Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2001 by James Smethurst

Richard Wright's Native Son is still usually taken as one of the foremost examples of late American naturalism, and much is made of the impact of modem sociology, particularly what became known as the Chicago School of Sociology, on the conception and shape of the novel. [1] Yet numerous scholars, at least in passing, have remarked on the influence of the gothic tradition on Wright's novel, arguing to one degree or another whether his usage of the gothic undermines or supports the sociological "realism" of the work. [2] However, the crucial importance of gothic literature and what might be thought of as the gothic sensibility to the representation of political consciousness and political development (and the relation of the gothic to contemporary mass culture) in Native Son has not received much sustained scholarly attention. The primary question here is not whether Native Son is a gothic novel, but how the gothic functions within the novel and how it relates to the African American folk culture of the South as well as the mass culture associated with the urban North. In fact, Native Son is not a gothic novel, but an anti-gothic in which the gothic figures an American consciousness, particularly the consciousness of black Americans, which is the product of the particular social relations of American capitalism and hence something to be transcended. Wright's use of the gothic is also implicitly a critique of the African American writers who preceded him, and their handling of the actual and symbolic journeys from and to the African American folk and constructions of the folk inheritance. Wright's use of the gothic is not in conflict with his ideological stance as a black male Communist writer of the mid-twentieth century, but in fact follows from this stance.

As Teresa Goddu points out (133-40), it is not hard to see why black writers (and such white writers as Herman Melville and Theodore Weld) in the nineteenth century, particularly during the antebellum era, would find such works attractive literary models for the representation of slavery and American race relations. Generally speaking, classic European gothics, such as Walpole's Castle of Otranto or Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho--not to mention such later American gothic-influenced texts as Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables and the short fiction of Poe--contain a past event involving an unrightful and violent usurpation which constrains the actions of succeeding generations. This familial original sin is often passed down through the bloodlines of both the sinners and the sinned against. There is a strange doubling in which the two families strangely come to resemble each other. One also sees in the classic gothic novel patriarchal tyranny, transgressive sexuality which generally accompanies relat ions of power, and an instability of markers of social identity, such as family, class, race, gender, and nationality.

Slavery also involved a moment of usurpation in which the birthright of the enslaved individual was stolen. As in the gothic, the results of this usurpation are transmitted through the bloodlines of the enslaved. One finds in the novels and fugitive slave narratives by such nineteenth-century black writers as William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, and Harriet Jacobs a patriarchal tyranny and a concomitant transgressive sexuality in which the slave master coerces or attempts to coerce female slaves into unwanted sexual relations. One also often sees a flight from tyranny on the part of the female slaves which resembles that of the typical gothic heroine from the typical gothic villain. There is a foregrounding of the instability of the normative markers of social identity such as those of nationality, family, class, citizenship, and so on, insofar as such markers exist, at the sufferance of the slave master. Finally, there is within many of these texts a strange doubling of the slave and the enslaver. Perhaps the most ubiquitous figure of nineteenth-century black literature is that of the "mulatto," a person of equal African and European ancestry. This "mulatto" is almost always the offspring of the female slave and the slave master and, though legally a slave, stands as a sort of the double of the slave owner's white offspring. In fact, this figure, often female, is typically paired explicitly with the slave owner's wife and/or the slave owner's white daughter.

The point here is not to claim that the gothic is the most important single influence on African American literature or to attempt to show every shared concern and trope, but simply to suggest that the gothic, along with other genres such as the spiritual autobiography, the captivity narrative, and the sentimental novel, was extremely important in the development of a rhetoric that allowed black authors who preceded Wright to reach an essentially white audience while figuring their particular social and aesthetic concerns. This use of a gothic rhetoric and a gothic sensibility obviously did not end with slavery. For example, much of the terminology of W. E. B. Du Bois could be said to be gothic, particularly his use of the term veil as that which hides the black world from the white world and vice versa--or perhaps more accurately that by which the white ruling class of America conceals the black subject as human, much like a concealed skeleton in a classic gothic novel. Similarly, Du Bois's notion of "doubl e-consciousness," which was largely drawn from the work of William James, proposes a version of Spencer Brydon's split consciousness in Henry James's gothic-influenced short story "The Jolly Corner" as a more or less permanent condition for African Americans. Some prominent uses of the gothic in African American fiction of the early twentieth century would include Jean Toomer's Cane (particularly in the concluding "Kabnis" section which opens with the' wind whispering ominously to Ralph Kabnis) and, to a lesser extent, Nella Larsen's Quicksand (especially in the section set in Chicago when Helga Crane confronts her "white" family).