Rape, Repression, and Remainder: Racial Trauma in Wright’s Early Novels

Abstract

In his afterword to Richard Wright’s novel Rite of Passage (begun in 1945 but published in 1994), Arnold Rampersad illuminates Wright’s interest in the psychology of young African American males, an interest that has only achieved critical notice in Wright criticism relatively recently. Rampersad notes that Wright was part of an effort by the psychiatrist Dr. Louis Wertham to found the first psychiatric clinic in Harlem, and Wright was also interested in the work of the Wiltwyck school for Boys in the Catskills, which Wright was convinced was doing its best “to rehabilitate broken boys, emotionally smashed boys who need a chance” (136). According to Rampersad, this school is “directly in the background” of Rite of Passage: Wright went so far as to discuss his novel with “a black social psychiatric caseworker at Wiltwyck, who visited Wright at his home and facilitated Wright’s visit to the school” (133, 135). Wright was fascinated with “‘the whole psychology of anger,’ which he called ‘a terribly complex thing [that] ought to be gone into more closely’ “ (141). While in his journals Wright speculated that mother-son relationships and Oedipal fixations might be the cause of rampant African American “juvenile delinquency,”¹ he was also interested in the Jim Crow-era stereotype of the black male rapist (a deadly inversion of the original trauma, the rape and castration of Africa), and in what I call the “primal scene”² of lynching.

And shucks, if them [World War II German soldiers] happen to come across a [Belgian] woman, … every soljer in the German army would pile her, and when they got through there wasn’t nothing left. … One soljer after another getting on one poor little woman, and she just laying there and can’t do nothing. And aint no policemen around to bother you … a soljer gets a chance to do a lot of things.

(Wright Lawd Today! 30)

Had [Bigger] raped [Mary]? Yes, he had raped her. Every time he felt as he had felt that night, he raped. But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape every time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too, was rape.

(Wright Native Son. 658)

As a paradigm for the human experience that governs history, then, traumatic disorder is indeed the apparent struggle to die. The postulation of a drive to death, which Freud ultimately introduces in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, would seem only to recognize the reality of the destructive force that the violence of history imposes on the human psyche, the formation of history as the endless repetition of previous violence.

(Caruth 63)