Social Demarcation and the Forms of Psychological Fracture in Book One of Richard Wright's <i>Native Son</i>

One of the most stunning aspects of Frederick Douglass's narrative of his experiences as a slave is his keen insight into the psychology of both the slave and the slave owner. Douglass vividly represents the diabolical psychological manipulation of the slaves by the white masters, but he also shows the figures in his work to be so psychologically damaged by the unnatural and unholy master /slave relationship that the owner in such relationships frequently turns bestial or cruel even while maintaining a veneer of civility while the slave obviously suffers a depleted sense of worth and identity; dehumanization is the consequence common to both. Richard Wright's representation of Jim Crow-era Chicago in Native Son depicts a society in logical progression from Douglass's slave era. Though slavery was abolished a generation after the publication of Douglass's narrative, the sociological fractures persisted for generations hence, and enslavement was replaced with economic oppression and geographic racial demarcation, which only continued a long period of existential angst initiated by slavery. Wright's Chicago is fractured both sociologically and geographically, a condition that Wright shows results, like slavery, in the dehumanization of both the privileged and the oppressed both white and black suffer the psychological consequences of an environment schematized by ideas of racial inequity. Wright's central insight in Native Son, however, is that the sociological problem and the psychological one take the same form, a dissociation of parts. He sees the individual damage among AfricanAmericans as a psychological fracturing of identity that reflects and necessarily mimics the fractured society that whites work to maintain and blacks are forced to accept. The lead character of Native Son, Bigger Thomas, struggles with negotiating the different formulations of his identity, which are thrown into disarray by a segregated, inequitable, and frequently hostile society. The