Richard Wright

This seminar paper sheds light on the autobiographical influences in Richard Wright's non-fiction work. Many incidences in his childhood and early adult life have caused persistent scars in Wrights psyche that can also be detected in recurring themes in his literary work.

this paper analyzes the novel Black Boy by Richard Wright under the theme of 'Identity'.
The paper provides necessary examples where possible and tries to be as thorough as possible.
For the purpose of analysis, the paper is divided into two sections: childhood and adulthood. The theme of 'identity' is analyzed as per these two pointers which envelopes the entirety of Richard's life.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italian intellectuals participated in Italy’s reconstruction with an ideological commitment inspired by the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. Drawing on the work of many of the leading figures in postwar Italian culture, including Italo Calvino, Giorgio Caproni, Cesare Pavese, and Elio Vittorini, this essay argues that Italian intellectual impegno—defined as the effort to remake Italian culture and to guide Italian social reform—was united with a significant investment in the African-American cause. The author terms this tendency impegno nero and traces its development in the critical reception of African-American writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Postwar impegno nero is then contrasted with the treatment of African-American themes under Fascism, when commentators had likewise condemned American racism, but had paradoxically linked their laments for the plight of African Americans with defenses of the racial policies of the Fascist regime. Indeed, Fascist colonialism and anti-Semitism were both justified through references to what Fascist intellectuals believed to be America’s greater injustices. After 1945, in contrast, Italian intellectuals advocated an international, interdependent campaign for justice, symbolizing national reforms by projecting them onto an emblematic America. In this way, impegno nero revived and revised the celebrated "myth of America" that had developed in Italy between the world wars. Advancing a new, postwar myth, Italian intellectuals adopted the African-American struggle in order to reinforce their own efforts in the ongoing struggle for justice in Italy.

This essay attempts to specify and justify the core normative content of an ethics of resistance for the oppressed. I grapple with and sketch an answer to the question, what values should the oppressed embrace as they struggle to find a morally responsible and dignified response to intractable, oppressive conditions? To aid me, I provide a new reading of Richard Wright’s short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), which I regard as philosophical fiction. Building on insights from these stories, together with ideas from neo-Kantian moral and political theory, I explain and defend the role of solidarity and self-respect in the ethics of the oppressed. I also try to make sense of the controversial charge of “Uncle Tom” with black folk culture.

Margaret Alexander Walker's poem "For My People" (1937) is a much anthologized piece that is still highly regarded as a literary work espousing Afro-Marxist ideology. This paper discusses elements of the text that reveal it as being an occult (esoteric) writing that carries the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff and A.R. Orage in a subtext. The literary group that Walker belonged to in Chicago in the 1930s was an esoteric group disguised as Marxists. The essay is a close reading of Walker's poem that deciphers Walker's text.

This article is an exploration of two forces that come into play in the
development of epistemic and legal practices of exclusion: (1)
invisibility conditioned by racial criminalization and (2) its disenfranchising effect on particularly black people well into the present.

Slavery ingrained into human life in such way that it never came to the minds of slaves that their condition was unjust or brutal. Both the slaves and their masters accepted their status of birth without undue question. Anthropological and sociological changes coloured slavery with tints and shades of human desires. Slaves in most societies were despised. For an insightful comprehension of the system of slavery it is essential to trace out the attitudes of the world's great religions and civilizations towards it. In the passing of time slavery got faded as an institution but not yet uprooted from human psyche. It is still playing its dice in the form of class, caste, race and gender exploitation. Without proper check in the present times if we continue exploding science and stripping off the dignity of the weak, soon we might pay a heavy price for that.

What is the link between theology and autocracy?  Zora Neale Hurston offered some answers to this question through her biblical biographical novel about Moses, which is really about theocratic political systems in Nazi Germany and the United States.  It is generally believed that African Americans revere Moses, who was supposedly sent by God to set his people free.  But actually, some of the most prominent black writers of the twentieth century consider Moses a very dangerous figure.  This is the case because they believe that Moses, like the God-concept, can be used to justify both slavery and violence.  In fact, many twentieth-century black writers claim that Moses was an effective political instrument for establishing western theocracies.  Given this view, many black writers consider secularization an incoherent fiction that has blinded us to the role religion plays in the formation of western political systems.

Perhaps the novel evolved in order to deal with man's growing awareness that behind the façade of social organization, manners, customs, myths, rituals and religions of the post-Christian era lies chaos. Man knows . . . that he did not create the universe, and that the universe is not at all concerned with human values. Man knows even in this day of marvelous technology and the tenuous subjugation of the atom, that nature can crush him, and that at the boundaries of human order the arts and the instruments of technology are hardly more than magic objects which serve to aid us in our ceaseless quest for certainty. We cannot live . . . in the contemplation of chaos, but neither can we live without an awareness of chaos, and the means through which we achieve that awareness, and through which we assert our humanity most significantly against it, is in great art. In our time the most articulate art form for defining ourselves and for asserting our humanity is the novel. Certainly it is our most rational art form for dealing with the irrational. ðRalph Ellison, "Society, Morality, and the Novel"Þ 1 This essay reads two historical debates concerning novelistic "just representations"-ð1Þ the problem of poetic justice in the novels of longeighteenth-century England and ð2Þ the nature of race and its representation in the development of the twentieth-century African-American novel-as progressive iterations of a crisis of certainty that characterizes modernity. Both examples address, according to their own cultural and historical contexts, questions of epistemology-the problem of knowledge-in the * The author would like to thank Richard A. Rosengarten and two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and helpful insights in the preparation and revision of this essay.

In this book, I argue that black atheists reject belief in God more for political than epistemological reasons.  The God-concept was frequently used as an ideological instrument for subjugating and violating blacks.  Therefore, to make a more just polity possible, atheism is a political must.  Included here is the introduction to the book.

African-American literature stands out for its interest in using the literary field as a way to protest and mainly to denounce social contexts marked by the use of oppression and violence. In this context, stands out in the literary scenario the novel Native Son (1940), written by the African-American writer Richard Wright, who describes through its protagonist Bigger Thomas, the painful details and psychological problems that characterize the black experience in a social context marked by oppression and violence. So, the present paper aims at developing some considerations about the African-American
experience depicted in Richard Wright‟s novel during the racial segregation period and attempts to examine how the social context interferes in its protagonist‟s psychology. To do so, we based our analysis on the studies developed by Brookshaw (1983), Bhabha (1998), Woodward (2009) e Silva (2009).

Founded in March 1946, Harlem, New York’s Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic was the first outpatient psychiatric clinic established in and for a black community in the United States. The result of a collaboration among the psychiatrist and social critic Dr. Fredric Wertham, writer Richard Wright, and clergyman Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop, the clinic was both a practical response to the need for low-cost psychotherapy and counseling for black residents of New York City (many of whom were newly-arrived migrants) and a radical precursor to nation-wide campaigns to address disparities in the mental healthcare of African Americans. This article places the Lafargue Clinic’s history and legacy in conversation with the fraught role of race in the history of psychotherapy—fraught in the sense of how concepts of race and practices of racism have played a determining role in how established American psychiatry has approached the treatment of racialized populations and how these populations have experienced their encounters and/or exclusions from psychiatric mental healthcare.

Hostis humani generis, meaning “enemy of humankind,” is the legal basis by which Western societies have defined such criminals as pirates, torturers, or terrorists as beyond the pale of civilization.

Sonja Schillings argues that the legal fiction designating certain persons or classes of persons as enemies of all humankind does more than characterize them as inherently hostile: it supplies a narrative basis for legitimating violence in the name of the state. The book draws attention to a century-old narrative pattern that not only underlies the legal category of enemies of the people, but more generally informs interpretations of imperial expansion, protest against structural oppression, and the transformation of institutions as “legitimate” interventions on behalf of civilized society. Schillings traces the Anglo-American interpretive history of the concept, which she sees as crucial to understanding US history, in particular with regard to the frontier, race relations, and the war on terror.

http://www.upne.com/1512600155.html

This article is a comparative consideration of Morehouse College president and public theologian Benjamin Elijah Mays and novelist Richard Wright . Their respective views on modernism were developed through a gendered lens of black Southern masculinity and religion that each experienced during his formative childhood. Mays and Wright responded differently to theism and Christianity. They also responded differently to the mothering women in their lives-one with affection, the other with disaffection. Both Mays and Wright viewed modernism as a means of navigating the political hegemony embodied by white males. Yet, they each reproduced the modernist heterosexism, unwittingly supporting the subordination of the women who mothered them. a masculinist, modern interpretation of Christianity, while Wright reflected secular Marxism. Each broke with premodern mores to vindicate the race and provide direction to an ongoing struggle to achieve "full manhood rights. "

Richard Wright’s major works of the early 1940s—Native Son (1940) and 12 Million Black Voices (1941)—protest the racism of the mainstream media and advance positive images of African American life. Through his exploration of the media’s power, he depicts the human toll caused in a historical moment when visual images were gaining currency and presents alternative representations that accurately depict black life. In this thesis, I identify and analyze the ways Wright challenges representations of African Americans across film, print media, and photography. In Native Son, Wright protests media representations of African Americans by highlighting the demonization of Bigger Thomas by the mainstream media. 12 Million Black Voices complements Native Son through its effort to realistically portray African Americans. My first chapter explores Bigger Thomas’s experience as an audience member of Trader Horn, through which Wright demonstrates that Hollywood representations of African Americans deceive black people into entering an inherently unfair racial and economic system only to punish them for attempting to cross racial and economic boundaries. In my second chapter, I argue that Bigger’s journalistic treatment dehumanizes him and convinces white society of the necessity of his execution. In this way, Wright suggests that newspapers possess a kind of legal authority over black life. The final chapter of my thesis examines the significance of photography in Wright’s 1941 photobook 12 Million Black Voices. In this work, Wright utilizes Farm Security Administration photographs—taken by white photographers—to replace negative mainstream representations of African Americans with positive and realistic representations of black life through the history of black people in the United States from the beginning of slavery up until his present day. In this way, Wright challenges white supremacy by recontextualizing African Americans within African American history.

Low and Campano | The Image Becomes the Weapon David E. Low is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education whose research examines how multimodal reading and composing-primarily via the medium of comics-enable youths' critical literacy practices. Gerald Campano is an associate professor and chair of the Reading/Writing/Literacy department at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education whose research focuses on practitioner inquiry, critical literacy, identity, and university-community partnerships.

For the first time 10 writings by Richard Wright produced while on the Illinois Writers' Project were published in the Winter 2009 issue of Southern Quarterly celebrating the centenary of the novelist. An introduction by Brian Dolinar provides context for the essays.

Totality, in vogue in a wide variety of forms in the first half of the twentieth century, was roundly critiqued in the second half. Yet it's starting to revive in altered form. From the bad totalities of the earlier period (total war, the total artwork, totalitarianism, etc.) we've turned to more flexible models (of globalization, world literature, climate change, etc.). This course takes up the problem of totalities then and now through the prism of British Modernism (a grouping of literary texts that is itself a questionable totality). We'll read works that pursue an exhaustive depiction of their moment even as they call attention to the impossibility of such a project: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, James Joyce's Ulysses, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Richard Wright's Lawd Today!, and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable. The course pairs these texts with totalities formulated and resisted by Saint-­‐Amour, Tsitsi Jaji and others. Roughly a third of the course's energies will be devoted to the ins and outs of archival research, manuscript studies, and textual scholarship. In addition to writing and revising a seminar paper based on their interests, students will give presentations on the textual history of the day's primary readings. Through the lens of totality, the course will introduce students to pressing topics in the field of modernist studies, from the modern epic to media ecology, " the archive " to empire, critique génétique to the environment.

Black masculinity is a highly convoluted social concept. It is nearly impossible to define Black masculinity without referring to its antithesis, White hegemonic masculinity. White hegemonic masculinity, according to Josef Benson’s text, Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, derives from the basic social characteristics of White, rural men. Benson argues that these men are often personified in literature and film as saviors rescuing the White race from “savage Native Americans” (xii). These basic characteristics of White, hegemonic masculinity are still prevalent in 21st century America and have been adopted by the collective White social structure. Most White men are groomed to lead and protect their homes/families from the outside infiltrations of Black, brown, and indigenous people men. White men are often characterized as triumphant heroes, whereas Black men are characterized as aggressors. Prolific literary figures of the African American literary canon have long sought to resolve the racial and gender discrepancy. In the late 19th Century, W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington codifies the concept of a Black hegemonic masculinity that limits black male performance. In other words, Washington believes that the masculinity of black men is dependent upon their ability to assimilate into the larger white society. Dubois believes that the masculinity of black men is dependent upon their intellectual prowess. From those two Victorian thinkers our present day ideals of Black masculinity are not culturally relevant. As a result, African American literary figures challenged (and continue to challenge) DuBois and Washington’s notion of black manhood.   
Readers can draw inferences of Black masculinity through the short stories of renowned African American authors such as Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960), Richard Wright (1908-1960), James Baldwin (1924-1987), and Alice Walker (1944).

Several scholars have looked at Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” as a work that criticizes black culture for not providing a strong foundation for its race but places hope in the idea that African Americans will overcome and defeat racism. They also looked at it as a testament of struggle over black subjectivity in a racist society. Other scholars viewed Adichie’s “Americanah” as a text that has narratives of race weaved into it. They looked at it as a text where the characters struggle for identity. They all overlooked the issue of unhomeliness which left the characters in both texts yearning for a better life in a better place other than their current homestead. This research work further reveals the unhomely situation as prompting individuals to work towards creating a home for themselves in an unaccommodating environment. The unhomely situations and its workings bring to fore the aspects of the society which initially were not noticed.

Examining Richard Wright's vast haiku oeuvre, this article shows how he used haiku to reinvent the form in English by repeating playfully anamorphic imagery so as to construct a poetic matrix modelled on, but distinct from, the categories he saw used in Japanese haiku. Writing haiku in this productive manner produced Nietzschean jouissance rather than resentment, so that the affective dimension of a multitude of socio-economic relations, including race, could be demonstrably reframed in this matrix of anamorphic imagery which maintained political allegories and critical consciousness in the landscapes of his invention. He asserted measured displacements and anamorphic transvaluations of how one sees (in Jacques Rancière's sense), and as such presented a modernist haiku constructed not in isolate verses (as haiku are often read), but in refrains and nodes, suggesting an intertextual matrix asserting new commonplaces (locus communis) and self-evident ways of seeing. This article also points out the lack of evidence for the current consensus in literary criticism which mistakenly asserts that Wright discovered a Zen spirit which elevated his spirit and brought him closer to nature. Moreover, the editing of the book manuscript is shown to be not only flawed in its critical framing, but in the very ordering of haiku, presentation, and even title.

"It’s a fascinating essay, one that thoroughly justifies and vouches for spending serious time with great, or nearly great books. It’s actually exciting when he recounts the logical fallacies that are uncovered through reading a Malcolm X speech. The idea of assigning *Gravity’s Rainbow* to illustrate the concepts of analytic philosophy is motivating — but the essay is most exciting when he talks about the way the students respond"
~ vouchedbooks.com (10 May 2012)
https://vouchedbooks.com/2012/05/10/great-books/

1. THE WILLIE LYNCH LETTER AND THE MAKING OF A SLAVE – LUSHENA BOOKS

2. SEKOU MIMS, M.Ed ., MSW – LARRY HIGGINBOTTOM, MSW, LCSW – OMAR REID, Psy.D – POST TRAUMATIC SLAVERY DISORDER – PYRAMID BUILDERS , INC; - DORCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS – NO DATE, PROBABLY BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY

3. DR. JOY DEGRUY – POST TRAUMATIC SLAVE SYNDROME, AMERICA’S LEGACY OF ENDURING INJURY AND HEALING – UPTON PRESS – JOY DEGRUY PUBLICATIONS INC. – PORTLAND, OREGON – 2005

4. DANIEL « CHÉRI-BIBI » PARIS-CLAVEL – DOMINIQUE MISSLIN – NDH MUSIC – BEFORE REGGAE – 2013

5. GEORGE GERSCHWINN – IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-1959 - DVD

6. GEORGE GERSCHWINN – IRA GERSCHWINN – PORGY AND BESS – 1935-1959 – SIMON RATTLE – CD

7. JACQUES DE CAUNA – CECILE RÉVAUGER – LA SOCIÉTÉ DES EXPLOITATIONS ESCLAVAGISTES, CARAÎBES FRANCOPHONE, ANGLOPHONE, HISPANOPHONE, REGARDS CROISÉS

8. MUSÉE D’AQUITAINE – BORDEAUX [AU XVIIIe SIÈCLE] LE COMMERCE ATLANTIQUE ET L’ESCLAVAGE – 2010

9. RICHARD WRIGHT – UNCLE TOM’S CHILDREN – 1936

10. RICHARD WRIGHT – NATIVE SON - 1940

11. RICHARD WRIGHT – BLACK BOY – 1944/45

12. JAMES BALDWIN – SONNY’S BLUES – 1957

13. JAMES BALDWIN – THE AMEN CORNER – 1954

14. JAMES BALDWIN – JUST ABOVE MY HEAD – 1979

15. JAMES BALDWIN – JUST ABOVE MY HEAD – 1979 – AN OLDER REVIEW ON AMAZON.COM March 6, 2004

Several scholars have looked at Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” as a work that criticizes black culture for not providing a strong foundation for its race but places hope in the idea that African Americans will overcome and defeat racism. They also looked at it as a testament of struggle over black subjectivity in a racist society. Other scholars viewed Adichie’s “Americanah” as a text that has narratives of race weaved into it. They looked at it as a text where the characters struggle for identity. They all overlooked the issue of unhomeliness which left the characters in both texts yearning for a better life in a better place other than their current homestead. This research work further reveals the unhomely situation as prompting individuals to work towards creating a home for themselves in an unaccommodating environment. The unhomely situations and its workings bring to fore the aspects of the society which initially were not noticed.

Office hours: MWF 10:30-11, 1-2, 4-4:30; by appt. Course Description This course surveys African American literature from the end of the Harlem Renaissance through the period of the Black Arts Movement to the present. The primary objective is to gain an understanding of the various ways in which African American literature both shapes and is shaped by the changing conditions under which it is produced, including segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War, among others. Students develop critical thinking and communication skills through discussion and exams as they cultivate knowledge of texts covering a wide range of genres, themes, styles, and points of view. Key topics to which the course returns throughout the semester include the representation of race and gender, social and economic mobility, freedom, community, identity, and nationalism, among others. Students will also reinforce analytical, critical thinking, and communication skills; build content knowledge; and expand computer and information literacy by pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary, digital humanities project culminating in the presentation of a research paper. A blog will be used to host course-relevant internet resources discovered and annotated by students. The research paper will incorporate one or more texts from the syllabus, internet resources from the blog, and at least one non-literary primary text (film, painting, photograph, song, etc.) so as to illuminate relations between literary works and the social, political, economic, and artistic culture as a whole.

This paper explores the impact of the conceptual boundary created by the notions of lawfulness and lawlessness on the individual. Law in Western culture is a goal-oriented instrument of state. The legal limits established in legislative acts and judicial decisions delineate a territory for potential action. As a normative domain, law guides human conduct in the process of individual practical reasoning. In states where codes and statutes go against natural human inclinations, individuals view the conceptual boundary of law as a challenge, which leads to conflicts between the system and the individual. I analyze such a conflict in the personal narrative of Bigger Thomas, the main protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native Son. The growing tension caused by the discriminatory system of Jim Crow laws ends in the character crossing legal- and custom-determined boundaries.

This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1941), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly “exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” in its foreclosure from the World’s grammar of anti-Blackness. With allegory (of reading), I draw attention to both 1) how Wright recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave in modern America and, following Paul de Man, 2) how Wright’s text is an allegory of un/readability. Finally, with liturgy, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of mystery as a performance that (re-)enacts the text. This leads me to theorize that Wright’s anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading brings the reader into speculative attunement to the Black messianic, which is a radical mode of fidelity to the Black’s singular positionality in aspiring to the un-veiling [apo-kalyptein] of the katechontic anti-Black World—toward gratuitous messianic freedom.

Literature of the U.S. South. Our focus in the American Literature seminar this year will be on the long, grand, and problematic tradition of U.S. Southern literature, especially fiction in both comic and tragic modes as it developed after the Civil War to the present. The South has given the U.S. some of its greatest writers, while also enacting perhaps more powerfully than any other region the nation's ongoing internal debate regarding the nation's ideals vs. its realities, equality vs. rampant inequities, an obsession with the past and yet also a propulsive drive to seize the future. Most well known for a focus on the paradoxes of "race" in both the individual and national psyche, southern literature also exemplifies imaginative writers' concerns with regional history and memory; oral story-telling as a source of inspiration for textual experiment; and a long tradition of understanding that local, regional, ethnic, and racial identities are always marked by global connections and crossings-especially the U.S. South's deep cultural connections to "other" tropical Souths in the Caribbean and Latin American that also experienced plantation slavery, colonialism, civil wars, and nationalism.

Richard Wright was a pioneer in American Literature whose relationship with socialism helped to define him as a person and as a writer. The inspiration behind his literary accomplishments and their impact on his contemporaries can be understood by tracing two of the most important themes in his life; socialism and identity. This article describes the evolution of his relationship with socialism in order to better understand the writer and his best known works in their social and political context. This exercise can also help us to gain a clearer understanding of the cultural and social implications of socialist ideology in the United States after the First World War.

Richard Wright's 1951 film of Native Son could have been the essential African-American film noir, as Wright, a Black expatriate living in Paris, was part of the very intellectual scene that invented the noir sensibility. However, contemporary prints of the film reveal it to be an ugly, difficult film. Using archival historical research into the film's production and censorship, and analysis of the film's noir components, this article explores how Wright (and co-writer and director Pierre chenal) used the film's darkness and its lacks to create a cinematic text critical of capitalism, criminalization, and American race relations, one grounded in an aesthetic that is Blacker than noir.

As an African American in 20th-century America, Richard Wright occupied an outsider-insider position in his home country, the United States. He cultivated what he called his “double vision,” a Du Boisian double consciousness, a power that facilitated his cosmopolitan development. Wright’s painful location both inside and outside of American society—to say nothing of the larger Western world—prepared him for the kind of “border thinking” that Walter Mignolo considers prerequisite to a cosmopolitanism not determined by the hegemonic center.  Wright’s life and work in the US and France occasion a reconsideration of cosmopolitanism from the position of border thinking, however. In addition, because the writer deserted the US to declare himself a citizen of the world with a radicalism paralleled by few other American intellectuals, he illustrates the in-process nature of cosmopolitan practice.

Twenty-three authors, twenty-three plays covering a period of nearly sixty years (1935-1992) from the New Deal to the Clinton era. The plays are classified by theme which makes the book rather strange in a way instead of having chronological order: the value of a play does not come from the theme only but from the author and the period when it was written and performed. I will follow the book though to cover the twenty-three plays in the order of the book.

As the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács noted, class has both an objective and a subjective quality: workers are reified as alienated commodities while at the same time they perceive their interests as qualitatively different from those of the capitalist who purchases their labour-power. This essay will argue that one of the most complex theorisations of the material production of working-class subjectivity emerges from Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, a second-person collective narrative of the African-American Great Migration. Wright locates African-American subjectivity in the contradiction of its formation, at once trapped in the neo-feudal relations of the Jim Crow South, and brutally thrust into the matrix of Northern racialised and ghettoised industrial production. This produces for Wright acute misery, but also a proletarian revision of Du Bois's Hegelian concept of 'double consciousness' , as Black workers have a unique insight into the totality of the capitalist world-system.

In the classical and neo-classical philosophical tradition, virtue is necessary, or even sufficient, for happiness; it partially or fully constitutes happiness. Virtue comes first; happiness attends it. In Frankenstein, however, Shelley’s creature thinks of happiness as a social and material entitlement, and, turning classical philosophy on its head,
a prerequisite to virtue. ‘I was benevolent and good,’ the creature
says to his creator, ‘misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and
I shall again be virtuous.’ Happiness, to the creature’s mind, is not
available to the lone, superior individual as an assertion of his own
rational independence; it is, rather, dependent on circumstance and
our needs as fundamentally social creatures. Shelley’s moral and psychological inquiry into virtue and happiness emerges from political-philosophical responses to the French Revolution, chiefly those by her
parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The ethical question
explored in Frankenstein continue to animate nineteenth-century realist
and naturalist novels. Developing the case for Shelley’s direct
influence on African-American literary naturalism of the first half of
the twentieth century, I conclude with a consideration of Richard
Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son, which examines the genesis of and
responsibility for another moral monster, Bigger Thomas.