What Bigger Killed For: Re-reading Violence against Women in Native Son

Wright's own indignation and the sickness of the age combined to make him dependent on violence and shock, to astonish the reader by torrential scenes of cruelty, hunger, rape, murder and flight, and then enlighten him by crude Stalinist homilies.

--Alfred Kazin

Bigger is Uncle Tom's descendent, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses. And indeed, within this web of lust and fury, black and white can only thrust and counter-thrust, long for each other's slow, exquisite death; death by torture, acid, knives and burning; the thrust, the counter-thrust, the longing making the heavier that cloud which blinds and suffocates them both, so that they go down into the pit together.

--James Baldwin

In interpreting Native Son, critics have most often responded negatively both to those sections of the book that articulate Richard Wright's commitment to Communism ¹ and to the violent deaths of Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears. The former are said to be clumsily written and unevenly assimilated into the dramatic structure of the story. The latter are read as excessively brutal--undeniable evidence of the misogyny underlying Wright's work. I suggest here the extent to which these two subjects are inextricable and, as well, the significance of the relationship the novel establishes between violence against women and a class analysis. Native Son represents Wright's attempt to criticize, rather than to repeat, what Kazin characterized as "crude Stalinist homilies." Wright succeeds in this, I contend, by exposing how the fight for the workers' revolution is threatened by the force tellingly portrayed by James Baldwin in the above quote as the "thrust and counter-thrust" of American racism.

Native Son is a proletarian novel--a novel that aims to convince its readers of the inevitability of a Marxist revolution. ² Wright dramatizes the parasitic nature of the class system by telling the story of the wealthy Daltons' participation in the systematic exploitation and destruction of Bigger Thomas and his family. Wright's extensive work in the Communist Party as both a writer and an organizer led him to position his experiences of racial oppression within the context of international capitalist exploitation. In the essay "How Bigger was Born" Wright explains how his contact with the radical movement allowed him to "feel far-flung kinships, and [to] sense . . . the possibilities of alliances between the American Negro and other people possessing a kindred consciousness." ³ Because Wright believed that the coming revolution would be an uprising of black and white working-class Americans, he intended Native Son to address those issues that divided the races.

In "How Bigger Was Born" Wright explains how he chose the narrative that would make clear the necessity for interracial class revolution:

The far-flung items of [Bigger's] life had to be couched in imaginative terms, terms known and acceptable to a common body of readers, terms which would, in the course of the story, manipulate the deepest held notions and convictions of their lives. That came easy. The moment I began to write, the plot fell out, so to speak. . . . Any Negro who has lived in the North or the South knows that times without number he has heard of some Negro boy being picked up on the streets and carted off to jail and charged with "rape." This thing happens so often that to my mind it had become a representative symbol of the Negro's uncertain position in America. (531-32)

For Wright, the most appropriate way to make clear the plight of blacks in capitalist America came via the narrative Angela Davis calls "the myth of the black rapist." ⁴ Native...