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Words As Weapons: the Indeterminacy of Language, Race and Sexuality in Richard Wright

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Words As Weapons: the Indeterminacy of Language, Race and Sexuality in Richard Wright Words as Weapons: The Indeterminacy of Language, Race and Sexuality in Richard Wright A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements Master of Arts in English University of Regina by Shane Derek Reoch Regina, Saskatchewan April, 1997 Copyright 1997: S.D. Reoch 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada Your fiIo Votm nlférenœ Our fi& Noire rdtdrence The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence dlowing the exclusive permettant à la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la fome de microfiche/nlm, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts f?om it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. From his earliest novel, Lawd Todav! (unpublished until 1963) to his last completed novel, The Lons Drearn (1958), American novelist Richard Wright (1908-60)understood that even the most rigidly ordered society is not static. Power is never harnessed entirely by an individual or group. Rather, it circulates indiscriminately through society, across racial, sexual and monetary borders, leaving everyone vulnerable to its flow. Authority may be fierce and oppressive, but it is ultimately unstable; al1 of Wright's fiction is based on this belief. The centrality of this belief to the Wright canon does not, however, imply a lack of development in Wrightrs late fiction. Although authority is always unstable in Wright, the effects and contexts of this instability continually change throughout his writing. As well, Wright's application of this central belief becomes broader with each successive work. Whereas his early fiction illustrates the instability of power and authority by exploring race and sexuality, his late fiction focuses more specifically on how his characters use language. Wright has too long been dismissed as a historically significant but artistically meagre writer. In my analysis of power, race and sexuality in five Wright works, Native Son, Black Boy, "The Man Who Lived Underground," Savase Holidav and The Lonq Dream, 1 will both illustrate the long overlooked consistency of the Wrlght canon and challenge the unfair negation of Wright's prose. - This thesis would not have been possible without the two Graduate Scholarships and one Teaching Assistantship 1 received £rom the Facu-ltyof Graduate Studies and Research. 1 am also indebted to those who helped me in the course of my studies. 1 thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Ken Probert, for his sound advice and steady encouragement over the last four years, and 1 thank Mrs. Kelley Reoch for her endless support. Special thanks as well go to my readers, Dr. Troni Grande and Dr. Bernie Selinger for their insight and enthusiasm. Abstract i Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Introduction: The Negation of Richard Wright 1 Chapter One: Shifting Sand: Indeterminacy of Sex, Race and Power in Native Son Chapter Two: Beyond the Black Hero Proper: Universality in "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Savage Holiday Chapter Three: "He Can't Howl if He's Dead": Power and Language in Black Boy And The Long Dream Conclusion Works Cited By his death at age 52 in November of 1960, Richard Wright was widely dismissed by American critics as yesterday's novelist. His early fiction--Uncle Tom's Children (l938), Native Son (19401, and Black Boy (1945) --still lauded by critics, vaulted Wright to stardom and established him as the first commercially successful African-American novelist. But his later fiction, The Outsider (19531, Savage Holiday (1954) and The Lonq Dream (1958), written in France following Wright's expatriation from America in 1947, sold poorly and received harsh, even vicious, reviews when published in America. Wright's detractors based their criticism of his late fiction on the false assertion that his graphic portrayals of racism were not as applicable to America in the 1950's and 60's as they had been twenty years early. In his review of The Long Dream, for example, Nick Aaron Ford contends that, in his late fiction, Wright is out of touch with the American race relations. This novel is written largely in the spirit of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Black Boy. Those books were timely in their day. But that day has passed, and evidently Wright does not know it. His years in France have given him an excellent base for understanding the European, Asian and African minds. But it has also cut him off from an understanding of the swiftly moving currents of racial attitudes and methods in America. (Gates and Appiah 60) - - - - - - . - - . - -- - . -- - - greatly oversimplify the significance of Wright's fiction. Wright is not a merely a journalist documenting the often desolate conditions of African-Arnerican life in the forties and fifties, nor is his fiction somehow belated by the passage of the. Xe is an intensely theoretical novelist, less concerned with the intricacies of given social systems than he is with human conditions, conditions which transcend language, race, gender, time and culture. Wright' s brilliance as a fiction writer--as well as the consistency of the Wright canon--is found in his ability to identify and illustrate these conditions. From his earliest novel, Lawd Today! (unpublished until 1963) to The Lonq Dream, Wright understood that even the most rigidly ordered society is not static. Power is never harnessed entirely by an individual or group. Rather, it circulates indiscriminately through society, across racial, sexual and monetary borders, leaving everyone vulnerable to its flow. Authority may be fierce and oppressive, but it is ultimately unstable; al1 of Wright's fiction is based on this belief. The centrality of this belief to the Wright canon does not, however, imply a lack of development in Wright's late fiction. Although authority is always unstable in Wright, change throughout his writing. As well, Wright's application of this central belief becomes broader with each successive work. Whereas his early fiction illustrates the instability of power and authority by exploring race and sexuality, his late fiction focuses more specifically on how his characters use language. More than Wright's first published collection of stories, Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son symbolically defines the terms of how Wright perceives power and authority. The novel traces the hard life, and even harder fall, of Bigger Thomas, a poor black youth who briefly and violently transgresses the narrow margins of American racism by murdering a woman. In his despotic behaviour, Bigger assumes the role of oppressor, a role coveted by whites. His ability to obscure the social placements of black and white is, for Wright, strong indication of the mutability of American social order. Furthemore, Wright investigates in the novel the dichotornous role of sexuality in American racism. White patriarchy in Native Son attempts to enforce segwegation by controlling the sexuality of its citizens. Wright reveals, however, that racial autonomy is always illusory; sexuality can never be absolutely policed. When the racial/sexual border is crossed--whether by consensus or 4 * - - and the foundation of racist society crumbles. Wright continues to examine the instability of power and authority in "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Savage Holiday. However, by shifting his focus away from the specifically racial context of Native Son and ont0 the psyches of his cruelly oppressed protagonists, he better accents the universality of this instability. Fred Daniels, an innocent black fugitive in "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Erskine Fowler, a white insurance executive in Savage Holiday, are both unfairly oppressed by white authority. When they are banished from society, each replicates the violent behaviour of his oppressors. Such behaviour obscures each characterfs association with societyfs oppressed and makes indeteminate the social placements of ruler and ruled. Although their focuses differ from Native Son, "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Savage Holiday arrive at the same conclusion as Wright's first novel: total control and complete innocence are equally impossible; everyone is culpable. Wright's vision of power and authority is again refashioned in Black Boy and--what 1 consider the writer's second (albeit fictional) autobiography--The Lonq Dream. Like Native Son, both texts depict the brutality of American - - in The Long Dream--are violently subjugated by patriarchal authority. However, the currency of racism in these two texts is language, not sexuality. Just as racist authority attempts to police sexuality, it naively attempts both to regulate the circulation of written texts across the racial border and to control signification in language for those whom it oppresses. As is the case in al1 of WrightCs fiction, however, authority in Black Boy and The Long Dream is vulnerable to the very thing it ventures to control. Initially oppressed by (and through) language, Richard and Fishbelly ultimately negate their own marginality by learning to use words as "weapons" (E 237). In their cunning subversions of white patriarchy, Richard and Fishbelly again illustrate the instability of authority; power is never completely harnessed, reality is never fully detennined. My choice of material in this thesis stems in part from Arnold Rampexsad's curious exclusion of "The Man Who Lived Underground," Savage Holiday and The Long Dream from the "Library of America" editions of Wright's fiction.
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