The Politics of Self-Identity in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods

Abstract

I do not want [black men] to imbibe the dangerous draught which has intoxicated their white brothers of this Western world and sent them raving madmen, struggling for life at the expense of their fellows in the stockmarkets and wheat-pits of our great cities. --Paul Laurence Dunbar Marion B. Ross observes that in Paul Laurence Dunbar's final and most acclaimed novel, The Sport of the Gods (1902), when the Hamilton family moves from the rural South to the urban space of New York City, the freer atmosphere of the city only increases the seductiveness of moral/sexual license without effecting any concomitant political, economic, or social reform (Ross 145). Ross suggests that the Hamiltons are heavily influenced by the sexual enticement of the city and therefore unable to participate in the social task of racial uplift. To further complicate the situation, Ross engages Kevin Gaines's disturbing picture of blacks already in the North, whose movement [from the South] to the North had worsened the black elite's already considerable sense of dislocation. Themselves ill-equipped to assist the migrants, they were largely incapable of viewing the migration positively.... As a result, continues Gaines, elite blacks viewed southerners like the Hamiltons as disorderly, unfit for citizenship, immoral, and needing to be compelled to (qtd in Ross 146). By combining Ross's premise that the Hamiltons are destined both to self-destruct and also to undermine important race work with Gaines's idea that northern blacks are equally unable to accept their physical displacement and prejudiced against the newcomers, it can be deduced that for Dunbar racial uplift is almost impossible, whether southerners stay in the North or simply pass through that region. Equally intriguing is Ross's eventual recognition that writers like Ida B. Wells, William Pickens, and W.E.B. Du Bois saw the northern city as a stage where racial resistance could be most effectively enacted by exceptional leaders and the common people whom they led (146). One implication of Ross's statement regarding Dunbar's characters' eventual moral and sexual degeneracy following their move to the city is that Dunbar fails to see the opportunities, both literary and real-world, that are offered to plantation blacks. Ross views Wells, Pickens, and Du Bois, however, as socially-centered activists in contrast to Dunbar and his novel, which emerge as anomalous failures in terms of the progressive political work that uplift writers attempted during post-Reconstruction. In short, Ross's argument excludes The Sport of the Gods and by possible extension Dunbar's entire body of work from the social uplift canon. (1) Doubtless Dunbar's characters and their misadventures, both down home on the farm and up in the city, do parade a kind of degeneracy that legitimate race writers are working against. But should we dismiss this portrayal as a failure, a triumph, or something in-between? I argue that although political and social elevation are neither immediate nor overt, viewed through the wide-angle lens of psychoanalytical and materialist criticism, The Sport of the Gods is indeed a powerful and subversive uplift novel, working on a subtle, subcutaneous level to realize a black subject in constant negotiation with the ideologies of class in order to critique and transcend the severe restrictions of American democracy. Although the liberation is not immediate, Dunbar's characters are representative of a kind of self-identification that, in fits and starts, grows into an interrogation of southern white ideas of class elevation. It is this progress, self-defined, that offers the possibility of socio-political revolution both in the North and the South. Certain criticism fuels the idea that the North is the antithesis of social uplift for Dunbar. In Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, historian C. Vann Woodward finds that although Progressive era reforms generally held opportunities for social change in the South, the era did not usher in sweeping changes for African Americans in the North. …