Category: Native Son

Introduction

This study is about representation of women in the African American Literature as written in Native son and The Colour purple. African-American literature has undergone a revolutionary change from Phillies Wheatley, the first African-American poet to publish her works, to Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Paule Marshall, the contemporary top Black writers. Phillies Wheatley, who was sold as a slave child to America, “the child was a victim of the largest involuntary human migration in history” (Carretta, Phillies Wheatley Biography 1), and her works give an impetus to the beginning of Afro-American Literature. Other Afro-American early writers also helped the Afro-American Black writing move forward (Yee, 1992). Fredrick Douglass, American reformer, social orator, writer and statesman, is one of them. He escaped from slavery, and became the leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing.

Afro-American culture refers to the cultural contributions of African-Americans to the culture of the United States, whether as a distinct or dominant part of American culture. The distinctive identity of African American culture is based on the historical precepts of the African American people, including the slave trade to the Atlantic culture, despite its divisions, has enormous influence on the American population and literature. African-American literature can be regarded as set of writings or texts by people of African descent living in the United States. It is influenced by the oral traditions of African slaves in America. The slaves utilized tales the same way they utilized music as a social articulation to achieve freedom and stop racial segregations in America (Lacelle, 1979).

Throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries the black woman’s place in history and society has been problematized by racism, sexism, and in many cases classism. Though some black women have managed to surface to the forefront of certain political movements, stereotypes of immorality and inferiority have kept most on the fringe. The black woman, who found it difficult to ‘fit in’ society because of her unique experiences, encountered the same dilemma in her place in literature. Literature, called a mirror of society, often reflected societal restraints, leaving the black woman and her condition voiceless or only partially revealed. The existing genres of the nineteenth-century that black women occupied were the domestic/seductive genre of white women and the slave narrative genre of black men. These genres often had to be modified, expanded, or altered in some way to capture her life, experiences, and thoughts m writing (Crenshaw, 2001). Black women writers of the nineteenth-century, because of the parameters of these two genres, had to pave their own way.

Background to the study

This study came up as a result of the author’s interest to the African American literature as part of one of the courses done in the program. Just before World War II broke out, Richard Wright, born in Mississippi yet moved north to Chicago in adulthood, distributed Native Son (1940). The tale tended to the consequences of racial bias and isolation, recommending that lawful viciousness to singular rights at last could prompt homicide. The epic recounts the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black escort in Chicago, who murders the girl of his boss. In the Novel Women exist in relation to the male figures of authority that surround them, such as their boyfriends, husbands, sons, fathers and the Protagonist of the story Bigger Thomas. In the book Native son still states how black women were portrayed by the whites from their rights as women and the limitation of their intelligence being blacks. In the Native Son, it can be easily noticed a common negative feeling shared by Bigger Thomas towards the African American Women although he is also black. Some of the black women in Native Son are: Bigger’s mother, Bessie who was Bagger’s girlfriend and Vera the worker of the Daltons. The Novel Native Son also shows the negativity from blacks to another blacks and states how women are meaningless without men and that they cannot function as independent characters. In any case, the conditions are more convoluted than an insignificant plot outline, and the book at last recommends that the nation all in all might be in charge of such culpability.

In later decades in America, critical female voices have developed unequivocally on the artistic scene, for example, those of Alice Walker. In her mid-1980s epistolary novel The Colour Purple (1982), Alice Walker portrayed isolated presence in 1930s Georgia. And again, The Colour Purple, emphasis on how black women were portrayed as Slaves and sexual instruments to male needs. The Colour Purple Shows the Sex-division of labor which goes back historically when male strength was required for outdoor activities such as hunting; and women were seen as more fragile and assumed domestic responsibilities (Eagly, 1987).

Oppression did not end with the slavery in America, during the war and the post-emancipation period there was still a lot of sexual violence against African American girls and women. Black girls were used by white men as instruments to establish their power after they lost their privilege by the abolition of slavery. Alice Walker, focused on issues such as sexual assault also by African-American men to blacks that is, she states the representation of black female sexuality in literature and the way African-American women dealt with that issue.

Statement of the problem

As literature keeps depicting black women in various negative or stereotypical ways, it affects the way black women see themselves and also the way they create their identity. In Berry & Duke (2011), various black women and young black girls opened up to how they feel about this representation. The documentary explored the deep-rooted preconception and attitudes about skin colour, particularly dark-skinned women, outside of and within the Black American culture. It is disheartening black women feel depressed and cowardly about themselves, this is why this study has to clear the air by looking deep into the ways African American women were portrayed in Colour purple and the Native Son. Black people from the same community discriminate among each other, over skin colours. African American women feel insecure and always want to find a way to feel better about themselves. If literature doesn’t frequently show African American women the way they do, will people see them that way? Hence, this study is focused on the representation of African American women in Native son and the Colour Purple, and also revealing the hiding messages or symbols that African American women are been represented with.

Delimitation of the Study

This study is limited to the representation of African American women in Native son and the colour purple. Although there is a representation of all the gender in the African American literature, the study is limited the portrayals both black and white women on their representation in the “Native Son” and “The Colour Purple”. The research data will be generated from the /discourse of the primary text.

Research methodology

The study will adopt a phenomenological research design where deep inductive, qualitative methods are used in framing up the research methods. Phenomenology is research that produces and analyses descriptive data, such as written or spoken words and observational behaviour of people (Taylor and Bogdan, 1984). This research method refers to a method of research interested in the meaning and observation of a social phenomenon in a natural environment. It deals with data that are difficult to quantify. It does not reject numbers or statistics but just does not give them first place. The researcher is interested in knowing the factors conditioning a certain aspect of the behaviour of the social actor put in contact with a reality. It uses an interpretive model where the focus is on the processes that develop within the actors (here, we are interested in the meanings that the actor attributes to his environment as well as to these interpretations). Life history collections have been gaining interest in the social sciences since the 1970s. It can be defined according to Chalifoux (1992) as a narrative that tells the story of a person’s life experience. It’s actually a personal work and autobiographical.

The method that will be used for this study is historical and literary analysis in articles, books (The native by Richard Wright and The Colour Purple) and journals that describe the case of Representation of women in the African-American Literature. For this review the researcher intend to analyse 30 articles including books through a two-step analysis, combining concept matrices. The researcher will be able to also perform theoretical analysis into the black feminism theory, and a study of the themes of gender, regulatory offence of black ladies by the whites, the intersectionality of race, class, gender and, oppression of black ladies.

Definitions of Key Terms

Representation: The shorter oxford English Dictionary suggests two relevant meanings for the word: to represent something is to describe or depict it, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal or imagination; to place the likeness of it before us in our minds or in the senses. As for example in these sentences; “this picture represents the murder of Abel by Cain (Hall, 1997).

African American literature: body of literature written by Americans of African descent. Beginning in the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American writers have engaged in a creative, if often contentious, dialogue with American letters. The result is a literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight, offering illuminating assessments of American identities and history. Although since 1970 African American writers, led by Toni Morrison, have earned widespread critical acclaim, this literature has been recognized internationally as well as nationally since its inception in the late 18th century (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

• Portrayal: the other word to mean Representation.
• Character: a person who play a certain role in the novel.
• Women: both the Marriam- Webster and the Oxford Living dictionaries defined a woman as “An adult human female”.
• Native son: According to the dictionary.com, Native Son is a person born in a particular place. In the context of this research, Native Son (1940) it refers to the novel by African-American author Richard Wright about a young black man whose life is destroyed by poverty and racism.

The Colour Purple is the most powerful wavelength of the rainbow. In the context of the research it refers to the 1982 epistolary novel by an American female author Alice Walker portraying the of African-American women in the Southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture.

Summary

The introductory chapter lays down the background of the study, justification, and the research objectives, outlining the research questions and assumptions, and then defining terms as applied in the study. The importance of the chapter is that it draws a road-map for the research and it defines the course of the entire research project. The next chapter reviews the literature on women representations in the African American literature and it will address ideas from different scholars co

“Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed…It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.” (Wright, PAGE 45). Native Son (1939) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908 at Rucker’s Plantation. Bigger Thomas is a poor uneducated, twenty year old man in the 1930’s Chicago, that lives in a house with his little sister and brother and his mom in a one bedroom apartment in a poor neighborhood in Chicago. Bigger does not have the same opportunities as whites because of his race. To get money Bigger and his gang have robbed many black owned businesses. He does not own white business because he knows if he rob any white business the cops we come looking for him and won’t stop. He knows that if he robs blacks business the cops won’t care as much and won’t really do much. Bigger mom preteches to him about getting a job working for the rich white man Mr. Dalton. Bigger gets the job he started working as a chauffeur and one day Bigger places Mary on her bed, Mary’s blind mother, Mrs. Dalton, enters the bedroom. Though Mrs. Dalton cannot see him, her ghostlike presence terrifies him. Bigger worries that Mary, in her drunken condition, will reveal his presence. He covers her face with a pillow and accidentally smothers her to death. In native son the factors that greatly impacted Bigger’s perspective on life was his friends,family and his employer and jail.

In addition, to that Bigger’s family is one thing that puts a big impact on his perspective of life. Bigger’s mom is very supportive of him because she only wants the best for him and emphasizes alot to him about talking about the job that the Daltons are offering, and she wants her son to stop hanging out with the gang of boys he spends time with because they are no good.They are no good because they have robbed people and cause fights in public places. Bigger’s mom said to Bigger, “You’ll regret how you living some day,” she went on. “If you don’t stop running with that gang of yours and do right you’ll end up where you never thought you would. You think I don’t know what you boys is doing, but I do. And the gallows is at the end of the road you are traveling, boy. Just remember that” (Wright ,20). This shows that Bigger’s mom is caring, she wants the best for him, and only wants him to be an active member of society. Bigger’s mom also always brings the job for the Daltons so Bigger can help bring in money for their family and reiterated she doesn’t want him hanging out with that gang. Bigger’s mom expresses her desire for Bigger to become more for himself and the family by telling him, “If you get that job,” his mother said in a low, kind tone of voice, busy slicing a loaf of bread, “I can fix up a nice place for you children. You could be comfortable and not have to live like pigs” (Wright, 21).

Most Importantly the thing that impacted Bigger’s perspective on life is the Daltons and facing jail time. When Bigger was in jail he said,“You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man” Max has an understanding of Bigger’s feelings to the extent of why Bigger acted the way he did. Max does not understand Bigger’s new feelings at the time near his death. Bigger had shared feelings with Max that he had not ever been honest with himself. The white people at the jailhouse and in the courtroom did not classify him as a human being, they called him a ‘black ape’. Max was a white lawyer that was trying to help Bigger because he understood where he is coming from even though Max knew Bigger killed Mary and Bessie. Max is the only person that treated Bigger like a man as he genuinely held a conversation with Bigger. While Bigger was thinking to himself, he said, “I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em…” (Wright 295). This thought shows that threw out Bigger’s life he did not have much feelings for life and that all of his life he basically felt like he was not a person that people respected. Also Bigger having the feeling of always be powerless.

In Conclusion Bigger perspective on life gets changed dramatically throughout the book, he faces oppression from society and denial. Which had a big impact on the choices he made, which was robbing with his gang for money. Bigger did this not for fun but to help his family get out of poverty. But people didn’t really understand his state of mind and respected him as a human being so they couldn’t really get this viewpoint on things. In addition Max was the only person that respected Bigger as a human being .In native son the factors that greatly impacted Bigger’s perspective on life was his friends,family and his employer and jail.

The novel Native Son by Richard is set in Chicago during the 1930s. It follows the story of Bigger Thomas who is a 20-year-old African American. He lives in poverty with his family in the beggarly south side. Bigger needs to get a job to help support his family but he is self-centered. Bigger prefers to go to the pool house and smoke with his friends. Nevertheless, Bigger, goes to work for the Daltons. These novel reveals that the environment you grow up in influences the choices you are willing to make in order to prevail, and that society shapes you into their own mold.

To begin with, The Daltons are white millionaires. Mr. Dalton is a real estate who earns his money by charging black tenants twice as much as he does white tenants. Yet he claims to be a supporter of black Americans. At the end of the first book Bigger has killed Mary Dalton. The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Dalton. He burned her body in the furnace and fled to his old home. Mary’s murder gives Bigger a sense of power and identity he has never known. Bigger’s girlfriend, Bessie, makes an offhand comment that inspires him to try to collect ransom money from the Daltons. They only know that Mary has vanished, not that she is dead. However, Mary’s bones are found in the furnace, and Bigger flees with Bessie to an empty building. Frightened that she will give him away, beats her to death with a brick after she falls asleep.

Wright writes a gruesome tale using Bigger as personification of black rage. It’s not a light-hearted story he’s the embodiment of rejecting the idea that black men should be begging for their income or working 2x as hard to earn ½ of much. Bigger is not a complex character, and this done here to fulfill one purpose which is to elucidate a very pressing issue. Racism. However, the situations in the events are arise around Bigger are the things that are complex, and the book is wonderful due to this. The racism was over the top out of line and generally unbelievable. Violence against black people was devilish. Daily racism was unrestrained. The most interesting thing of all of that Bigger’s crime could have been easily avoided if he was white. When you look at Bigger’s actions overall, they seem clear cut in an objective sense what he should have done seems like an obvious thing but when you bring in the factor that he was black everything gets turned on its head

In book three Max is defending Bigger. His case is based on Bigger being a “test symbol” who embodies and exposes the ills of American society. Max explains that his intent is not to argue whether an injustice has been committed, but to make the court understand Bigger and the conditions that have created him. Bigger is a violent and ruthless protagonist who’s a product of the society he lives in.

In conclusion We either sit back and do nothing which is contributing to the problem or there are some of us who are actively doing this because they want to. This book is really dark but that’s what makes it so good. There are these problems and these issues that happen and the only way to change them is to change our mentality and change like how we view other people. We need to view other people as people and not as less than or not equal to.

The beginning of Native Son we are introduced to Bigger, the main character in this novel by Richard Wright, he is a 20-year-old who lives with his family in a one-bedroom apartment, in the South Side of Chicago. During the beginning of this book, Bigger needs a job, and sets out to find something but has trouble finding the motivation. Soon Bigger finds a great job paying 25 dollars a week which is a considerably large amount for that time. Bigger had gotten a job working for Mr. Dalton, a very wealthy man, the main job duties are to drive him, his wife, and daughter around when they need to go somewhere. Working for the Daltons is a far cry from the one-bedroom he shares with his mom and siblings. But Bigger does not think things through, and this leads him to commit a terrible crime.

One of Biggers duties is to drive Mr. Dalton’s daughter, Mary, to and from college, while on his drive to drop Mary off she tells Bigger to take a different route and he soon realized that they were far from the college. Mary wanted to go out and have a good time, Bigger went along with it and they ended up with Mary’s friend Jan and went drinking, now sometimes drinking can be a good time but this was not one of those times. At the end of the night, Bigger is trying to get Mary into her house, into her room but Mary’s mom walks in, but she is blind so she didn’t know Bigger was in the room. Bigger then grabbed a pillow and put it over Mary’s face, suffocating her to the point where she dies. This was, of course, was never the plan but it happened, the only reason it happened was because of his extreme paranoia.

Book one is titled ‘fear’ and the fear is mostly Bigger’s. Certainly, his fears of invaded white territory are matched with his fears of never having a free territory of his own. A second source of Bigger’s fears come from his slightly inflated masculine ego and the concept of ‘Manhood’ is one of four major themes that Wright presents in Book One. Bigger detaches himself from his family’s misery, not because he doesn’t care about them, but because he knows that can’t support them. When his mother nags Bigger and questions his ‘manhood,’ her words spark one of the day’s refrains: in Doc’s pool room, in the theatre with Jack, in Dalton’s car and Mary’s bedroom, Bigger seeks opportunities to display and change his masculinity, usually unsuccessfully. While the episodes in the theatre and Mary’s bedroom were more sexually motivated, Bigger primary definition of ‘manhood’ is one of violence. He relies on his gun and knife as physical displays of his masculinity and even if most of Bigger’s violence stems from the racist hanging of his father and his present socio-economic condition, Bigger is biased towards displays of strength and oppression. Bigger is happiest when he is dangling the bloody corpse of a newly killed rat or frightening his weaker friends to tears. Bigger is more than a bully, for despite his oppression Bigger roots for tyrants and enjoys hearing stories of Japanese invasions and Hitler’s murderous oppression of the Jews. Bigger hopes to reassert his deflated manhood by tyrannizing those around him.

Book One’s second theme initiates a discussion of youth and innocence. Early on, we learn that Bigger is only twenty years old. One of Wright’s efforts in Book One, is to juxtapose Bigger’s favorite youthful activities with the grim adult activity that he unwittingly and then, knowingly commits at the end of book one. As much as Bigger has hardened himself into an adult, his criminal efforts end his youth in that they are educated by fantasy and not by reality. Bigger kills by accident and afterward, he tries to make something out of what he has done. Bigger does not want to rob Blum’s deli, but he perceives the heist as an adult thing to do. Even though the Daltons have offered him a nicer room, after burning Mary’s body, Bigger flees home to his bed with his brother, mother and sister surrounding. When Bigger wakes up in Book Two, he will be an adult and his ‘FLIGHT’ is an effort to escape the Chicago police and also an attempt to undo the adulthood that has been foisted upon him. Neither of these endeavors succeeds, of course, but Bigger is able to mature once he honestly assesses the ‘adulthood’ that has been forced upon him. Again, the title Native Son resonates in the loss of innocence that the ‘native son’ suffers.

Blindness is the third theme in Book One, and Wright’s initial treatment of ‘blindness’ is partially that use physically and spiritually blind characters to foreshadow tragedy and fuel tragic fate. Certainly, Mrs. Dalton fits within this rubric, as the only physically blind character in the novel. It is her blind presence that causes her daughter’s death and provides much of the suspense of Book One’s conclusion. Mrs. Dalton’s physical blindness is, of course, the physical manifestation of a ‘blindness that she shares with her husband, her daughter Mary, Jan and much of Wright’s America. Wright makes deliberate efforts to suggest that America is self-blinding, seeking to address the symptoms of racism while remaining deliberately incognizant of reality. Jan’s reverie at the lake, when he promises Bigger an ensuing revolution reflects a ‘lake view’ blindness that is as glaring as Mary’s insistence that Bigger join a labor union. And just as Bigger murmurs that his self-deluded family is blind to his reality that a job at the Daltons’ is not going to improve their economic condition he too, blinds himself with intense anger and rash acts of violence. All of Wright’s characters blind themselves, one way or another so that they do not have to look at life’s realities; and as a Naturalist, this blindness is just another one of the details that Wright uncovers.

Finally, the theme of ‘territory’ is initiated in Book One and this will emerge as the most important theme of Book Two. In regards to the title of the novel, Wright is a little sarcastic in depicting Bigger as America’s ‘native son.’ While Wright wants to make the argument that Bigger is a creation that can only be created in American territory, he also argues that part of Bigger’s ‘native son-hood’ is being treated as a non-native creature. As a result, the ‘Black Belt’ ghetto of Chicago is what Bigger considers to be his ‘territory.’ All other areas of the planet excluding Harlem, but including Lake Michigan, the ditches of the US Army and the entire sky are part of what Bigger considers to be ‘alien, white world.’ Bigger tries to maintain the idea that the white world is ‘alien’ and that there is a fixed barrier between his space and the white space, but this construction proves faulty. Bigger is afraid to rob Blum because his deli is in a white neighborhood but afraid or not, Bigger must trek into a white neighborhood to collect his menial chauffeur job. If this does not prove the permeability of the ‘color line,’ the idea of fixed territories is surely destroyed when Bigger drives Jan and Mary into the Black Belt so that they can ‘play black’ at Ernie’s Kitchen Shack. In effect, Bigger is forced into a realization that the ‘territory’ that he considers his own, is not. The region to which black living space is confined is merely a ‘belt’ within the city and in a most literal sense, Bigger’s family continually faces eviction by the South Side Realty Company owned by their landlord, Mr. Dalton. The relationship between America and her ‘native son’ is little different from the medieval scheme that attached a feudal landlord to a throng of serfs. Trapped at home, in the streets and oddly enough, even while he is driving, Bigger has no ‘native’ territory and Wright’s effective thematic treatment of this question rightly reduces Bigger’s thoughts of ‘flight’ to the realm of impossibility.

The behavior expressed in Richard Wright’s Native Son provides us with a basis to realize our own faults in today’s society. The rampant prejudice within the novel’s society led to the mental and emotional shifting within the black community, seen specifically in Bigger Thomas. The racist precedents set in the past determine our actions today, and if anything, Native Son was an opportunity to realize that it’s time to change those precedents. Fear of change and fear of persecution cause acts of desperation within a system of oppression. External justification from historical, systematic hate generates that oppression and injustice throughout society.

Oppression fundamentally stems from the human urge for control and power. We want to keep the power we hold over other people, and will do anything we can to control what we can. This constant battle to see who comes out on top is what gives entire communities the mindset that they are fundamentally superior, because they are the ones who have been winning the battle for centuries. The oppressive systems in place in our society today come from the systematic dehumanization that this country was built upon, and it stays in place because of our unwillingness to see beyond our own dilemmas. In Native Son, the Chicago described is one with a blatant imbalance of power between the white and black communities, notably mentioned in the environment as a physical separation of the two communities. This separation leads to each community having serious misconceptions about the other, altering the mindset of each because of centuries of precedent, evidential in the text, “Why did he and his folks have to live like this? What had they ever done? Perhaps they had not done anything. Maybe they had to live this way precisely because none of them in all their lives had ever done anything, right or wrong, that mattered much.” (Wright 105). This mindset that Bigger has is detrimental to his entire community, as well as himself. He truly believes that all of the black people within Chicago, including his own family, deserves to live in conditions harmful to their health. This separation within communities is dangerous to the mental and emotional state of those being harmed by the separation.

Bigger Thomas has been mentally and emotionally shaped by the environment around him, clearly seen in lines such as, “He stood up in the middle of the cell floor and tried to see himself in relation to other men, a thing he had always feared to try to do, so deeply stained was his own mind with the hate of others for him.” (Wright 361). Bigger has been so fundamentally molded by the conditions that he grew up in that he truly believes he is worth less than the white people in his city. “He had no right to feel that, no right to forget that he was to die, that he was black, a murderer; he had no right to forget that, not even for a second. Yet he had.” (Wright 360). These quotes clearly show that the hate he has been given, the hate that has shaped him, has ingrained itself so deeply in his mind that he now believes that he is not deserving of equal treatment. Bigger’s fear of persecution and hate lead him to commit acts he may not have committed otherwise, such as the murder of Mary Dalton. This systematic oppression that he has grown up in has critically shifted his view on the world and his view on himself.

Nearly every act within Native Son was an act of desperation, subconsciously caused by the standardized injustices within this society. From Bigger to the Daltons, every choice was indicative of a deeper meaning – a desperate desire to prove themselves. The imbalance of power within this Chicago community was the cause of this desperation, leading the characters to believe that they either had to protect their power or protect themselves from persecution and hate. Specifically, Bigger killing Mary Dalton was his chance to prove his worth in some way or another – to prove that he could leave a mark on the white community that had so wrongfully oppressed him, seen in the passage, “His crime seemed natural; he felt that all of his life had been leading to something like this… There was in him a kind of terrified pride… It was as though he had an obscure but deep debt to fulfil to himself in accepting the deed.” (Wright 106). Bigger felt as if his whole life, the life in which he had been treated as nothing other than inferior, had been leading to a course of action that would deeply affect the white community. On the other side of the spectrum, the white community was so desperate to see Bigger put to death for this murder, that they blinded themselves to the underlying issue within their society, seen in the passage, “’Kill ‘im!’ ‘Lynch ‘im!’” (Wright 270). In this passage, the angry white mob is rooting for the police to kill Bigger on the spot, without considering their own blind hate and the environmental aspects that led Bigger to murder. Both the white and the black communities have a fear of the other, leading to the series of desperate acts that readers can see throughout the novel.

The patterns found within Native Son are applicable to the world we live in today, and still decidedly present. The world around us supports a system of oppression designed so that those without power feel helpless. In order to tear down this oppressive societal structure, we have to be willing to study the underlying issues, and realize the faults within ourselves. The mindset of different communities within our world have been established by centuries of precedent, just as both the white and black communities in Bigger’s world are defined by misguided notions of hate for the other. This human instinct to desire power is what ultimately causes our own downfall. Bigger’s desire to be seen as an individual and to leave his mark on the white community is what lead to the murder of Mary Dalton, and Bigger’s death sentence. To break the cycle of this struggle for power over one another, we have to be self-aware of our actions and the underlying implications of those actions. We should not strive to be like that “white looming mountain of hate,” (Wright 361), or that “sea of white faces… that ocean of boiling hate,” (Wright 265). We should strive to have our own individual thoughts instead of following the outdated precedents set for us in the past, urging us to become a faceless mass of blind anger. We should realize our own individuality, just as Bigger realized his.

Systems of oppression are caused by those in power staying in power because of past precedents, which generates an altered mindset in both parties affected, causing a series of injustices throughout society. The lessons recognized when Native Son was published are still lessons that are applicable today. We face the same urges of blind hate and blind accusations today as they did back then, it’s simply not as widely recognized because we are no longer physically segregated as a society. There is no doubt in my mind that Richard Wright accomplished the goal he set out to achieve: to prompt self-reflection in all members of his audience. As much as Bigger is a product of his society, we are a product of ours. Without self-realization of the implications of our actions and words, history will repeat itself, and it will be to the detriment of all.

Works Cited

1. Wright, Richard, and Arnold Rampersad. Native Son: the Restored Text Established by the Library of America. Harper Perennial, 2005.

This study is about representation of women in the African American Literature as written in Native son and The Colour purple. African-American literature has undergone a revolutionary change from Phillies Wheatley, the first African-American poet to publish her works, to Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Paule Marshall, the contemporary top Black writers. Phillies Wheatley, who was sold as a slave child to America, “the child was a victim of the largest involuntary human migration in history” (Carretta, Phillies Wheatley Biography 1), and her works give an impetus to the beginning of Afro-American Literature. Other Afro-American early writers also helped the Afro-American Black writing move forward (Yee, 1992). Fredrick Douglass, American reformer, social orator, writer and statesman, is one of them. He escaped from slavery, and became the leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing.

Throughout 19C and 20C, the black woman’s place in history and society has been problematized by racism, sexism, and in many cases classism. Though some black women have managed to surface to the forefront of certain political movements, stereotypes of immorality and inferiority have kept most on the fringe. The black women, who found it difficult to ‘fit in’ society because of their unique experiences, encountered the same dilemma in their place in literature. Literary works, called a mirror of society often reflected societal restraints, leaving the black women and their condition voiceless or only partially revealed. The existing genres of the nineteenth-century that black women occupied were the domestic or seductive genre of white women. These genres often had to be modified, expanded, or altered in some way to capture her life, experiences, and thoughts m writing (Crenshaw, 2001). Black women writers of the nineteenth-century, because of the parameters of these two genres, had to pave their own way.

Background to the study

This study came up as a result of the author’s interest to the African American literature as part of one of the courses done in the program. Just before World War II broke out, Richard Wright, born in Mississippi yet moved north to Chicago in adulthood, distributed Native Son (1940). The tale tended to the consequences of racial bias and isolation, recommending that lawful viciousness to singular rights at last could prompt homicide. The epic recounts the story of Bigger Thomas, a Black escort in Chicago, who murders the girl of his boss. In the Novel Women exist in relation to the male figures of authority that surround them, such as their boyfriends, husbands, sons, fathers and the Protagonist of the story Bigger Thomas. In the book Native son still states how black women were portrayed by the whites from their rights as women and the limitation of their intelligence being blacks. In the Native Son, it can be easily noticed a common negative feeling shared by Bigger Thomas towards the African American Women although he is also black. Some of the black women in Native Son are: Bigger’s mother, Bessie who was Bagger’s girlfriend and Vera the worker of the Daltons. The Novel Native Son also shows the negativity from blacks to another blacks and states how women are meaningless without men and that they cannot function as independent characters. In any case, the conditions are more convoluted than an insignificant plot outline, and the book at last recommends that the nation all in all might be in charge of such culpability.

In later decades in America, critical female voices have developed unequivocally on the artistic scene, for example, those of Alice Walker. In her mid-1980s epistolary novel The Colour Purple (1982), Alice Walker portrayed isolated presence in 1930s Georgia. And again, The Colour Purple, emphasis on how black women were portrayed as Slaves and sexual instruments to male needs. The Colour Purple Shows the Sex-division of labor which goes back historically when male strength was required for outdoor activities such as hunting; and women were seen as more fragile and assumed domestic responsibilities (Eagly, 1987).

Oppression did not end with the slavery in America, during the war and the post-emancipation period there was still a lot of sexual violence against African American girls and women. Black girls were used by white men as instruments to establish their power after they lost their privilege by the abolition of slavery. Alice Walker, focused on issues such as sexual assault also by African-American men to blacks that is, she states the representation of black female sexuality in literature and the way African-American women dealt with that issue.

Statement of the problem

As literature keeps depicting black women in various negative or stereotypical ways, it affects the way black women see themselves and also the way they create their identity. In “Berry & Duke” (2011) many black women and black girls opened up to how they feel about their representation in Society. The narrative investigated the main concepts preconceptions and attitudes about skin colour, especially dark-skinned women, outside of and inside the Black American culture. It is discouraging black women feel depressed and cowardly about themselves, this is the reason why this study has to clear and eliminate the air by looking profound into the ways African American women were portrayed in Colour purple and the Native Son. Black people from the same community discriminate among each other over skin colours or race. African American women feel insecure and always want to find a way to feel better about themselves. If literature does not frequently, show African American women the way they do, will other people see them that way. Therefore, this study is centered on the representation of African American women in Native son and the Colour Purple, and also uncovering the concealing messages or images that African American women are been represented with.

The scope of the study is concerned about the Representation of Women in the Color Purle and Native Son in the African American Literature. The study is limited to the representation of African American women in Native son and the colour purple. The time that the researcher has to conduct this research is so limited. Therefore, the study will be limited to 2 novels “Native son and The Colour purple. This would have been more enhanced and wider if more literary works or novels were examined. Another limitation is the access to electronic materials which may be relevant to the study. Some would need to be paid for access to be granted, others in relation to African American portrayal in the Colour purple and the Native son may not be accessible or may no longer exist considering the period when these two novels were published.

Research methodology

The study will adopt a phenomenological research design where deep inductive, qualitative methods are used in framing up the research methods. Phenomenology is research that produces and analyses descriptive data, such as written or spoken words and observational behaviour of people (Taylor and Bogdan, 1984). This research method refers to a method of research interested in the meaning and observation of a social phenomenon in a natural environment. It deals with data that are difficult to quantify. It does not reject numbers or statistics but just does not give them first place. The researcher is interested in knowing the factors conditioning a certain aspect of the behaviour of the social actor put in contact with a reality. It uses an interpretive model where the focus is on the processes that develop within the actors (here, we are interested in the meanings that the actor attributes to his environment as well as to these interpretations). Life history collections have been gaining interest in the social sciences since the 1970s. It can be defined according to Chalifoux (1992) as a narrative that tells the story of a person’s life experience. It’s actually a personal work and autobiographical.

The method that will be used for this study is historical and literary analysis in articles, books (The native by Richard Wright and The Colour Purple) and journals that describe the case of Representation of women in the African-American Literature. For this review the researcher intend to analyse 30 articles including books through a two-step analysis, combining concept matrices. The researcher will be able to also perform theoretical analysis into the black feminism theory, and a study of the themes of gender, regulatory offence of black ladies by the whites, the intersectionality of race, class, gender and, oppression of black ladies.

Definitions of Key Terms

Representation: The shorter oxford English Dictionary suggests two relevant meanings for the word: Representation means to describe or depict something, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal or imagination, it also means to place the likeness of it before us in our minds or in the senses. As for example in these sentences.

African American literature: body of literature written by Americans of African descent. Beginning in the pre-revolutionary War period, African American writers have engaged in a creative, if often contentious, dialogue with American letters. The result is a literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight, offering illuminating assessments of American identities and history. Although since 1970 African American writers, led by Toni Morrison, have earned widespread critical acclaim, this literature has been recognized internationally as well as nationally since its inception in the late 18th century (Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Portrayal: the other word to mean Representation.

Character: a person who plays a certain role in the novel.

Women: both the Mariam- Webster and the Oxford Living dictionaries define a woman as “An adult human female”.

Native son: According to the dictionary.com, Native Son is a person born in a particular or certain place. In the context of this research, Native Son (1940) refers to the novel by African-American author Richard Wright about a young black man whose life is dep stroyed by poverty and racism.

The Colour Purple is the most powerful wavelength of the rainbow. In the context of the research it refers to the 1982 epistolary novel by an American female author Alice Walker portraying the of African-American women in the Southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their exceedingly low position in American social culture.

Summary

The introductory chapter lays down the background of the study, justification, and the research objectives, outlining the research questions and assumptions, and then defining terms as applied in the study. The importance of the chapter is that it draws a road-map for the research and it defines the course of the entire research project. The next chapter reviews the literature on women representations in the African American literature and it will address ideas from different scholars concerning Black Feminism in relation to the Representation of women in the African American Literature.