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PARTISAN REVIEW
on a knowledge of actual documents and their own speculations.
Styron's dramatization of Turner's slave rebellion in early nine–
teenth-century Virginia,
The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967),
stirred up a storm of controversy, especially among black radical
separatists who had their own politicized image of Turner as a
precursor of Malcolm X. Styron's Turner was conditioned by the
author's southern sense of needing to come to terms with the
Negro personality, after generations of legalized racial segrega–
tion had hidden his real features from whites. Styron was also
impressed by Erik Erikson's psychoanalytic portrait of young
Martin Luther's "identity crisis" as a religious rebel. Styron nar–
rates the evolution of a revolutionary preacher by showing how
his religious and ambiguous sexual feelings were exacerbated by
patronizing whites, who aroused and frustrated a sense of his
own equal worth ; despite his status as a slave. Styron's imagina–
tion seized upon one provocative fact in the existing document
of Turner's confession made to a white lawyer: the only person
Turner actually killed was an adolescent white girl.
Styron's psychologizing interprets Turner's apocalyptic Old
Testament God as a surrogate for his kind owner, whose inabil–
ity to carry out his promise to free Nat disenchants the slave with
his "disgraced and down faIled prince." The girl, who encour–
ages his Bible-reading and unconsciously solicits his sexual in–
terest, provokes both his tenderness and his rage. This invention
of Styron's contrasts with a newspaper reference to Turner's
having a wife on another plantation, and radical blacks were
deeply offended because in their own image Turner was sexually
mature, happily married, and entirely without the hesitations
and distaste for violence that Styron attributed to him. Now it is
true that the old-fashioned southern plantation novel had often
been fond of seeing Hamlet in its white heroes, as Styron was
fond of seeing Hamlet's "access of guilt" and "fatal irresolu–
tion " in Turner. There is no evidence, furthermore, that the ac–
tual Turner was a Hamlet, or that he lusted after the girl he
killed. But Styron had no obligation as a novelist to present a
Turner politically favorable to the ideology of black nationalists.
His Turner is only a historically
possible
Turner, not even a
probable one, but he is, at least, a more human and complex fig–
ure than the crazed, fiendish fanatic pictured by the lawyer's
document of his confession. In any event, there have been several
