Crow Gothic: Wright's

296 c.A wooLEY FurrHeR. R¡aorNc Bendey, N. (2009). Frøntic pø,nlrø,/nø.s: Aruericøn literøtøre ønd, rnøss cwlture CHAPTER 23 I 8 7 0- I 9 2 0. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press. Bendey's section on Chesnutt (in the chapter'Black Bohemia and the African American Novel') situates his critique of realism within his awareness of the power of spectacle. While her focus is not on the Gothic, her argument that 'the real role for the black Jim Crow Gothic: Richard Wright's Southern person in public'is'to perform his own nonexistence as a black cirizef (199) aids gothic readings of dead black bodies, lynchings and minstrelsy particularly the rep- Nightmare resentation of such in mass culture. Clymer, I. A. (2013). Fømily money: Property rø.ce, ønd. literøtøra in the nineteønth cen ury. New York: Oxford University Press. Clymer's chapter 'The Properties of Marriage in Chesnutt and Hopkins' shows how ,þnieszk ø Soltysih, Monn et Chesnutt's fiction assesses the impact of anti-miscegenation law on the economic rights of African Americans, making inter-racial marriage a site tlrough which to see the possibilities, and limits, of inheritance as a form of red¡ess. African American author Richard Wright's interest in crime writing and hard- boiled pulp fiction is well use of horror elements in his major no The Outsid'er (Ì960). FIowever, by far collection of short stories set in the rur ld'rnt' (1938)' legislation in the first decades of the twentieth century. Published in 1945, the autobiographical Bløch Boy ptovides another layer to t}tis picture of the South as hell for blacks, corroborating and fleshing out some of the details in (Jncle Torn's Child.ren,b:ut also complicating the narrative with anecdotes ofWright's ordeal as a child of poverty, including abandonment, lack of education, religiously fanatical female relatives, and a mother who is abusive and that est i like fiction. Long Dreøm (1958), these publications represe hern Gothic that we could call Jim Crow Cõtnic uth as a land permeated by raci¿rl fear and white violence against black selfhood. A.S. Monnet (E) Universiry of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland O The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 201ó 297 ( l- street C T Crow (e¡ls.\. The Pølørøte Hønd.booh of the Soutbern Gothic, 298 A.s. MoNNET IIM CROW GOTHIC: NCFIARD I.VRIGHT'S SOUTHERN NIGHTMARI' 299 Susanne B. Dietzel points out that critics have been slow to recognize the houses and neat hedges of a white Arkansas suburb become an 'overarching use of popular genre forms by African American writers (15ó). Nevertheless, symbol of fear' for the black narrator. The first piece, a sketch called 'The critics have discussed the rather explicit gothic elements in Wright's later works Ethics of Living lim Crow', shows the protagonist, ostensibly Wright himself (see for example Brodziok, Dow and Bryant). Nøtfue Son (1940) is structured as a young man, learning the strict and humiliating rules of Jim Crow-shaped into sections titled'Fear','Flight'and'Fate', whlIe The Owtsid,er (19ó0) has interaction with Southern whites. In a series of vignettes, Wright describes his equally gothic-sounding chapters, such as 'Dread', 'Descent' and 'Despair'. 'education'in the ways of subservience and self-effacement. William Dow observes that The Outsider ís 'filled with allusions to what might The sketch opens with a description of a childhood batde between a grouP be called the topoi or landmarks of the gothic: premonitions) curses) the sub- of black boys and a group of white boys that ends with Wright hit on the terranean, confinement, doubles, conspiracies, and premature burial' (L42). cheek by a broken bottle. Instead oftending to his wounded face and pride, A key incident in tåe novel is an underground train wreck that allows the pro- his mother reacts with fury, suipping the young Wright naked and beating tagonist to shed his identity and begin a new life without attachments (or so him 'till I had a fever of one hundred and two' (Uncle Torn\ Child.ren 4). cmonstrous he thinks). In order to escape the burning train, he must step on the body The subsequent illness is accompanied by delirious visions of white of ayoungwoman) his feet sinking into her chest as he does so. The novel is faces suspended from the ceiling, leering at me' (5). This incident serves as the permeated by a sense of claustrophobia and horror as Cross finds himself again reader's gateway into the often bewildering world of the Jim Crow South for trapped in his new life, both by circumstances and his own crimes, just like the young Wright, and is charged with many layers of meaning. First of all, the Bigger Thomas ín Nøtiye Son. incident is told very differendy in Wright's autobiography, Bløck Boy, where the Genericall¡ Wright's later work is characterized by a hybridity in which the beating and subsequent illness are prompted by him setting his family home on darkness and violence of urban crime fiction are blended with the moral and fire. llere Wright transposes the beating to an incident that makes his mother's epistemological complexities of the Gothic. The result is a sensational explora- reaction seem not only disproportionate but perversely unjust, underscoring tion of the nightmare world that is specific to African American experience of the fear that grips the black population, so distorting normal human emotions the mid-century metropolis as urban ghetto. Wright's influence on later African that a mother whips her son to teach him a potentially life-saving lesson rather American urban crime fiction has been enormous - one can think of Chester than tend to his injuries, and also infusing the incident with a strange sexual Himes, Iceberg Slim and Walter Mosley - but his connections to the Southern charge. His mother strips him 'naked' to beat him, adding a layer of shame, Gothic have been less explored by scholars, even though his Southern child- which then expresses itself in the boy's feverish vision of being 'leered' at by the hood is indisputably at the origin of his attraction to the gothic mode. This white faces hovering near the ceiling. chapter examines Wright's Southern writing in order to demonstrate that his This mixing of sexuality and violence is typical of Wright's work, although work constitutes a crucial piece of the Southern Gothic puzzIe.In contrast to it is fairly muted in the stories of this collection, appearing more forcefully in the Southern Gothic of white authors that often approaches race obliquely, his later Nøtfue Son and The Long Dreørn. Why does he inject a sexual layer tfuough minor characters, family secrets) haunted houses and ghostly remind- into this story of childhood in the lim Crow Southf The reasons become ers of past crimes, Wright's gothicized fiction reveals the terror and violence more apparent when reading these later novels and they go beyond the simple that lie at the heart of the Southern Gothic as a whole . His South is a land- observation that social subordination exacts a symbolic castration of black men, scape drenched in fear, the mutual fear of blacks and whites, and terror, or although this is also true. For Wright, the fear that the Jim Crow legislation more specifically 'the white terror', which is another lvord for lynching and its created produces a complex set of taboos that become perversely intertwined variations. No survey of Southern Gothic could be complete without Wright's with sexual anxiety, shame and a desire to trensgress, leading to situations that work, because no other writer exposes so clearly and so powerfully the racial reveal the violence that gives the South its uniquely terri4ring atmosphere. violence that has shaped the American South. In'The Ethics of Living lim Crow', for example, the price for sexual trans- gression appears in vignette VII, the shortest of all, which tells of a bell-boy in bed with a white pros- UNctt Tou's Cøtrnnrx at the hotel where the narrator worked. Discovered titute, the young man is castrated and run out of town. This is presented to The first and most important work in this regard is Uncle Torn\ Child.ren. }Jad the other bell-boys and hall-boys as both a'lucky' break (presumably because Wright published nothing else after this collection of stories, his legacy as a he is not killed) and a warning, since the hotel would not be responsible for Southern Gothic writer would still have been assured. The five short stories the lives of other'trouble-making niggers'(12). In this, the shortest of the and one autobiographical sketch that constitute this powerful collection paint anecdotes he recounts, Wright's narrator evokes the darkest kind of white an indelible poruait of the South in the first decades of the wentieth century violence against black men in the South: mutilation and murder for any hint as a land so permeated by the threat of lynch-mob úolence that even the white of sexual contact) whether real or imagined, between black men and u'hite GOTHIC: RICFIARD WRIGHT'S SOUTHERN NIGHTÀ'LA'RE 30f 3OO A.S. MONNT,T tIM CROW a man for sleep- \\¡omen. The reverse situation, white men sexually using and abusing black literalized when a black man named Silas, who has shot white \4/omen) has not only been an open secret of Southern society since the earli- est slave times, but is also represented as an ongoing source of danger to black men. The vignette that immediately follows the castration of the bell-boy is an incident in u'hich a white man slaps a black maid on the backside in front of the narrator, who is ordered at gunpoint to say that he does not mind (ì.2).

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