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

Abstract

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 re-evaluated 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)