Abstract
This chapter analyzes Richard Wright’s literary depiction of a representative white male psyche in terms of the author’s critically cognizant black perspective. In Savage Holiday (1954), an overtly Freudian crime novel, a white male insurance executive boils over while trying to contain his emotions in obedience to his era’s expectations of white, middle-class, Christian-oriented career men. Wright exposes the violent side of the nostalgic underpinnings of a collective, besieged white masculine psyche that partially bolsters itself with claims of moral superiority. This chapter advances recently renewed scholarly interest in Wright’s novel by reading its visceral excesses as an allegorical satire on its era’s collective white male emotions, including their grounding in nostalgia and relationally constructed morality. Wright satirizes both ironically immoral white supremacy and postwar white male longings for an earlier social eminence.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Atwood, Margaret. “Margaret Atwood on What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Means in the Age of Trump.” New York Times, March 10, 2017, n.p. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html. Accessed 10.14.2017.
Baldwin, James. The Price of the Ticket. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.
Barthes, Raymond. “Interview.” In Conversations with Richard Wright, edited by Keneth Kinnamon & Michel Fabre. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993: 166–68.
Berthold, Dana. “Tidy Whiteness: A Genealogy of Race, Purity, and Hygiene.” Ethics and the Environment 15, No. 1 (2010): 1–26.
Blum, Edward J., and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Boren, Zachary. “The Nature of Nostalgia.” Contemporary Psychotherapy 5, No. 1 (Spring, 2013): n.p. http://www.contemporarypsychotherapy.org/volume-5-no-1-spring-2013/the-nature-of-nostalgia/. Accessed 5.22.2018.
Cassuto, Leonard. “A Father’s Law, 1950s Masculinity, and Richard Wright’s Agony over Integration.” In Richard Wright: New Readings in the 21st Century, edited by Alice Mikal Craven & William E. Dow. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011: 39–54.
Charbonnier, Georges. “A Negro Novel About White People.” In Conversations with Richard Wright, edited by Keneth Kinnamon & Michel Fabre. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993: 235–38.
Charles, John C. Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013.
Demirtürk, E. Lâle. “Mapping the Terrain of Whiteness: Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday.” MELUS 24, No. 1 (1999): 129–40.
Des Moines Register. “Asserts Negro’s Fight for Equality Benefit to Nation.” In Conversations with Richard Wright, edited by Keneth Kinnamon & Michel Fabre. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993: 85–86.
DiPiero, Thomas. White Men Aren’t. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.
Driscoll, Christopher M. White Lies: Race and Uncertainty in the Twilight of American Religion. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Dubek, Laura. “’Til Death Do Us Part: White Male Rage in Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday.” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures 61, No. 4 (2008): 593–613.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015.
Early, Gerald. “Afterword.” Savage Holiday. 1954. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994: 223–35.
Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Fanon, Frantz. White Skin, Black Masks. 1952. New York: Grove Press, 2008.
Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Goetz, Rebecca Anne. The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.
Gounard, J. F., and Beverley Roberts Gounard. “Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday: Use or Abuse of Psychoanalysis?” College Language Association Journal 22 (1979): 344–49.
Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Picador, 1999.
Green, Tara. “The Virgin Mary, Eve, and Mary Magdalene in Richard Wright’s Novels.” CLA Journal 46, No. 2 (2002): 168–93.
Harvey, Jennifer. Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice Through Reparations and Sovereignty. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
JanMohamed, Abdul R. The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Kidd, Colin. The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Interview transcript, “Meet the Press” April 17, 1960. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/interview-meet-press. Accessed 10.14.2017.
Kinnamon, Kenneth, and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
Kiuchi, Toru. “Psychoanalysis as Self-Reflection in Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday.” In Richard Wright: Writing America at Home and from Abroad, edited by Virginia Whatley. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016: 118–38.
Kuhl, Stephan. “Guilty Children: Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday and Fredric Wertham’s Dark Legend.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 55, No. 4 (2010): 667–84.
La Nef. “Are the United States One Nation, One Law, One People?” In Conversations with Richard Wright, edited by Keneth Kinnamon & Michel Fabre. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993: 173–79.
Leotta, Alfio. Touring the Screen: Tourism and New Zealand Film Geographies. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Li, Stephanie. Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Lipsitz, George. How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.
López, Alfred J. “The Gaze of the White Wolf: Psychoanalysis, Whiteness, and Colonial Trauma.” In Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire, edited by Alfred J. López. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005: 155–82.
Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.
Nast, Heidi J. “Mapping the ‘Unconscious’: Racism and the Oedipal Family.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, No. 2 (2000): 215–55.
Perkinson, James W. White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Reilly, John M. “Richard Wright’s Curious Thriller, Savage Holiday.” College Language Association Journal 21 (1977): 218–23.
Smith, Virginia Whatley. “Lying, Deception, Truth-Telling, and Self-Negation: Ironies and Failures of Nation-Building in Wright’s African Parody Savage Holiday.” In Richard Wright: Writing America at Home and from Abroad, edited by Virginia Whatley Smith. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016: 98–117.
Sullivan, Shannon. Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Takaki, Ronald. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Vassilowitch, John, Jr. “‘Erskine Fowler’: A Key Freudian Pun in Savage Holiday.” English Language Notes 18, No. 3 (1981): 206–8.
Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. 1988. New York: Amistad Press, 1993.
Watson, Veronica T. The Souls of White Folk: African American Writers Theorize Whiteness. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015.
Wilmore, Gayraud. “Black Theology: Its Significance for Christian Mission Today.” International Review of Mission 63 (1974): 211–31.
Wright, Richard. “Between the World and Me.” Partisan Review 2, No. 8 (1935): 18–19.
———. Black Boy. 1945. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
———. Savage Holiday. 1954. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Zimring, Carl A. Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States. New York and London: New York University Press, 2015.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Engles, T. (2018). Moralizing White Male Nostalgia: Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday. In: White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90460-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90460-3_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90459-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90460-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)