Hello! As we finish Native Son, I was compelled to look back on my notes of Uncle Tom's Cabin. As I did this I also stumbled upon my notes from another "native" book, The Return of the Native. I'll make no claims that any of these thoughts are valid literary analysis, but I did find a few common themes and threads that I wanted to weave together.
Let's start with Native Son to set the framework of my tapestry. Bigger wants freedom in a world that is his own, yet is hostile to him. His daily life is a battle to survive; he is at war against the whites and blacks alike for food, warmth, protection, and dignity. The imagery of the book is chock full of illusions to hot/cold, fire/steel, blindness, human constructed settings. Wright doesn't so much give us a solution to the problems caused by Jim Crow but he does want to convince us of the naive and simplistic notions our past "solutions" have been.
In The Return of the Native, Hardy has also put his characters in a harsh, hostile environment. This time it is man against nature. Eustacia, the heath-dweller, calls her home, her "cross, misery and death." In short, the heath is a prison to those who live there. Clem alone escapes to the city, but returns educated, emancipated but spiritually blind. Once again themes of fate or freewill are projected. In the end, when several of the character's lives are in peril, Venn, the Savior-figure, is able to save Clym but Eustacia and Wildeve parish. Does that remind you of Max who is powerless to save Bigger (Final chapter called Fate)?
Uncle Tom's Cabin was the real purpose of my investigation because of the connection to the whites' treatment of the blacks, from a black person's perspective. What interests me is that Uncle Tom and Bigger have such different outlooks. In fact, Uncle Tom is the "native son" who finds his purpose and meaning in religion, a solace that Wright critiques. With each step of Tom's journey he goes deeper and deeper into a metaphorical hell, and though he suffers, he becomes the metaphorical Jesus laying down his life for another. As I analyzed my notes from this book I came back to the question, "What does Uncle Tom want?" Of course Bigger's central desire is to experience freedom and dignity--it is a desire that is buried so deep he hardly knows it exists until Max helps him. Uncle Tom, whose suffering is deeper, never dwells on personal rights. His focus entirely is to be faithful to Jesus. In the climax of the book, it is not his bondage or his antagonistic master that he wrestles spiritually with. It is his atheism. Is this book really about slavery?
I want to explore this more at some point. Any comments would be helpful.
Did anyone notice a relationship of Native Son to The Trial?
