“The Blood Will Flow Back to You”: The Reactionary Proletarian Fiction of Marita Bonner

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 32, no. 1, 2002 “The Blood Will Flow Back to You:” The Reactionary Proletarian Fiction of Marita Bonner Judith A. Musser The first fifty years of twentieth century American literature is marked by various literary movements such as the European adaptation of modernism, the rise of the Proletarian novel influenced by Marxist ideology, literature of the “lost generation ,” the Harlem Renaissance, and the rise of feminist writing. The connection between proletarian literature and Harlem Renaissance is useful, for many of the leading leftist and Marxist intellectuals sought to promote or encourage the development of black literature. This is a period marked and made important historically by critical attention to the fiction of black male writers such as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Claude McKay who depict the struggles of black male subjects to survive hostile ghettos, joblessness and underemployment , and racial hostility and segregation in the migrant community originally from southern cities. More recent critical attention has focused on African American women writers who contributed to at least three of these movements – most notably the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, proletarian literature, and black feminist ideology. Feminist scholar Paula Rabinowitz has reevaluated the 1930s as a decade of women’s revolutionary fiction. According to Rabinowitz, women’s revolutionary fiction of the 1930s narrates class as a fundamentally gendered construct and gender as a fundamentally classed one and so enables the beginnings of a theory of gendered class subjectivity. (8) Writers such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Anne Petry, Dorothy West, and in particular, Marita Bonner1 challenged the paradigms of African American male proletariat writers by connecting class and race consciousness with gender consciousness . Using any of the various time periods allotted to the Renaissance,2 Marita Bonner ’s life (1899–1971) framed this period of unprecedented African American Canadian Review of American Studies 32 (2002) 54 writing. Her placement within the context of the Harlem Renaissance is clear, for she was the most prolific woman short story writer in two of the most prominent journals of the Harlem Renaissance (The Crisis and Opportunity). Her fiction not only appears during the time period of the Harlem Renaissance, but the thematic content of her works places her within the era of social realism in African American writing between the 1930s and 1950s. Bonner did not begin her career as a proletariat writer. Her first creative publications were three plays: The Pot Maker: A Play to Be Read (published in Opportunity 5: February 1927), The Purple Flower (published in The Crisis 35: January 1928), and Exit, an Illusion: a One-Act Play (published in The Crisis 36: October 1929). Although this essay will not analyze Bonner’s drama, it may be helpful to summarize critical assessments of these plays since they help us to understand Bonner’s transition from modernism to social realism and womanist prose in her short fiction. The most noteworthy of the three plays, according to critics, is The Purple Flower.3 The play stands out for many reasons. First, Bonner does not merely lament a history of the oppression of African American people. Instead, the play attempts to predict a future in which conflict between the races is inevitable . This conflict will take the form of a revolution, a bloody revolution, and she does not question whether it will happen, but when – “Is it time?“ she asks at the end of the play. Second, her futuristic vision in this play places the oppression of African Americans within the framework of global racial oppression. She understood very clearly that African American people in America were only one group that suffered as a result of racial oppression. She explicitly notes the necessity for African Americans to join with other oppressed peoples in their struggle for freedom. She was in a small minority of playwrights who expanded their vision to incorporate diversity and to see the African American predicament in a global context, cutting across lines of age, class, and race. W.E.B. Du Bois would later address this issue of world racial politics in an essay entitled “The White World“ and in the essay “The Negro Mind...