Alexander Rogers
Professor Maryemma Graham
English 205
8 October 2010
Revisiting Gender in Richard Wright’s Black Boy
For obvious reasons, Richard Wright has long been the subject of accusations of misogyny. It is indeed hard to deny the misogynist current running throughout his work. Yet articles such as Sondra Guttman’s “What Bigger Killed For: Re-reading
Violence against Women in Native Son” and Cheryl Higashida’s “Aunt Sue’s Children:
Re-viewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright’s Radicalism” suggest that perhaps our previous criticism of Wright’s treatment of gender was too simplistic.
Both articles argue that Wright wrote with a conscious view of gender as it functioned in the Marxist politics to which he subscribed. Reexamining Uncle Tom’s
Children, Higashida especially shows how the evolution of his thinking transcended the proletarian masculinity typically associated with Leftist writers of her era.
Even in view of this, however, it has been difficult for me to find evidence of such nuanced gender politics in my re-reading of Black Boy. Here, too, gender is politicized, but in such a way that women are generally the political antagonists. In particular, African American women appear to be complicit with the racial and social order.
Consider, for example, an incident cited by Higashida, [locate this scene]where Wright and the Jewish director DeSheim want the Federal Negro
Theater to stage Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun, a social realist drama,. The company’s objection to the play as “indecent”, its desire to return to what Wright sneeringly dismisses as racially stereotyped vaudeville, is most vividly displayed as follows:
That day a huge, fat, black woman, a blues singer, found an excuse to pass me as often as possible and she hissed under her breath in a menacing singsong:
“Lawd, Ah sho hates a white man’s nigger.”
(Wright 366)
Strikingly apparent in this passage is its uncharacteristic portrayal of Southern black dialect. Especially significant is its use of “Ah” for “I”, a substitution characteristic of Zora Neale Hurston’s dialogue, and one which Wright had previously derided.
Wright’s feud with Hurston is quite well-documented, along with Wright’s famous lambasting of Their Eyes Were Watching God as a “minstrel-show turn that makes the white folks laugh.”[citation needed] For him, Hurston represented a kind of romanticized folksiness that stood in opposition to social progress. So in choosing to evoke Hurston here, Wright is casting this “huge, fat, black woman” as the embodiment of a folk culture that he sees as black people perpetuating their own social oppression.

The fact that he makes this symbol a woman might not seem important on its own, but it takes on meaning through repetition. In Wright’s work, it is almost always women who represent racial submissiveness. Even in simple episodes like the one with Bess [locate the scene], we are given this same gender dichotomy: masculine ambition for positive change is opposed by feminine complacency.
Like folk culture, or rather, as a part of folk culture, religion is also a gendered antagonist for Wright. It finds its most prominent place in Black Boy through his grandmother’s Seventh Day Adventist faith. In “‘Using My
Grandmother’s Life as a Model’: Richard Wright and the Gendered Politics of
Religious Representation,” Whitted argues that Wright takes his grandmother’s faith as representative of African American religion in general. Indeed, his grandmother is his main prototype for the Southern black woman. There is significant revisionism involved when Wright takes the Seventh Day Adventists as representative; it is a particularly fundamentalist religion and a particularly socially conservative one.
More than that, it is focused only on salvation and on the messiah’s return.
A man who worships in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church lives, psychologically, in a burning and continuous moment that never ends: The present is ever-lasting; the past is telescoped into now; there is no future and at any moment Christ may come again and then the anxious tension of time will be no more.
(Wright, quoted in Whitted)
It is, therefore, as far away as a religion can get from Wright’s ideal of social progress. Its focus on the afterlife is a way of living with and accepting an oppressive social order. Thus, if his grandmother represents the Southern black woman, then that woman will always be a political antagonist to Wright.
Somehow, after writing this, I am not substantially less puzzled about how to view Wright’s treatment of gender. Without question, throughout Black Boy, he uses
African American women to symbolize social complacency. Yet it is unclear whether this is necessarily the result of a misogynist outlook. Regarding Native Son, Guttman argues that Wright’s portrayal of women is used to show the interaction of patriarchal structures with class and race dynamics. This may be giving Wright a bit too much leeway, but it is an interesting thought. Throughout Black Boy, his negative portayals of women are almost always symbolic of broader sociopolitical issues.
With his grandmother, it is African American folk religion as a tool of supression.
With Bess, it is the danger of settling into normative Southern life. With the Chicago housewives, it is financial desparation.
Perhaps I am looking for nuance where there is none. Perhaps, unlike what
Higashida argues, Wright does not transcend the proletarian masculinity typical of
Marxist writers, or at least not fully. It was typical of Marxist writers to associate masculinity with the working class, and femininity with the bourgeoisie. Wright’s tendency to associate social compliance to women in contrast to his own social rebellion could be nothing more than an expression of those same associations. That is, Wright’s misogyny could be exactly the misogyny we would expect of him as a writer informed by Marxism.

This is a fascinating read, Alex. First, do remember that Higashida’s essay derives from the short story, “Bright and Morning Star,” the one story that DOES present a very different kind of female Wright character.
My major criticism of the paper is that your main beginning point here, that “black women are complicit with the social and racial order” does not maintain its focus well or is not as clearly articulated throughout the essay. Your second, attendant point, “religion as a gendered protagonist” is well takenm and I actually think is stronger than your first.
My suggestion for revisions include my edits above as well. You write extremely well, so mostly this is follow through on ideas, I would say.
Sorry it took so long to get to this !
Dr. G
Works Cited
Guttman, Sondra. “What Bigger Killed For: Re-reading Violence against Women in
Native Son”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43 Summer 2001: 169-193.
Web. 7 Oct. 2010.
Higashida, Cheryl. “Aunt Sue’s Children: Re-viewing the Gender(ed) Politics of
Richard Wright’s Radicalism”. American Literature 75.2 June 2003: 395-425. Web. 6
Oct. 2010.
Whitted, Qiana J. “‘Using My Grandmother’s Life as a Model’: Richard Wright and the
Gendered Politics of Religious Representation”. The Southern Literary Journal 36
Spring 2004: 13-30. Web. 7 Oct. 2010.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger). New York: Harper Collins, 2006.
Print.