A number of African American novels set in urban spaces focus on the motif of claustrophobia to convey the effects of racism. Richard Wright’s Native Son, for instance, opens with a rat trapped an killed in the apartment of a black family. The trapped rat serves as an allegory for the novel’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, who is as trapped in the South Side of Chicago as the rat is in his apartment. Bigger frequently laments the feeling of claustrophobia, of having his mobility–both physical and socio-economic–severely restricted by white people. Bigger can only live in certain slums and occupy certain jobs. He is trapped in the ghetto and it enrages him. Similarly, Lutie Johnson, the protagonist of Anne Petry’s somewhat less deterministic novel, The Street, also feels a sense of claustrophobia. She desperately wants to get an apartment on a better street, but she realizes that without substantially more money than she, a single mother, can earn, she will never be able to move to a cleaner, brighter neighborhood. Like Bigger, she also feels trapped, walled-in by inaccessible white people. Interestingly, Helga Crane, the biracial protagonist of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand expresses a sense of claustrophobia toward her fellow African Americans. Helga feels ambivalent toward blackness, both attracted to and repelled by it. Helga feels a sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped as a member of a race with which she feels no kinship.
Tag: Richard Wright
Re-Writing Dostoyevsky
Several African American writers were deeply influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, for instance, draws on Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Like the Underground Man, the Invisible Man has retreated from society to his underground refuge. Both figures respond to statements or objections by their imagined interlocutors. While Dostoyevsky’s protagonist is bitter, resentful, and self-sabotaging, Ellison’s reveals a deeper love for humanity, even if he has his share of bitterness at his racist society.
Richard Wright’s Native Son re-writes Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov kills the old pawn broker to test if he is a super-man, to see if he can take the life of a “worthless” woman and feel no compunction. He is obsessed with this idea that great men, like Napoleon, could kill with impunity because it would enable them to do good later. Raskolnikov becomes consumed with guilt, despite his desire to suppress it. In Native Son, a young black man, Bigger, kills the white daughter of his employer, Mary, by accident. Yet, after he has killed her, he embraces his identity as a murderer. In the racist and segregated landscape of Chicago, murder is the only act which gives Bigger’s life any meaning; violence is the only way for him to exercise agency. Although he kills Mary by accident, he subsequently wishes that he had planned it on purpose. He covers up his crime by burning her body with the same meticulousness as Raskolnikov takes. Like Raskolnikov, Bigger is afflicted by guilt which he often suppresses. While Raskolnikov never feels indifferent to the murder of the old pawnbroker, as he hoped he would, even though he can intellectually justify the act to himself, Bigger does feel empowered by his murder of Mary. Moreover, both characters commit a second murder that follows directly from the first. Raskolnikov’s planned murder of the pawn broker leads him to kill her sister when she witnesses him committing the crime. Similarly, Bigger kills he lover Bessie because he fears that she will give him away. Bigger feels that his crime is justified because of the racist actions of white people against him. Wright, thus, re-writes the plot of Dostoevysky’s novel in an American racial context.
