Eleanor Humphrey
“Rethinking Wright’s Women: Discovering the Agency of Richard Wright’s Female Characters”
Mentor: Nathan Grant
Richard Wright’s work continues to spark creative conversation in the academic world.
Rightly so, as his raw, violent, and unapologetic depictions of Black life in America were a major turning point in African-American literature. One topic within the wide discussion of
Wright that draws my attention is the conversation around Wright’s treatment of female characters. Wrght is typically identified as a misogynist in these discussions. There is little debate that Wright’s narratives put women in stereotypically degrading roles or that his protagonists are abusive with negative attitudes toward women. Although the concluded reasons for this negative treatment vary between scholars, none of the conclusions give credit to the agency of these female characters. The arguments ignore how the women act and respond, and solely focus on how they are repsented and acted upon instead. With these conclusions, Wright’s female characters are merely representations or reflections of the author’s and/or the protagonist’s experience; they are two-dimensional minor characters filling the space.
In my paper, I'd like to attempt a character analysis that moves away from treating these women as subjects who are only acted upon, and moves toward treating them as subjects who also act. I will use Alex Woloch’s The One Vs. The Many as my theoretical frame and analytical lens. Woloch’s work argues that rather than having major and minor characters, the novel has character space and each character has his/her allotted amount. Specifically, I want to look at the women of The Outsider and Native Son in this context in order to show that these characters are not merely functioning as representations of Wright’s experience. Rather, they are female characters with agency and identity of their own that are reacting to volatile protagonists and surviving in a racist/sexist culture.
With my argument, I do not wish to entirely negate past arguments, but to enrich them with a reading of the women that argues for complex characters rather than stereotypes. Like some of the past arguments, I will also use Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, to inform my conclusions about his treatment of female characters, as Wright’s own turbulent history with women should not be discounted in a reading of his female characters. Ultimately, I’d like to use
Woloch’s character space theory to redeem Wright’s women from object roles by demonstrating that they are acting subjects, and to show how the two-dimensional way protagonists view them is not necessarily indicative of the identities Wright wrote for them.
Preliminary Bibliography
Carby, Hazel V. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context.” Critical Inquiry 18.4
(1992): 738-755. JSTOR. Web. 22 Dec. 2013.

Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Morrow, 1967. Print.
DeCosta-Willis, Miriam. "Avenging Angels and Mute Mothers: Black Southern Women in
Wright's Fictional World." Callaloo 28 (1986): 540-51. JSTOR. Web. 21 Dec. 2013.
Gates, Henry Louis, and Anthony Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and
Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Print.
Gayle, Addison, ed. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. Print.
Hayes, Floyd W., III. "Womanizing Richard Wright: Constructing the Black Feminine in The
Outsider." Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men 1.1 (2013): 47-69. Project MUSE. Web.
20 Dec. 2013.
Jackson, Lawrence Patrick. The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American
Writers and Critics, 1934-1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2011. Print.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. The Death-bound-subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology of Death.
Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.
Keady, Sylvia H. "Richard Wright's Women Characters and Inequality." Black American
Literature Forum 10.4 (1976): 124-28. JSTOR. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.
Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and times. New York: Henry Holt and, 2001. Print.
Skerrett, Joseph T., Jr. "Richard Wright, Writing and Identity." Callaloo 7 (1979): 84-94.
JSTOR. Web. 21 Dec. 2013.
Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at
His Work. New York, NY: Warner, 1988. Print.
Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the
Novel. Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 2003. EBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 22
Dec. 2013.
Wright, Richard. How Bigger Was Born. Early Works. New York, NY: Library of America,
1991. Print.
Wright, Richard. Richard Wright Reader. Ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. Print.