and class as he is dreaming of a life where he can be a pilot – a dream which requires him to be white and of a higher class to be easily achievable. The invisible boundary Bigger notices between himself and the white side of town brings back to mind the discussion of Eugene Williams whose death for crossing an imaginary line that white boys noticed resulted in the worst riot in American history. The real incident of Eugene Williams and the fictitious account Bigger Thomas takes place in the New Jim Crow era where blacks and whites are no longer legally segregated, and blacks have some sense of freedom afforded to them, yet they are constantly being watched to make sure they stay in line.
Bigger’s status as a poor, black man firmly places him within the Black Belt being watched over by the fleshy and stern Buckley poster and unable to achieve any of his dreams.
However, his presence as a man is also firmly placed into the novel as Wright has Bigger literally holding onto his manhood in the theater as a reaction to Mary on screen. This is the one 72
moment early in the novel where Bigger can look back at those supposedly watching him and
Wright makes it clear that he is able to do so because of his phallus.
Working for the Daltons
As the novel continues, Bigger continuously has anxieties about being watched or seen because of his race. Wright continues to showcase Bigger's awareness of being surveilled when he ventures to the white side of town to meet Mr. Dalton, a real estate owner, with whom he has an interview. When Bigger reaches the Dalton estate he comments on the home and his place outside of it: “he stopped and stood before a high, black, iron picket fence…fear and emptiness filled him now” (Wright 55). The way that Bigger describes the Dalton home standing behind a
“high, black iron” fence continues this metaphor of surveillance as this is not a welcoming fence like a small and charming white picket fence would be. This fence seems to tell passersby not to enter and serves as a separation of the Dalton home from the outside street and city. As Bigger stands outside of the fence, he asks himself if he is expected to go in the back door: "he walked along the length of the picket fence in front of the house, seeking for a walk leading to the rear.
However, there was none…Suppose a police saw him wandering in a white neighborhood like this? It would be thought that he was trying to rob or rape somebody" (Wright 55). He then says that if he is "doing wrong" by going in the front door to the house, "they could not kill him…all they could do was to tell him that he could not get the job" (Wright 55). This shows Bigger trying to govern himself as he knows he is or could be being watched. Ultimately, Bigger walks to the front door, and when he knocks, a white servant of the Dalton home greets him, notes she has been expecting him and knows exactly who he is.
Bigger is permitted entry into the Dalton home and is hired by Mr. Dalton as a chauffeur and takes on his first job of driving Mr. Dalton’s daughter Mary, a job that will ultimately end 73
tragically. Mary requests that Bigger drive her to the South Side of town which Bigger begrudgingly does. Mary gets drunk that night, and Bigger has an impossible choice: leave Mary drunkenly passed out in the car and be blamed for her behavior, or take her to room and get caught in a drunken white girl's bedroom late at night. Bigger is putting Mary in bed when the blind Mrs. Dalton appears in the door. In order to keep from being discovered, Bigger covers
Mary’s face with a pillow as he “knew if Mary spoke [Mrs. Dalton] would come to the side of the bed and discover him” (Wright 107). This instinct to preserve his own life ultimately leads to
Bigger accidentally suffocating Mary Dalton. The killing of Mary is an act of self-preservation because a black man raping a white woman is a much higher offense than a black man murdering a white woman. Bigger kissed Mary in her drunken state, but he was not raping her and he knew if he were discovered in her bed at night he would surely be accused and convicted of rape.
Robert Bone suggests in his book, The Negro Novel in America, that Bigger suffocates Mary out of fear because “he has been so conditioned that being found in a white girl’s room is the ultimate fear-inspiring situation” (145). The constant governance by white men has conditioned
Bigger to rely upon survival instincts to not get caught in bed with a white woman. The night that Bigger brings Mary home when she is drunk is the second moment in the novel where
Bigger is in possession of his gaze. Bigger is only able to control this gaze at the moment that
Mary is passed out and Mrs. Dalton is in the room with him. As Mary is passed out and Mrs.
Dalton is blind, there is no one else in the room capable of gazing except for Bigger. However, he is so scared of being caught in this room objectifying Mary that this ultimately results in his accidental killing of Mary. Additionally, one of the most violent moments of the novel occurs in the basement after Mary’s death when Bigger carries her downstairs and graphically and violently decapitates her, dismembers her body, and throws her into the furnace. Again, there is 74
no one else capable of gazing at that moment and all of Bigger’s frustrations with the white populace comes out as he projects them onto Mary.
These moments inside the Dalton home leading up to the first murder and crime of the novel serve to not only place Bigger within the panopticon, but to show again the intricacies of race, class, and gender involved in power struggles that Foucault does not address. When Bigger is walking through the neighborhood to the Dalton home, he expresses fears of being caught and accused of robbing or raping someone within the neighborhood. Rape is a highly gendered crime attributed to black men as raping a white woman is one of the worst crimes a black man could commit at this time. In this sense, Bigger's fears seem legitimate; furthermore, when Bigger does knock on the door, he is informed that they were expecting him. So, while Bigger is attempting to govern himself from the periphery, and worried about those watching him from the inside, he is actually being watched from the inside of the Dalton home, further enforcing the idea that: “in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (Foucault 498). The Dalton home, therefore, serves as another symbol of the central tower of the panopticon. In these brief moments outside of the
Dalton home, Bigger is both interpellated in the Althusserian sense as he is aware of the policing of black bodies and the ways in which he must act to avoid being further policed, but he is also docile in the Foucauldian sense as Bigger does, in fact, govern himself and act exactly as he must in order to avoid further surveillance and classification as a deviant.
The scene within Mary's bedroom becomes an additional panoptic space for Bigger as
Bigger understands himself as both black and male. When Mrs. Dalton comes into the room,
Bigger describes feeling as if "a hysterical terror seized him, as though he were falling from a great height in a dream" (Wright 107). However, Bigger also knows that Mrs. Dalton is blind and 75
cannot actually see him, so he has thus far gone undiscovered, which is why Bigger so frantically covers Mary's face in the hopes of not being discovered. At this moment, there is an interesting aspect of the panoptic tower in that Bigger seemingly has the vantage point here for the first time in the novel. Bigger is the only person in the room capable of seeing anything at all, yet white society is still governing him. Mrs. Dalton cannot see Bigger, but whenever she enters a room,
Bigger describes her as vibrantly white. In this instance she is a "white blur," a "ghostlike" image, an oppressive white force that stops Bigger from acting and makes him take the role of the "deviant body" which needs to be governed even when he has the upper hand (Wright 107).
Bigger is so frightened of being caught in Mary's room that he is terrified of a woman who cannot see him; he has been taught to fear whiteness in any regard. So, Bigger does what he must do to stop others from perceiving him as a rapist, unfortunately for him this ends in a terrible mistake where he ultimately kills Mary Dalton.
On the Run
The night that Bigger kills Mary changes everything and Bigger turns this into an opportunity to make some money in order to leave Chicago. He stages Mary’s disappearance as a kidnapping and leaves a ransom note for the Dalton’s asking for a lot of money. Bigger includes his girlfriend, Bessie, in on this plan to help him collect the money. Bessie is understandably afraid and Bigger decides he has to kill her in order to save himself. Bigger brings Bessie to an abandoned building and rapes her. Once Bessie falls asleep, Bigger listens to her breathe for a while and then suddenly, he violently bashes Bessie's head in with a brick and throws her down an air conditioning shaft. When Bigger throws Bessie's body down the air conditioning shaft, he describes her in a dehumanized way, "he pushed her as far out in his arms as possible, then let go. The body hit and bumped against the narrow sides of the air-shaft as it went down into 76
blackness. He heard it strike the bottom” (Wright 301, my italics). Bessie goes from being a
“her” with a body to being just a body with no existence once Bigger lets go of her; alternatively,
Mary never loses her pronouns even when her charred bones are found they are still described as
“her” bones. Mary and Bessie are both women who were assaulted by Bigger, but Bigger himself views them differently based on their race. Mary Dalton is sexually assaulted by Bigger only in images as Bigger watches her on screen and he accidentally kills her and only becomes violent with her body once she is dead, and even then he still refers to Mary as “her.” However, Bigger’s treatment of Bessie is much different seemingly because she is also black and Bigger feels that he can assert his agency and dominance over her as black women are the only people below black men in this society. Bigger physically sexually assaults Bessie and her death is not accidental or civil. Bigger bashes her head with a brick -an incredibly violent act that is imposed on Bessie while she is alive. And from this moment on Bessie becomes an “it” in Bigger’s eyes instead of a “her.”
Bigger’s dehumanization of Bessie is related to the media’s dehumanization of Bigger himself. Mary’s bones are found in the furnace and Bigger is pegged as the killer, and almost immediately the newspaper heading and stories portraying Bigger as an animal begin to surface and continue throughout the end of the novel. The first headline Bigger sees the morning after
Mary’s bones are found simply states “HUNT BLACK IN GIRL’S DEATH” (Wright 305).
Bigger is no longer a man or a person, simply a “black” he has become a color instead of a person. Underneath that headline, there is a map of the South Side with shaded areas wherein the: “shaded portion shows area already covered by police and vigilantes in search for the Negro rapist and murderer. White portion shows area yet to be searched” (Wright 310). This map of the
Black Belt is another aspect of surveillance wherein Bigger is known to be within this map 77
somewhere, and every minute the places for him to hide are more and more restricted by the police force crashing in on him. This is, in turn, a function of the RSA which is working on him throughout the novel. In addition to the police force closing in on him, this is an example of the media acting as an RSA instead of an ISA as the newspaper works with the police to physically restrict Bigger’s movements and help to capture him. Bigger immediately muses that “he was trapped” and tries to devise a plan to hop from building to building in the white portions of the map (Wright 310). However, he can only guess as to where the police are in their search for him, but the police already know where they have been and where they are yet to go and that Bigger will be in one of the buildings they are searching. The map and infiltrating police force shows that Bigger is now in a literal peripheric ring in which the white governing force is infiltrating to find him; a white force that has already supervised him long enough to know that he will stay in the South Side of town to hide because he is most comfortable there. This search culminates in a rooftop chase where Bigger ends up on top of a water tower above the white policemen chasing him and seemingly has the upper hand at this moment as he has a view of the men running around beneath him while they cannot see him. However, every time he shoots at one of them he misses, and every time they throw tear gas at him it lands exactly where it should before Bigger throws it off the tower.
The moments leading up to Bigger’s capture classify him initially by his race and class as the media and police state that they know he will hide in the Black Belt because that is where he feels most comfortable. This headline and map works to strip any power Bigger thought he had away from him as it shows that the police are already a step ahead of him in their search.
However, things seem to turn around for Bigger as he ends up on top of the water tower which is a stand-in for the literal tower like that presented in the panopticon. However, he is still unable to 78
see the white men below him (the enforcers) while being fully surveilled as a black man by the white men he is trying desperately to see. Under white supremacy, the black body can never occupy the tower; he may be allowed to think he is the supervisor temporarily, but he can never occupy that space. He is always surveilled without being allowed to look back in any meaningful way. At one point Bigger is so confident in his place on the water tower that he says that he knows they will not shoot at him simply because they cannot see him (Wright 339). However, at this point Bigger cannot see any of the white oppressors looking for him, he knows that one of them is behind a chimney and he knows that they are all out there, yet "his eyes roved, watching for a moving object to shoot at; but none appeared" (Wright 338). Bigger is on top of his tower confident that he is not being watched because no one can see him and also confident that he has the upper hand because he can see all from his vantage point. However, he can see no one and is not sure where they are hiding while everyone knows exactly where he is, whether they can physically see him or not. While Bigger lays on top of the tower, confident that he is unseen, the fire department turns a water hose on him ultimately forcing Bigger to give himself up. He is unable to occupy the role of the man in power on the tower within this panoptic structure even though he is on a literal tower overlooking those he wishes to see; Bigger’s place as a poor, black male lock in his position as always being surveilled and never surveilling. Wright makes this point explicit throughout Native Son. Bigger cannot have the vantage point no matter what he does. He tries to help a drunken white woman to bed and accidentally kills her, he disposes of the body but is found as the killer anyway, he kills his girlfriend to cover all of his tracks and is still found, he is above everyone else with a gun and still cannot win and is overpowered.
Capture 79
Bigger’s heightened anxiety about how others see or describe him is a result of his awareness of the intense surveillance he is under throughout Native Son. These anxieties are in place to show the reader just how little agency Bigger has over his own life – he is anxious about everything that he does and is always wondering how others will perceive him from simply walking through a white neighborhood, to being in the South side of town with white people. It seems as if no matter how Bigger presents himself he will ultimately be seen as a black animal.
This point is made clear after Bigger's capture when he reporters describe him on his first day of court:
Though the Negro killer’s body does not seem compactly built, he gives the
impressing of possessing abnormal physical strength. He is about five feet, nine
inches tall and his skin is exceedingly black, His lower jaw protrudes obnoxiously,
reminding one of a jungle beast. His arms are long, hanging in a dangling fashion
to his knees. (Wright 353, my italics).
This connection of Bigger to that of a deeply black, jungle beast is not an uncommon representation of black masculinity. In Black Looks, bell hooks also discusses the issues associated with black masculinity and how "the portrait of black masculinity that emerges…constructs black men as ‘failures' who are psychologically ‘fucked up,' dangerous, violent, sex maniacs whose insanity is informed by their inability to fulfill their phallocentric masculine destiny in a racist context" (89). This notion of masculinity is the same notion that Bigger is up against throughout the novel, the notion that simultaneously begs for him to take control of his actions and also stops him from gazing. Bigger is a man and has an innate desire to exert his masculinity over others' however, his classification as a black man stops him from being able to do so. He is under the rule of white men and even white women, and as a result, his ability to exert his masculinity is 80
extremely diminished. He is aware of his place in the world and the governance he must enact upon himself, but he is at war with the representation of black masculinity and these racist stereotypes which are thrust upon him by the dominant culture. Bigger did not rape Mary but from the very first newspaper headline stating that Bigger killed Mary and marks him as a "Negro rapist" instead of a murderer.
This representation of Bigger as a violent, black brute and rapist which is a typical trope or stereotype of black men throughout history and as such is the type of representation that Alain
Locke attempts to step away from in The New Negro: “the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or
‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’” (3). This notion of the old Negro that Locke characterizes here is the exact representation of Bigger throughout Native Son. Bigger fits the stereotype of the violent, black brute throughout the novel, but he is also a black man who must be “kept down” due to his social and economic position within the novel as an adult man living with his mother in a small apartment owned by white men. Additionally, Bigger is also seen as a man who must be “helped up” as the same white man renting this apartment to him becomes his boss who gives him the opportunity to drive for his family and make some extra money. Bigger is not only helped up by
Mr. Dalton, but Mary and her boyfriend, Jan, also attempt to help Bigger up by introducing him to communism and telling him that they can help put a stop to race riots and when communism takes over “there’ll be no white and no black; there’ll be no rich and no poor” (Wright 86). Mary and Jan see Bigger as a poor, black boy who needs to be “helped up”and while their intentions may be pure their execution is poor as they go out of their way to classify Bigger and other black people as human as Mary states "never in my life have I been inside a Negro home. Yet they must live like we live. They’re human…” she then goes on to say that “they have so much emotion! What a 81
people” (Wright 88, 97). Bigger fits into this model of the old Negro as he is continuously classified as a man to be put down or helped up and never a man who exists of his own accord with his own actions.
Bigger’s dissatisfaction with not being able to exist outside of this paradigm of “helping the black man up” results in his constantly fluctuating and extreme emotions. The novel itself is loud and abrasive from the very first line "Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnng! An alarm clock clanged in the dark and silent room. A bed spring creaked. A woman's voice sang out impatiently: "Bigger, shut that thing off!" (Wright 3). The first glimpse Wright gives the reader into Bigger's life is loud and intrusive and sets the tone for the rest of the novel, which is often loud and abrasive.
Bigger begins the novel quiet and sleepy and progressively gets louder and more active and abrasive as the novel progresses, ultimately ending with a quiet Bigger accepting his fate of death. While Bigger's emotions grow and explode with each incident in his life, his physical limitations get stronger and stronger. At the beginning of the novel, Bigger is trapped within
Chicago and does not have the funds to move elsewhere as he has to scrounge up quarters to ride the bus to the white side of town. However, once Bigger is employed by the Daltons he can feel his surroundings trapping him in. Bigger is given a bedroom above the basement in the Dalton home and can hear conversations in the basement and the kitchen as a result of his room placement. He often sits and listens to the details of Mary's disappearance and murder unraveling around him while he has nowhere to go. When Mary's bones are found in the furnace, an old feeling rises inside Bigger again, "he was black and had done wrong: white men were looking at something with which they would soon accuse him. It was the old feeling, hard and constant again now, of wanting to grab something and clutch it in his hands and swing it into someone's face" (Wright 276). At the return of this feeling, Bigger decides to run away, but he does not 82
know where to go simply that “all his life he had been knowing that sooner or later something like this would come to him. And now, here it was. He had always felt outside of this white world, and now it was true" (Wright 278). Bigger has these two emotions of violence and then of sadness as an outcast, and as a result of these things, Bigger knows he has been ostracized from an entire world and has no idea where he should go next which ultimately leads to his next emotional outburst where he rapes and kills Bessie.
His geographic boundaries keep growing smaller and smaller as the novel progresses.
The newspapers state that the police know that Bigger will be hiding within the Black Belt because that is where he feels comfortable, and Bigger knows he must hide there because he cannot afford to get out of Chicago and he cannot hide in the white side of town because he will stick out there. The newspapers also release maps of the Black Belt showing areas they know him not to be in anymore. These maps effectively shrink the area Bigger is allowed to be in at that moment, and he must keep moving as the area is growing smaller each hour. As his area grows smaller, so do his emotions. At this moment, Bigger has to think very clearly about his moves to avoid capture and this clear thinking requires a more logical and less emotional mind.
Finally, Bigger is trapped on top of the water tower and then in a prison cell. Interestingly,
Bigger’s emotions grow less and less extreme the smaller his geographic limitations become. At the beginning of the novel, Bigger feels like the whole world is offered up to him, but there is nothing that he can do within it because he is black. He becomes violent, aggressive, and abrasive because of this oppression, but by the end of the novel when he is on the water tower, his aggression is very subdued. This is a moment where Bigger has a vantage point and a gun, he could have stood up and shot wildly into the crowd as a way of letting out his anger, but instead, he lays there and lets out shots occasionally – but mostly he lays there and lets the fight come to 83
him. Once he is in prison, he almost never raises his voice, and he desperately tries to make amends for the things he has done. He apologizes to Jan, his family, and his friends, shares stories with Max, and keeps his temper and emotions under control. As his world shrinks, so do his emotions and he has more capability to take control of them. At the beginning of the novel,
Bigger is not truly "trapped," but he knows white men are constantly watching him; as his world shrinks this surveillance becomes more physical and clearer. The authoritarian surveillance of
Bigger begins as a poster and a feeling of being watched but then becomes more clear as the police and the media close in on him. Bigger’s emotions respond to this shrunken geographic mobility as he no longer has the opportunity to fight for the things that he wants. His fate has been sealed and his anger will have no veritable outcome. When Bigger was outside, his angry outbursts were a way for him to fight against the system which had shrunken his world and limited his dreams. However, once captured he knows he will die and he accepts that fate and with that acceptance his emotions become manageable.
Conclusion
In both Quicksand and Native Son mobility becomes freedom. For Helga, this freedom was in her ability to choose where she would go to try and find her safe space; for Bigger, this freedom was in his emotions to fight back against a corrupt system which had limited his dreams. However, both novels ultimately end the same. Neither Helga nor Bigger have been able to attain the things they were after and both are sealed into a fate they never wanted as the result of institutionalized racism. Both novels also end with their protagonists entangled within ideologies that they cannot escape as is evident by the end. Their endings are also extremely gendered as Helga ends her novel in an unhappy marriage repeatedly giving birth to children she 84
does not want. She essentially gives up searching for anything and accepts her life for what it has become. Similarly, Bigger is trapped within one of the most racially institutionalized systems for black men of all time – prison. Bigger begins and ends his novel in drastically different head spaces despite never going anywhere or experiencing life outside of Chicago. His world is continuously shrunken by the institutions he is forced to be part of whether that be the job he is allowed to have, the newspapers depicting his location, or the police forcing him into incredibly small spaces. Bigger begins his novel angry at his social and political situation and ends the novel understanding that he did what he had to do in order to survive.
Native Son is dependent on the intersections of race, gender, and class in order for this story to be told. Bigger Thomas lives the life that he does because he is black, male, and poor. If any of those characteristics were different, this novel would not be able to function the way that it does. Bigger's race and class firmly places him within the Black Belt in Chicago and requires that he get a menial job to make ends meet. His gender on top of that places him in a role of violence, a black man to be feared by all white women. There are many different ways that a novel about a poor, black man can end; however, Bigger's ending is not surprising. He had a few paths to choose from, but any path he takes will put him at the liberty of the white man's judgment and more times than not will land him in prison.
The last conversation Bigger has before being executed is with his lawyer, Max, and he says:
“What I killed for must’ve been good!” Bigger’s voice was full of frenzied
anguish. “It must have been good! When a man kills. It’s for something. . . .I
didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill
for ‘em. . . .It’s the truth Mr. Max. I can say it now, ‘cause I’m going to die. I 85
know what I’m saying real good and I know how it sounds. But I’m alright. I feel
all right when I look at it that way… (Wright 544).
In this moment, Bigger experiences large emotions as described by his voice of “frenzied anguish,” but he contains this emotion as he comes to terms with his previous outbursts. He finally understands his fate as a black man in an overtly racist society and understands why he followed the path that he did. The last line in the novel describes Bigger walking towards his execution and “he smiled a faint, wry, bitter smile” an incredibly small emotion only seen on his face and not in his voice or in aggression, but with that smile Bigger simultaneously accepts his fate and protests the system which has put him there (Wright 545). He has accepted his fate as a black man, but he also realizes that no matter what he did with his life he was always going to end up exactly where he is now because this society put him here.
86
CONCLUSION
This thesis comes at a time when the future of all American citizens is unclear but more than that the future of all minority groups is in jeopardy. We have seen an uprising through black America as the rallying cry of “Black Lives Matter” rings throughout the nation after the loss of so many young black lives at the hands of predominantly white police officers. The #BlackLivesMatter movement took root in urban cities after the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and far too many others whose only crime was being black in the wrong spot, much like Bigger. This movement is holding steady at a time when the President of the United States refuses to acknowledge the inequality coursing through the nation. So, I leave you with this – why is it important to still read
Quicksand and Native Son in 2018? Why is it important to continue reading literature from the 20s and 40s in this age?
A recent study in the New York Times reveals the statistics of 10,000 boys who grew up in rich families. The study uses equal numbers of white and black boys for this study and found that thirty-nine percent of these white boys grew up to be rich adults, while only seventeen percent of black boys grew into rich adults. Additionally, twenty-one percent of black boys grew into poor adults, while only ten percent of white boys grew into poor adults. Each of these boys started their lives in the same class, the only remarkable difference being their race. Racial divides, inequalities, and lack of opportunity for African Americans is still a huge problem in the United States. These statistics showing the real-life inequality in our country is why it is still important to understand racial trends and bring them to light.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes about these racial tensions and the past and current movements of African Americans in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. She opens her book with the acknowledgment that “it is almost never useful to compare eras; it is even less useful to look at the past and say nothing has changed. However, [there] are painful continuities between the present and the past that remind us that, in some cases, the past is not yet past” (2). This is where 87
my thesis serves to show how the past fictional lives of Helga Crane and Bigger Thomas and the real lives of African Americans they represent may not be as far in the past as we may think. I, like
Taylor, argue that in some cases it is important to look back on the past as a way of understanding current moments in the hopes of learning and not repeating old mistakes and patterns.
These novels may be from eighty years ago, but the themes presented within them hold true.
Racial tensions in the United States are bubbling up and erupting violently in many urban cities.
These tensions and a desire to be heard is leading to another boom in the art by African Americans.
Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out is an excellent example of how these tensions are seeping into art.
Peele wrote Get Out in 2016 when Obama was still president, but the film was released within
Trump’s presidency which resulted in Peele making some final changes to the theatrical release. The ending of the movie as released shows Chris escaping from the Armitage house which has been burnt down. Chris then runs into Rose for one last time, and they engage in a final confrontation, and Chris is choking Rose. Rose begins to smile suggesting that she is happy that Chris is turning into the stereotype of the violent black brute, and then he gets up and leaves her there, alive. Rod then shows up in a police car and picks up Chris, and they drive off together. However, the original ending to the film shows Chris killing Rose and then going to jail for her murder as the house containing all of the evidence has been burnt down. Rod is desperately trying to collect evidence to get Chris out of jail, but in the final moments, Chris says, “Rod, I’m good. I stopped it. I stopped it” (Get Out). Chris is then ushered back to his cell. The directors and producers behind Get Out changed the ending because they felt as though America needed a little more hope, “the country was different. We weren’t in the Obama era; we were in this new world where all the racism crept out from under the rocks again. It was always an ending that we debated back and forth, so we decided to go back and shoot the pieces for the other ending where Chris wins” (Chitwood). In this film, Chris gets to win and can walk away from this traumatic event which is something Stephon Clark, Freddie Gray,
Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner never got a chance to do. African Americans needed to 88
see an outcome where they could win and walk away from these events. The alternate ending where
Chris is in jail and tells Rod not to worry about him is uncannily comparable to the ending of Native
Son. At the end of Native Son, the reader sees Bigger in jail accepting his crimes and noting that it was just something that he had to do, much like Chris in Get Out. 1940 and 2017 seem to be lifetimes apart, but the representation of both black men ending in similar circumstances bridges this gap.
Additionally, a production company has just bought the rights to Native Son; playwright Suzan-Lori
Parks will transform the novel into a new film. This film adaptation will take place in present-day
Chicago instead of 1940 Chicago further emphasizing the racial tensions, and possible outcomes for black men in 1940 are not so different from those in 2018.
These notions of unequal opportunity and racist institutions presented within this thesis also carry through to current African American literature. Claudia Rankine’s 2014 book, Citizen, calls back to the inherently racist institutions and moments in daily life for African Americans. Rankine’s work is subtle, beautiful, and depressing. She documents art, media, pop culture, and personal anecdotes throughout this book. Rankine opens her book with a small story from a school where a white girl sitting behind her has asked Rankine to move to the right during the test so that she can cheat. Rankine continues this description as the white girl notes she “has features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white person” (Rankine 11). Rankine then goes on to explain that this is a Catholic school and that “Sister Evelyn never figures out your arrangement perhaps because you never turn around to copy Mary Catherine’s answers. Sister Evelyn must think these two girls think a lot alike or she cares less about cheating and more about humiliation or she never actually saw you sitting there” (Rankine
12). This cheating tale is a small, subtle moment in the life of Rankine or one of her friends who has relayed this story to her, yet it embodies the nature of institutionalized racism. Sister Evelyn seems not to care that a white girl is cheating off of a black girl. This white girl, Mary Catherine, assuages her guilt by noting that the black girl has white features, implying that Mary Catherine should not 89
feel that a black girl is smarter than her as this black girl seems more white than black. These subtle intricacies of the race barrier between whites and blacks as well as the mixed race of the black girl hearken back to Helga Crane’s journeys in Quicksand.
Larsen and Rankine never explicitly state that an institution is racist or that there are unfair opportunities for blacks; however, both books point to this and express this notion without ever saying it. In the above anecdote, Rankine never states that Mary Catherine feels better about
“cheating from an almost white person” because cheating from an entirely black person would imply
Mary Catherine is less than, but Rankine suggests it. Rankine also never states that the teacher never notices the black girl whom Mary Catherine cheats off of because she is a black girl in a predominantly white school, but Rankine implies it. The same can be said for Quicksand, as Larsen never outright states that institutions are racist but instead laces the implication into the text such as when Larsen describes the white preacher’s visit to Naxos. Larsen never says that this preacher was oppressive or racist, but she places this within the narrative when she recounts the speech he gives to the black students and teachers:
if all Negroes would only take a leaf out of the book of Naxos and conduct
themselves in the manner of the Naxos products, there would be no race problem,
because Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of them. They had good sense and
they had good taste. They knew enough to stay in their places, and that, said the
preacher, showed good taste. (Larsen 5)
This speech reads as incredibly racist and oppressive, but Larsen is subtle about how it is racist. On the surface, this is a nice speech congratulating the Naxos community on their accomplishments, but underneath that, it is a speech reminding the Naxos community to stay where it is and never reach higher.
Get Out and Citizen were best-sellers and commercial sensations upon their release. The messages within this book and film were heard all over America, by black and white audiences. Get 90
Out was not a film for black audiences, but for white audiences so that white men and women could be invited into this conversation and understand their own racism. The same can be said for Citizen.
These texts, like Native Son and Quicksand, were not made for white audiences to feel better about themselves, but instead deliver harsh truths and realities that African Americans deal with within their daily lives. From 1940 to 2018, racism has not changed. Racism has become more subtle in some cases, and more institutionalized in many cases, but it still remains. This is why this project is important.
I have framed my thesis around the Great Migration as the historical background for
Quicksand and Native Son. The Great Migration was intended to provide a new life full of hope and possibility for southern African Americans who had spent years depressed and oppressed; but did they ever achieve this new life? Are things any better after the Great Migration for the Migrators?
The Migration set in place some of the policies still intact today regarding housing and even education and when we look at where we are now politically and socially, we have to ask are things actually better, are we truly post Jim Crow? In this era of Trump, police shootings of unarmed black men, Get Out, Citizen, and #BlackLivesMatter have we actually left the plantations behind? 91
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