The Function of Violence in Richard Wright's Native Son

Abstract

Since appearance of Native Son in 1940, critics have raised questions about its heavy preoccupation with violence. In an early review of book, Malcolm Cowley, then a strong defender of Wright, nevertheless worried that the author's deep sense of inequities heaped upon his race would result in his revenging himself by a whole series of symbolic murders in his fiction (67). David Daiches complained in a subsequent review that novel's thesis was seriously undercut because killing of Mary Dalton was so violent and unusual, a melodramatic action which was too bizarre to verify book's claims about general condition of blacks in America (95). Twenty-one years later, James Baldwin put case most pointedly in Nobody Knows My Name, arguing that one of severest criticisms that can be leveled against Native Son is Wright's and interest in violence in book: violence is gratuitous and compulsive because root of violence is never examined. The root is rage. It is rage, almost literally howl, of a man who is being castrated