Mapping the Terrain of Whiteness: Richard Wright's Savage Holiday

Abstract

Richard Wright's Holiday, which focuses on how the white male protagonist Erskine Fowler deals with his guilt, has been ignored by critics until recently. Yoshinobu Hakutani maintains the reason why Holiday has not received popularity among the critics is Wright's exclusive treatment of white characters and his concern with nonracial matters (15). J.F. Gounard and Beverley Roberts Gounard claim that Savage Holiday is Richard Wright's only nonracial (344), and they read the novel from Freudian perspective in relationship to the Oedipal conflict between Fowler and his mother. John Vassilowitch also focuses on the paradoxical connection between male sexual desire ... and female degradation ... [that] has its counterpart in Erskine's Oedipal fantasies about (207). John M. Reilly analyzes the novel as thriller and feels that it omits racial conflict because its narrative scope is ... restricted to the singular pattern of one man's Oedipal complex (218). What all these critics have in common is psychoanalytic exploration of Fowler's Oedipal conflict with his mother which draws him to the point of murdering Mabel. Michel Fabre is the only critic who gives an extensive study of the novel and of Fowler's profile as a psychopathic murderer (376). The plot of the novel is simple. The 43-year-old Erskine Fowler is forced into early retirement from his job as insurance agent after 30 years of long service. As he picks up his Sunday paper, he is locked out of his apartment, fully naked, when the door slams shut. In panic to avoid being seen by anyone, he decides to climb through his bathroom window just above the balcony on which his neighbor Mabel Blake's son Tony is playing. Seeing Fowler nude, Tony is shocked and falls from the balcony ten floors down to his death. Believing that Mabel may be aware he is indirectly responsible for Tony's death, Fowler becomes involved with Mabel, although she is just whore in his eyes. Failing to deal with his own fear and guilt, he tries to make Mabel, widow, feel guilty for being mother, for Tony got terribly scared whenever he saw his mother have sex with men, associating the sexual relationship with in his mind. The naked body of Fowler apparently represented the war of which he has been deadly afraid. In order to buy Mabel's silence, Fowler makes proposal to her, but Mabel is too clever for that. When she eventually discovers what Fowler had been up to, he kills her and turns himself in to the police. Before he confesses his murder to the police, he remembers his childhood memory of beating the doll's head with brick because it is bad woman--a replica of his mother, who was prostitute. We realize that Fowler's revengeful act of crushing the doll and drawing the doll with his colored pencils to represent his mother's promiscuity is the reason why Mabel replaces his mother in his mind. All along he has failed to resolve the Oedipal conflict with his mother, who has deprived him of maternal affection, twisting his drive to love at an early age. He resolves the Oedipal conflict in killing in Mabel the mother that he has repudiated. In an interview with Raymond Barthes on Holiday, Wright himself states: `Having left America and having been living for some time in France, have become concerned about the historical roots and the emotional problems of western whites which make them aggressive toward colored peoples.... was looking for explanations of the psychological reactions of whites.... In this novel, have attempted to deal with what consider as the most important problem white people have to face: their moral dilemma' (167). Later, in an interview with Georges Charbonnier, Wright delves into the depth of the problem: I picked white American businessman to attempt demonstration about universal problem ... the problem of freedom (236). Given the overview of the limited body of critical works on the novel, we need to remember Wright's intention in writing it. …