"Things I Don't Want to Find out about": The Primal Scene in The Confessions of Nat Turner

Abstract

Facing death by hanging, haunted by guilt because he has lost touch with avenging God whose word he has followed, William Styron's Nat Turner devotes his last days to a careful examination of people and events that have driven his life. Styron calls section of novel that commences Nat's analysis Old Times Past: Voices, Dreams, Recollections. Nat's determination to focus on these elements of his life--the voices that he has heard and that have shaped his mental world, his dreams, and his memory--indicates his desire to find a new sense of himself by reconstructing narrative of his life. His religion having failed him, Nat searches for another means to understand how he has become man he is and how he has committed his life to most important slave revolt in American history. The episodic structure of Old Times Past: Voices, Dreams, Recollections resembles structure of an analysand's free association through his store of experiences. Such an examination constitutes a self-analysis and more, for Styron puts Nat at mercy not only of his own conscience but of readers who, he must hope, can accept confession of his pain and guilt. Already judged legally guilty in a Virginia courtroom, Nat seeks self-justification and moral expiation from his readers by providing complex network of events that motivated his actions, beginning with events from his childhood. Among motifs that dominate Nat's recollection are his sense of having been a chosen one, his curiosity about his father's departure (and his desire to replace lost father), and, perhaps most of all, his reaction to seeing an Irish overseer rape his mother. Though no single act fully determines one's personality, one as shocking as his mother's rape makes such an impact on Nat that he relives experience at several points in his life. Deprived of a father and unable to forget his mother's violation as he watched passively, Nat suffers a fractured masculine identity. To compensate, he makes women object of his rage, while denying himself fulfillment of his sexual desires. Before he can understand himself and his actions, Nat must recognize importance of his ambivalent feelings, some of which are directed at absent father and his white surrogate fathers, others of which are directed at violated mother and sexual attraction and threat she represents. In his representation of Nat's life and his relatively comfortable status as a house slave, Styron has given his hero considerable grounds for confusion and ambivalence. Nat's ambivalence is first evident in his feelings about his father, a runaway. How is Nat to accept his mother's story of his father's flight? Nat seems proud, on one hand, of his father's refusal to take beatings his master has given him. On other hand, Nat must wonder whether fate or a failure of will has caused his father not to fulfill promise he made to Nat's mother to come back and buy their freedom. Even if he fully understands dangers inherent in such a return, young Nat might understandably feel rejected by his father. His real father gone, Nat is left especially free to fantasize about himself and his origins. He creates a family romance, a fantasy in which, according to Freud, the child's imagination becomes engaged in task of getting free from parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who, as a rule, are of higher social standing (Family 238-39).(1) I have shown elsewhere that Styron used romance in Sophie's Choice (Ross), but in case of a black slave romance has potential to be especially complex. For a slave child like Nat this fantasy could easily have implications of racial mixing: according to Frederick Douglass, no black child could be sure of his paternity, and many fantasized having a white father.(2) Others encourage Nat's fantasy, especially his master, Samuel Turner, who gives him special attention, and his mother, who, as Nat recalls, teases me for way I parrot white folks' talk--teases me with pride (114). …