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Wright's next novel after Native Son, The Outsider, focuses on the theme of a black man's protection of his freedom at the expense of both black women and a white woman. Indeed, Arna Bontemps wrote cynically in a review of the book, "A more hag-ridden young man than the fretting and sweating hero of The Outsider is hard to imagine." Certainly, Cross Damon's plan to fake his own death in order to start a new life elsewhere is inspired by his desire to get away from his angry wife, his pregnant mistress, and his moralistic mother. Wright conveys Cross's thoughts in the following passage: "What greater shame was there for a man than to walk the streets cringing with fear of grasping women? Somehow, he would shake loose of this and never in all his life be caught again." Thus, Cross abandons the black women in his life of whom he thinks in stereotypical terms as 'bitches' and drudges. At first, it seems that Wright is suggesting that a white woman is the only antidote to a black woman. Cross's only relationship with a woman (or anyone) to which he attaches any value is with Eva, the wife of a member of the Communist party, whom Cross comes to know after his recruitment by the party. Wright's emphasis on Eva's nonthreatening nature emphasizes her immature "girlishness" as though Wright were actually charmed by her, especially as the antithesis of the black women introduced earlier in the novel. Wright describes Eva, for example, as a "fragile girl" ( 1953, 175) and in other passages has Cross think of her as a "child" (202), referring to her "childishness" (202), and noticing her "schoolgirlish" handwriting (206). To Cross, therefore, Eva is the opposite of the people (mainly black women) who have tried to manipulate him. There are problems, however, that make Eva seem merely a somewhat more highly developed Mary Dalton. Like Wright himself, Eva is disillusioned with the Communists; unlike Mary, who was a party sympathizer (although Wright was still in the party when he wrote Native Son, he had great hostility toward its restrictive policies and lack of true interest in dealing with racism), Eva is not directive but passive, a quality whose attractiveness Wright seems to emphasize. Like Mary, however, she is ironically racist in her affection for blacks. Wright, for example, underscores Cross's annoyance at the importance Eva places on his blackness. At one point, for instance, Eva tells Cross, "I want your people to be my people. . . . I want to feel all the hurt and shame of being black. . . . I wish I was black, I do, I do. Let me share the fear, the humiliation". Cross feels frustrated by this declaration: Could he allow her to love him for his color when being a negro was the least important thing in his life? . . . Yet he wanted that sensitive heart of hers to be his monitor, to check him from sinking into brutality, from succumbing to cruelty, and she wanted to love him because she thought he was an innocent victim! Cross's frustration with Eva's misinterpretation of his identity is reminiscent of his past relationships with the black women from whom he escaped: "His sorrow for Dot [his mistress], his mother, and Gladys [his wife] originated in his knowing that they had hoped for something in him which he did not possess" . Consequently, Cross feels that Eva's patronizing conception of him hinders him from revealing his true nature to her. This barrier is nowhere more evident than in the section of the book that deals with Cross's hatred for and later murder of Eva's husband, Gil. Ironically, Eva and Cross share a hostility toward Gil. When Cross reads Eva's diary without her knowledge, he reads about her unhappy marriage and her feeling that "I could kill Gil". Thus, after reading Eva's diary, Cross feels "a numbing sense of recognition go through him. Impulsively he wanted to run to her and talk to her, to tell her she was not alone". Despite this secret aspect of their emotional closeness, Cross's relationship with Eva is marred by his desire to have control over her. After he murders Gil, for example, and Eva tells Cross that she feels isolated and asks him to "have pity on me and let me stay near you," Cross "smiled, feeling he was listening to her words as perhaps God listens to prayers. . . . A wave of hot pride flooded him. She was laying her life at his feet. With a gesture of his hand he could own her" . This theme of power continues when Cross is delirious and tells Eva about his crime. Under the guise of wanting to protect Eva from the disillusionment she would feel if she knew his true nature (she does not believe him at this point), he thinks of murdering her: "Show me a way not to hurt her, not to kill this sweet girl" . Nevertheless, he later thinks that death is his only way of sparing her feelings: "Would it not be better for her to die now and be spared the pain and shock which he knew he had yet to bring to her? . . . [Wasn't] death better than prolonged suffering? Didn't he owe it to her to kill her and thereby guard her from the monstrousness of himself?" On this theme, Wright makes it evident that Cross is merely another one of the megalomaniacs who pollute the modern world, which is perhaps the book's main theme. Certainly, Cross's kindheartedness--asserting that his thoughts of killing Eva are motivated by his love for her--is specious. Clearly, Wright underlines the fact that Cross contemplates killing Eva primarily to keep her from terminating their affair because he fears what she would do if she believed his confession. He strove in vain to banish from his consciousness the realization that he was the quintessence of all that Eva most deeply loathed and would flee to avoid. Eva was his kind of woman but he was not her kind of man nor would he ever be. . . . He ached with anxiety as he watched the flame of love and trust in her eyes, for . . . when she finally gained a knowledge of what he was, it would be snuffed out. Ultimately, although Cross decides not to murder Eva, he does, in effect, kill her. Eva commits suicide in reaction to Cross's crime and deception. As Houston, the district attorney, tells Cross, "She leapt from that window to escape the kind of world you showed her! You drove her out of life!" (428). Ultimately, it seems that Eva is the victim of Cross's desire for power, which was the catalyst for his murder of her husband (and others). The Outsider, in comparison to Native Son, does not affirm the protagonist's killing of a white woman or, more to the point, what this killing represents. Cross, in contrast to Bigger, is responsible for the death of a white woman not for reasons that symbolize white America's culpability for generating the fear and hatred of racism, but for reasons that are merely personal--not sociological. While Cross does think briefly of the death of Eva as being possibly liberating for him, his idea of liberation is of a piece with the tyranny that Wright so abhorred (as represented in his denunciation of communism and fascism in the novel). Thus, in contrast to Bigger's relationship with Mary in Native Son, The Outsider seems to represent that aspect of male-female relationships that Michel Fabre notes as a recurring theme in some of Wright's works: "The male desire for superiority as well as the despair at still being imprisoned in a solitude which even sexual relations cannot destroy." In contrast to The Outsider, Wright's next novel, Savage Holiday, builds up to an actual murder of a white woman. This novel, almost completely neglected by critics of Richard Wright, was first dismissed as a lurid potboiler having nothing to do with race because the characters are white (an amazing grounds for dismissal, as if whites were raceless). It finally received marginal attention as Wright's excursion into the psychological (especially Freudian) novel. This book, nevertheless, is a gold mine for Wright's critique of whites and for his attack on the idealization of white women in much of American culture. In fact, the novel is intriguing if one reads it in light of Cash's analysis, in The Mind of the South, that white men, in a pseudochivalric gesture, elevated white women to a realm of alleged purity beyond sexuality in their creation of the myth of the purity of white womanhood which was, in fact, an ideology created to maintain white supremacy and a psychological method of divesting white women of sexuality as a defense mechanism for the widely practiced rape and sexual abuse by white men of black women during slavery. With this defense mechanism, white men could convince themselves that their abuse and adultery was a favor to their wives, who were above the "beastly" practice of sex, unlike the "hotblooded" black women of their imagination. This psychological duplicity is an aspect of the Puritanism condemned by Wright. As a result, Savage Holiday can be read as a merciless attack both on the sexually hypocritical white man and the lie of the purity of white women to whom men such as the protagonist of the novel were devoted.
Erskine, perhaps the male counterpart to Hughes's Miss Briggs, and Mabel, his promiscuous neighbor with whom he is obsessed, represent Wright 's disgust with the sexual hypocrisy of many members of the white race--a hypocrisy which, outside of the text, Wright conveyed was a source of much misery and violence to blacks. Moreover, as the novel is presented completely from Erskine's point of view, although one cannot completely separate Mabel's image from his neurosis, one can understand that Wright is presenting an image of whites that counters the narcissistic myths that upheld white supremacy. Indeed, Wright was aware of the meaning of Savage Holiday in this regard, for the novel reflects Wright's concern with both the cruelty and aggressiveness of some whites toward blacks and with the moral vacuum and psychological confusion that give rise to such behavior. These themes are reflected strikingly in Wright's complex representation of the Puritanical and psychologically confused white man and the irresponsible and unethical behavior of the white woman. Thus, when one reflects on Savage Holiday, in light of the image it offers of whites and how this image is an important part of Wright's racial typology, the book stands as a refutation of devastating proportions of aspects of the white character that Wright seems to feel are major aspects of white behavior and psychology. In order to understand Wright's examination of Erskine's relationship with Mabel, it is important to analyze what Wright emphasizes in Erskine's character and his attitude toward women because the seeds of his murder of Mabel are present in his repressed and Puritanical view of life. Though Erskine is a retired successful businessman and avid churchgoer, he has a very suspicious view of life, and much of this suspicion is focused on women. Reflecting on his years in the insurance business, for example, Erskine thinks: Insurance was life itself; insurance was human nature in the raw trying to hide itself. . . . yes, insurance was a shifty-eyed, timid, sensual, sluttish woman, trying, with all of her revolting and nauseating sexiness, to make you believe that she'd been maimed for life in an automobile accident. . . . [I]nsurance was an old, sweet-looking woman of seven-odd who'd insured her new daughterin-law for a huge amount of money and then, with a stout hatchet, killed her one night in bed and had told a seemingly plausible tale . . . of finding her daughter-in-law in bed hacked to pieces. Erskine's belief that life is fowl (his last name is Fowler) is the most fundamental aspect of his view of life in general and of women in particular. Wright emphasizes the centrality of this priggish, judgmental, defensive, and threatened view of people in the development of Erskine's relationship with Mabel. Erskine's belief that Mabel is representative of such devious and manipulative women is clear. When he suspects, for example, that she has left her son Tony alone all night, he thinks, "Women who couldn't give the right kind of attention to children oughtn't be allowed to have them" ( Wright 1994, 35). Furthermore, though he is somewhat attracted to Mabel, and on two occasions has seen her from his apartment in various stages of undress, "he'd nipped in the bud the possibility of any such image haunting his mind by promptly becoming angry" ( 1994, 35). Thus, Erskine uses "righteous indignation" to prevent his admitting his attraction to such a woman. This is characteristic of his reaction to Mabel-especially after Tony's death. Wright emphasizes that Erskine's arrogance is a device that he uses to try to establish his superiority to, and later control over, Mabel. Erskine's relationship with Mabel becomes central to the plot after Tony's accidental death. The circumstances surrounding the accident are essential to the understanding of Erskine's obsession with having power over Mabel. Erskine's actions lead to the boy's death. Erskine undresses for the shower and then hears the paperboy leave his paper. He decides to try to get the paper, but it is beyond his reach. Still nude, he steps outside the door, planning to pick the paper up quickly before anyone sees him. However, a gust of wind closes the door, and Erskine must find a way back into his apartment. He remembers that his bathroom window is unlocked, and he plans to climb from the balcony to his window. When he enters the balcony, Tony, who is playing by himself, is frightened by Erskine and falls off the balcony. Like Bigger, who felt that the true reason for his being in Mary's room would be disbelieved, Erskine feels that people might suspect that he was trying to do something perverse to Tony and therefore does not reveal his role in the accident to the police. It is important that Erskine first rejects his responsibility for Tony's death. In his thoughts about how the boy's death might have been prevented, Erskine blames Mabel: "[I]f only that lazy, good-for-nothing Mrs. Blake had been looking after her child properly" (79). In Erskine's attempt to absolve himself of his responsibility and establish his superiority over Mabel, religion plays an important role. For instance, "Since God had foreordained all," he thinks that he should not go to the police, that taking any action would be presumptuous (86). Furthermore, Erskine comes to think that Tony's death was Mabel's penalty for living an immoral life and that it is his religious duty to rehabilitate her: that accident was God's own way of bringing a lost woman to her senses. . . . [H]adn't she wallowed shamelessly in the fleshpots of nightclubs? God had punished her by snatching little Tony into Paradise. . . . He, Erskine, was God's fiery rod of anger! . . . A sense of mission seized him. Yes, God was giving him a mandate to face Mrs. Blake and have it out with her! (87) Erskine's indignation is reinforced when he remembers instances of Mabel's loose behavior (seeing her drunk, hearing her having sex). Reflecting on these episodes, he was more certain than ever that the true guilt for Tony's death lay not on his, but her shoulders" (92). This belief is reaffirmed when Erskine recalls a conversation with Tony during which the little boy recalled seeing men having sex with his mother and ignorantly believed that the men were "fighting" with her (99). Consequently, Erskine thinks that when he ran into Tony on the balcony, his nudity made the boy fear that he would "fight" with him. In light of this, Erskine feels indignant. How right he'd been in refusing to accept blame for Tony's death. It hadn't been his fault at all. Only an ignorantly lustful woman could spin such spider webs of evil to snare men and innocent children! . . . [H]e told himself with the staunchest conviction of his life: "That Mrs. Blake's the guilty one." (105) Thus, Erskine tries to convince himself of his superiority, which is crucial to his having psychological control in his relationship with Mabel. Erskine, however, never succeeds in maintaining his command of the relationship. Erskine's confidence is shaken when he receives an anonymous phone call from a woman who says that she saw him on the balcony with Tony, and Mrs. Blake says that she also saw someone. (Mabel later reveals that she was the anonymous caller.) It is then that Erskine thinks that Mabel's death might be the only way he can control her and prevent her from raising questions that could lead to the discovery of his involvement in Tony's death. Though he is instantly horrified at having wished for her death; thereafter, Erskine's relationship with Mabel is characterized by his need to convince himself of his moral superiority and to have power over her. Erskine's feelings toward Mabel are influenced by his belief, at times, that he has, or could have, power over her. As we have seen, his belief in her immorality makes him comfortable with his supposed moral superiority over her, which allows him to attempt to absolve himself of his guilt for Tony's death and to alleviate his feeling of being threatened somehow by Mabel. Erskine's feelings toward Mabel oscillate depending on whether he feels he has power over her. For instance, following the scene in which Erskine briefly considers how convenient it would be if Mabel were to fall over the balcony railing and die, her crying causes a radical change in his attitude: "Her grief was so genuine, so simple that his conception of her as an evil, giant, entangling spider-mother seemed remote. She was a poor woman who needed counselling and understanding and her stricken humanity appealed to him powerfully" (117). As a result, he becomes "almost hysterically anxious to help her" (118). It becomes clear, however, that this wish to aid Mabel is of a piece with his earlier arrogant desire to reform her for his actions toward her reveal that his emotions hinge upon the need to feel that she is helpless and that he can dominate--or, perhaps, he would say "help"--her. Erskine's actions toward Mabel after Tony's death show that his need to control her is behind his seemingly affectionate behavior toward her. When he offers to make funeral arrangements for Tony, for example, she looks at him with "humble admiration" (135), and "[h]e basked in the glory of the praise in her eyes" (136). Her confession of her hard life--her bad job, her lack of intelligence--affirms his feelings of superiority. With such confidence, Erskine feels that "he could handle her. . . . She was begging for guidance" (137). Wright emphasizes the extremity of Erskine's obsession to have power over Mabel. Not only is his help with Tony's funeral prompted by this need to establish dominance over her but his desire to marry her is also caused by this same need. He thinks of marrying her in order to prevent questions that might reveal his involvement in Tony's death and to save her: "It [marriage] solved his problems, hers, squared little Tony's death, and placed him in the role of a missionary. . . . She'd obey him! She was simple; and, above all, he'd be the boss; he'd dominate her completely" (134). One sees, therefore, the contradictory nature of Erskine's relationship with Mabel, for his actions are prompted by a self-centered desire to hide his role in her child's death and an arrogant and twisted drive to help Mabel--a drive that is, ultimately, an expression of his need to control her. Erskine, however, is frustrated in his need to dominate Mabel by her independence. Even her appearance the day after Tony's death makes Erskine feel threatened by his loss of control over her. When he goes to see her, for example, "he was surprised by the Mabel who opened the door. She was pert, brisk; she held a detached smile on her heavily rouged lips. . . . He entered her apartment feeling that her new mood was subtly shutting him out of her life. He fought down an attitude of resentment" (142). That his emotions toward her change depending on whether he can control her is emphasized in this visit with her. His jealousy is reinforced when she glibly talks with another man on the telephone. Yet, when she cries as she talks about Tony's funeral and expresses her gratitude to Erskine and her reliance on him, Erskine was stricken. His distrust and irritation fled. . . . He'd judged her harshly . . . and now he hated himself. Once more Mabel was redeemed in his feelings, once more she was the abandoned tragic queen of his heart--a queen whom he'd serve loyally and without reserve. She didn't even think enough of the other men she knew to invite them to the funeral. . . . Only he was being invited. (145) Erskine's jealousy returns, however, when Mabel talks on the telephone to another man: "He felt nauseated. He should be tending to his own affairs and not meddling with this cheap woman. She wasn't worth it" (147). Erskine's feelings that Mabel is either a "cheap woman" or a "tragic queen" are bound to his ability to have power over her. The complexity of Erskine's feelings is revealed again later in the novel. Erskine becomes jealous when Mabel is with a man in her apartment. After the man leaves, Erskine asks her about her relationships with men. He questions Mabel in such an arrogant manner that she is reduced to tears. When he realizes that he has hurt her, "Contrition gripped him. . . . Had he reduced her to this? She was his again, nobody else's" (159). Clearly, Erskine is satisfied that his ability to hurt Mabel gives him power over her. Furthermore, when she continues crying, both because of his treatment and because of Tony's death, Erskine stood spellbound, appalled. Hot gratification suffused his body with so keen a sensation that he felt pain; he could scarcely breathe. She was his now, completely. Like this, she belonged to him. He had conquered her, humbled her. . . . Because she had been receding beyond his grasp, he had treated her abominably, had hurled at her his complaints and abuses . . . but now he could be compassionate, loving towards her, for she was prostrate and at his feet. When he hears her talking on the telephone again after he leaves and suspects that she is talking to another man, Erskine thinks that she is toying with him. This Mabel, whom he does not control, is a "bitch" and a "complete slut" . Erskine's inability to maintain dominance over Mabel ultimately leads him to kill her. After Erskine reveals his responsibility in Tony's accident and convinces her that she, too, contributed to the boy's death, Mabel, in guilt and confusion, briefly considers marrying him. Again he becomes jealous when she wants to leave his apartment to answer her phone because he suspects that she will be talking to another man. Furthermore, Mabel implies that, if she and Erskine do marry, she will not be faithful unless she is satisfied with him. As a result of Mabel's refusal to accept his terms for a relationship, Erskine feels that she "loomed as the personification of an enemy" (212). When she definitely refuses to marry him, he kills her. Because of his inability to control her, Mabel falls victim to the violence that, as Addison Gayle, Jr., points out, many of Wright's female characters suffer at the hands of his protagonists. At one point, Erskine asks himself about his relationship with Mabel: "Why did he love her one moment and hate her the next?" (186). Wright provides the answer to this question when he sums up Erskine's feelings about Mabel: The more distraught she seemed, the more he wanted her; the more abandoned she was, the more he yearned for her; the more dangerous she loomed for him, the more he felt that he had to remain near her for his own selfprotection. His desire for her merged with his hate and fear of her and he was jealous. (155-56) "He was jealous"--not really of the other men with whom Mabel is involved but of her own independence from him. Mabel herself--or the willful side of her personality--is the rival who prevents Erskine from controlling her and thereby having the kind of relationship he wants to have with her. He hates her both for her independence and its negation of the image he wants to cling to of himself as a morally superior human being and possible savior of this "fallen woman." She always "hovered agonizingly beyond his reach" (212). And because she is inaccessible to him in life, killing her is Erskine's only means of establishing dominance over her. Hence, as in The Outsider, a woman's death is part of a man's means of holding onto his sense of autonomy. When one looks at the trajectory of Wright's trilogy on the killing of white women, it is clear that each novel has a different agenda. Native Son seems to be Wright's attempt to create a counternarrative to the lynching of black men with the metaphorical lynching of a white woman. The liberating aspects of Bigger's killing Mary are in contrast to the results of Cross's inspiring Eva's death in The Outsider, which reads like a cautionary tale on the abuse of power. Savage Holiday, which critiques psychosexual megalomania, acts as an exposé of the neurosis Wright believed possessed some whites, which in his other works, informs whites' psychological degeneracy in race relations. Wright's concentration on violence against white women seems, on the whole, to be related to the meaning of violence discussed by Ronald T. Takaki in Violence in the Black Imagination: "Violence was, in a crucial sense, an expression of rage. But the rage was complicated: it was based on an alienation from an America" to which blacks are attached. Wright's attachment to and alienation from America find their greatest expression in his attachment to and alienation from white women. Thus, while Langston Hughes's implicit condemnation of the white woman as represented in Little Dog is unambiguous, Wright leaves the reader contemplating what exactly are the full implications of his imaginary murder of white women. |
