From No Man's Land to Mother-Land: Emasculation and Nationalism in Richard Wright's Depression Era Urban Novels

Abstract

Not plunge into the complex jungle of human relationships and analyze them is leave the field the fascists and I won't and can't do that. (Wright, qtd. in Fabre 185) ... anything that is felt give out goodness and beauty, and that calls forth pleasure and satisfaction, in the physical or in the wider sense, can in the unconscious mind take the place of [the infant's perception of the mother's] ever-bountiful breast, and of the whole mother. Thus we speak of our own country as the motherland because in the unconscious mind our country may come stand our mother, and then it can be loved with feelings which borrow their nature from the relation her. (Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation 103) While serving as Director of the Harlem Bureau of the Daily Worker between 1937 and 1938, Richard Wright wrote an article the newspaper praising the launching of New Challenge, a black American literary quarterly that published first-rate black writers such as Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and Langston Hughes. Wright was particularly excited about the quarterly because for the first time in Negro history problems such as nationalism in literature, perspective, the relation of the Negro politics and social movements were formulated and discussed (Negro Writers 7). For those familiar with Wright's A Negro Writing, first published in New Challenge in 1937, it is obvious that he was applauding his own planned contribution the quarterly, as Blueprint deals first and foremost with the problem of nationalism black writers. Moreover, since the Daily Worker article and the New Challenge essay were written in the middle of 1937, it is safe say that Wright, then twenty-eight years old, was beginning formulate just what sort of contribution black American writing he would make during the next few years. The literary works Wright wrote between 1937 and 1941 focus explicitly on issues related nationalism, although scholars have yet explore this fact in depth. Remarkably, Wright's literary treatment of nationalism remains avant-garde since he reveals what many contemporary theorists have yet disclose: a complex insight into the deep psychology of nationalism. Like many contemporary theorists, Wright viewed nationalism as an historical phenomenon that constructs what Benedict Anderson has termed imagined communities people who in fact are anonymous each other but wish social communion. Wright also perceived nationalism as a divisive political ideology that must be supplanted with a Communist ideology he believed necessary the emancipation of the working class. But Wright's most significant contribution is his synthesis of Marxist and psychoanalytic concepts in his effort portray critically the insidious appeal of nationalistic ideas the infantile desires of working-class men. For Wright, the danger posed by nationalism was its unconscious appeal the psyches of male workers. His Depression Era works suggests that, since all male workers are raised in a patriarchal society, their feelings of powerlessness can evoke feelings of emasculation. Wright shows how these feelings of emasculation can be intensified black men, since they are extra-oppressed by racism and are symbolically emasculated as boys in a racist discourse. In somewhat Oedipal terms, the black man is put in the position of having to kill the white man/father in order cancel his boy status. Wright's concern is that black working-class men are apt heed the call of black nationalists, precisely because they promise a reclamation of manhood and the goal of disposing of the white father - namely, the acquisition of the mother-land. In Lawd Today! (completed in 1938 and posthumously published in 1963) and Native Son (1940), Wright represents urban black men in the grip of such a racialized Oedipal struggle. His urban protagonists internalize the racist dynamic of the black boy-white father dialectic and are thus psychologically caught between an impulse act the black boy who submits (in various ways) whites and a desire be the man, which involves behaviors associated with the powerful white father. …