Slouching toward Beastliness: Richard Wright's Anatomy of Thomas Dixon - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2001 by Clare Eby

Wright, growing up in the Jim Crow South two generations after Dixon and on the other side of the color line, had a childhood memory that provided an alternative primal scene. The components are the same--race, sex, and violence--though rather than Dixon's fusion into a scene of traumatic heroism, Wright depicts a youthful revelation that others view his essential nature as depraved and criminal. At age fifteen, Wright took a job doing chores for a white family, the Walls, which provided him with money to pay for books and incidentals. One day he entered Mrs. Wall's bedroom without knocking, his arms filled with wood. She was in the process of dressing, and his generally liberal employers reprimanded him. As Michel Fabre describes the significance of the event, Wright "had...inadvertently broken the barrier protecting white women from black men.... The sin of being a potential... ravisher only reinforced the guilt" that the youth had already accumulated concerning sexuality (47). Wright's and Dixon's traumati c primal scenes helped to shape their decisions to write such differently positioned protest novels.

Given the role that The Birth of a Nation played in disseminating Dixon's ideas, it is appropriate that the first sure sign of Bigger Thomas's "beastliness" occurs in a movie house. The passage as originally published in 1940 juxtaposes a newsreel featuring glorified images of rich white women with Trader Horn, a film depicting "naked black men and women whirling in wild dances and...drums beating" in Africa. The juxtaposition illustrates the interlocking assumptions determining the white fantasy of the "beast": the desirability of white women and the essentially "primitive" nature of people of African descent. The scene as it appears in the restored Library of America text makes the anatomy of the "beast" yet clearer, superimposing on the celluloid images of desirable white femininity and uncivilized Africans the sight of Bigger and company engaging in what Jonathan Elmer calls competitive masturbation (Native 36; Elmer 779). Lying at the center of the "beast" stereotype is the assumption of the black male's uncontrollable sexual appetite, believed to crystallize in the lust for white women. Thus the disturbing juxtapositions in the scene as restored illustrate the process of young black males' watching widely disseminated images of blackness and whiteness while confirming stereotypes about black masculinity.

While commentators have noted Bigger's resemblance to the black "beast," little attention has been paid to the location of the alleged rape: the Daltons' home. As becomes clear in Dixon's novels, multiple meanings of the home structure and indeed rationalize the white fantasy of black "beasts." The Clansman addresses the problem of a nation fragmented, as Dixon sees it, by Reconstruction policies, and he figures the political issues as domestic problems. [8] Dixon's concern with the political implications of domestic arrangements becomes especially clear in his depiction of the radical Republican Congressional leader Austin Stoneman (Dixon's fictionalized version of Thaddeus Stevens), whose real deformity is not the clubfoot the narrator obsessively mentions, but rather his position at the head of a miscegenous household. Or, more precisely, Stoneman's housekeeper Lydia Brown, described as "a mulatto, a woman of extraordinary animal beauty and the fiery temper of a leopardess," presides over his home (57). What scandalizes Dixon is that Lydia exercises unnatural power over Stoneman, who in turn exercises ungodly power over the nation, and thus "the seat of Empire had moved from the White House to a little dark house on the Capital hill. where dwelt an old clubfooted man, alone, attended by a strange brown woman of sinister animal beauty" (79). The torn nation resembles nothing so much as a miscegenous household, and the "first lady of the land" has become "the strange brown woman," Lydia (91).