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

African American Review, Fall, 2001 by Clare Eby

In a nightmare version of Dixon's worst fears, Bigger Thomas experiences a revelation of his power as a direct consequence of passing through the threshold of Mary's bedroom. He comes to feel, after killing Mary, both "power" and "security" as a direct result of his crime. This response bears comparison with that of the stereotypical "beast": "The knowledge that he had killed a white girl they [white people] loved and regarded as their symbol of beauty made him feel the equal of them" (188). Yet for a black man to defy the color line will be read not merely as an individual action but rather, in racially representative terms, as a "symbolic challenge" to white supremacy, and be dealt with accordingly [14].

Beyond the trepidation felt by blacks toward the prospect of committing crimes against whites lies Wright's more fundamental revision of the "beast" stereotype. He depicts the fear blacks have of whites--the inverse of the white fear of blacks that Dixon considers natural and healthy--as sexualized. Early in Book Two, as Bigger recalls carrying Mary to her bedroom, he realizes that "each time he had come in contact with her... [fear and shame] had arisen hot and hard." This passage comes right before the memorable description that "to Bigger and his kind white people...were a sort of great natural force" (129). Thus Wright does depict the interaction of black men and white women as strongly charged erotically, but the erotic component comes from the fear and shame instilled in blacks by whites. Like the erection he has fought off when Jan and Mary were making out in the back seat, Bigger's fear is a response to whites' actions. [11]

Wright's revision of the "beast" plot so as to show how whites fuse sex with fear in the consciousness of black males helps account for the logic of one of the most disturbing passages in Native Son. When Bessie, who comprehends what whites think about black "beasts," warns Bigger that "'... they'll say you raped her [Mary]'" (262), Wright follows with a disturbing redefinition. Confronting for the first time the inevitability of the accusation to follow, Bigger asks himself,

Had he raped her? Yes, he had raped her. Every time he felt as he had felt that night, he raped. But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one's back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape every time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too, was rape. (262-63)

By this account, rape is not an act of aggression but of retaliation, with Bigger its initial victim. The black man in America, far from being a "beast"/rapist, is raped by white society--gang raped, actually. "To keep the pack from killing one" clearly alludes to lynching. Wright's redefinition of rape makes perfect sense given the white stereotype of the "beast," according to which black men are ex post facto rapists of white women. As Wright puts it in "How 'Bigger' Was Born," "the reason for the lynching is usually called 'rape'" (Native Son 512).