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PARTISAN REVIEW
cated piece of literature, with much more social and intellectual con–
tent, in the same terms as Little Red Riding Hood? In Richard
Wright's
Native Son
the decisive event is the murder of a young white
girl by a Negro, and the burning of her body in the furnace, a very
unlikely subject, one might think, for a young Negro to choose for a
propagandist novel. But the selection of this scene was determined by
a forgotten incident of great emotional significance for the writer,
and its imaginative development expressed both hatred for the
girl,
as white, and strong sexual desire for her, unconsummated even in
the imagination except through the symbolic rape of murder. Such
impulses are dangerous psychically as well as socially, and cause much
anxiety. They cannot always be expressed so frankly. In much art
which is predominantly defensive they are so deeply buried that they
can hardly be discerned. When such impulses are dramatized it must
be in the immediate prospect of punishment for their agent. This is
not to make the fantasy socially acceptable; the need for punishment
is just as deeply motivated as the impulse to crime, and is inseparable
from it. The explanation for our penal system lies in the psychic needs
of the public which developed it rather than in its social accomplish–
ments. Our demand for the punishment of the Germans is not un–
connected with the excitement with which we read the detailed ac–
counts of their crimes.
In Richard Wright's case, however, the legal prosecution of Big–
ger Thomas was not enough, because of the author's feelings that the
law, on another level, represented a threat to him in its injustice
toward Negroes, a kind of injustice that Communism might be ex–
pected to abolish. And as in Little Red Riding Hood, even though
Bigger Thomas acted as agent for the writer and the reader, it was
necessary for us to be separated from him responsibly. This was done,
not so much by making him a different kind of person, as by showing,
in the manner of the naturalist novel, that Bigger's crime was a natural
consequence of his social circumstances, and therefore as appropriate
and understandable as the wolf's eating the grandmother. Although
the author is a Negro and most readers are white, the psychic situation
is the same except that Bigger's being a Negro makes our conscious
separation from the murderer easier. And despite its social doctrines
the book makes full emotional and imaginative use of the deeper
prejudices against Negroes and the part they play in dream fantasies,
of women especially. But the woman in the novel is punished, too,
of course.
Although he did not analyze the novel in this fashion, Dr. Frederic
Wertham has recently published a brief report on conversations with
