Striking Back at the New Overseer:  Response to White Panopticism in the Works of 
Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison 
by 
Mark Joseph Henderson 
 
 
 
 
A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of 
Auburn University 
in partial fulfillment of the 
requirements of the Degree of 
Doctor of Philosophy 
 
Auburn, Alabama 
August 3, 2013 
 
Copyright 2013 Mark Joseph Henderson 
 
Approved by 
 
Sunny Stalter, Chair, Assistant Professor of English 
Susana Morris, Assistant Professor of English 
Marc Silverstein, Professor of English 
Kelly Kennington, Assistant Professor of History 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ii 
 
 
 
 
 
Abstract 
 
 
 This dissertation examines the representation of institutional surveillance of mid- 
 
twentieth-century African-American urban migrants in the works of Richard Wright, Ann Petry,  
 
and Ralph Ellison.  I see the Wright-Petry-Ellison ?trinity? as a pivotal development in the  
 
artistic/literary documentation of the urban migrant experience.  This development entails a  
 
departure from the mysterious ?forces? of naturalism to the more identifiable and human sources  
 
of the forces of oppression acting upon the urban migrants.  Central to this examination is the  
 
image of the ?New Overseer,? the Orwellian, twentieth-century version of the pre-bellum  
 
overseer.  This New Overseer, given his more modern and industrial urban setting, has much  
 
more sophisticated and subtle strategies of white panopticism, or the systemic surveillance of the  
 
African-American urban population in order to contain and control their movements, both  
 
physically and socioeconomically.  Given the continued racial discrimination experienced by  
 
African-Americans post-Emancipation, I also see the migration narratives of these authors as  
 
revisiting the slave narratives of the nineteenth century, particularly those of Frederick Douglass  
 
and Harriet Jacobs, in order to rediscover their triumphs against the old overseer?s white  
 
panopticism. 
 
 
 
iii 
 
 
 
 
Table of Contents 
 
 
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii 
 
Chapter One:  ?The New Overseer? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 
 
Chapter Two:  ?Beyond Naturalism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 
 
Chapter Three:  ?The Horrible Choice? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72 
 
Chapter Four:  ?The New Root? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .105 
 
Chapter Five:  Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 
 
Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 
 
 
 
 
Chapter One:  ?The New Overseer? 
This is an examination of the representative works of Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and  
Ralph Ellison?namely, Native Son, The Street, and Invisible Man, respectively, along with 
some other works by each?in terms of white panopticism, or the seemingly constant and 
omnipresent surveillance on the part of a dominant white force (culture, government, agency, 
institution, etc.) of non-white, especially black, citizens for purposes of oppression, 
disenfranchisement, and segregation.  To me, this common presence of white panoptic power 
among these three authors is indicative of a new and particularly shocking African-American 
urban migration narrative, one which sets them apart and signals a progression from the Dreiser-
esque urban naturalism that so influenced them (especially Wright).  In the works of Wright, 
Petry, and Ellison, the elusive and seemingly nonhuman forces of naturalism are replaced by a 
more tangible, malicious, and easily located panoptic group or individual ?overseer??a word 
whose significance will be crucial to my examination, given the racial specificity with which 
these forces select and target their subjects.  
In the context of the historical placement of these authors1 and their importance to not 
only African-American literature but American literature period, I call this panopticism the 
?New Overseer.?  This choice of name obviously harkens back to the nineteenth-century slave 
narratives, of which I see the Wright-Petry-Ellison trinity as a newer, more modern, post-Great 
                                                            
1The publication dates of these authors? representative works span twelve years of the mid-twentieth century:  
Native Son (1940), The Street (1946), and Invisible Man (1952). 
2 
Migration version.  ?Overseer,? after all, seems an appropriate choice of name not only for its 
obvious Orwellian connotations; consider what is perhaps the most oppressive psychological 
strategy used by the overseer2 in what is arguably the best-known slave narrative, that of 
Frederick Douglass:  Edward Covey, the ?nigger-breaker? to whom Master Thomas sends 
Frederick ?to be broken? (The Narrative 67-68), creates a paranoid atmosphere of constant 
surveillance among the slaves by sneaking up on them, even crawling on his hands and knees to 
avoid detection and pretending to ride away on his horse only to actually hide close by and watch 
their every move.  As Douglass recounts:  ?His work went on in his absence almost as well as in 
his presence [? ] He appeared to us as being ever at hand.  He was under every tree, behind 
every stump, in every bush, and at every window, on the plantation? (71).  Similarly, in Harriet 
Jacobs? Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,3 Dr. Flint keeps a constant, jealous and predatory 
watch over Harriet (his slave), especially when she comes in contact with other men?even the 
overseer and his own son!  Even within the expected security of meeting a lover on a street 
corner, she looks up and sees Dr. Flint watching them from his window (174-175).  She realizes 
with a chill that he ?had an iron will, and was determined to keep [her], and to conquer [her]? 
(176). 
Both examples call to mind Michel Foucault?s discussion of panopticism and his use of 
Jeremy Bentham?s Panopticon as a guiding metaphor in Discipline and Punish: 
                                                            
2The primary function of antebellum overseers was the supervision and management of  his employer?s (the 
plantation owner?s) most valuable asset, the slaves.  However, it should also be pointed out that, as opposed to 
Covey, Dr. Flint is clearly not a literal overseer; he is the slaveowner.  However, his surveillance of Jacobs is 
included in this examination for his specific, predatory targeting of a female slave?his selective ?seeing over? of 
Jacobs.   The antebellum overseer should not be confused with the plantation owner, for though his duties are clearly 
in the interests of the plantation owner, he nonetheless is subservient to the plantation owner.  The notorious cruelty 
of these overseers, as hinted by Douglass through the example of Covey, is in fact a method of preserving their 
livelihood by ensuring and perpetuating the reputation of their effectiveness for keeping slaves in line.  As William 
Kauffman Scarborough points out, most overseers were pressured by their employers into a by-any-means-necessary 
approach through initial poor pay and generally uncertain tenure (6).   
3First published in 1861, sixteen years after the publication of Douglass? Narrative. 
3 
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon:  to induce in the inmate a state of 
conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of 
power.  So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even 
if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to 
render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a 
machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person 
who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power 
situation of which they are themselves the bearers.  (201) 
It is crucial that, according to Foucault, ?the inmate must never know whether he is being looked 
at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so? (201).  Even before they 
are confronted with the urban setting and the more sophisticated mechanisms that the modern 
era?s technological advances afford white panopticism, the would-be migrants of Douglass? and 
Jacobs? slave narratives (themselves) feel these Foucauldian effects of white panopticism.  
Through the low-tech but nonetheless effective system of night patrols and unevenly scheduled 
surprise supervision-visits by the slaveowner and/or his overseers, as well as the web-like 
dissemination of supervision duties among the slaveowner and and his overseer,  the actual, pre-
urban slaves of slave narratives are not spared the oppressive power of white panopticism.  Their 
experiences, in fact, foreshadow what is perhaps the further horror in the more intricate and 
subtle systems to be confronted not only by themselves in the urban North, but their modern-era, 
Great-Migration descendants as well.     
Panopticism, then, is what links the Douglass-esque slave narrative and the post-bellum, 
pre-Harlem African-American literature that would immediately follow it,4 as well as the Harlem 
                                                            
4?Post-bellum, pre-Harlem? is Charles W. Chestnutt?s adjective, used as the title his 1931 essay, and appropriated 
into the title of Caroline Gebhard and Barbara McCaskill?s collection of essays, Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem:  African 
4 
Renaissance literature that would follow that, with the Wright-Petry-Ellison school of the 
African-American urban migration narrative.  The New Overseer?s new white panoptic regime 
makes up the ?new? slavery with which the African-American migrating to the cities in the 
North must frustratingly and further contend in hopes of truly winning his/her freedom; as 
Johnson?s anonymous protagonist in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man explains the 
seemingly perpetual nature of the ?battle? against slavery, it ?was first waged over the right of 
the Negro to be classed as a human being with a soul,? then ?as to whether he had sufficient 
intellect to master even the rudiments of learning,? and today ?it is being fought out over his 
social recognition? (55).  The ever-shifting strategies of the enslaving dominant culture thus 
make the ?battle? seemingly impossible to win by constantly changing the game.5  There are, 
however, some key differences between?and, in fact, developments from?the white 
panopticism of Douglass? time (the middle of the nineteenth century), place (the rural, isolated 
setting of a plantation), and overall context (slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation6) to 
that of post-bellum, pre-Harlem literature, Harlem Renaissance literature, and the mid-twentieth-
century literature of Wright, Petry, and Ellison.  And these differences hinge upon new strategies 
adopted within the master-slave relationship, on the part of both master and slave?white 
panopticism from the ?master,? and a late-coming ?terrible honesty? (the term is Ann Douglas?) 
                                                                                                                                                                                                
American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919.  In terms of migration and panopticism, this period is perhaps best 
represented by Paul Laurence Dunbar in The Sport of the Gods (1902) and James Weldon Johnson in The 
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912).  Both works anticipate the Harlem Renaissance through their 
representation of the Tenderloin district, described by Robert M. Dowling as notorious for its proliferation of dance 
halls, brothels, cabarets, and gambling clubs, yet also producing a ?black Bohemia that would serve as a model for 
the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s in Harlem (117). 
5Also, as the ?ex-colored? man?s rich white travel companion explains the seeming impossibility of getting 
completely rid of slavery to him in Europe:  ?We hit slavery through a great civil war.  Did we destroy it?  No, we 
only changed it into hatred between sections of the country? (106). 
6The Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863.  Native Son was 
published, as the first footnote has already indicated, in 1940. 
5 
from the ?slave?; hence the need for a new slave narrative, provided by Wright, Petry, and 
Ellison. 
First of all, one notices a move from something closer to naturalism, with its apparently 
arbitrary and nonhuman, environmental/hereditary ?forces? acting upon a helpless and hopeless 
protagonist, to protagonists demonstrating more agency and control over their own destiny.  
Sure, Bigger is clearly influenced by the white hegemonic forces of American capitalism, 
materialism, and urban segregation, but he is ultimately powerless, even in spite of the arguable 
protest in the terror he creates through his crimes.  This is markedly obvious when placing the 
essentially doomed Bigger and the more ambiguously hopeful situation of Ellison?s ?invisible 
man? side by side, with the sad and high-priced ?escape? of Petry?s Lutie Johnson in the middle.  
Also, there is an overall progression in tone from the bleak and hopeless to the more ironic, 
humorous, and optimistic.  Of the three, Ellison seems to stress the individual (aside from purely 
racial identity) the most; and it is also with Ellison and his ?invisible man? that one sees the 
ultimate reclaiming of the Douglass-esque victory.  But this victory must be over a new kind of 
Covey?that is, the New Overseer, a new overseer with a new strategy. 
 
I. The Master?s New Strategy 
In his introduction to Albert Memmi?s The Colonizer and the Colonized, Jean-Paul Sartre  
explains how the guilt-ridden colonizer (the dominant, usurping force) can only exonerate 
himself and justify his actions through ?the systematic pursuit of the ?dehumanization? of the 
colonized? (xxvi-xxvii).7  Memmi himself warns of the dangerous desperation that the colonizer 
                                                            
7Sartre also mentions the unavoidable and reciprocal self-dehumanization of the colonizer seeking to dehumanize 
the colonized:  ?[S]ince he denies humanity in others, he regards it everywhere as his enemy.  To handle this, the 
colonizer must assume the opaque rigidity and imperviousness of stone.  In short, he must dehumanize himself, as 
well? (xxviii). 
6 
creates for himself upon realizing his being caught between his wanting to disown the colonized 
?while their existence is indispensible to his own,? and that, having chosen to maintain the 
colonial system, the colonizer ?must contribute more vigor to its defense that would have been 
needed to dissolve it completely? (54).  Within the Faustian pact that is colonialism, the 
colonizer8 thus becomes a monster of his own making, whose relentlessness and adaptability?
here, as the New Overseer?is evidence of his absolute need for the colonized as his slaves.  
Whatever form that the slavery assumes, and whatever methods are undertaken by the enslaver, 
he, as a colonizing force, must continually absolve and justify himself not only by promoting his 
own supposed virtues and superiority, but by degrading and dehumanizing the colonized 
population as well.  The persistence of suffering and discrimination experienced by African-
Americans in particular beyond literal slavery is proof of the oppressor?s entrapment within the 
?circle? of the colonial apparatus (54).  To attest to his own humanity, then, the colonizer must 
render the colonized subject ?hardly a human being,? even an ?object,? having ultimately 
succumbed to the colonizer?s ?supreme ambition? of the colonized?s existing ?only as a function 
of the needs of the colonizer, i.e., be transformed into a pure colonized? (86). 
In a 1940 letter to Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison seems to pick up on this importance of  
dehumanization as a part of the colonizing process:  
He, Bigger, has what Hegel called the ?indignant consciousness? and because of 
this he is more human than those who sent him to his death; for it was they, not 
he, who fostered the dehumanizing conditions which shaped his personality.  
When the ?indignant consciousness? becomes the ?theoretical consciousness? 
indignant man is aware of his historical destiny and fights to achieve it.  Would 
                                                            
8I use ?colonizer? in place of Memmi?s more specific term of ?colonialist,? which he defines as ?only a colonizer 
who agrees to be a colonizer? (45). 
7 
that all Negroes were psychologically as free as Bigger and as capable of positive 
action! 
Bigger Thomas, within the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, is clearly the slave, whose ?indignant 
consciousness? springs from a burgeoning self-consciousness.  Hegel?s outlining of the master-
slave relationship within an existential framework can easily be appropriated for a postcolonial 
point of view to examine the problematic relationship between the colonizer and the colonized?
specifically, between the dominant white culture and its black subjects (between the white master 
and the black slave).  Hegel?s master-slave dialectic is especially helpful within a postcolonial 
context since it is a relationship that is inherently self-defeating?doomed from the start, with 
what seems an inevitable turn toward crisis and revolution, as history has so often proved.  
Viewed through this postcolonial lens, Hegel?s explanation of the master-slave dialectic can be 
divided into a few key stages:  the defining of the initial colonial situation, the realization of what 
I call the ?colonial dilemma? and the true relationship between master and slave on the part of 
the master, and that same realization on the part of the slave. 
 Both master and slave begin in the colonial situation as two unequal and opposing 
entities, with ?their reflection into a unity [?] not yet [?] achieved,? one being ?the 
independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself,? the other ?the dependent 
consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another?; the ?lord?9 is the 
?consciousness existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness,? 
the ?bondsman? (633).  The slave?s service is in itself ?impure and unessential? (634), an action 
done within his relationship to the master, making that action not his own but the master?s action 
by virtue of his rule over the slave.  The outcome, then, is ?a recognition that is one-sided and 
                                                            
9In Alix Strachey?s translation of Hegel, the master is the ?lord [Herr]? and the slave is the ?bondsman [Knecht]? 
(633). 
8 
unequal,? with the slave?s consciousness rendered unessential ?by its dependence on a specific 
existence? (634)?namely, his self-obliterating servitude.  But the master achieves his very self-
recognition through the slave?s consciousness of his servitude; the master, as it turns out, needs 
the slave, and therein lies his colonial dilemma?for when confronted with the slave, the master 
realizes that his own consciousness within the master-slave relationship is ?not an independent 
consciousness, but a dependent one,? the ?truth? of which is provided by ?the servile 
consciousness of the bondsman? (634).  And this realization, of course, threatens to work both 
ways, for ?just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so 
too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is; as a 
consciousness forced back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly 
independent consciousness? (634).  Servitude, as it turns out, is also a self-consciousness, one 
whose position holds more power than it may have initially realized?hence Douglass? 
understanding that his defending himself against Covey will go unreported because of Covey?s 
own fear of losing his reputation as an effective overseer and slave-breaker.  This is what Paul 
Gilroy refers to in The Black Atlantic when he returns to the example of Douglass? confrontation 
with Covey to explains how Douglass makes the master ?the representative of a ?consciousness 
that is repressed within itself?,? and how, as an author, Douglass transforms Hegel?s 
?metanarrative of power? into a ?metanarrative of emancipation? (60). 
What the master apparently fails to take into consideration is how the tactics of fear so 
typically involved with subjugation actually create and exacerbate self-consciousness in those 
upon whom those tactics are imposed.  The ?pure universal moment? created by the subject?s 
fear of death, ?the absolute Lord,? allows for the ?absolute melting-away of everything stable,? 
and this is the ?essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, [and] pure being-for-
9 
itself? (635)?in other words, what was initially thought to define the place of the master within 
the dialectic!  The slave?s fear of the master leads to self-consciousness and self-realization, 
which leads to the slave?s awareness of the master?s dependency upon him within the master-
slave relationship; in a one-on-one master-slave relationship?the norm in the case of nineteenth-
century slave narratives?the master?s methods for oppression are ultimately counterproductive, 
often planting the seeds of his own undoing.  The urban overseer of the twentieth century would 
then need a new strategy, a new kind of panopticism?one more subtle and insidious, and less 
one-to-one?to maintain his dominant position. 
 
II. White Panopticism:  Covey Everywhere 
Confronted with the urban space, the African-American fleeing the South to find refuge 
in the North finds what is perhaps an even more daunting version of what he had hoped to 
escape.  This new environment in the North seems, in fact, to have honed and refined many of 
the mechanisms and institutions of southern slavery?in a fashion and to a degree that is all the 
more deceptive and disorienting.  Rather than the obvious seclusion afforded by the plantation 
and its isolated rural landscape, the city allows for a more paradoxical hidden-ness?a public 
hiding in plain sight afforded by the convoluted windings of its labyrinthine streets and 
anonymity within large crowds.  The overseers of this northern slavery are, then, even more 
difficult to locate; and, given the city?s technological and bureaucratic sophistication, the New 
Overseer?s seeming powers of constant surveillance are much closer to the truth than the illusion 
created by the older and more crude strategies of a Covey. 
Yes, Edward Covey is everywhere now.  It is a new time, with the slave replaced by the 
black migrant; but also with a new slavery, a New Overseer, and a new white panopticism?
10 
hence the need for a new slave narrative.  Douglass himself attests to how his experiences in the 
North certainly did not mark the end of his problems; once in New York City, he soon learns that 
he is ?still in an enemy?s land,? having been told by a runaway slave ?that the city was now full 
of southerners, returning from the springs; that the black people in New York were not to be 
trusted; that there were hired men on the lookout for fugitive from slavery, and who, for a few 
dollars, would betray me into the hands of the slave-catchers; that I must trust no man with my 
secret? (My Bondage 249).  Beyond this immediate danger, which he will prove to surmount, 
however, are the longer-lasting effects of a migrant?s being confronted with the urban North: 
A sense of my loneliness and helplessness crept over me, and covered me with 
something bordering on despair.  In the midst of thousands of my fellow-men, and 
yet a perfect stranger!  In the midst of human brothers, and yet more fearful of 
them than of hungry wolves!  I was without home, without friends, without work, 
without money, and without any definite knowledge of which way to go, or where 
to look for succor.  (249) 
Loneliness, uncertainty, and poverty are the key grievances here, and poverty is the most 
tangible; it proves to be the embittering commonality between himself and the poor white 
apprentices who beat him over job competition.  But loneliness, uncertainty, and poverty 
together, however, prove to be the defining features of the North?s ?new slavery.?   
Similarly, upon reaching New York, Harriet Jacobs is discombobulated by the ?noise of 
the great city? (318) and is surprised by the apparent general lack of alarm and even notice given 
to people ?screaming fire in the streets? (321) even before realizing that the city is ?swarming 
with Southerners, some of whom might recognize [her]? (337).  Dr. Flint himself even makes a 
visit to New York in an attempt to find her, and a letter from Emily Flint, her former mistress? 
11 
daughter, makes it clear to her that Dr. Flint?s family had been tracking her movements, even her 
trip to Europe (336, 352).  And this was all, as Jacobs writes, before the passing of the Fugitive 
Slave Law!10  Jacobs? case, of course, is complicated and made more particular by her gender, 
which makes her a more obvious and vulnerable candidate for sexual predation, exploitation, and 
abuse.  Motherhood too becomes an additional worry, as well as a point of psychological 
manipulation and intimidation to be potentially used against her by her (mostly male) pursuers.11 
The mode, the mechanism, which creates migrants? urban grievances, however, is what 
Farah Jasmine Griffin calls ?urban power,? which ?separates and categorizes individuals? and 
?sustains a discourse around race, sex, and desire which confines the black migrant? (102).  This 
power manifests itself as urban segregation12 and points toward forces far more human and 
intentional than those associated with naturalism, in which the mysterious forces acting upon the 
characters seem almost supernatural in their apparent arbitrariness.  In a specifically African-
American context, these conscious and human forces?landlords, housing agents, politicians, 
local businessmen, law enforcement, etc.?are actively willing to ?resort to the use of force and 
repression when necessary? (Griffin 102).  The more hidden and insidious nature of this new 
slavery not only seems a continuation of the old slavery; many conclude that it is, in fact, 
worse?from Douglass? account of some runaway slaves ?preferring the actual rule of their 
masters, to the life of loneliness, apprehension, hunger, and anxiety, which meets them on their 
                                                            
10After the Fugitive Slave Law is actually passed, she is lucky enough to be sheltered by someone who is against it 
(362).  More could certainly be said here concerning the panopticism in Dr. Flint?s specific machinations to isolate 
and ?break? Harriet, but it is perhaps more appropriate to save such details for Chapter 3, which is devoted 
specifically to Ann Petry. 
11As the same sort of female counterpoint to the Frederick Douglass narrative as Ann Petry is to both Richard 
Wright and Ralph Ellison, the special case of Jacobs will be further discussed in the third chapter, which is devoted 
to Petry. 
12The collect-and-quarantine methodology of housing discrimination in particular calls to mind how the system of 
colonialism, in its begrudging need of a perpetual supply of the colonized, ?wills simultaneously the death and the 
multiplication of its victims? (Sartre xxvii).  Memmi even specifically mentions living conditions as a chief means 
through which the colonizer denies liberty to the colonized (85-86).  
12 
first arrival in a free state? (My Bondage 250), to Jake Jackson, the protagonist of Wright?s Lawd 
Today!, who concludes that the only difference between the North and the South is ?them guys 
down there?ll kill you, and these up here?ll let you starve to death? (180).  Blacks coming north, 
from runaway slaves to Great-Migration migrants, would experience a profound disillusionment 
in realizing how ?their search for a freer space [had] led to a space where they are confined in 
ways they had never imagined? (Griffin 102).  The migrant?s disillusionment is one chiefly born 
of a frustration with the more indirect tactics of the North?s white panoptic power.  Its closer-to-
actual omnipresence (as opposed to the South?s illusion of omnipresence) is virtually a given 
because of the elusiveness of its source; it becomes, then, almost another part of the scenic urban 
environment, like the streets, skyscrapers, and even the sky?an unquestioned, unconfronted, and 
often unnoticed part of the background, like the city?s very fiber.  And to the black migrant, of 
course, this assumption is white.  This is in accordance with George Lipsitz, who says, 
?Whiteness is everywhere in U.S. culture, but it is very hard to see [?] As the unmarked 
category against which difference is constructed, whiteness never has to speak its name, never 
has to acknowledge its role as an organizing principle in social and cultural relations? (1).  In 
other words, as the representative emblem of the dominant culture, whiteness is the given, what 
goes without saying; as Richard Dyer explains in White:  ?As long as race is something only 
applied to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we 
function as a human norm.  Other people are raced, we are just people? (1).  But, as Lipsitz 
elaborates, this is no passively acquired boon of chance, but something much more orchestrated 
and sinister:  ?Conscious and deliberate actions have institutionalized group identity in the 
United States, not just through the dissemination of cultural stories, but also through the creation 
13 
of social structures that generate economic advantages for European Americans through the 
possessive investment in whiteness? (2). 
The value placed upon whiteness as a result of such an investment on the part of the 
dominant culture grows out of a shrewd desire to maintain social, cultural, and economic power; 
and as the playing field on which this power is to be maintained changes?say, as a result of a 
Civil War, the abolishing of slavery, and ensuing civil rights movements?so must the white 
hegemony?s methods for maintaining its power.  As Lipsitz points out, ?There has always been 
racism in the United States, but it has not always been the same racism.  Racism has changed 
over time, taking on different forms and serving different social purposes in each time period? 
(4).  Furthermore, it is a sad fact and a sobering testimony to the desperate ingenuity of white 
hegemony that even the most successful of antiracist mobilizations seem to always inspire 
?reactionary forces? which help to engineer ?a renewal of racism in new forms during 
succeeding decades? (5).  These new forms of racism bring with them a new form of white 
panopticism, a specifically urban brand that is much more elusive, widely disseminated, and less 
isolated than the rural kind demonstrated by Edward Covey and Dr. Flint in Douglass? and 
Jacobs? narratives, respectively?and more obviously akin to the panopticism discussed by 
Foucault.   
The development of one form of white panopticism (urban) from another (rural) 
coincides with the development of one facet of American Gothicism13 from another?from the 
                                                            
13In referring to the American Gothic tradition, I mean not only the most obvious  examples but the tropes of those 
examples and their presence within and influence upon other, less obvious examples?i.e. works with a more 
arguably  ?gothic? status, that might more quickly or easily fall under another  category?such as naturalism, crime 
fiction, etc.  Moreover, the qualifier American in American Gothic already calls attention to the reappropriating of 
the old European tropes within a new national context; the American Gothic got its start as a reappropriated, bastard 
genre of tropes.  Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith demonstrated both soberly and humorously their awareness of 
such arguments over purism by including Maurice Levy?s ??Gothic? and the Critical Idiom? as the first essay in their 
collection Gothick Origins and Innovations.  In it, Levy laments how the word ?gothic? has ?shown a prodigious 
capacity for adaptation and an uncommon appetite for conquering new semantic space? (9).  However, even Levy 
14 
dungeon-like horrors within the isolation of the plantation so often depicted in slave narratives,14 
to the terrifying sense of paranoia and lack of privacy created by the far less easily located 
sources of surveillance within a large city15; in short, from a plantation gothic to an urban gothic. 
The Gothicism of plantation life was certainly not lost on Douglass, particularly in his 
description, in My Bondage and My Freedom, of Colonel Edward Lloyd?s ?home plantation,? 
which sounds like something right out of the European Gothic, the ominous and autonomous 
castle with God-knows-what going on behind its walls:  
In its isolation, seclusion, and self-reliant independence, Col. Lloyd?s plantation 
resembles what the baronial domains were, during the middle ages in Europe.  
Grim, cold, and unapproachable by all genial influences from communities 
without, there it stands; full three hundred years behind the age, in all that relates 
to humanity and morals.  (50) 
Indeed, Paul Gilroy points out how Douglass ?conceived of the slave plantation as an archaic 
institution out of place in the modern world? (59), as a perverse preserving ground for barbarity 
that should have no place in a supposedly civilized and modern society.  Colonel Lloyd?s ?home 
plantation? is but one example of ?certain secluded and out-of-the-way places [?] seldom 
visited by a single ray of healthy public sentiment,? where slavery can be ?indecent without 
shame, cruel without shuddering, and murderous without apprehension or fear of exposure? (My 
                                                                                                                                                                                                
concludes that ?another voice in me speaks a different pitch [and] whispers into my reluctant ears that life after all is 
movement, that words belong to no one, that each generation has a right to project onto them the cultural and 
fantasmal images of its own choice? (15). 
14According to Leslie Fiedler, American literature, of all the fiction of the West, is ?bewilderingly and 
embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic?a literature of darkness and the 
grotesque in a land of light and affirmation? (29).  Particularly for African-Americans, however, the horrors depicted 
(rather, documented) in slave narratives and in all African-American literature to follow those narratives is much 
closer to home; the sadism, violence, and grotesquerie are painfully real-life. 
15In American Gothic Fiction:  An Introduction, Alan Lloyd-Smith uses the billboard of the ?panoptican optician Dr. 
T.J. Eckleburgh? presiding over the ?Valley of Ashes? in F. Scott Fitzgerald?s The Great Gatsby as an example of a 
typical American urban gothic trope (1). 
15 
Bondage 48).  The plantation, then, acts as a kind of micro-state in its seclusion from prying eyes 
and wagging tongues, complete with its own very rigid class system??SLAVEHOLDERS, 
SLAVES and OVERSEERS? (My Bondage 49)?and virtual economic self-sufficiency:  ?Thus, 
even the glimmering and unsteady light of trade, which sometimes exerts a civilizing influence, 
is excluded from this ?tabooed? spot? (My Bondage49).  And adjoining micro-states certainly are 
not going to disapprove of their neighbor?s atrocities, if Colonel Lloyd is any example (which, of 
course, he is): 
Nearly all the plantations or farms in the vicinity of the ?home plantation? of Col. 
Lloyd belong to him; and those which do not, are owned by personal friends of 
his, as deeply interested in maintaining the slave system, in all its rigor, as Col. 
Lloyd himself.  Some of his neighbors are said to be even more stringent than he 
is.  (49) 
Public sentiment, to Douglass, is exactly what the plantation, by design, works to avoid; this is 
the motivation behind its isolation, and its white panopticism functions within this sequestered 
space. 
Within the urban landscape, panopticism finds a more complex playground; the sheer 
size and attractiveness of the metropolis provides a concentration of the masses which intensifies 
all of the older gothic effects of the wilderness?paranoia, primal regression, lawlessness, 
distortion of perception, racial doubling and ambiguity, etc.?while also adding the newer effects 
of labyrinthine complexity, anonymity, crime, and the underworld.  Within the cityscape, the 
dimensions of panoptic surveillance as well as its scope are reversed and intensified, as Foucault 
explains: 
16 
In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions?
to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide?it preserves only the first and 
eliminates the other two.  Full lighting and the eye of the supervisor capture better 
than darkness, which ultimately protected.  Visibility is a trap.  (200) 
The public is not avoided or deflected but embraced and used.  The public, in a sense, becomes 
the very agent of white panopticism in the cityscape; rather than having the plantation?s more 
easily located centers of white supremacy (slaveholder and overseer), the public provides the 
matrix for Foucault?s ?punitive city??in fact, a ?coercive institution??behind whose 
overwhelming vastness the now more elusive dominant culture can seemingly hide and project 
itself multiform, as ?hundreds of tiny theatres of punishment [?] tirelessly repeat[ing] the code? 
of difference and punishment (113).  As the new and defining tool of white hegemony, this urban 
white panopticism, like Foucault?s Panopticon and punitive city, is a functioning of the dominant 
culture?s penal power, ?distributed throughout the social space [?] present everywhere as scene, 
spectacle, sign, discourse,? to the extent that its power is no longer seen as that of certain 
individuals over others, ?but as an immediate reaction of all in relation to the individual? (129-
130). 
Urban white panopticism works, then, through a sense of permanent, exhaustive, 
omnipresent surveillance??domination-observation? (305)??capable of making all visible, as 
long as it could itself remain invisible [?] transform[ing] the whole social body into a field of 
perception:  thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, 
hierarchized network? (214).  White hegemony is thus disindividualized, dispersed, its power 
?not so much in a personal as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, 
gazes? (202)?virtually beyond location and made analogous with the cityscape itself.  This 
17 
defines the power of this ?New Overseer? and his white panopticism is the frustrating sense of 
nowhereness created by his intimidating illusion of everywhereness?that he is so everywhere 
that he cannot be pinpointed and found to make the kind of one-on-one stand which had so 
defined Douglass in the face of Edward Covey.  For his omnipresence to be revealed for the 
myth that it is, the overseer must be located and confronted, and with the New Overseer this is 
virtually impossible; his omnipresence is, after all, part of the very culture that so torturously 
influences and Other-izes the protagonists of Wright, Petry, and Ellison.  Whether it be Buckley 
in Wright?s Native Son, Junto in Petry?s The Street, or the Brotherhood in Ellison?s Invisible 
Man, the migrant?s (the new slave?s) victory over the New Overseer (if there is a victory at all, 
which arguably occurs only in Ellison?s novel) is certainly more ambiguous than Douglass? and 
Jacobs? victories. 
Equally key to the New Overseer?s successful avoidance of becoming demythicized?in 
accordance with Foucault?s description of the hegemony?s dissemination of its panoptic power 
within the society it seeks to control?is the internalization by the urban populace, especially its 
African-American members, of the white panopticism?s criteria for enforcing and maintaining its 
expected Norm.16  The punishment dealt by the New Overseer, in his seeming hiddenness and in 
true Foucauldian fashion, must not appear ?as the arbitrary effect of a human power? but assume 
?the form of a natural sequence? (105)?acting, in accordance with the progression of these three 
authors from one of their key and immediate literary influences, more in line with a naturalistic 
force than a human force.  It is, in fact, part of the slightly less active and direct alternative to 
forcefully maintaining the norms of the status quo?what Foucault calls the ?discipline-
                                                            
16This maintaining of the Norm is in accordance with Memmi?s third major ideological component of colonialism.  
For the sake of unity, I will include the first two as well in quoting him:  ?one, the gulf between the culture of the 
colonialist and the colonized; two, the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the colonialist; three, the 
use of these supposed differences as standards of absolute fact? (71, italics added). 
18 
mechanism? (vs. the more obvious, confrontational option of the ?discipline-blockade?17), which 
must ?improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design 
of subtle coercion for a society to come [?] from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of 
generalized surveillance? (209).  This panoptic system can be seemingly egalitarian, but one 
supported by ?those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian? (222); the 
subtlety of its machinations creates an illusion of softness and leniency, even fairness.  This new 
system of slavery can be so seemingly gentle in its coercion as to produce oblivious subjects?
ones unaware, or at least not completely or consciously aware, that they are slaves?in the case 
of black migrants, too close to theslaves of the old South for comfort. 
 However, there is another side to the populace?s internalization of panopticism?s effects:  
their gradual?often very gradual?coming into awareness of it, which produces a subliminal 
brand of terror akin to Freud?s ?uncanny,?18 often in the form of a gradually increasing paranoia.  
Given the New Overseer?s seeming omnipresence, one wonders who his agents are, thus 
rendering all glances?from friend, foe, and stranger alike?suspect.  The dominant power 
structure works, then, as a ?network of gazes? (171).  But the subject?s dawning paranoia is ever 
kept at bay, just on the brink of conscious acknowledgment, by his/her own insistent denial; and 
this is the key to normalization?rather, the Panopticon?s institutional implementation of 
?normalizing judgment? (183), or the ?power of the Norm? (184).  Normalization maximizes the 
efficiency of panopticism, creating the sort of self-preserving and opportunistic prejudice within 
the populace necessary for its self-separation; the key to normalization, then, is to trick the 
                                                            
17According to Foucault, the discipline-blockade works within ?the enclosed institution, [is] established on the edges 
of society, [and is] turned inward toward negative functions:  arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending 
time? (Discipline 209). 
18That term so virtually synonymous with the gothic, defined by Freud as ?that class of the frightening which leads 
back to what is known of old and long familiar? (930), the recognized resurfacing of something repressed that 
arouses dread and horror. 
19 
powerless into doing the work of the powerful, to make it easier for those in power to find those 
whose interests are the most contrary to theirs?those with the least power, the most 
marginalized; and, therefore, those who pose the greatest threat.  The ?normalizing gaze,? or the 
?examination,? then, acts as ?a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to 
punish? (184), and provides the unit making up what Foucault calls the ?great carceral 
continuum??the extension of the hegemony?s disciplinary power to punish ?from the penal 
institution to the entire social body? (297), creating a ?carceral archipelago? in which it is 
possible ?to pass naturally from disorder to offence and back from a transgression of the law to a 
slight departure from a rule, an average, a demand, a norm? (298).  Through normalization, after 
internalization, the panoptic exercise of hegemonic power becomes not only tolerated, but 
expected, even correct, the ?level from which it becomes natural and acceptable to be punished? 
lowered by the ?universality of the carceral? (303).  
But what is perhaps the most diabolically ingenious aim of the dominant culture?s 
panopticism is something hit upon by Homi Bhabha in his The Location of Culture?that the 
awareness, especially the conspicuous awareness, itself of the mechanisms of panoptic 
surveillance can become a target of marginalization; the subject (the slave) who demonstrates a 
consciousness of his being such is the greatest Other:  
Forms of social and psychic alienation and aggression?madness, self-hate, 
treason, violence?can never be acknowledged as determinate and constitutive 
conditions of civil authority, or as the ambivalent effects of the social instinct 
itself.  They are always explained away as alien presences, occlusions of historical 
progress, the ultimate misrecognition of Man.  (61-62) 
20 
The black subject (referring back to the Hegelian dynamic) becomes alienated within his own 
community, with the white master counting on the subject?s fellow slaves? wish to not be made 
conscious of their plight, of how miserable their lives have been made by a master who they 
cannot locate and directly confront (like Douglass).  Within their sense of powerlessness in the 
face of the master?s seeming omnipresence and omnipotence, the fellow slaves of a protagonist 
such as Bigger Thomas or Cross Damon (from Wright?s The Outsider) tend to abandon their 
peer out of an urgent refusal to dwell on injustices that they have no power to right, if not more 
directly and violently push him/her away; consciousness of their slave status is the ?dialectical 
real [?] apprehended as unwelcome? (69) described by Jacques Lacan in his Four Fundamental 
Concepts of Psychoanalysis.  The result is a self-policing born of self-preservation on the part of 
the subjects under surveillance, making any Norm-averting troublemakers more conspicuous and 
easy to locate by the white hegemony?s disciplinary power.  White panopticism?s power has 
become so internalized by the subjects upon whom it is acting that they become complicit in 
their own surveillance and judgment; they have quite thoroughly accepted the ?lactification? (29) 
described by Franz Fanon in his Black Skin, White Masks?that is, the desire to be white?and 
its ensuing ?affective erethism? (41), Fanon?s term for the inferiority complex born of wanting 
white admission, part of the ?tripod? of anxiety, aggression, and devaluation of self (54). 
In the case of black migrants, and African-Americans in general, the dominant white 
culture must criminalize, pathologize, and altogether Other-ize?all in order to externalize?any 
living symbol which poses a threat to its power or inspires in it any self-conscious historical 
guilt.  It is as Fanon says, ?The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me [?] I am 
fixed? (95)?and one of the most reliable and effective fixation tools of urban white panopticism 
is ghettoization, which will be much further discussed in Chapter Two, but certainly merits a 
21 
brief explanation here.  According to Foucault, if ?discipline proceeds from the distribution of 
individuals in space,? then this distribution would certainly require ?enclosure [?] the protected 
place of disciplinary monotony? (141).  Both the separation and concentration effects of the 
ghetto make for a veritable crucible of the white panoptic effects?the categorization, 
internalization, normalization, otherization, and ?affective erethism? already discussed.  And out 
of the crucible of the ghetto comes another refined tool of white panopticism consistent with 
Foucault?s ideas, a further means of recruiting both extension of its surveillance powers and 
diversion of attention from those surveillance powers?delinquency.  Coerced within 
panopticism?s power to punish and granted a few relieving steps away from his crushing 
marginalization, the delinquent becomes a new kind of slave, one that provides testimony to the 
hegemony?s economy and shrewdness:  ?The ideal would be for the convict to appear as a sort of 
rentable property:  a slave at the service of all.  Why would society eliminate a life and a body 
that it could appropriate?? (Discipline109). 
As part of the ?penitentiary technique,? the delinquent becomes the New Overseer?s tool 
of diversionary illegality??a politically or economically less dangerous?and, on occasion, 
usable?form of illegality? (277).  Foucault discusses at length the delinquent?s usefulness ?in 
relation to other illegalities? (279)?the greater, systematic, institutional crimes perpetrated by 
the isolated and insular ruling class, ?dedicated to a violent criminality, of which the poorer 
classes are often the first victims, hemmed in on every side by the police, exposed to long prison 
sentences, followed by a permanently ?specialized? life? (279).  Out of these targeted poorer 
classes comes delinquency, though which the ?alien, dangerous and often hostile world? of the 
ruling class ?obstructs or at least maintains at a sufficiently low level everyday illegal practices 
(petty thefts, minor acts of violence, routine acts of law-breaking)? (279).  Delinquency, then, is 
22 
a controlled illegality, an agent for the illegality of the dominant groups, and thus represents ?a 
diversion of illegality for the illicit circuits of profit and power of the dominant class? (280).  The 
delinquent is no outlaw?that is, outside of the law; he is, as Foucault says, ?from the very 
outset, in the law, at the very heart of the law [?] an institutional product? (301).  He may be 
one of many ?informers, police spies, strike-breakers,? but his diversionary function is always 
the same:  ?to maintain the hostility of the poorer classes to delinquents? (285) and not the 
dominant classes who are the true orchestrating criminal masterminds, using the subjects? own 
sense of inferiority and self-loathing to isolate crime ?as a monstrosity and to depict it as the 
work of the poorest class? (289). 
 The hierarchization and doubling of the delinquency born of marginalization and 
ghettoization can become quite complicated and intricate?a grand and discombobulating system 
of overseers working for other overseers who likely are not even aware that they are working 
towards someone else?s ends.  Again, this will be discussed and examined more extensively in 
the next chapter, which is devoted almost exclusively to Richard Wright?s work?with black 
criminals, black intellectuals, and Communists of both races serving as scapegoats and patsies 
for much more powerful and elusive institutional powers representing the dominant white 
culture.  What the works of Wright, Petry, and Ellison demonstrate, however, is a working 
through and a working towards a new counter-strategy on the part of the new slave.  In the spirit 
of Gilroy?s description of Douglass? story as ?metanarrative,?19 a big part of this strategy would 
have to be authorial, stylistic. 
 
III. A Terribly Honest Reaction 
                                                            
19See the top of page 7. 
23 
With 4,500 copies sold in the first 5 months of its existence and repeated reissues in 
America, followed then by English, Irish, and French editions, the Narrative of Frederick 
Douglass was, as William L. Andrews says in To Tell a Free Story, ?the great enabling text of 
the first century of Afro-American autobiography? (138).  Andrews also sees a change in tone 
and choice of details when comparing Douglass? Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom; 
consider this passage from My Bondage and My Freedom, in which Douglass hints at justifying 
slaves? murder of their masters: 
The slaveholder, kind or cruel, is a slaveholder still?the every hour violator of 
the just and inalienable rights of man; and he is, therefore, every hour silently 
whetting the knife of vengeance for his own throat.  He never lisps a syllable in 
commendation of the fathers of this republic, nor denounces any attempted 
oppression of himself, without inviting the knife to his own throat, and asserting 
the rights of rebellion for his own slaves.  (197) 
The implicit threat in this passage anticipates the audacity which Wright, Petry, Ellison, and their 
successors would embrace so wholeheartedly almost a century later.  But the motivation behind 
this new and shocking tone comes not only from his direct experience of oppression from 
slaveholders and overseers, but also from the political censorship placed upon him by his 
abolitionist colleagues, which would lead to his eventual breaking with them.   
Between the Narrative and My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass was coming off a 
triumphal British speaking tour and experiencing opposition from abolitionists to his wanting to 
start an antislavery weekly paper (To Tell 214).  As Andrews points out: 
Douglass learned early that abolitionists had an old-fashioned prejudice against 
letting an ex-slave comment freely on the significance of his experience as he 
24 
narrated the facts of his life [?] In a society as hostile to blacks as the North was 
in the 1840s, an ex-slave who hoped for a good sale of his narrative was not likely 
to embarrass his white sponsors or contradict his audience?s expectations by 
talking about slavery or himself in an unsanctioned manner.  (107-109) 
Having become something of an outsider whose interests, as it turned out, lay apart from both 
those of proslavery forces and those of both black and white antislavery forces, Douglass found 
himself at a crossroads in the early 1850s.  And his decision to use a new approach in My 
Bondage and My Freedom reflects a more complete embracing of what Andrews presents as 
three sources for the authority that justifies the black man?s ?declaration of independence?:  ?(1) 
the act of having claimed it?; ?(2) his allegiance to the self rather than to the other, the reader?; 
and ?(3) his definition of truth and falsehood as that which is consistent with intuitive perception 
and needs, not as absolute standards? (103).  Given the emergence of a new slavery with a new 
white panopticism, African-American authors of the twentieth century would have to embrace 
these as well?to rediscover the authorial and stylistic strategies of literary presentation offered 
by the old slave narrative and apply them, with even more intensity, within the new contexts of 
African-American social realism and modernism.  
So what is it that makes these three particular authors?Wright, Petry, and Ellison? 
so worthy of this focus?  The obvious answers are not only their chronological proximity to each 
other, but also the significance of their mid-twentieth-century historical placement.  All three 
experienced the tensions arising from the disparity between the national prosperity emerging 
from World War II and the continuing discrimination against black Americans?especially 
housing discrimination; as Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. bluntly sums up the sharp difference between 
civil rights legislation and abject living conditions for black people, ?the promised land was a 
25 
slum? (33).  These tensions would often erupt violently, especially in the form of race riots, and 
all three authors allude to race riots in their works:  for example, Wright?s Jake Jackson recalls 
when black homes were being bombed during the Chicago race riots (Lawd Today! 172); Petry 
dedicates an entire short story, ?In Darkness and Confusion,? to the 1943 Harlem riots; and the 
climactic conclusion of Invisible Man involves a race riot in Harlem.  Such violent reactions are 
evidence of a perhaps keener awareness of a rigid social hierarchy founded on a highly rigged 
system of racial chauvinism and socioeconomic mobility.  And such violence translated into 
literature takes the form of a long-earned and overdue ?terrible honesty? on the part of mid-
twentieth-century African-American authors like Wright, Petry, and Ellison.  
In Terrible Honesty, Ann Douglas uses her titular phrase to encapsulate the generally 
brutal, irreverent, shocking, and iconoclastic attitude and aesthetics with which American 
modernist writing is so closely identified.  She is quick to point out, however, how African-
American writers of the early and ?high? modernist period are an exception to the rule of 
?terrible honesty?: 
  The blazoning of truths that one?s society would prefer to deny is by definition an  
  attention-grabbing, adversarial strategy, one most easily and effectively utilized  
by those whom society has no reason or desire to sacrifice, namely, its own 
chosen elite.  The New Negro was a figure with few claims on mainline 
America?s attention, interest, or sympathy.  If he insulted or displeased, he could 
be cut off, erased, without a thought or regret.  (104) 
For African-American modernist writers, especially those of the Harlem Renaissance, ?terrible 
honesty? was obviously riskier and less politically feasible?not only when faced with white 
patronage and public perception, but also with Harlem Renaissance leaders and spokespersons 
26 
uncomfortable with a warts-and-all presentation of black life from a public relations standpoint.  
After the Harlem Renaissance?s highpoint (the end of which was signaled by the 1929 stock 
market crash), however, Wright would prove to be far less cautious.  His boldness harkens back 
to an initiative taken by African-American writers just before the Harlem Renaissance in the 
post-bellum, pre-Harlem period; as William L. Andrews points out in his introduction to The 
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the leading characters in most African-American novels 
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ?almost always have a choice between self-
interest and self-sacrifice in the name of uplifting the race,? and generally, the choice is in favor 
of the latter, with ?usually, little soul-searching? (xviii).  As Andrews elaborates, what these 
characters might think and say in the privacy of their own hearts and minds is simply not a 
priority:  ?Burdened by a sense of their own obligation to speak for black America to white 
American, early African-American novelists could not allow their characters the moral of turning 
inward.  It was more important that they speak in public about public issues? (xviii).  To varying 
degrees, Wright, Petry, and Ellison are all very much inside their respective protagonists? heads, 
with primacy placed on their sufferings as individuals not only at the hands of oppressive white 
forces, but often at the hands of other African-Americans who have variably internalized the 
dominant white culture?s standards and norms.20  To varying degrees, a big part of these authors? 
?terrible honesty? is directed not only at a potential white audience, but fellow African-
Americans who might entrap them with a self-defensive, hyper-communal anti-individualism. 
                                                            
20Interestingly, Robert M. Dowling points out a significance in the progression from Dunbar?s The Sport of the Gods 
and Johnson?s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man that seems to anticipate a similar relationship between 
Native Son and Invisible Man; if Dunbar?s novel ?tracks the naturalistic slippery slope of a guileless country boy 
who evolves from well-meaning son and brother to gambling addict, violent drunk, and murderer,? Johnson?s novel 
?catenates the steps of a talented vagabond who stumbles into Tenderloin life and is able to take something 
productive from his experience [?] and move on? (21).  There are, a fter all, noticeable similarities between 
Dunbar?s Joe Hamilton and Wright?s Bigger Thomas (both are violent and murderous) and between Johnson?s ?ex-
colored? man and Ellison?s ?invisible? man (both of whom are never named and engage in some form of 
tricksterism to negotiate their new urban environments). 
27 
In 1940, Native Son was published and became a best-seller, changing ?American culture 
[?] forever,? according to Howe, making ?impossible? a ?repetition of the old lies? about the 
relationship and tensions between black and white Americans by bringing ?out into the open [?] 
the hatred, fear and violence? felt by both and assaulting ?the most cherished of American 
vanities:  the hope that the accumulated injustice of the past would bring with it no penalties? 
(98).  But the point of such risky narratives, ones that seem to confirm the worst racist 
stereotypes, is the anti-sentimentality which denies whites the consolation of romanticizing black 
urban plight and reacquaints them with their part in creating it; as Howe says of Native Son, 
Bigger is drawn ?from white fantasy and white contempt? and is ?the worst of Negro life 
accepted, then rendered a trifle conscious and thrown back at those who had made him what he 
[is]? (99).  It is the monster confronting Dr. Frankenstein with the reality of its presence, through 
the medium of ?terrible honesty? as a strategy against white panopticism and its methods of 
internalization and normalization; it is the strategy of the new slave narrative. 
 Fittingly, the candid artistic rendering of such open indignance, as well as an overall 
more confrontational tone and approach on the part of African-American authors, marks the 
seizing of a new initiative, a late-coming version of ?terrible honesty,? for African-American 
literature in the modern era.  And it all begins with Richard Wright and Native Son; he is the 
beginning of an audacity that would profoundly influence African-American writing even 
beyond Ellison.  What makes Wright?s Native Son such a significant work is not simply that it 
was written by an African-American author; Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Langston 
Hughes, Frances E.W. Harper, and even Frederick Douglass, among others, had couched in 
gothic terms and tropes their written descriptions of the black migrant?s disillusionment upon 
arriving North and confronting the city.  The crucial ingredient contributed by Wright is a 
28 
sustained, undisguised, and unflinchingly angry honesty; the gentle, polite approach was, for 
him, over.  It simply no longer worked.  James Baldwin perhaps explains it best in ?Alas, Poor 
Richard,? from Nobody Knows My Name: 
The violence is gratuitous and compulsive because the root of the violence is 
never examined.  The root is rage.  It is the rage, almost literally the howl, of a 
man who is being castrated [?] the great attention paid to the details of physical 
destruction reveal a terrible attempt to break out of the cage in which the 
American imagination has imprisoned him for so long.  (188) 
This calls to mind Hegel?s description of the fear which leads to the slave?s self-consciousness 
and self-realization:  ?In that experience [of fear] it [the slave-consciousness] has been quite 
unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been 
shaken to its foundations? (634).  The first chapter of Native Son is, after all, called ?Fear?; and 
in his artistic communication of the black subject?s fearful coming into consciousness of the truth 
within the master-slave relationship, Wright decides to be far from polite.   
No matter what their reaction to Wright and Native Son, the African-American authors 
who would succeed him were undeniably affected and influenced; from contemporaries of 
Wright such as Petry, Ellison, and Baldwin, to later writers such as Baraka and Morrison, 
African-American literature after 1940?particularly in the tradition of American urban gothic 
literature?would be far different had Wright not been, according to Irving Howe,?courageous 
enough to release the full weight of his anger? (99), the anger from which Margaret Walker says 
his ?daemonic genius? (53) springs forth.  It was the ?Native Son effect?really the Bigger 
Thomas effect,? as Lawrence P. Jackson calls it in The Indignant Generation, that ?stimulated an 
enormous growth in consciousness in American audiences and publishers.  The black critics 
29 
could not help but want Bigger to smash the lurid stereotype of Uncle Tom and Aunt Dinah, 
which they found insulting.  Bigger did replace the stereotype of Uncle Tom, and his brand of 
devil-may-care activism quickly made the techniques of patient black social uplift and the 
journals that carried the theme [?] outdated? (125).And it was all so deliberate, an antagonistic 
reaction?the seed of which was planted by a letter from the First Lady Mrs. Franklin Delano 
Roosevelt in which she enthusiastically praised and described her mawkish, ?unhappy? response 
to Wright?s far more safe and sentimental Uncle Tom?s Children; he knew, as Constance Webb 
describes, that ?when people could cry and feel sorry they rid themselves of the necessity for 
action, for trying to change the conditions under which black people lived? (168).  Hence the 
sadistic joy with which Wright presented Native Son; as Walker recounts of his describing the 
book to her just before its publication:  ?He said, ?Yes, I think it will shock people, and I love to 
shock people.?  He grinned gleefully and rubbed his hands together in anticipation? (124).  
Wright was downright giddy to finally have forsaken heroism, romance, and sentimentality in his 
presentation of the black urban condition??how a black underprivileged male in white 
American society truly feels? (Walker 148).  And he had foreshadowed this new level of honesty 
three years before Native Son?s publication with his ?Blueprint for Negro Writing? essay, in 
which he draws a stark contrast between most of the African-American writing of the past?
?enter[ing] the Court of Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show 
that the Negro was no inferior,? only to be ?received as though they were French poodles who do 
clever tricks? (1381)?versus what he saw as called for in the present.  Through his fiction, 
Wright, as Memmi would say, is taking the bolder of the ?two historically possible solutions? at 
the colonized subject?s disposal when confronted with colonial oppression??to reconquer all the 
dimensions which colonization tore away from him,? as opposed to assimilation (120).  The very 
30 
fact that white panoptic oppression has not ceased but has actually evolved since the 
Emancipation is, again, proof of the colonizer?s desperate insatiability and the self-destructively 
vicious cycle in which he finds himself.  As the threat against the existence of oppression 
increases, the more oppression itself increases, and the more the colonizing/enslaving force 
needs justification through debasing the colonized population; as Memmi concludes, this engine 
of colonialism will inevitably burn itself out through the colonized?s ultimate revolt:  ?The more 
he [the colonizer] must debase the colonized, the more guilty he feels, the more he must justify 
himself, etc.  How can he emerge from this increasingly explosive circle except by rupture, 
explosion?? (128).  The unprecedented shock that Native Son provides is that very rupture and 
explosion in a literary context. 
 The chief vehicle for Wright?s newer, more honest presentation is Bigger Thomas, the 
anti-Uncle Tom, who takes away from liberal whites the consolation of guilt and replaces it with 
a far more arresting, unsettling, and demanding truth?that underprivileged black Americans, if 
not all black Americans, as Howe states, ?were far from patient or forgiving, [?] were scarred 
by fear, [?] hated every moment of their suppression even when seeming most acquiescent, and 
[?] often enough [?] hated us, the decent and cultivated white men who from complicity or 
neglect shared in the responsibility for their plight? (98-99).  This element of warning in Bigger 
leads to another aspect of Wright?s work that separates him from other, earlier African-American 
literary renderings of black urban hardship:  in presenting Bigger Thomas to the white public as 
the culmination of all of their racist suspicions and guilty fears, he also makes Bigger 
representative of all black people who have suffered the discrimination and institutional violence 
of their urban migration experience; Wright seems to relishingly exploit whites? fear of not only 
individual but also collective black violence?of an imminent uprising, or a revolution.  McKay, 
31 
again, certainly proposed violence in his poem ?If We Must Die???And for their thousand 
blows deal one deathblow!??years before Wright, but the motive for that violence is purely 
defensive and given a heroic, underdog sense of pathos and romanticism:  ?If we must die, let it 
not be like hogs [?] O let us nobly die [?] Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!? (970)  
Then there is the combative language used by W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk to 
describe his aspirations for rising into the social acceptance and success usually reserved for 
whites:  ?But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them? 
(italics added), even though his true ends were nonviolent??by reading law, by healing the sick, 
by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head? (38).  But there is no such heroism or 
ultimate nonviolence with Bigger, with either his unintentional killing of Mary Dalton or the 
deliberate rape and killing of his girlfriend Bessie?nor is that heroism present with the vast 
majority of Wright?s other protagonists, for that matter, such as the cheating and wife-beating 
Jake Jackson of Lawd Today! or the ultimate surrender and self-betrayal of Fred Daniels in ?The 
Man Who Lived Underground.?21  The violence of Wright?s protagonists seems much more 
direct and instigating; the distance, elusiveness, and wide institutional dissemination of the 
discrimination perpetrated against American black migrants makes their in-fact reactionary 
violence appear more like a first blow.  Expanded to the collective, historical level, this smacks 
of a long overdue and long in-the-making payback?the apocalypse and judgment day that 
haunts the collective white American psyche and serves as the foundation for its guilt over past 
sins and its compensatory sentimentality. 
 Wright specifically warns of the dangers in the ?paternalistic attitude of whites? toward 
blacks in a 1945 Town Meeting radio debate, ?Are We Solving America?s Race Problem?? being 
the topic.  He says that white paternalism ?lulls whites into feelings of dangerous complacency 
                                                            
21First published in 1942, two years after Native Son. 
32 
about rising racial tensions,? that whites ?can no longer regard Negroes as a passive, obedient 
minority,? that the choice between ?a violent or a peaceful solution [?] depends upon the degree 
to which white Americans can purge their minds of the illusions that they own and know 
Negroes,? and that unless white Americans ?pry their minds out of their horse-and-buggy ways 
[?] violence may be upon us? (75).  Startlingly direct as these s tatements may be, they reveal 
and remind of the American concern in Wright?s African-Americanness; inescapably American 
himself, he too has an interest in a peaceful resolution (or at least an ultimately positive one); the 
gravity and strength of his warnings show how, contrary to white American opinion, he does not 
want American society to crumble as a result of its racial fissures either.  Fred Daniels? ?cold 
dread at the thought of the actions he knew he would perform? if he resurfaces in ?The Man Who 
Lived Underground? comes to mind (1439). 
 However, Wright continues to disturb by hinting at the uncomfortable reminder that, in 
American history, violent revolution has often been necessary for cultural transition.  This 
resulting uneasiness defines the African-American urban gothic tradition in the ?school? of 
Wright.  It haunts the works of his immediately-influenced contemporaries as well as his 
successors decades later; regardless of how they felt about Wright?s work and how they reacted 
to it, these other African-American writers are far less cautious about representing black anger 
and hatred toward whites, as well as the potential for an outbreak of violence, than black authors 
who had come before Wright.  Take Petry?s The Street, published only six years after Native 
Son, for example.  Lutie Johnson, who hates white people and blames them directly for her 
poverty and failed marriage, has a premonition of a full-blown riot after seeing a smashed store 
front:  ?She walked past, thinking that it was like a war that hadn?t got off to a start yet, though 
both sides were piling up ammunition and reserves and were now waiting for anything, any little 
33 
excuse, a gesture, a word, a sudden loud noise?and pouf!  it would start? (200).  Violence also 
seems to be the only remedy for Lutie?s anger after Mr. Crosse offers professional singing 
lessons for sex instead of money; she welcomes the ?roar? of the ?lurching, swaying? train, 
wishing it would ?go faster, make more noise, rock more wildly? (322).  Later, Lutie?s son Bub 
overhears an old black man say, ?The trouble with colored folks is they ain?t got no gumption.  
They ought to let white folks know they ain?t going to keep putting up with their nonsense? 
(341).  Then there is Amiri Baraka, who would up the ante of Wright?s brazenness with far more 
undisguised and openly confrontational language, referring to white liberal sentimentality and 
denial by white people of their historical oppression of black people as ?the propaganda of devils 
that they are not devils? in The System of Dante?s Hell (154) and beckoning white patrons 
toward their deaths in ?The Revolutionary Theatre?22:  ?WHITE BUSINESSMEN OF THE 
WORLD, DO YOU WANT TO SEE PEOPLE REALLY DANCING AND SINGING???  ALL 
OF YOU GO UP TO HARLEM AND GET YOURSELF KILLED.  THERE WILL BE 
DANCING AND SINGING, THEN, FOR REAL!!? (1901)  And ?Violent? Violet?s attempted 
mutilation of Dorcas? corpse for sleeping with her husband Joe in Toni Morrison?s Jazz appears 
to be the result of all of her past suffering and suppression; owning her violence, she says, ?that 
Violet is me!  The me that hauled hay in Virginia and handled a four-mule team in the brace [?] 
stood in cane fields in the middle of the night when the sound of it rustling hid the slither of the 
snakes and I stood still waiting for him [Joe] [?] the welts given me by a two -tone peckerwood 
because I was late in the field row the next morning? (96).  Clearly, post-Wright African-
American literature was more daring in its airing of historical and sociological grievances.  It 
was as though the floodgates of angry racial protest in literature were not only opened, but 
demolished.  
                                                            
22Both works by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka were first published in 1965. 
34 
 Obviously, this provocative edge gives Wright and his successors a curious place within 
American literature; they are both defined by and rebelling against their white canonical 
?colleagues.?  Unavoidably influenced by them, they pay begrudging homage while revising and 
reacting to their ideas and tropes through various intertextual variations and inversions.  The 
tension and angst felt by their protagonists, beginning with Wright?s Bigger Thomas, are but 
creative extensions of the same uneasiness they feel as black people who also happen to be 
American writers.  Within America, like their fictional creations, they are both victim and 
inheritor, and their art reflects a coming to grips with that fact.  At the heart of their authorial 
strategies, however, is what Louis S. Gross describes as the African-American writer?s 
dilemma??how to write within an oppressive cultural context without becoming either a 
cultural lapdog, or even more insidiously, to somehow support the culture which relegates you to 
the status of Other by defining you as the lack or absence of something within the dominant 
culture? (65).  This potential for internalizing and becoming complicit in one?s own cultural 
relegation is a significant risk for African-American authors, especially those who employ the 
gothic in an urban context; Wright presents Bigger, according to Ellison, as a ?near-subhuman 
indictment of white oppression [?] des igned to shock whites out of their apathy? (?The World 
and the Jug? 162), yet, as Thomas Heise points out, such depictions run the obvious risk of 
?merely confirm[ing] white fears and fantasies, rather than to deconstruct the politics? (129).   
Similarly, Wright?s depiction of working-class black people in Lawd Today!, for 
example, is far from flattering, if not outright self-loathing (the novel?s original title was 
Cesspool), and he seems to go out of his way to present individual black characters as ugly and 
unpleasant; Jake?s palms are ?dingy? (5), his ?fat black feet? spread ?like cobraheads upon the 
carpet,? his face is ?round as a full moon? and ?an oily expanse of blackness,? ?flabby pouches? 
35 
hang under his ?two cunning eyes,? the nostrils of his ?broad nose? gape ?militantly frontward 
like the barrels of a shotgun,? he has big lips that droop and tremble as he walks, has a big roll of 
neck fat, he has ?sticky and greasy? hair (9), and his wife calls him ?black and evil? (13).  And 
the novel ends on a violent and unresolved note, with the city?s (Chicago?s) icy wind ?whining 
and moaning like an idiot in a deep black pit? (219, italics added), complementing the eerily 
quiet aftermath of a domestic altercation in which Jake?s wife has defensively slashed him across 
the head with a jagged piece of windowpane.  The point, however, as will be further discussed in 
the next chapter, the point is not uncomplicated self-loathing, but of how the degradation 
perpetrated by the panoptic forces of the dominant white culture reduces its black subjects to a 
seemingly uncivilized and even subhuman level that reaffirms by example the dominant culture?s 
supposed superiority. 
Wright stands apart in terms of the previous African-American literary presentation of the 
urban landscape, for as much as Claude McKay presented the hardships of black people in the 
urban setting of Home to Harlem, that novel still retains a significant portion of the romance and 
glamour that Wright argued was a guilty white invention for black urban life.  Take, for instance, 
Jake?s love and eventual reunion and departure with the prostitute Felice, who comes to sexually 
embody the same helpless and conflicted attraction Jake feels toward the city of Harlem; and 
Ray?s love/hate relationship with Harlem??Its brutality, gang rowdyism, promiscuous 
thickness.  Its hot desires.  But, oh, the rich blood-red color of it!  The warm accent of its 
composite voice, the fruitiness of its laughter, the trailing rhythm of its ?blues? and the 
improvised surprises of its jazz? (Home to Harlem 267).  Here, McKay?s urban state of mind is 
akin to Sandburg?s sober but dignified depiction of the heroism of the lower, working classes (in 
?Chicago,? ?Happiness,? ?Muckers,? and ?Jack,? for instance, all from his Chicago Poems). 
36 
 Wright himself sounds rather Sandburg-esque in his introduction to Black Metropolis, 
speaking of Chicago in darkly sentimental terms, as ?that city so deadly dramatic and 
stimulating? in which he ?caught whispers of the meanings that life could have? (xvii); yet he 
would transcend Sandburg and McKay by forsaking dignity and heroism virtually altogether, 
flirting with stereotype and stripping Bigger down to a rage-filled and inarticulate brute 
incapable of such romantic and bittersweet complexity and, therefore, a more startling revelation 
of the anger, resentment, and disillusionment felt by black urban migrants.  Bigger is a warning, 
that no African-American exists, according to James Baldwin, ?who does not have his private 
Bigger Thomas living in the skull? and is ?compelled to accept the fact that this dark and 
dangerous and unloved stranger is part of himself forever? (?Many Thousands Gone? 1669). 
 
The purpose of this opening chapter is to provide the context for and the criteria by which 
the following chapters will examine the progression?from Wright, to Petry, to Ellison?of each 
author?s presentation of white panopticism and its effects on their protagonists (and other 
characters, for that matter).  This will involve a thorough explanation of three concepts that are 
key to understanding the authors? motives and placement within American literature:  
panopticism as a change of strategy on the part of the master within his relationship to his slave, 
white panopticism?s basis within Foucauldian social theory, and ?terrible honesty? as a 
reactionary strategy on the part of African-American authors.  Chapter Two will address Richard 
Wright as the first move away from Dreiser-esque naturalism, with a focus on environmental 
racism and housing discrimination.  Chapter Three will address Ann Petry with an emphasis on 
its revisiting of the Jacobs narrative and its heavy-handed use of classical gothic clich?s to reveal 
a more truly horrifying, real-life conclusion.  Chapter Four will address Ralph Ellison?s work as 
37 
the fulfillment of the ?new? slave narrative?s rediscovery of the Douglass-esque triumph.  The 
concluding chapter will further explain why a ?new? slave narrative was needed and touch upon 
the influence of these three crucial writers on later African-American literature from the likes of 
James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison. 
 
 
 
 
  
38 
 
 
 
Chapter Two:  ?Beyond Naturalism? 
The mid-twentieth century works of Wright, Petry, and Ellison mark the much-needed 
second coming of the slave narrative?a new narrative for a new kind of slavery.  The influence 
of early-twentieth century urban naturalism23 provided the means of formulating that new 
narrative, the springboard from which they (especially Wright) would launch their own protest-
driven ?terribly honest? works.  However, to clarify and examine the development of the works 
of these three authors from naturalism and to contextualize its function as a new kind of slave 
narrative for the twentieth century, one must identify the new and more tangible (and thus less 
naturalistic) source, mechanism, and strategies of the oppressive forces?in this case, in the form 
of the New Overseer and slaveowners of the new plantation that is the northern urban landscape.  
Also, one must identify the reactionary strategies that define the agency which separates the likes 
of Bigger from a more typically naturalistic character?in other words, what makes him 
?terrible.? 
Protest is certainly not absent from the pathos-inspiring helplessness of typical 
naturalistic protagonists, especially those of Theodore Dreiser, but all three authors introduce 
two new ingredients:  a tangible, locatable, and human source for all of the supposed ?forces? 
acting upon the protagonists, and a new and real sense of agency on the part of those 
                                                            
23This includes not only white authors such as Dreiser and Crane, but post-bellum, pre-Harlem black antecedents 
such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson.  As William L. Andrews points out in his introduction to 
The Sport of the Gods, African-American writers of Dunbar and Johnson?s era recognized both the usefulness in 
naturalism?s ?honest portrayal of the human condition as one of struggle against an indifferent or hostile 
environment? and naturalism?s troubling tendency ?to minimize or dismiss individual will and human reason as 
effective means of changing one?s environment or fate? (viii).  The key difference between these post-bellum, pre-
Harlem writers and Wright, Petry, and Ellison is the varying degrees of agency afforded to the protagonists of the 
three latter authors. 
39 
protagonists.  To put it another way, Wright, Petry, and Ellison?s protagonists are not as helpless 
as those of, say, Dreiser.  And since the forces acting upon them are less mysterious and more 
malicious than those of typical naturalism, there is at least the possibility of their fighting back.  
Of course, Bigger Thomas still loses in the end, defeated by the forces of the dominant white 
culture working against him.  But the terror that he inspires through violence and audacity, again, 
defines his ?terrible honesty? as a character, both in terms of his involvement in the plot and as 
evidence of the grave and personal grievances on the part of his creator, Richard Wright.  
Furthermore, this terrible agency marks that first division and departure from urban naturalism. 
It is both convenient and important to note that Wright in particular was especially 
influenced by Dreiser.  As Wright documents in Black Boy, reading the works of Dreiser had 
made a lasting impression:   
I grew silent, wondering about the life around me.  It would have been impossible 
for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing 
less than a sense of life itself.  All my life had shaped me for the realism, the 
naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them.  (250) 
Wright was certainly familiar with other arguably naturalist American writers, such as Frank 
Harris and Stephen Crane (Black Boy 249), but Dreiser was his introduction and perhaps most 
poignant influence.  It makes sense, then, that Wright?s works, more so than those of Petry and 
Ellison, would most closely resemble those of Dreiser.  What Dreiser?s brand of urban 
naturalism introduced to Wright was the realization that the forces that seem to arbitrarily 
determine the fates of certain unfortunate souls in the city are, in fact, socioeconomic in nature; 
the drives and ambitions of both Bigger Thomas and Clyde Griffiths, the protagonist of Dreiser?s 
40 
An American Tragedy,24 are shaped by the pressures of American socioeconomic inequality and 
the illusion of the American Dream, with Bigger and Clyde both working from positions of 
disadvantage.25  For Dreiser, the supposedly equal opportunity for all Americans to achieve 
economic independence is a ?mirage? (An American Tragedy 24) borne of the romance of 
personal freedom that the American Dream engenders.  Nonetheless, the less fortunate  
positions in which Dreiser characters such as Clyde and Caroline ?Sister Carrie?26Meeber find  
themselves make them vulnerable to the hopeful, pie-in-the-sky aspirations of American 
capitalism and materialism, which lead them to their respective calamitous and disillusioning 
ends.  Such descriptions as Carrie?s feeling like a ?wisp on the tide? (25) in the huge business 
district of Chicago and the painful discrepancy that Clyde feels between his uncle?s magnificent 
house in Lycurgus and his squalid room on Thorpe Street (191-192)?as well as the disturbing 
topography of Lycurgus, in which Clyde sees the occasional ?miserable slum? among factory 
after factory (191)?help to illustrate how, for Dreiser, the ?mysterious? forces of naturalism are, 
then, not so mysterious after all, but the result of the characters? desperation within a system that 
is rigged against them. 
                                                            
24First published in 1925, An American Tragedy is the story of how the poor, young, and immature but ambitious 
Clyde Griffiths tries to make it in the big city, first in Chicago and then in Lycurgus, New York, through his 
connection to his rich uncle.  In maintaining two romantic relationships, one with the poor farm girl and factory 
worker Roberta Alden and the other with the much richer Sondra Finchley, Clyde gets Roberta pregnant.  Feeling 
that her insistence on not getting an abortion and his marrying her threatens his more advantageous future with 
Sondra, Clyde takes Roberta on a rowboat to a remote area and murders her by hitting her in the face with his 
camera and letting her drown after the boat capsizes (though the narrative is perhaps deliberately unclear as to 
whether Clyde acted instinctively or with malice).  Once found out, Clyde is imprisoned and executed. 
25As Richard Lehan writes, Dreiser would ?always distrust democracy, believing that the wealthy still had the 
privileges of the old aristocracy and that the poor had never found their sense of place? (18). 
26First published in 1900, Sister Carrie is the story of how young country girl Caroline ?Carrie? Meeber comes to 
Chicago to live with her poor sister, then (fed up with the sister?s poverty) moves in with the much more promising 
Charles Drouet, who eventually gets her the acting job that will blossom into a very lucrative career.  Along the way, 
she also begins a relationship with the (unhappily) married bar owner George Hurstwood.  Out of his infatuation for 
Carrie, Hurstwood embezzles (again, like Clyde?s murder of Roberta in An American Tragedy, ambiguously) a 
large sum of money from the safe at his bar, leading to his running off with Carrie to New York, her gradual 
dissatisfaction with him, his financial ruin, and suicide.  Given the obvious gender significance of Caroline Meeber 
(as opposed to Clyde Griffiths), Sister Carrie will play a more extensive comparative role in the next chapter, which 
is devoted to the works of Ann Petry. 
41 
Indeed, in Black Boy, Wright speaks of his first arrival in Chicago in naturalistic  
terms, showing again the strong influence of Dreiser and other naturalist writers, wondering if he 
would ever learn the ?strange laws? by which ?this machine-city? was governed (262).  And one 
can see the influence of Dreiser in the chapter design of Native Son??Fear,? ?Flight,? and 
?Fate.?  From the beginning, Bigger?s path seems fixed, and he feels this seeming inevitability 
vaguely, trying in vain to keep it at bay, living in reference to both his family and himself behind 
?a wall, a curtain? (10) just as Clyde feels shut out by the city?s tall walls.  But from ?Fear? to 
?Flight,? with the accidental killing of Mary behind him, his ?crime? seems ?natural? to him, and 
he feels that ?all of his life had been leading to something like this? (106).  Finally, to ?Fate,? he 
knows that ?something like this just had to be? (358).  In spite of the hopelessness of the 
socioeconomic condition imposed upon him because of his race, Bigger is nonetheless tortured 
by the vain hopes engendered by the false promises of the supposedly equal opportunity within 
the American Dream, as well as the tentacles of its Anglo-centric popular culture.  As Boris 
Max, Bigger?s defense attorney, explains during Bigger?s trial for the murder of Mary Dalton, 
the ?alluring? and ?dazzling? aspects of the mere physical aspect of the American urban 
landscape, along with its advertisements, radios, newspapers and movies, ?dangle within easy 
reach of everyone the fulfillment of happiness? (394).  However, these aspects are, in fact, 
merely ?tokens of mockery? and ?daily taunts? to those who will never possess what this 
environment offers; as Boris sums up what apparently creates a Bigger Thomas, ?Imagine a man 
walking amid such a scene, a part of it, and yet knowing that it is not for him! (Native Son 
394).Bigger?s crimes are then the result of a rage borne of being denied what was initially and 
tantalizingly promised as an equal and universal opportunity for social mobility and economic 
success.  The perfect metaphor for this frustration born of exclusion is Bigger?s masturbating in 
42 
the movie theater, in which he is bombarded by the images and standards of white popular 
culture (especially those images and standards concerning female trophy-beauty) via its movies, 
as well as its newsreels.  As Boris further explains, ?His entire existence was one long craving 
for satisfaction, with the objects of satisfaction denied? (402). 
For a working-class African-American such as Bigger, the mockery of which Boris 
speaks in a general sense is felt much more keenly; thus, with Wright?s works we see a 
specifically racial trajectory from naturalistic forces.  And within the concentration of this new 
racial specificity, the ?forces? for Wright become less elusive and more human?the ?forces? are 
created by the white hegemony and its culture; these ?forces? are, in fact, white people, as 
Bigger and other working-class black migrants seem to conclude.27  To Bigger and many other 
African-American migrants, ?white people were not really people; they were a sort of great 
natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching 
suddenly at one?s feet in the dark? (114).  And the result of these white ?forces? of the urban 
North is the ghettoization of black migrants?the ghetto being the factory-space for the 
concentration and cultural indoctrination of those black migrants to ensure the white power 
structure?s perpetuity, for the central import of the tragedy of Bigger Thomas is how he, even in 
his apparent rebellion and move toward individual agency, is in fact a product, a tool, and a 
casualty of the New Overseer?s strategies of acculturation and internalization.  In spite of this, 
one can see in even the bleak example of Bigger the beginnings of a successful move toward 
                                                            
27To begin with, perhaps even before their realization of the continued racism that they will face in the North, 
African-American migrants from the South have the ?time rush? (Heise 140) of migration to negotiate.  From 
slavery to freedom, from rural to urban, and from agrarian to industrial, the tasks of acclimation and acculturation 
are dauntingly multiple and compounded.  Added to this are what Heise describes as ?the more insidious and often 
invisible machinations of northern racism? (139), with segregation being the chief tool for marginalization in the 
new urban sphere, combining ?race and space? in the inner cities and threatening to specifically reduce the black 
inhabitant to a criminal stereotype. 
43 
self-realization that transcends the sense of fated inevitability posed by naturalism.  Even in its 
bleakness, Native Son is thus less bleak than naturalism.  
 
I. When Images Come to Life, Forces Become Human 
An obvious conclusion to black migrants? inescapable sense of white hegemony in the 
city environment is one that reaches paranoid and conspiratorial proportions, yet seems all  
too real?the idea of a panoptic mastermind or master-organization watching your every move 
and controlling everything that happens to you.  This more modern, urban take on the plantation 
owners and overseers of the previous centuries appears in Wright?s fiction, especially in Native 
Son.  The overseeing forces working against Bigger Thomas come in the form of a single man. 
Very early in Native Son, Bigger sees a poster of Buckley,28 the State?s Attorney who ultimately 
puts him away for murder, and ?the white face??not a, but the white face?of Buckley on the 
poster appears to be addressing Bigger specifically:  Buckley?s hand is uplifted with the index 
finger pointing straight at the onlooker, and above the top of the poster are tall red letters 
reading, ?YOU CAN?T WIN!? (13)  This resulting sense of God-like ubiquity is seen again 
when Buckley interrogates Bigger in person; he knows virtually everything about Bigger, 
everything he?s ever done.  He seems to be the human avatar of the overwhelming snow, the 
virtual blizzard which, in its insistent and omnipresent whiteness, serves as, according to James 
Smethurst, ?a powerful metaphor for a system of supervision and control and its effect on the 
black subject? (34).  Notice, for instance, how the presence of the snow intensifies upon the 
                                                            
28The Buckley poster in particular calls to mind the mysterious yet ominous billboard of the optician Doctor T.J. 
Eckleburg overlooking the ?valley of ashes? in Fitzgerald?s The Great Gatsby.  Much like how Buckley has an 
uncanny knowledge of Bigger?s crimes and whereabouts, the adulterous drama among Tom Buchanan, Myrtle 
Wilson, and George Wilson appears to unfold ?under Doctor Eckleburg?s persistent stare? (24).  Later, George tells 
his co-worker Michaelis what he told his cheating wife Myrtle:  ?God knows what you?ve been doing, everything 
you?ve been doing [?] God sees everything? (159).  While saying this, George is staring at the Dr. Eckleburg 
billboard.  But unlike the figure on the billboard, Bigger eventually meets Buckley in the flesh, and Buckley proves 
to be just as all-seeing and all-knowing as his campaign posters lead to believe. 
44 
detectives? discovery of Mary Dalton?s remains in the family furnace, the event leading up to 
Bigger?s discovery and capture; Bigger runs upstairs and jumps out of the window of his room, 
?sailing through the snow? before violently landing and feeling himself ?buried in a cold pile of 
snow,? with snow ?in his mouth, eyes, ears [and] seeping down his back? (220)?and after he is 
finally knocked off of the water tank by the fire-hoses, Bigger is dragged through the snow by 
his feet, then two officers ?placed a foot on each of his wrists, making them sink deep down in 
the snow? after stretching his arms out ?as though about to crucify him? (270).  It is as though he 
is a sacrificial, messianic tribute to the snow and the power that it represents. 
 Mr. Dalton too, by virtue of Bigger?s hearing his name during the movie theater?s 
newsreel, ?comes to life? as an actual presence for Bigger?in fact, as Bigger?s landlord and 
employer.  Before Bigger goes to work for him, Mr. Dalton ?was somewhere far away, high up, 
distant, like a god? (174).  Although less ominous or obviously malicious than Buckley, the 
reach of his influence as owner of the South Side Real Estate Company makes him a crucial part 
of the bigger problems of housing discrimination and urban segregation?problems that lead to 
Bigger?s criminal behavior and make the panoptic services of the scarier Buckley necessary in 
the first place.  Those like Mr. Dalton, then, are ultimately responsible for creating the 
playground, the arena, on which the white panopticism of a Buckley can function:  the ghetto 
created by environmental racism, the new plantation for the new slavery black migrants find in 
the North.  Sylvia Hood Washington contextualizes this very well in her work in Chicago from 
the second half of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century.  According to 
Washington, the history preceding the sound of the alarm clock which begins Native Son is this: 
The Black Belt of Chicago was essentially created by the fire of 1874, which burned 
continuously for twenty-four hours and consumed forty-seven acres and over eight hundred 
45 
buildings, destroying about eighty-five percent of the city?s African-American-owned property.  
Half of the African-American families that survived the fire dispersed among white residences, 
while the other half concentrated in a long, thin strip of land between a well-to-do white 
neighborhood and that of the ?shanty Irish.?  This ?Black Belt? would be where most of 
Chicago?s African-American residents and institutions would be located for the next several 
decades, and continued migration and white movement to the more ?environmentally desirable? 
lake-front and suburban areas would lead to its expansion throughout the twentieth century.  
Multiple bombings from 1917 to 1921 were meant to discourage expansion, not only against the 
black residents themselves, but the real estate agents and bankers as well.  Both black and white 
real estate speculators were not innocent in the matter either; both engaged in ?block-busting,? a 
lucrative profit-making scam that exploited both the racial fears of whites and the ignorance of 
the black migrants:  vulnerable white homeowners would be scared into selling below market 
prices after being convinced that blacks had already ?infiltrated? their communities, then the 
price would be marked up for black people willing to pay a premium for good-quality housing in 
ostensibly racially mixed neighborhoods.  Encroachment upon white geographical spaces came 
from a continual influx of black migration from the South which reached its peak between 1940 
and 1950.29  And the circumstances which led to this concentrated confinement of black urban 
newcomers are not lost on Bigger in Native Son: 
  The rental agencies had told him that there were not enough houses for Negroes to  
live in, that the city was condemning houses in which Negroes lived as being too 
old and too dangerous for habitation.  And he remembered the time when the 
police had come and driven him and his mother and his brother and sister out of a 
                                                            
29All information concerning the history of Chicago?s Black Belt is taken from Sylvia Hood Washington?s Packing 
Them In:  An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865-1954.  139-146. 
46 
flat in a building which had collapsed two days after they had moved.  And he had 
heard it said that black people, even though they could not get good jobs, paid 
twice as much rent as whites for the same kind of flats.  (248) 
Within this system of housing fraud and block-busting, what black migrants are actually getting 
at an outrageously expensive price are the whites? leftovers, the second-rate husks of a 
prejudicial retreat.  The combination of this housing shortage and the continuing influx of black 
migrants is what makes the Black Belt so concentrated and suffocating, with its increasing 
population systematically (and often violently) on their side of ?the line? (Native Son 21).30 
 
II. The Overseer?s New Plantation 
The inner city, the ghetto, the projects, are all fodder for sentimental white romanticism.  
But the artistic renderings by the likes of Wright of where black migrants so often end up when 
confronting the new urban North prove that such romantic glorification by whites is, if not 
purposefully diversionary, at least woefully misguided.  Black migrants have not chosen the 
asceticism of a ?humble? or ?simple? life; the forces of white panopticism have forced black 
migrants into these overcrowded and impoverished areas to maximize the effectiveness of their 
surveillance of those migrants, thus assuring the dominant and exclusive position of the white 
                                                            
30In another city, Harlem, in 1919, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia called for a commission on the Harlem riot 
of that year, and the findings of the commission read like a sure-fire recipe for civic unrest within a population 
specifically targeted for discrimination and exploitation?namely, Harlem?s black citizens.  According to the report, 
landlords abused and exploited their black tenants? desperation and lack of other options (72-73); these same 
landlords would increasingly bump up rent prices for their black tenants in spite of dilapidated conditions (67), often 
resulting in tenants spending half of their income on rent (69); because of these high rents, entire families would 
cram themselves into single rooms (71); this overcrowding, compounded with something as petty as garbage 
discrimination (74), would inevitably lead to an increase in disease (92-93); adding insult to injury, there were only 
three proprietary, three volunteer, and only one municipal hospital in central Harlem at that time (93), resulting in 
the hospitals becoming overcrowded as well; and within these hospitals there was bad equipment and an overall 
discipline problem with disgruntled employees (98). 
47 
power structure   Using Harlem as an example, James Baldwin would make this point bluntly in 
Nobody Knows My Name: 
The projects in Harlem are hated.  They are hated almost as much as policemen, 
and this is saying a great deal.  And they are hated for the same reason:  both 
reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many 
liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no 
matter how many civil-rights commissions are set up (63) [?] A ghetto can be 
improved in one way only:  out of existence.  (65) 
The point is that the ghetto is neither noble nor quaint, but a zone of continuing and sustained 
discrimination.  But the predicament of black migrants is not only no better in the North than it 
was in the South; according to Wright, it is, in fact, worse.  Consider Sarah?s resentful statement 
about the Party?s exploitation of her husband Bob in Wright?s The Outsider31:  ?Even in the 
South when the white folks lynched you, they told you why!  You didn?t agree with ?em, but, by 
God, they told you why!? (257)  And, again, Jake Jackson expresses a similar sentiment in Lawd 
Today!:  ?Them was the days when we lived in hope (178) [?] The only difference between the 
North and the South is, them guys down there?ll kill you, and these up here?ll let you starve to 
death? (180).   
 The modus operandi for the new, northern slavery that is ghettoization is concentration?
that is, severely limiting the space within which the constantly-incoming black migrants can 
settle.  In Wright?s 1927 Chicago, for instance, and according to Hazel Rowley, the city?s 
African-American population had grown to more than 100,000 from the roughly 40,000 of 1916 
at the beginning of the Great Migration?but this was all within a space, the Black Belt, far 
limited and diminished by housing discrimination and environmental racism; as Rowley sums 
                                                            
31First published in 1953, thirteen years after Native Son. 
48 
up, ?Chicago had become the second largest black city in the United States, after New York [but] 
Chicago was also the most residentially segregated city in the nation? (52-53).  This was 
because, during that same year, the Chicago Real Estate Board had come up with a ?Model 
Racial Restrictive Covenant? to ?protect whites from black residents,? with actual legal 
documents written up between white home owners who pledged ?not to rent, lease, or sell their 
property to ?colored persons?,? with the courts enforcing them, and transgressors under threat of 
lawsuits (53).  The typical Black Belt experience for newly arrived black migrants was evidence 
of an institutionalized system of concentrating a specific populace; as Rowley outlines, a black 
family moves into a previously white street, are greeted with violence, and panic is whipped up 
by real estate ?panic-peddlers? trying to encourage white owners to sell for very cheap; realtors 
buy the cheap property and subdivide the apartments into one- or two-bedroom ?kitchenettes?; 
white tenants might have paid $50/month for a seven-room apartment, while black tenants were 
charged $25/week for a one- or two-room apartment; landlords ignore upkeep of the apartment 
buildings to the point of it eventually being condemned (though city officials rarely demolish 
them?out of actual pity for the black tenants!); and because of high rent, whole families would 
inhabit one room, resulting in predictable social problems:  disease (including sexually-
transmitted diseases, seven times higher than anywhere else in the city), crime, delinquency, 
teenage pregnancy, casual law enforcement, and black-on-black crime (53-54). 
There is, of course, an uncanniness, an unsettling familiarity, that black migrants feel 
upon reaching the urban North.  And disillusionment gives way to horror when migrants realize 
that, not only is the situation in the North not as good as they had hoped, but might actually be 
the same as, even worse than, what they had fled from in the South.32Similarly, the new slavery 
                                                            
32Along with his presentation of Dr. Eckleburg as the panoptic ?mad-scientist god of the wasteland,? Alan Lloyd-
Smith presents a theme related to the migrant?s terror upon confronting the city, something he describes as Gatsby?s 
49 
and New Overseer with which black migrants find themselves confronted lead them to believe 
that what they find in the North is actually no better than what they had left in the South?as 
Robert B. Stepto says, black migrants ?experience mobility, only to be confronted in turn by 
circumference? (71).  And, according to Margaret Walker, Wright not only recognized this but 
made it a consistent theme of his work, testimony to his own discovery as a black migrant ?that 
the landlords and bosses of the urban buildings in the North were no different from the lords of 
the land in the rural South? (Daemonic Genius 56).  The haunting past, the source of the uncanny 
return, is, of course, the South.  Most obviously, we see this in the geographic nomenclature of 
segregation in Wright?s city of migration, Chicago; African-American migrants are confined to 
the South Side.  More subtly, we see it in the less obvious racism of rich whites? condescending, 
self-serving philanthropy.  Bigger is from Mississippi, and his father was, as he tells Jan, ?killed 
in a riot when I was a kid?in the South? (74).  Images of race riots and lynchings33 occur 
throughout the hunt for Bigger, his capture, and especially his trial, with the white mob 
screamings things like ?You black ape!? (337), ?Burn ?im!? and ?Kill ?im!? (338), sober 
testimony to the North?s not being so different from the South after all, to the profound 
disappointment of the collective black migrant spirit.34 
Whatever kindness that is shown by rich whites is sullied by the guilt and hypocrisy that 
it is based upon.  Mr. Dalton apparently thinks that a few ping-pong table donations to the local 
boys? clubs and hiring black people for driving and housework makes up for his ownership of the 
                                                                                                                                                                                                
mistake:  ?to believe that the past can be superseded, transfigured, overcome by the valiant present?a very 
American assumption? (1).  To further define this erroneous assumption, Lloyd-Smith defines its opposition as the 
American Gothic, which is about ?the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts 
and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit, will not or dare not tell itself? (1).  
33In The Chicago Race Riots:  July, 1919 (first published in 1919), Carl Sandburg describes Chicago at this time as a 
receiving station for those fleeing lynching in the South (26, 29). 
34In Anatomy of Four Race Riots, Lee E. Williams and Lee E. Williams II write about how, much like how 
Douglass had been surprised and frightened at seeing Southerners up North,  many white Southerners had come 
North during the Great Migration creating bitter labor competition and spreading racism (92). 
50 
South Side Real Estate Company.  Also, as shown in his testimony to Boris Max, he seems to 
have convinced himself that the indirect, out-of-sight-out-of-mind nature of his involvement with 
real estate makes it less harmful, that his invisibility as a landlord to his tenants somehow 
absolves him from responsibility for their predicaments: 
  ?Now, Mr. Dalton, the Thomas family paid you??  
?Not to me!  They pay rent to the South Side Real Estate Company.? 
?You own the controlling stock in the Dalton Real Estate Company, don?t you?? 
?Why, yes.? 
?And that company in turn owns the stock that controls the South Side Real Estate 
Company, doesn?t it?? 
?Why, yes.? 
?I think I can say that the Thomas family pays rent to you?? 
?Indirectly, yes.?  (326) 
In the end, Mr. Dalton?s evasiveness reveals his ultimate sense of underlying guilt, but he seems 
primarily concerned with making money.  When asked who fixes the rent scales, his answer is 
?the law of supply and demand? (326), and he dismisses the racially selective designation of 
Chicago housing shortages as ?an old custom,? saying of the black tenants, in one of his most 
embarrassingly transparent statements, ?Well?.Er?.I ?I?I don?t think they?d like to live any 
other place? (327).  When Boris finally calls him out on his motives, saying that ?you give back 
to them to ease the pain of their gouged lives and to salve the ache of your own conscience,? Mr. 
Dalton?s final smug reply is ?I don?t know what you mean? (328).  Similarly, even the ?good 
guys,? Mary and Jan, do not appear to have the pure sympathies for Bigger and the rest of the 
black community?Jan seems most interested in advancing his Communist agenda, wanting to 
51 
use Bigger as a possible recruiting tool, and Mary?s interest does not seem to go much beyond a 
superficial anthropological curiosity.  Her references to songs ?your people sing? (65) and 
wanting to see ?how your people live? (69) are painfully patronizing, and her fascination with 
black life on the South Side, especially inside Ernie?s Kitchen Shack, contains the insulting, 
condescending detachment of someone on a safari.  Bigger later recalls with resentment, thinking 
of ?those whose hate for him was so unfathomably deep that, after they had shunted him off into 
a corner of the city to rot and die, they could turn to him, as Mary had that night in the car, and 
say:  ?I?d like to know how your people live?? (240). 
References to ?the line,? the understood border between the Black Belt and the white 
neighborhoods, are made throughout Native Son.  Bigger remembers that bombs were thrown by 
whites into houses like the long-abandoned ones he hides in with his girlfriend Bessie after Mary 
Dalton?s remains are discovered (182).35  Especially revealing is the description of the ?tall 
buildings holding black life? (70) Bigger sees while driving Mary and Jan through the Black Belt 
at their request; the strong sense of imprisonment it evokes is only enhanced by Mary?s na?ve 
wistfulness:  ?Yet they must live like we live.  They?re human?.There are twelve million of 
them?.They live in our country?.In the same city with us? (70).  And this ?holding? of ?black 
life? is, in fact, a packing in of it, a fact perhaps most alarmingly portrayed by the lack of privacy 
suffered by the individuals of Bigger?s family sharing a single one-room, rat-infested apartment, 
with the men having to avert their eyes for the women to change clothes and vice versa (3-4).   
It quickly becomes clear that, to the forces of white hegemony, the black subject is 
expendable, a fair-game sacrifice for the dominant cultural and economic agenda.36  When 
considering the degree to which these black urban newcomers are exploited within the systems 
                                                            
35In Lawd Today!, Jake also remembers how black homes were bombed during the Chicago race riots (172). 
36Indeed, according to Joseph Bodziock, the white mythos is a power so terrifying that it is willing to sacrifice one 
of its own, as was the case with Mary Dalton, to get to sacrificing a black migrant such as Bigger Thomas (40). 
52 
of housing discrimination and real estate fraud, the relationship between real estate officials and 
their black tenants is a parasitic one, exactly how Thorstein Veblen describes the relationship of 
the ?leisure? classes, especially within the business world, to the working classes in The Theory 
of the Leisure Class,37 their relation being one of ?acquisition, not of production; of exploitation, 
not of serviceability? (153).  Veblen?s understanding describes a Hegelian relationship, with the 
upper class?s pseudo-aristocracy defined by their leisure and ownership (18), in which the work 
of a bondsman?namely, the toil and rent money of the black tenant?defines the dominance of 
the lord?in this case, landlord.  And this relationship does not end with those whites actually in 
power, but trickles downward to other whites along class and political lines in their relation to 
black migrants.  Poor whites, for instance, as Bigger figures, are more hateful of blacks  ?because 
they didn?t have their share of the money? and ?too stupid? to play the white ?game? (33-34).  
Also, in Lawd Today!, Jake reveals how white labor competition is a key source of bitterness, 
resentment, and economic stress for Depression-era urban black people?be it white student-
clerks working temporarily at the post office where he works regularly (117) or out-of-work 
white people who need the less appealing jobs now (132)??nigger work,? as Capeci describes it 
(35).  Indeed, as Lee E. Williams points out, many of these now unemployed white people were 
returning white veterans who proved to be not only a source of labor competition, but housing 
competition as well (78). 
 
III. The New Dungeon 
The new kind of slavery encountered by black migrants in the North leads to a sense of 
inescapability?for the black migrants, the overcrowded imprisonment of urban segregation; for 
                                                            
37?Their office is of a parasitic character [?] The conventions of the business world have grown up under the 
selective surveillance of this principle of predation or parasitism? (153). 
53 
the more fortunate whites, the deep-seeded racism of those who do not even realize that they are 
being racist?and Wright?s descriptions of urban decay allows for a truly American gothic 
sensibility, a sense of the past revisited.  The houses left behind by the retreating whites?passed 
down to blacks, then abandoned altogether, like the ones Bigger and Bessie hide out in?have 
?black windows, like blind eyes, buildings like skeletons standing with snow on their bones in 
the winter winds? (173), windows ?like the eye-sockets of empty skulls? (231).  Such language 
makes the South Side out to be one large above-ground dungeon.  Indeed, Alan Lloyd-Smith 
cites as a key American substitution for the European gothic ?the city for the subterranean rooms 
and corridors of the monastery? (4).  But with Native Son, the city is the dungeon, turning 
Bigger?s world into ?a strange labyrinth? (240) of buildings, flats, and corners, with even the 
roof-tops on top of which he is tracked like an animal and finally captured described as ?a maze? 
(246), the underground realm of the European gothic brought to the surface.  However, Bigger is 
not the gothic villain chasing some helpless heroine through the catacombs; rather, he is the one 
being pursued?the representative black migrant imprisoned, observed, and controlled by the 
city?s white panoptic forces.  It should be remembered that, in spite of his brutality, the point is 
that Bigger is none the less a victim of white panopticism, a ?monster? created by the forces of 
white oppression acting upon him for virtually his entire life. 
James Baldwin writes, describing Harlem:  ?The projects are hideous, of course, there  
being a law, apparently respected throughout the world, that popular housing shall be as 
cheerless as a prison? (Nobody 63).  Housing for blacks in Harlem were, after all, built for 
another race and economic level, according to Nat Brandt; Harlem had begun in the seventeenth 
century, annexed and drained by New York, but the 1904 depression left behind new but empty 
apartment houses which were picked up and resold to incoming black migrants by Philip A. 
54 
Payton (Harlem at War 25-28).  This opportunism was a direct result of the combination of white 
flight and the Great Migration, and further complications resulted from the already-mentioned 
poor whites as well as immigrant competition for jobs (28).  Given this competition for already 
very limited space and continued racial pressures within that very limited space, black migrants 
typically found that they had run from the prison of the plantation only to reach the ?prison? of 
overpriced substandard housing in the urban North?from one dungeon to another. 
The Dalton house itself is portrayed in gothic terms?like a European gothic manor, part 
of ?a cold and distant world [full of] white secrets carefully guarded,? complete with the 
intimidating ?high, black, iron picket fence? (44)38 keeping outsiders at bay and starkly 
separating it from the dungeon-like habitations of the black communities it exploits for wealth, 
power, and status.  Evie Shockley points out how this gothicizing of the black home space 
actually turns the home ideal on its head, taking away the assumptions of protection and privacy 
traditionally associated with the home, thus rendering the typical African-American literary 
portrayal of the black migrant?s urban experience as gothic rather than naturalistic, with the 
space of the street and the substandard housing that lines it acting as the new version of the 
medieval dungeon (446-447).  In Wright?s work, this gothicizing of the black home stylistically 
and metaphorically indicates the race-based marginalization of black migrants by the white 
panoptic forces working to isolate and concentrate them.  And this Gothicism provides an 
especially useful alternative to naturalism for portraying how those marginalizing forces are far 
more human, intentional, and malicious. 
Within the northern city?s new dungeon, the pressures and influences of the dominant 
white culture bombard the black subject, who often internalizes these standards and influences 
for the sake of sheer survival and comfort.  All of this leads to the distortion of black migrants? 
                                                            
38Joseph Bodziock points this out in ?Richard Wright and Afro-American Gothic? (31). 
55 
sense of humanity and identity through distorting their perception?everything in the seemingly 
underground space of the black ghetto made ?strange and unreal? to the likes of Fred Daniels in 
Wright?s ?The Man Who Lived Underground? (1415), given his internalization of the standards 
of the above-ground white world.  The case is even stronger with Bigger Thomas, who, when he 
sees the sky-writing airplane overhead, mumbles to himself bitterly, ?I could fly one of them 
things if I had a chance? (16).  This, for Keneth Kinnamon, illustrates the painful contrast 
between the opportunities afforded to whites by white society who, with working-class African-
Americans like Bigger, instead ?consigns him to the hell of the Dalton basement to maintain the 
glowing, searing, fiery furnace? (65).  Indeed, with Bigger, the distortion appears to be not only 
of his perception but of his very character, as if the fires of the basement furnace actually 
transform him diabolically, shaping him toward a criminal, murderous direction. 
In his introduction to Native Son, Arnold Rampersad describes the reasons Wright, a 
migrant himself, had for moving to Chicago in 1927 from Mississippi, where he was born:  ?His 
jobs in the South were marked by harassment by whites and by his own disdain for what 
segregation and racism had done to distort the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it? (xii). 
An alarming example of such distortion is something that Bigger sees from a roof-top before his 
capture: 
  Directly below him, one floor away, through a window without shades, he saw a  
room in which were two small iron beds with sheets dirty and crumpled.  In one 
bed sat three naked black children looking across the room to the other bed on 
which lay a man and woman, both naked and black in the sunlight.  There were 
quick, jerky movements on the bed where the man and woman lay, and the three 
56 
children were watching.  It was familiar; he had seen things like that when he was 
a little boy sleeping five in a room.  (247) 
Such close quarters clearly make for a quick breakdown of appropriate familial sexual 
boundaries, even creating incestuous tensions, hinted at by the suspicious way Bigger keeps 
looking at his own sister, Vera.  But the point is how dehumanizing conditions make for such 
severely compromised humanity, and how the criminal and neglectful behavior so stereotypically 
associated with working-class African-Americans is very likely a result of the inhumane squalor 
to which they are subjected through housing discrimination and segregation.  The forces of white 
panopticism distort them?morally, psychologically, and even physically.  As Capeci points out 
about Harlem during the 1940s, working-class blacks were so discriminated against in seeking 
employment that many of them became too frustrated to even apply for work, often resulting in 
illegal and unhealthy practices to pay rent (37-39) and an increase in the number of neglected 
and homeless children (41).  Given the insistence of the pressures upon black migrants and the 
seeming hopelessness of their situation, one can see how a character like Jake in Lawd Today! 
could find his only solace in getting ?lowdown? (195)?that is, with alcohol and women other 
than his wife.  Thanks to the oppressive forces acting so relentlessly upon them, the very reality 
of black migrants appears to become monstrously distorted. 
 However, the ultimate goal of such distorting dehumanization on the part of the white 
hegemony is to isolate black migrants, to set them apart for surveillance and observation?to 
quarantine them within a slum.  But Wright?s African-American urban migrants clearly do not 
have the same chances that, say, the white Carrie Meeber does, and his choices of metaphor are 
fittingly more intense, angry, and insistent?like Fred Daniels? finding himself lost underground 
in a sewer after running from the police, feeling ?a million miles away from the world? (?The 
57 
Man Who Lived Underground? 1416) as he encounters such powerful sights as a dead baby?
?dead, cold, nothing? (1418); that is, forsaken?half-submerged in the sewer water before 
himself getting shot to death by the police and washing away in the sewer like an ?object [?] 
lost in the heart of the earth? (1450).  This is made all the more tragic when considering how 
Fred had apparently so internalized the laws and standards of the white world above as to 
ultimately turn himself in?demonstrating how, according to Michel Fabre, Daniels is no less a  
prisoner of the preexisting relationships because reversal implies acceptance, how it is essentially 
impossible for him to elude ?culture and heritage? and therefore wanting to return from the 
underground (99).  The ghetto acts, as Heise says, as the toilet for the dominant white culture?s 
urban America and the black migrants themselves treated as white society?s waste (129), with 
the sewer ?materializing the ideology of racial abjection? (148); under the ?duress of institutional 
racism and violently enforced spatial isolation? (146), ghettoized black migrants become 
distorted in both their perception and their character by ?amnesia, mental fragmentation [both 
achieved through the internalization of the dominant cultural ideology], and the release of 
repressed desires [through crime or a kind of desperate and hopeless hedonism]? (144).  The 
gothic treatment thus seems to provide a far more appropriate approach to conveying the 
psychological torture and degradation that go into twisting and transforming individual black 
migrants such as Fred and Bigger toward assimilation, self-loathing, and acting out through 
violence.  It perhaps more closely and essentially communicates, with its shocking and grotesque 
aesthetics, the real-life horror of urban segregation and environmental racism.     
 
IV. Internalizing Forces 
58 
Internalization on the part of the black migrant of the white hegemony?s dominant 
ideology is no accidental byproduct of white panopticism.  It is, in fact, an intentionally inspired 
effect, one that complements white panopticism?s more direct machinations to quarantine and 
make visible those representing the Other with a more indirect, indoctrinating mechanism that 
inspires those representing the Other to make themselves more visible for categorization and 
separation.  Through the painfully distorting pressures to which black migrants are subjected, the 
hegemony presents its standards and norms as the sole means to a more comfortable and 
dignified (not to mention less dehumanized) life.39  And this can raise some rather unsettling 
questions pertaining to black migrants? true sense of national identity and feelings toward their 
troubled and extremely fractured historical past. 
Michel Fabre explains how the underground motif in Wright?s literature ?clearly 
represents the marginal character of the black man?s existence and his ambiguous rapport with 
American civilization? (97) and points out the ?obscene disparity? between a black migrant?s 
actual situation and his aspirations?aspirations inspired by the standards of the new northern 
city?s dominant white culture (100).  A big part of this ambiguity comes from the internalization 
by the black migrant of the cityscape?s dominant ideology.  And this internalization is a defining 
feature of that ideology?s influence and power?how its new system of slavery works from 
within as well as without; according to Farah Jasmine Griffin: 
This power also seeks to educate migrants and to create in them a desire for those 
things available in the dominant society [?] At times, the migrants themselves 
engage in acts of self-discipline.  Often in their very attempts to resist they have 
                                                            
39However, such acceptance of white hegemonic standards, according to Andrews, is what makes the Hamiltons in 
The Sport of the Gods so unprepared and vulnerable for what they come to face in the Tenderloin district; they 
?display the complacency of people who are satisfied with the world as it is???simple, well-meaning people? who 
are at worst ?self-satisfied? and at best ?na?ve? (intro to The Sport of the Gods xv-xvi). 
59 
so internalized the effects of the power that represses them that they become 
complicit in their own subjugation.  (102) 
Fred Daniels? experiences underground provide the perfect example?not only with his final, 
desperate and irrational drive to resurface and go to the police station, but with such equally 
irrational gestures as papering the walls of his underground room with money, not so much for 
the money itself, but for the odd comfort provided by what it stands for (1432).  Heise sees this 
as a futile attempt at a momentary escape (143), driven by Daniels? misguided, indoctrinated 
sense of guilt (147); the sewer in which Daniels has found himself is indicative of the black 
migrant?s internalized sense of uncleanliness when compared as an Other to aboveground, white 
American criteria (130).   
 As has already been mentioned, snow persists symbolically throughout the novel as an 
overwhelming, blanketing, inescapable whiteness.  This is indicative, according to Bodziock of 
how Wright manipulates the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, whose murderous characters are 
driven primarily from within, by madness; Wright, instead, portrays his protagonists as driven 
from without by the white mythos (39).  But Wright hints at a more literal internalization with 
Bigger, with all of the transformative actions taking place in the snow at night, the ?white snow 
and the night? (147) surrounding Bigger and Bessie as they flee toward the abandoned buildings 
indicating that the gothic historicity of America is shared between black and white, 
archetypically concentrated within Bigger, who, as the newspapers reporting on his capture 
suggest, ?may have a minor portion of white blood in his veins, a mixture which generally makes 
for a criminal and intractable nature? (281).  Given this hereditary possibility, and in spite of his 
ostensible hatred for whites, Bigger seems, in fact, to achingly long to be white: 
  It was when he read the newspapers or magazines, went to the movies, or walked 
60 
along the streets with crowds, that he felt what he wanted:  to merge himself with 
others and be a part of this world, to lose himself in it so he could find himself, to 
be allowed a chance to live like others, even though he was black.  (Native Son 
240) 
Bigger experiences the instability of racial doubling to a painful extent, and we see both 
patriarchal tyranny and transgressive sexuality in his more sadistic actions; notice the incestuous 
undertone in the relish with which he torments Vera with the dead rat to the point of her fainting, 
?enjoying his sister?s fear? (7), and the prison-homoeroticism in how he forces Gus to lick his 
phallic knife-blade (39).  Both incidents hint at rape, which later takes on a heavier significance, 
both literally and symbolically, in terms of Bigger?s transformation.  What is so uncanny in 
Wright?s novel, then, is how much like his white persecutors Bigger becomes, especially when it 
comes to his employers; his relationship with them begins to resemble more of a tacit partnership 
than a socially tiered subservience.  In his accidental ?getting back at? the whites through the 
initial success of his crime, he is beginning to more closely identify with something within them.  
This becomes chillingly more apparent as Bigger progresses toward his rape and murder of 
Bessie?from his accidental crimes against whites toward his deliberate crimes against blacks.  
Indeed, right after accidentally killing Mary and fooling her parents, ?Bessie was the one he 
wanted to see now? (129).  Finally, through Bessie?s actual rape and murder, Bigger seems to 
become the white persecutor, rather than merely resembling him, through an act more 
historically associated with the slave-owner and the overseer than the slave.  And his conclusion 
that ?what [he] killed for [?] must?ve been pretty deep in [him] [and] must?ve been good!? 
(429) demonstrates just how deeply he has internalized the forces of white society around him. 
61 
An ironic twist to Bigger?s internalization of white standards is his thoughts concerning 
rich blacks, the ?leaders? of his race, as Boris Max describes them.  Bigger?s response to Boris is 
this:  ?They rich, even though the white folks treat them almost like they do me.  They almost 
like the white people, when it comes to guys like me.  They say guys like me make it hard for 
them to get along with white folks? (357).  Even Cross Damon, who possesses the intellectual 
capacity for self-consciousness and self-scrutiny that is lacking in Bigger and other Wright 
protagonists, however, seems incapable of escaping the white hegemony?s strategy of 
internalization through indoctrination; his intelligence, in fact, only makes him more aware of it.  
After killing Gil and Herndon, for example, Cross cannot help but feel like a hypocrite?that, in 
killing ?two little gods,? he too ?had acted like a little god? (308), had ?taken on the guise of the 
monster he had slain? (309).  The pressures toward assimilation and internalization, in fact, 
prove to have the force capable of making the Other?the working-class African-American 
migrant, in this case?not only turn to the dominant ideology out of lack of better alternatives, 
but also of producing levels of exhaustion and frustration so complete as to make those same 
urban black people seek comfort in this new slavery!  Take, for instance, the heartbreaking 
surrender with which Sarah, after her husband Bob has been sold out and deported for 
imprisonment back to Trinidad, wants to go back to church and to confession; as Cross sees it, 
?She had to rest, to find support, a master; she was yearning to submit? (550).40 
 According to Foucault, ?the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment.  For 
punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty? (108).  It must be 
remembered that the panopticism of the white hegemony works toward isolation, and that an 
                                                            
40Even Cross is reduced to a similar level of surrender after the interrogating Houston decides to let him go free:  
?Suddenly he wanted to beg this man not to leave him [?] He was alone.  He felt like screaming for Houston to 
come back, to talk to him, to tell him what to do? (573).  And even as he is dying from the gunshot wound 
apparently caused by the pursuing Menti and Hank, Cross ?longed to see Houston,? and, with Houston leaning over 
him, he thinks, ?Houston!  [My] pal!  The old hunchback!? (583). 
62 
isolated subject (or group of subjects) is easier to observe and to place under surveillance; 
furthermore, if white panopticism can instill a self-preserving reflex of self-policing within the 
black migrant community, all the better for the dominant urban culture.  Consider how other 
black migrants refuse to help Bigger during his capture?how two in particular that he overhears 
while sneaking into an uninhabited flat argue over whether or not they would give him up to the 
police should they encounter him, concluding that ?ever? nigger looks guilty t? white folks when 
somebody?s done a crime,? and that this is because ?so many of us ack like Bigger Thomas [?] 
When yuhack like Bigger Thomas yuh stir up trouble.?  (251)  But Wright?s black characters 
clearly have a greater stake in their wish?their need, really?to not get themselves connected 
with the likes of Bigger; their immediate financial as well as physical well-being, even their 
lives, may depend on it.  This, of course, adds further incentive toward accepting and 
internalizing the dominant culture?s norms.  But also, an even more sinister dimension to the 
subtlety of white panopticism?s mechanisms is revealed, for once the black migrant reaches a 
certain degree of internalization?that is, acceptance and even comfort with the ?white way??
he is vulnerable to the possibility of being more directly used, becoming another one of the New 
Overseer?s tools, another agent of white panopticism. 
 
V. Recruiting Delinquency 
Through the mechanisms of internalization, it becomes clear that the New Overseer?s use  
of the black migrant is not always such a direct sacrifice; it can use its pressurizing methods of 
indoctrination for purposes of recruitment as well, a process in which the dominant culture?s 
?secret agents? are procured through the visibility of a specific kind of criminality that Foucault 
refers to as ?delinquency?:  
63 
Delinquency, with the secret agents that it procures, but also with the generalized 
policing that it authorizes, constitutes a means of perpetual surveillance of the 
population:  an apparatus that makes it possible to supervise, through the 
delinquents themselves, the whole social field.  Delinquency functions as a 
political observatory.  (281) 
This system of recruitment provides yet another avenue toward targeting and sacrificing the 
urban black populace.  Its possibilities for sacrifice range from the all-out absorption and use of 
the likes of Hank in The Outsider, who is recruited by the Party to, along with Menti, follow and 
intimidate the protagonist Cross Damon; to the disposal of those like Bigger and Fred in order to 
make an example of those who do not fully accept the hegemony?s norms, isolating them from 
their black community in the process.   
The precursor to this recruitment is a proliferation of the dominant culture?s panoptic 
strategies, a proliferation and dissemination of the New Overseer into a potential legion of lesser 
overseers (including twentieth-century versions of the ?driver,? or the black version of an 
overseer), which can create a labyrinthine world of uncertainty for everyone beneath the chief, 
often less accessible overseer (As opposed to white recruits, however, black recruits serve the 
additional function of example and distraction?as a visible example of the internalization and 
assimilation that the white hegemony expects of its black subjects, and as a diversionary object 
of blame to distract the black population from the true and ultimate source of its ill treatment).  
In The Outsider, for example, the Party, who claims to be working against the white, capitalist 
status quo, appears to operate under a complexly multiplied incentive system; as Cross reflects 
upon the new knowledge that Menti has been spying on his supposed superior Hilton: 
64 
What a system of life!  Spies spying upon spies who were being spied upon!  [?] 
an elaborate kind of transparent ant heap in which the most intimate feelings of all 
the men and women in it would be known, a glass jailhouse in which the 
subjective existence of each man and woman would be public each living moment 
[?] And for his spying in this ant heap, each spy would derive, as his reward, a 
satisfaction from the godlike position which he could assume in relation to his 
neighbor.  (453) 
Thus, a key strategy by which the New Overseer ensures the continued cooperation and loyalty 
of his agents is to trick them into believing that they are somehow on par with him in terms of 
overseeing power by giving them people and populations to oversee!  This is true, upon further 
examination, not only of the likes of Hank and Menti, but of even the District Attorney Houston, 
whose confessed sympathies toward criminals reveal how even someone so seemingly all-
powerful as he can demonstrate a degree of unwillingness and remorse toward his own duties.  
Even the more obviously malicious Buckley, from Native Son, is only an agent of the law made 
necessary by the more detached and powerful Mr. Dalton. 
 James Baldwin?s thoughts on cops in Harlem provide an appropriate set-up for white 
panopticism?s recruiting mechanisms and the philosophy behind those mechanisms:  ?Their very 
presence is an insult [?] They represent the force of the white world, and that world?s real 
intentions are, simply, for that world?s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled 
up here, in his place? (Nobody 65).Foucault?s thoughts on delinquency and its recruitment 
certainly apply to the New Overseer?s making an example out of certain black criminals to lend 
an intimidating tangibility to his authority; the black criminal?or the more racially general 
?convict? mentioned by Foucault?acts as a sign of visible authority to the hegemony?s black 
65 
subjects, thus perpetuating the white culture?s panoptic power.  Indeed, the way in which Bigger 
is essentially forsaken by the black community is testimony to white panopticism?s goal ?to get 
all citizens to participate in the punishment of the social enemy and to render the exercise of the 
power to punish entirely adequate and transparent to the laws that publicly define it? (129).  The 
black community?s seeming agreement with white society?s standards of difference and (black) 
criminality is, after all, in fact a coercion perpetrated by white society?s dominance, built upon 
fear and alienation.  Bigger thus provides for the reactivation of the code for the dominant white 
culture?s dominance and seemingly inevitable triumph, acting as a source of instruction for the 
intimidated black masses?especially those with violent rebellion on their minds?to preserve 
order. 
Another trajectory of white panoptic force is the various Communist organizations 
portrayed in Wright?s works, who, even though their agenda is supposed to be counter to the 
white, capitalist status quo, ultimately exploit the black members they recruit as well.  Indeed, 
perhaps even more chilling than Buckley in Native Son, are the various agents of the Party in 
The Outsider.  Take, for instance, the thorough inquiries of Blimin; as Sarah reveals to Cross 
Damon: 
That Blimin wanted to know what kind of books you read, what kind of mail you 
received, if you spoke any foreign languages, if you had any secret appointments, 
if a lot of telephone calls came for you, how large were the bills you spent, what 
kind of people came to see you, if I could hear you typing late at night, if you 
mailed any big envelopes?Lord, he was like a lawyer.  (468)  
But perhaps even more clever than the Party is the sympathetic but nonetheless dangerous 
District Attorney Houston, whose bringing in of Finch, the secretary of the Postal Union who 
66 
had negotiated Cross? $800 loan (508), to the interrogation of Cross, and flying in of Cross? wife 
Gladys and his children (519), makes him perhaps the most powerful and far-reaching white 
panoptic force in The Outsider.  Within white panopticism, though there are many layers of class 
and politics that subdivide the dominating white force, all of them seem to inevitably, even 
helplessly and unconsciously, come together at the heavy expense of the black migrant, who 
takes the full brunt of it all.   
However, the black criminal who the machine of white panopticism molds out of a black 
migrant is not always so obviously sacrificed; and therein lies the opportunity for recruitment?
how the possibility of incarceration or other punishment can create new agents through which the 
panoptic force can act.  As Menti explains to Cross, ?You have to belong to the Party? (372).  
This tacit agreement between the Party and Party member apparently goes so far as even ?unto 
death and beyond,? as Menti further explains:  ?If, after I?m dead, the Party wanted to make use 
of me, wanted to place some interpretation upon my life or death, upon any of my actions for 
organizational or propaganda purposes, it has the right? (372).Cross? response to Hilton before 
shooting him seems to say it all:  ?I might forgive you if you had been going to kill me.  But, no; 
you were going to make me a slave? (402).  That is, after all, the uncanny situation in which the 
black migrant finds himself.  Given his considerable intellectual advantage over characters like 
Bigger, Cross demonstrates a much more conscious awareness of the new northern slavery and 
its machinations, especially in legal terms; prophetically certain that Houston will eventually 
track him down, he ponders how the real aim of was ?to inhibit in the consciousness of man? 
certain kinds of consciousness ?which the law had to evoke clearly and sharply in man?s 
consciousness,? for the law possesses ?the strange capacity of creating vividly in man?s 
consciousness a sense of the reality of the crime it seeks to suppress? (411).  Implied within the 
67 
law, then, is a kind of dare, a challenge that seems to say, ?if you are strong enough, you can do 
so? (412)?that is, rebel and break the law.  But such a rebellion is often visceral and without 
deliberation, the kind of rebellion toward which white panoptic power actually baits would-be 
rebels, for the conspicuousness of this rebellion fits perfectly into white panopticism?s design of 
surveillance and selection?selection for the purposes of not only individual example-making, 
but for perpetuating the assumptions of white supremacy and rightness through an apparent 
fulfillment of the black criminal stereotype.41 
Cross also understands that, through the white hegemony?s recruitment of delinquency, 
the Party acts as a sort of unofficial but still useful arm of white panoptic power as well:  
?Though the Party was not an official adjunct to the police department, it did have wide powers 
of an effective and peculiar nature; it had its own underground apparatus and special methods of 
investigation? (462).  Not that this awareness will do him any good,42 given the fact that he too, 
like Bigger Thomas and Fred Daniels, dies at the hands of the new slavery.  But even up to the 
moment of his death, Cross knows that he ?was now under twenty-four-hour surveillance? (466), 
thanks to Menti and the black Hank?s following him around and staking him out.  The example 
of Cross thus sheds further light on the degrees of subtlety with which the forces of white 
panopticism can examine (even scrutinize) and select those members of the black migrant 
population they deem especially threatening for their intelligence (in addition to their 
indignance).  The New Overseer?s rationale seems to be that, if a particular black subject proves 
                                                            
41Dowling points out how there is evidence of at least an unconscious understanding of this environmental 
encouragement of criminality in the cynical and corrupt business practices of Tenderloin district landlords in the late 
nineteenth century:  ?Once the center of white middle-class respectability, by the late 1870s the Tenderloin proper 
was a major theater district, and the subsequent army of pleasure seekers chased its ?respectable? residents uptown.  
Tenderloin landlords then faced a difficult choice:  either turn the brownstones into multiple-family tenements for 
the crush of immigrant arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe, or lease them to gambling proprietors and 
brothel owners who could afford significantly higher rents.  They chose the second option, and seemingly overnight 
the Tenderloin became the most famous center of vice in New York history? (117). 
42This is certainly different with the case of Ellison?s intelligent protagonist in Invisible Man, which will be 
extensively examined in Chapter 4. 
68 
too smart for the simpler, first wave of indoctrination, then that subject can still be rendered 
useful through recruitment?both through isolating him class-wise and education-wise within his 
own community, and by flattering him with a false sense of equality within a system that is 
actually and no less white supremacist. 
 
VI. Terrible Bigger 
 Farah Jasmine Griffin says that the African-American migration narrative is marked by 
four pivotal moments: 
(1) an event that propels the action northward, (2) a detailed representation of the  
initial confrontation with the urban landscape, (3) an illustration of the migrant?s 
attempt to negotiate the landscape and his or her resistance to the negative effects 
of urbanization, and (4) a vision of the possibilities or limitations of the Northern, 
Western, or Midwestern city and the South.  (3) 
With Native Son, the latter two are obviously more apparent, with the first two having a less 
immediate, more residual significance, since the novel begins linearly from the Thomas family?s 
waking up in the run-down apartment that they are clearly used to.  However, Bigger?s 
confrontation with the urban landscape and resulting vision of its possibilities produce a very 
dark hue of self-consciousness; he knows that ?the moment he allowed what his life meant to 
enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else? (10).  And 
Bigger does kill, of course?though the true of source of fear for the white status quo is his 
accidental killing of Mary rather than his intentional killing of Bessie; and the confidence he 
gains from his initial success at remaining undiscovered as Mary?s murderer reveals a subtle 
understanding of the advantages of being underestimated?of being ?at the bottom of the world? 
69 
(150), language which again recalls the gothic underground-vs.-aboveground motif of mid-
twentieth-century African-American migration narratives.  Even toward the conclusion of Native 
Son, Bigger does not come across as completely contrite; he feels ?free for the first time in his 
life? after accidentally killing Mary, having ?accepted the moral guilt and responsibility for the 
murder? for its putting him ?into a position where he had sensed a possible order and meaning in 
his relations with the people about him? (274).  The ?faint, wry, bitter smile? (430) that is 
Bigger?s final gesture in the novel then reveals a kind of ironic, dark victory; he?s been a bigger 
part of the white world than he thought, what he?s wished for all along. 
But though the accidental killing of Mary brings a sense of renewal for Bigger, it does so 
only in the most chilling sense.  Even while he?s kissing Mary, the ?thought and conviction that 
Jan had had her a lot flashed through his mind? (84), which only increases his passion.  This 
harkens back to another image from the newsreel, of Mary, ?whose waist was encircled by the 
arms of a man,? that ?well-known radical? (32) Jan.  Mary?s body is an arena of conquest, and 
Bigger?s crossing of that line is a kind of rebellious victory, a way of saying, ?Now I?m having 
what you?ve had and didn?t want me to have!?  This gives him a sort of internalized swagger, a 
sense that he has ?created a new life for himself? (105) through the killing, to the extent that ?not 
once did he feel the need to tell himself that it had been an accident? (106).  He is quite proud of 
himself, being the supposedly weak and scared black man who dared to go where he was not 
supposed to?not only across the geographic line, but the social one as well. 
Bigger?s apparent living up to all of the worst white stereotypes and prejudices against 
African-Americans, especially of the poorer classes, defines Wright?s legacy as an African-
American writer?as a dealer of modern, African-American ?terrible honesty?; that is, living up 
to, artistically, the worst and most unfair of whites? dreadful expectations and then showing them 
70 
how this fulfillment of such stereotypes would, if true, be all their fault.  Wright runs the risk of 
being the authorial equivalent of the threat apparently posed by Fred Daniels to the police 
officers who kill him and say, ?You?ve got to shoot his kind; they?d wreck things? (?The Man 
Who Lived Underground? 1450).  For if black migrants do resort to violent and criminal 
behavior, it is the result of long-accumulating and long pent-up frustration and grievances; 
Walter White had posited this his list of the eight causes for American race riots:  1.) racial 
prejudice, 2.) economic competition, 3.) political corruption and exploitation of black voters, 4.) 
police inefficiency, 5.) newspapers? lying about black crimes, 6.) unpublished crimes against 
blacks, 7.) bad housing, and 8.) competition between white and black veterans (Anatomy 91-92). 
Similarly, Sandburg had documented a black veteran?s warning about how segregation only 
brings discord, through a ?commercializing? of ?racial antagonisms? (15).  But there is perhaps a 
troublingly constructive element to such violence, as the violent revolutions central to the history 
of the United States of America unavoidably (and begrudgingly) have proven.  Indeed, Heise 
describes urban riots as possible acts of ?remaking? (129), a last-straw reaction to a city?s spatial 
inequalities (134).     
 However, beginning with Bigger, one runs into considerable problems.  In spite of his 
importance as the first step in this tradition of African-American terrible honesty against white 
panopticism, he is by far the least sympathetic of these migration-narrative ?heroes?; he is a 
criminal, a murderer, a bully, and a rapist.  Also, as is the case with Petry?s Lutie Johnson, 
Wright?s protagonists, especially Bigger, do not win, even ambiguously.  From this point, the 
following chapters will work to unpack the problems posed by Wright by examining their 
incremental resolutions in the works of Wright?s contemporary successors?Petry and Ellison?
as well as some of his much later successors in the concluding chapter.  The work of Petry, for 
71 
instance, though her protagonist too is a ?loser,? provides a significant counterpoint to Wright?s 
treatment of gender; and with Ellison one sees what is perhaps the closest thing to a ?winner? in 
his nameless narrator?what is perhaps the successful culmination of Wright-esque ?terrible 
honesty.? 
  
72 
 
 
 
Chapter Three:  ?The Horrible Choice? 
 There are some obvious similarities between Ann Petry?s best-known work, The Street, 
and Wright?s Native Son.  Housing discrimination provides the chief means through which the 
sinister, panoptic forces act upon the protagonist, Lutie Johnson?especially the claustrophobic 
packing-in of entire families into single one-bedroom apartments, the reference to a ?line? (206) 
of geographic segregation, and the omnipresence of snow as a symbol of the dominant white 
culture.  And, like Bigger Thomas, Lutie too is driven to kill.  The difference is that she does so 
in self-defense, against the assault and attempted rape by Boots Smith, making her a relatively 
more sympathetic character.  Also, Lutie, unlike Bigger, gets to live.  However, like Bigger, she 
is defeated by the forces acting against her; in order for her to have another chance at life?and, 
as she sees it, to give her son Bub a better chance at life, she must abandon him, leaving him 
behind in New York so that she might escape to Chicago.  In short, Lutie Johnson and Bigger 
Thomas both lose.43 
Where Lutie finds herself at the conclusion of The Street is certainly a step beyond the 
more straightforward fate of Bigger, but the price?one spelled out in terms of motherhood and 
family, her having to abandon her son?is a considerable sacrifice, especially when considering 
slavery?s history of undermining and often severing family ties, as has been consistently 
documented in nineteenth-century slave narratives.  The consequences of the continued 
institutional racism of Jim Crow laws upon the stability and unity of African-American families 
                                                            
43The protagonist of Ellison?s Invisible Man, as will be demonstrated in the next chapter, marks an ambiguous 
departure from this trend of defeat. 
73 
is also well documented throughout post-bellum, pre-Harlem African-American works such as 
Francis E.W. Harper?s Iola Leroy, or , Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Charles W. Chestnutt?s 
?The Wife of His Youth? (1899), and Harlem Renaissance-era works such as Walter White?s 
Flight (1926).44  Along these lines, as well as along the obvious lines of gender, Petry?s work has 
perhaps more in common with that of Harriet Jacobs45 than Frederick Douglass? narratives as an 
example of a new slave narrative for the mid-twentieth century.  The stories of Douglass and his 
twentieth-century counterparts in Wright and Ellison are, after all, about the journeys and self-
actualizations of childless men.  The stories of Jacobs and Petry are about mothers; their 
protagonists, then, are much less immediately self-centered, with perhaps an even greater sense 
of urgency and pathos attached to their struggles.  Furthermore, motherhood defines the gender 
difference in the ways that black female subjects are targeted by white panoptic power; children 
become another wedge of influence and manipulation, another means by which the black female 
subject is ?kept in her place.?  This makes freedom and escape only possible through the 
heartbreak of family separation and rupture, which can lead further to desperate, self-defensive 
and callousing changes in attitudes towards children, especially one?s own.46Nella Larsen?s 
Quicksand (written almost twenty years before The Street) also comes to mind, with protagonist 
                                                            
44The ostensibly white Iola?s discovery of her own African ancestry and refusal to ?pass? reunites her with and 
introduces her to more dark-skinned relatives such as her uncle Robert Johnson and her maternal grandmother 
Harriet.  In ?The Wife of His Youth,? Mr. Ryder (real name, Sam Taylor) is reunited with his pre-Emancipation 
wife Liza Jane just as he is about to marry another woman.  In Flight, Mimi must temporarily abandon her son Jean 
to an orphanage in order to seek better employment opportunities in another part of the country.  
45In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Jacobs recounts her desperate attempts to elude the sexual pursuit of 
her master, Dr. Flint.  Such measures include her agreeing to an affair with a white neighbor, Mr. Sands, with whom 
she has two children.  Rather than give her up, Dr. Flint engages in a torturous campaign of vengeance against 
Harriet (or Linda, as she calls herself in the narrative), sending her to be broken in at a plantation and even resorting 
to the particular psychological torture of targeting her two children, which ultimately inspires Harriet to seemingly 
escape, actually hiding in the attic of  her mother?s shack-house, where her children are staying.  She eventually 
makes it to the North with her children, eluding Dr. Flint and his family?s attempts to retrieve her even there. 
46Take for instance, in Lorraine Hansberry?s A Raisin in the Sun, Ruth Younger?s impulse toward abortion when she 
finds out that she is pregnant again, knowing that another mouth to feed and body to inhabit the already cramped 
space of the family?s apartment has the potential to increase, not alleviate, her family?s financial struggles and the 
growing emotional gulf between herself and her husband Walter.  Hansberry and her play will be further discussed 
in the final chapter. 
74 
Helga Crane ending up trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience to a southern black 
preacher, and whose own children (birthed in rapid succession) leave her feeling trapped, 
defeated, and used up?in spite of the strong maternal instincts that ultimately keep her from 
abandoning them and their father (135).  Quicksand, in fact, ends on a note equating children 
with life-crushing burden:  ?And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again 
without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began 
to have her fifth child? (135).  Around the same time as Quicksand, and perhaps less seriously, 
there is the example of Mimi Daquin in Walter White?s Flight, who must resort to temporarily 
placing her son Jean in an orphanage in Baltimore (passing for white) while she financially gets 
back on her feet with better job opportunities in New York (181-183).  Obviously, the loss of 
Mimi?s son is merely temporary, with no murder having been committed to clinch the separation.  
Works such as Flight and Quicksand thus demonstrate how not only sexuality, but motherhood 
and family as well, define the added dimensions of predatory targeting and suffering experienced 
by black women at the hands of the New Overseer.  However, Petry avoids both the relative 
happy ending of Flight and the continuing entrapment at the conclusion of Quicksand with 
Lutie?s bitterly costly ?escape? from Junto. 
Motherhood also defines Petry?s point of departure from what is perhaps Dreiser?s best-
known female protagonist, Carrie Meeber of Sister Carrie.  For if Wright?s work represents a 
development away from Dreiser?s urban naturalism, Petry?s work demonstrates some key 
differences between the plight of the white female urban newcomer and that of the black female 
migrant.  Both protagonists are affected by their exposure, however distant, to the finer things in 
life?Carrie by the finer clothes of the chorus girls (377) and the ?wealth, fashion, ease?every 
adornment for women? (22) that the city seems to potentially hold for her, and Lutie by the 
75 
?miracle? (37) of a house and the expensive tastes of the Chandlers, a rich white family for 
whom she once worked.  But the white Carrie Meeber obviously has more options than the black 
Lutie Johnson.  The ?cold reality? (9) represented by Carrie?s poor sister Minnie and her humble 
apartment is something from which Carrie can actually run and become rich.  Lutie, of course, 
cannot do this and seems doomed to inhabit that ?cold reality? for the rest of her life.  Though 
Carrie is initially dependent upon the likes of Drouet and Hurstwood for social-financial 
opportunities, she can leave them once she achieves self-sufficiency; she can freely leave, even 
inverting the men?s attempts at sexual entrapment through gift-giving.47  Lutie obviously never 
reaches the heights that Carrie does; and, more importantly, the loss which ultimately defines 
Lutie?s disillusionment?in the form of an actual, living child in her son Bub?is obviously 
much more tangible than Carrie?s vague sense of disenchantment for her superficial success.48 
Like Wright, the departure of Petry?s work from the influence of urban naturalism is 
gothic in nature?in fact, even more so than Wright, to an extent that approaches the clich?d and 
the cartoonish.  However, such entertaining and sensational surface decoration acts as a 
temporary diversion from what The Street ultimately reveals as the true horror, one far less 
entertaining and much closer to home:  that is, the ways in which the New Overseer specifically 
acts upon black female subjects, mothers in particular, to ensure their enduring place within a 
new kind of slavery; and the heartbreaking measures to which these subjects must resort, through 
painful sacrifice of their sense of family and motherhood, to attain their freedom.  This chapter 
examines just how big of a difference gender makes in defining the role of the New Overseer and 
                                                            
47Carrie does so, of course, to the point of her attaining an arguable ?bad guy? position in the text as a Siren-like lure 
leading men like Hurstwood to their own destruction. 
48The same can be said for other white heroines, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald?s Daisy Buchanan and Judy Jones (from 
The Great Gatsby and ?Winter Dreams,? respectively), both of whom survive to live rather unglamorous married 
lives, with vast trails of male-suitor casualties in their wake (with Daisy, of course, the ?casualty? is much more 
literal, with the death of the title character).   
76 
his relationship to his pre-twentieth-century predecessor as portrayed in the narrative of Harriet 
Jacobs.  Petry?s black female perspective sheds light on the more sexually focused species of 
predation and exploitation exercised by white panoptic forces.  Such a focus requires a more 
sexually predatory and sexually selective system of recruitment and dependency, with women?
from the lowly Min to the more powerful Mrs. Hedges?ultimately dependent upon the power of 
men, often with the added edge of domestic abuse.49  A black woman is thus left to endure and 
negotiate a system in which she is dependently bound to a spouse or partner whose abuse of her 
stems from the same pressures acting upon her as a black migrant.  However, according to 
Lawrence P. Jackson: 
Petry molded the feminism available for her day, one that did not seek to blame 
black men for the poor standing of the group.  Lutie angrily concludes that her 
family life has dissolved because of her husband?s inability to find work.  Instead 
of the comfortable patriarchy available to white women, black women produce 
the family?s income.  (231) 
Petry thus understood the true complexity of the domestic strife and broken homes typical within 
working-class black homes?how, under white panopticism, black women who experience 
domestic instability, abuse and abandonment are, in fact, the victims of victims.  Domestic 
partners alike share oppression under the strategic initiatives of the dominant society.  And the 
initiatives of Junto make for a design that is shocking in its calculated meticulousness.  
 
I. Junto and the Junto:  A Tactic of Surveillance 
                                                            
49In another work, the short story ?Like a Winding Sheet,? Petry makes clear the connection between the pressures 
felt by black men under white panopticism  and the abuse suffered by black women at the hands of those same men 
within the domestic sphere.  The ill-timed teasing by his wife??You?re nothing but an old hungry nigger trying to 
act tough? (210)?Joseph perpetrates on her the violence of which he could only fantasize for his white female boss 
(who actually called him a ?nigger?) and the white female diner clerk who had apparently refused him service. 
77 
In The Street, Lutie?s gender helps Petry to reveal a new side of the New Overseer, one 
whose would-be victim is the sexually preyed-upon damsel in distress.  This new side is exposed 
through Junto, owner of Junto?s Bar and Grill and overall orchestrator of the local ghetto 
economy.  Like Jacobs? Dr. Flint, Junto has sex particularly in mind, wanting to essentially make 
Lutie his whore?or mistress.  Junto?s more casual approach to panopticism perhaps makes him 
even more maddening than the overseer of old; he seems so much gentler than the likes of the 
more obviously malicious and directly violent Dr. Flint.  This apparently softer approach, 
however, is afforded by a system of panopticism more sophisticated and elaborate than anything 
the old overseer had at his disposal; as William Scott writes, a network like Junto?s  ?requires an 
elaborate mechanism of surveillance to keep it intact? (109).  This certainly does not make him 
any different from Wright?s Buckley and Mr. Dalton.  However, what is different is how much 
more up-close and personal Junto prefers to be than Wright?s characters; and he achieves this 
more hands-on approach not only with Junto?s Bar and Grill, but by means of a three-space 
mechanism of panoptic surveillance?the three spaces being the apartment building, the street, 
and the bar and grill.  Each space carries with it the purposes of surveillance, recruitment, and 
inspiring the economic and sexual dependence of black women.  Recruitment seems especially 
important for the system?s survival and perpetuation, for Junto makes particular use of members 
of the black community who are brought into his fold to enhance the scope of further 
surveillance and dependency-entrapment.  Through these ?minions?50 (to use a gothically-
charged term) Junto?s system of surveillance, according to Hicks is exemplary of ?the 
Foucauldian axiom that modern surveillance is internalized by contemporary subjects, producing 
in them a mode of self-regulation that serves power? (28).  The recruited services of both Mrs. 
                                                            
50One cannot help but notice a connection between these ?minions? and ?drivers,? the black equivalent of overseers 
during pre-Emancipation slavery. 
78 
Hedges and Boots Smith in particular involve what Foucault calls ?the disciplinary gaze? 
(174)?whether it be Mrs. Hedges? general surveillance of the entire neighborhood, Boots? 
particular staking out of Lutie, or Jones? own obsessive voyeurism of Lutie.  Their gazes, all of 
which ultimately serve the panopticism of Junto, demonstrate how it is often necessary ?in order 
to increase its productive function? for the disciplinary gaze to be ?broken down into smaller 
elements,? thus ?specify[ing] the surveillance and mak[ing] it functional? (Foucault 174).  In this 
way, they act as ?drivers? in the service of the slaveowner and white supremacy. 
The three spaces? relationship with each other is more triangular than sequential, for once 
the system is created each space works in conjunction with the others as a circuit.  However, it is 
clear that Junto?s Bar and Grill is the last stop in the system?s creation, the ground zero for 
determining the system?s function, so I will begin there.  From the start, one should remember 
that the New Overseer?s particularly sexual targeting of black women is not necessarily a thing 
apart from his general targeting of the entire urban black populace.  According to Hortense 
Spillers, a black woman?s body, as an object of dominant white subjugation, acts as a cluster of 
?captured sexualities? that provide a ?physical and biological expression of ?otherness?? (4); and, 
in its otherness, her captive body translates for the dominant culture into a ?potential for 
pornotroping? that ?embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general 
?powerless,? resonating through various centers of human and social meaning? (206).  This 
?pornotroping? seems a consequence of the ?gaze? that Jacques Lacan describes as a function of 
the ?dark God,? or the presence of the desire for the Other representing what the gazer lacks 
(275)?an attempt at reaffirming one?s sense of self and power through seeing in the other what 
one wishes to see, with the gaze itself becoming the more accurate object of desire (the objet a) 
79 
than what the gazer is directing the gaze upon (104).51  The black female body then becomes for 
the predatory New Overseer and his panoptic forces a kind of sexualized metonym, just another 
part and trajectory of his isolation, surveillance, and subjugation of the black migrant masses.  
This is a continuation, of course, of how female slaves were not only preyed upon by their white 
masters not just for sexual gratification, but as psychological tools to undermine the sense of 
manhood and assertive confidence in male slaves made incapable of both maintaining 
relationships and protecting their women, as Harriet Jacobs demonstrates in her narrative.  
Whether the object of control-by-surveillance be a single woman or an entire population, the 
intention is to isolate.  Again, as a representative of the black populace, the black woman serves 
as a metonym for the white hegemony?s desire for control; the attempt to control her represents 
the wish to control the entire black community.   
Junto?s Bar and Grill is perhaps the most sinister of the three spaces, for it through this 
bar and grill that he seems almost friendly, having opened up a local watering hole as a getaway 
for the poor black residents, even frequenting the place himself.  He is, in fact, introduced in the 
novel as sitting in his own club and watching the customers.  He certainly does not appear to be 
hiding.  But Junto is hiding?in plain sight, in his unassuming conspicuousness; as Boots says, 
meditating on the subtlety of Junto?s power, ?He could sit forever at that table and nobody would 
look at him twice? (275).  It is Junto?s casualness that perhaps makes him even more maddening 
than the overseer of old; in her fear and hatred of Junto?s power, and in her increasing awareness 
of his plans to isolate her, Lutie feels that Junto ?could so casually, so lightly, perhaps at a mere 
whim, and not even aware of what he was doing, thrust her back into this place? (314), referring 
to her cramped apartment.  Junto?s Bar and Grill, then, is actually Junto?s surveillance station, 
                                                            
51Lacan?s description of the gaze in relation to the object of desire as ?love and mutilation? (263) is perhaps all too 
appropriate when considering the fate of many female slaves bold enough to refuse their masters? advances.  
80 
where he can observe the local black population in a more concentrated, less scattered setting.  
The Junto is, according to Scott, ?a kind of alternative space, offering its clientele the feeling of 
openness (in a mirrored wall), community, and good times? (107).  Lutie, as she herself sits in 
the Junto and drinks a beer, understands the desperation motivating the local poor black residents 
to regularly come there:   
They were there for the same reason that she was?because they couldn?t bear to 
look what they could see of the future smack in the face while listening to radios 
or trying to read an evening paper [?] No matter what it cost them, people had to 
come to places like the Junto, she thought.  They had to replace the haunting 
silences of rented rooms and little apartments with the murmur of voices, the 
sound of laughter; they had to empty two or three glasses of liquid so they could 
believe in themselves again.  (145-147) 
In this way, not only is the population less scattered, but Junto could conceivably observe them 
one by one, single-file, as they enter.  Even Junto?s huge mirror not only provides the place with 
a false sense of expansiveness (perhaps an added cruel joke, making the ?relief? of the bar and 
grill not so open after all), but also aids in Junto?s surveillance of the black patrons; it only 
appears that the mirror, according to Lutie, ?pushed the walls back and back into space [?] 
pushed the world of other people?s kitchen sinks back where it belonged and destroyed the 
existence of dirty streets and small shadowed rooms? (146), so that Junto, the Overseer, can 
better isolate them for his plans.  Through this diabolically clever manipulation, along with his 
additional tactic of local recruitment, Junto is able to isolate and to get to know certain people of 
interest quite quickly and quite well.  His specific interest appears, of course, to be the sexual 
81 
predation and exploitation of poor black women driven desperate by their bleak living conditions 
and lack of financial options.  And he has his eyes on Lutie. 
Though Junto may not be as obviously and directly racist or violent as Jacobs? Dr. Flint, 
he is nonetheless so.  Also, Junto?s willingness to socialize and cavort with black people (what 
Wright?s panoptic white characters apparently are not willing to do, seeing it as beneath them) 
and his sexual interest in black women, though superficially making him appear more racially 
tolerant, is in fact motivated by the same predatory opportunism that moves Dr. Flint.  As Hicks 
describes Junto?s interest in Lutie, ?despite his ostensible racial equanimity, [he] comes to gaze 
upon her as a whore because of a racist ideology that defines all black women that way? (23).  
Like Dr. Flint and his regaling of Harriet with promises of lavishly preferential treatment, Junto, 
in Lutie, is seeking to sexually capitalize upon her gender-based dependence and vulnerability 
within a place of social inequality, assuming that the gulf of socioeconomic difference between 
them will make her a more eager and easily-won sexual conquest.  
What many of Junto?s black customers do not realize is that, while he is the owner of the 
apparent boon their existence known as the Junto, he is also exploiting them through the same 
kind of housing discrimination and shoddy maintenance as portrayed by Wright in Native Son.  
It is a two-sided system that ensures the most convenient method of surveillance for Junto:  
create local living conditions so consistently poor as to unanimously attract all of the residents to 
the bar and grill!  Thus, the site where black women such as Lutie feel the pressures that drive 
them toward dependence most acutely is, of course, the apartment building.  Whereas Junto 
concentrates his own hands-on surveillance in his own bar and grill, making surveillance by 
recruited forces relatively unnecessary, he depends upon not only on recruited observational 
forces like that of Mrs. Hedges but (more darkly) also the men driven toward domestic abuse to, 
82 
through their unconscious complicity in the New Overseer?s master plan, to drive unhappy and 
abused women out towards the relief of a space like the Junto.52  As subjects of persecution 
themselves, these men come to resemble the persecutor, especially through their persecution of 
women.  The dominant culture?s internalization mechanisms have further created within these 
black migrant men the stereotype they need to justify that white culture?s destruction of those 
black men.  Even the likes of Jones the Super, who does not live with Lutie but obsessively and 
voyeuristically spies on her, is unconsciously working in the interests of Junto.  As Hicks points 
out, even though Jones seems to start out as Lutie?s most immediate sexual oppressor and that he 
has no direct allegiance to Junto, by the conclusion of the novel, in his vengeful manipulation of 
Bub to unwittingly stealing mail, he demonstrates that he ?has learned to marshal the powers of a 
white government against his victim, becoming complicit with its racist ideology? (23).  On the 
local level, this marshalling of the white power structure more immediately links him, though 
still indirectly, with Junto; and his own sexual obsession with Lutie and attempted rape of her 
turns out to not only anticipate Junto?s attempt to take advantage of her later in the text, but 
contribute as a force pushing Lutie away from her home and family toward the clutches of Junto 
as the greater, more systematic sexual oppressor.   
Mrs. Hedges also functions as a kind of masculine gaze by proxy; for as Hicks also points 
out, though Mrs. Hedges initially functions as the primary figure of surveillance in the text, ?we 
are ultimately made to understand that her complicity with the powerful white man Junto springs 
from a history of sexual marginalization? (23).  As a victim of a disaster of housing 
                                                            
52James Smethurst points out how Bigger Thomas comes to resemble the cruel and sadistic patriarchal figure (the 
monk, the baron, etc.) of the traditional European Gothic in the ways that he persecutes his own friends, family, and 
girlfriend (ultimately raping and murdering her), citing patriarchal tyranny and transgressive sexuality as two gothic 
staples in Native Son that generally accompany ?relations of power, and an instability of markers of social identity, 
such as family, class, race, gender, and nationality? (29-30).  A curious effect of the more subtle and insidious 
tyranny perpetrated by New Overseers such as Junto is how they seem to inspire, through their panoptic pressures, 
the more direct brutality of the older overseer within certain black migrant men. 
83 
discrimination herself, scarred for life by a tenement fire she managed to survive, Mrs. Hedges 
feels defeminized, even desexualized, thus tragically setting herself up for ?masculinization? via 
an alliance with Junto, leading her both to become an agent of his ?scopic regime? and ?to gaze 
upon women like Lutie as sexual objects? (Hicks 33).  On top of this masculinized role, Junto?s 
legal protection of the illegal services provided by Mrs. Hedges (madam of a brothel) is, in fact, 
an extension of his real estate practices, whose discriminatory methods create the kind of 
environment that ultimately drives black migrant women like Lutie toward the level of 
desperation that makes Mrs. Hedges? offer of a job as a prostitute seem like a viable option. 
Perhaps more so than Lutie (who is separated from her husband), Min demonstrates the 
depths of her dependence upon a man for security and survival in the harsh urban landscape of 
the new slavery.  In spite of his hatred for her, Min is possessive of Jones and the money he 
saves her by her living with him and is, therefore, worried that his obsessive infatuation with the 
obviously more attractive Lutie will lead to his eventual kicking her out of his apartment.  This is 
why she resorts, at the advice of Mrs. Hedges, to go to David the Prophet for magical 
paraphernalia to use against Jones?along the way, ?determinedly repeating, ?And I ain?t a-goin? 
to be put out?? (122).  But it dawns on Min, as evidenced by her increasing trepidation, that this 
visit to David is, in fact, ?the first defiant gesture she had ever made? in her life (126); and this is 
where Petry reveals the true extent of Min?s grievances.  This defiant gesture stands in sharp 
contrast to Min?s putting up with ?the actions of cruelly indifferent employers? while doing part-
time domestic work (126), with some of her female bosses having been ?openly contemptuous 
women who laughed at her to her face even as they piled on more work,? leaving her?and 
notice the tellingly gothic language??to be buried under the great mounds of dirty clothes 
[taking] days to work her way out from under them, getting no extra pay for the extra time 
84 
involved? (126, italics added).  Then there are Min?s various, previous husbands who ?had taken 
her money and abused her and given her nothing in return? (127).  But this turns out to be a weak 
and not wholly autonomous defiance, for Min?s initial goal is not to leave Jones but to stay with 
him; her defiance is an aggressive move to remain in spite of Jones? wishes!  It is an ironic 
defiance that, in fact, reaffirms Min?s dependence on a man.  And through Min, Petry makes the 
reasons for this dependence clear?if black men suffer greatly from the housing discrimination 
and urban segregation of the New Overseer, black women suffer even more so.  Min wants?
needs?to hang on to Jones and stay in his apartment ?because there she was free from the yoke 
of that one word:  rent,? that word meaning for her ?padlocked doors with foul-mouthed 
landladies standing in front of them or sealed keyholes with marshals waving long white papers 
in their hands? (127, italics added).  Min knows how single black women are viewed as 
especially easy pickings by predatory, opportunistic realtors and landlords; she knows how she 
stands no chance alone?that, by contrast, with ?a man attached to her she could have an 
apartment,? which she goes so far as to call ?a real home? (133), illustrating how black female 
migrants were left to settle for, even be delighted by, so little.  This is why, even after she finally 
decides to leave Jones, Min nuzzles up to a strong-looking black pushcart man: 
No, a woman living along really didn?t stand much chance.  Landlords took 
advantage and wouldn?t fix things and landladies became demanding about the 
rent, waxing sarcastic if it was so much as a day behind time.  With a man around, 
there was a big difference in their attitude.  If he was a strong man like this one, 
they were afraid to talk roughly. (371) 
And this advantage is often a purely psychological one; there is certainly no guarantee that the 
man to which a black migrant woman attaches herself will be of any directly financial help.  As 
85 
evidenced by Lutie?s ex-husband Jim and the already-mentioned Bill Smith, little to no work was 
available for black migrant men because of hiring discrimination and competition with poor 
whites.  This often led male heads of households discouraged and frustrated to the point of 
loafing, alcoholism, domestic abuse, and (as was the case with Jim) looking for other women to 
replace the ones they have, whose employment and sole-breadwinner status offends their 
masculinity.  Black migrant women, then, often find themselves between the rock of the white 
panoptic forces acting upon them as women and the hard place of the misdirected rage and 
abandonment?the result of those same white panoptic forces?of their men.  And these are men 
that they, nonetheless, need. 
What perhaps sheds further light on Junto?s actual cruelty is how Lutie is not his only 
victim.  The methodology of which the claustrophobic living conditions of the apartments and 
the relief of the Junto Bar and Grill consists involves, by its very nature, collateral damage.  In 
order for Junto to find what he likes/wants in the local population, everyone must suffer and be 
driven to the Junto.  Lutie even goes so far, in a particularly vivid metaphor, as to still liken him 
to the traditionally gothic patriarchal tormentor who is burying his victim alive:  ?Junto has a 
brick in his hand.  Just one brick.  The final one needed to complete the wall that had been 
building up around her for years, and when that one last brick was shoved in place, she would be 
completely walled in? (423).  One cannot help but to recall Poe?s ?The Black Cat? and ?The 
Cask of Amontillado? with Petry?s choice of imagery.53  And not only does Lutie feel like she is 
being walled in, but that ?instead of her reaching out for the walls, the walls were reaching out 
for her?bending and swaying toward her in an effort to envelop her? (12), like the insidiously 
sliding walls of some sophisticated torture chamber, like the kind seen in another Poe story, ?The 
                                                            
53More seriously, Petry?s choice of imagery also recalls the claustrophobia of the slave ship and the squalor of the 
slave quarters. 
86 
Pit and the Pendulum.?54  Such claustrophobic imagery virtually litters The Street, making it 
clear that the key to Junto?s gothic sensibility as a New Overseer?how he is ?felt? as a force of 
white panopticism?is the suffocating crampedness and feeling of being trapped in a confined 
spaced that he inspires in the poor black populace through the local system of urban segregation.  
That feeling of crampedness comes to affect Lutie so acutely that she, like the other black urban 
migrants who seem to carry the effects of their living spaces around with them, even feels closed 
in when outside of her apartment building?for example, by the mountains while riding around 
with Boots in his car (159-160).  Within Junto?s particular panoptic system, the apartments 
throughout Harlem are, as Lutie says, ?nothing but traps? (73), with the tenants inhabiting them 
having the uneasy premonition of a future of their being ?caged? (147) in them.  Lutie also seems 
to understand the darkly transformative potential in Junto?s indirect approach to gothic 
confinement, how the street?s more monstrous and grotesque inhabitants are ?the result of 
electric light instead of hot, strong sunlight? (248-249).   
Characters in other Petry works make it clear that cramped apartment spaces have a lot to 
do with their general sense of injustice.  In ?In Darkness and Confusion,? for instance, William 
blames a lot of the negative influences that the street has had on his son Sam on the living space 
in which his son grew up, one not big enough ?for a man to move around in without bumping 
into something? (261), thus forcing him out toward the mercies of the street.  Again, one can 
clearly see the line of commonality between the old slavery?s detriment to African-American 
families and communities and that of the urban North?s new slavery, whose effects and 
methodology are far more insidious and environmental.  Indeed, according to Shockley, Petry 
demonstrates in The Street how the horrible conditions of urban segregation and environmental 
racism ?turn[s] the home ideal on its head? (446), robbing the domestic space of the sense of 
                                                            
54Clearly, Wright was not the only one of these authors influenced by the work of Poe. 
87 
protection and privacy necessary to comfortably and healthily raise a family.  Having Mrs. 
Hedges surveying nosiness particularly in mind, Lutie concludes:  ?Living here is like living in a 
structure that has a roof, but no partitions, so that privacy is destroyed, and even the sound of 
one?s breathing becomes a known, familiar thing to each and every tenant? (313).   
The thinness of the walls also creates a kind of accidental surveillance by the tenants of 
each other, destroying all sense of the privacy that the space of a home is supposed to afford.  
This thinness is especially unnerving when violent domestic disputes occur, such as the 
unemployed Bill Smith?s routine of coming home drunk and beating up his wife (313).  Such 
events are especially painful to Lutie as a mother because they terrify her son, even more so 
because Lutie has to work and thus has no choice but to leave him there alone (the temporary 
abandonment which heartbreakingly foreshadows the more permanent abandonment).  Such 
occurrences demonstrate the added edge to what a black migrant faces if she happens to be a 
woman?as a potential sexual victim, as a concerned mother, and as the recipient of the 
displaced and misdirected rage of their husbands or boyfriends, also black, whose sense of 
manhood is perpetually injured by the dominant white culture?s denying them the dignity of 
employment and self-sufficiency.  Petry?s gender, as well her focus on women in her novel, 
allow for her to give a greater voice, through Lutie and even less prominent characters such as 
Min, to women such as Bessie in Native Son and Lil in Lawd Today! whose victimhood is 
perhaps not given as much due diligence by their male creator, Richard Wright.   
The third space, the street, is perhaps the most abstract.  As a space, it represents what is 
denied African-American migrants as well as the limitations placed upon him/her within white 
panopticism to maintain the norms and supremacy of the dominant white culture.  From the 
balcony from which she observes the street and the neighborhood, Mrs. Hedges actually 
88 
occupies a space between the street and the apartment building.  Given that it is through his 
acquaintance with Mrs. Hedges that Junto begins his panoptic existence within (and apart from, 
and over) the local black community, one could argue that the street is the space where it all 
begins.  If crime and illegal businesses are representative consequences of the street as a 
transformative force, and if it is his lasting business relationship with Mrs. Hedges that allows 
for the development and dissemination of Junto?s panoptic power, then the street is certainly the 
part of the three-space mechanism where Junto initially gets his foothold and establishes his 
panoptic status?according to Heather Hicks, what makes him ?omnipresent and insidious? and 
leads to the ?increasingly abstract, disembodied quality? (28) that defines him as a New 
Overseer.  However, there would be a considerable amount of wishful thinking on Mrs. Hedges? 
part to assume that she and Junto are equal partners, and that he is racially color-blind.  Her 
business as well as her surveillance is ultimately on behalf of Junto, who controls the local 
economy in Harlem.  As Hicks points out: 
Junto himself profits from the segregation enabled by this culture of surveillance 
by economically manipulating Harlem?s captive consumer base [?] no matter 
which interpretation one brings to Junto?s ostensible color-blindness, it is crucial 
to understand that his actions remain contextualized by the rigid hierarchy that the 
system of white power holds in place.  (29) 
Thus, Mrs. Hedges provides quite a different example of a black woman?s dependence on a  
man.  In her case, that man is white?and not just any white man but the white man, Junto.  It is 
Junto who makes the local police ignore Mrs. Hedges? ring of prostitution.  Whether she realizes 
it or not (and whether she likes it or not), she is an agent of Junto.  From the beginning, given her 
89 
usefulness in what she could offer him in terms of understanding the traumatic disillusionment in 
the local black migrant population, Junto has recruited her. 
Mrs. Hedges had a rather direct hand in this development, acting as a kind of mentor for 
the enterprising Junto; one can see the origins of the methodology behind his system of panoptic 
manipulation in Mrs. Hedges? cynical advice to him:   
  She told Junto people had to dance and drink and make love in order to forget  
  their troubles and that bars and dance halls and whorehouses were the best  
possible investments.  Slowly and cautiously Mr. Junto had become the owner of 
all three, though he still controlled quite a bit of real estate.  (251) 
However, it is clear that, as Scott points out, that although Mrs. Hedges organizes and oversees 
the ring of prostitution, ?it is Junto, her business partner, who provides the infrastructure for the 
operation? (107).  For her, Junto is an exception as a white man; though she generally has ?no 
use? for white people and does not want them ?anywhere near? her, she puts up with Junto, as 
she tells him, ?because you don?t ever stop to think whether folks are white or black and you 
don?t really care? (251).  In spite of her arguably ?making? of him with her cynical advice about 
manipulating the local community, Junto has made her no less dependent upon him for both legal 
protection and self-validation.  Though not sexually sought after, she is still exploited, even 
within the recruitment that misleads her towards a false comfort within an ostensible freedom.  
As for Mrs. Hedges? role as madam of her brothel, though she may at first appear to be the one 
ultimately responsible for selecting Lutie as a prospect-target for her prostitution ring?with 
Lutie?s ?thick, soft hair? offering ?great possibilities for making money? (256)?she is doing so 
specifically with Junto?s interests in mind.  This reaffirms and solidifies her status as a recruited 
minion of Junto, and it should be remembered that recruitment is a key resource in defining the 
90 
difference between the New Overseer and the old one.  The old overseer simply did not have the 
tool of recruitment?certainly not on the same scale, beyond his use of individual black 
?drivers,? as the New Overseer in his more industrialized and sophisticated urban environment.  
The old overseer had only the plantation, whereas the New Overseer has the entire cityscape for 
his panoptic playground?complete with law, employment, and housing systems working in his 
favor across a much more vast and daunting grid. 
The panoptic design of the street is what Lutie means when she describes how the streets 
are ?no accident,? a creation of ?the North lynch mobs? (323, italics added), whose malice is far 
less direct and more intricate than their southern counterparts.  Typical of disillusioned black 
migrants confronting the new slavery of the urban North, Lutie feels that there is no escape, like 
she has been ?hemmed into an ever-narrowing space? from the day she was born (323).55  In 
spite of his less obvious violence, especially when comparing him to the far more directly and 
physically abusive Dr. Flint, Junto still represents ?the implacable figure of a white man blocking 
the way, so that it was impossible to escape? (315).  Junto is no less sinister and dangerous.  In 
his aura of ubiquity, he seems to be the avatar of the very ?street? to which Lutie attributes all of 
the forces acting against her and other urban black migrants. 
 Junto?s subtle maneuvering of Lutie toward sexual and financial dependence upon him 
culminates in his taking advantage of the Super?s getting her son arrested.  He tries to make 
having sex with him light compensation for his possible freeing of Bub and improvement of her 
lifestyle.  As Boots Smith explain to Lutie, ?All you got to do is be nice to him as long as he 
wants and the two hundred bucks is yours.  And bein? nice to Junto pays off better than anything 
                                                            
55Petry?s imagery of being hemmed is reminiscent of similar claustrophobic and suffocating imagery in Larsen?s 
Quicksand.  In New York, for instance, Helga feels ?shut in, trapped? (47), and this feeling seems to follow her 
wherever she goes; upon her returning to New York from Copenhagen, she leaves her apartment in a panic, feeling 
that she ?must get out or [she?ll] choke? (110). 
91 
else I know? (421).  This cold-blooded willingness to manipulate black female subjects through 
their children defines the particularly diabolical lengths to which the New Overseer is willing to 
go to get what he wants?again, with Junto?s relatively less brutal approach making him no less 
evil.  Notice how the climax of The Street, Lutie?s killing of Boots Smith, comes shortly after 
Boots and (one can assume) Junto become aware of Lutie?s motherhood and the incarceration of 
her child.  Lutie has to go to Boots for the two hundred dollars to pay for a lawyer for Bub, who 
has been set up by the Super to unwittingly commit mail theft.  Boots? cold, predatory 
opportunism rears its head upon his finding out that Lutie has a child, and this is not entirely lost 
on Lutie: 
His face had changed while she talked to him.  Ordinarily his expression was 
unreadable; now he looked as though he had suddenly seen something he had 
been waiting for, seen it spread right out in front of him, and it was something that 
he wanted badly [?] He hadn?t known about Bub.  She had forgotten that she 
hadn?t told him she had a child.  (400) 
Also, after Boots tells her that he will have the money for her the next night, Lutie worries that 
his agreeing to do so had been ?too easy, much too easy? (401).  Shortly after, and having very 
likely been positioned to do so, Mrs. Hedges then mentions Junto after finding out from Lutie 
about Bub?s incarceration??A friend of mine, a Mr. Junto?a very nice white gentleman, 
dearie? (417)?insinuating that Junto would pay well for Lutie?s services as a prostitute.  Lutie 
then realizes that Junto had not wanted to pay her for singing in Boots? band; that sort of 
compensation would have lent Lutie a degree of independence and mobility quite counter to his 
plans for her.  Such subtle and unscrupulous manipulations make Junto and his minions, for 
Lutie, the very avatars of the street that she abstractly blames for everything working against her 
92 
freedom, security, and happiness.  The street, then, is the zone of negative influence upon black 
migrants, where they are transformed for the worse. 
In the case of Boots Smith, who also acts as a recruited agent, Junto is far more direct (as 
opposed to his approach with Mrs. Hedges) in communicating the true inequality within their 
relationship.  In sensing competition in Boots? desire for Lutie, he reminds Boots of, before he 
had hired him to play piano for him, Boots was a poor Pullman porter, starving and playing in 
dives and putting up with the insults of white patrons; he tells Boots, bluntly, ?I made you? 
(264).  Deciding that Lutie would not be worth the loss of Junto?s favors to him, Boots falls back 
in line and continues his role in Junto?s plot to financially isolate Lutie?first with promises of 
singing work that turns out to not pay, then to coldly taking advantage of her son?s incarceration.  
With the former, Lutie demonstrates a vague sense of Boots? link as a recruit to the devious 
power of Junto:  ?And time and Boots Smith and Junto had pushed her right back in here, deftly 
removing that obscuring cloud of dreams? (311-312).  But this link, again, is not one of equality, 
as was the case with Mrs. Hedges.  Perhaps more so than any other character, Boots 
demonstrates the ultimate usefulness of minions to Junto?to take the fall for him, which, 
according to Shockley, is exactly what Boots does (455).  Even as she is bashing his head in after 
he has struck her and attempted to rape her, Lutie knows that it is not really Boots who she is 
repeatedly striking with the iron candlestick but ?the white world which thrust black people into 
a walled enclosure from which there was no escape; and at the turn-of-events which had forced 
her to leave Bub alone while she was working so that he now faced reform school, how had a 
police record? (430).  And who best represents and typifies that white world with its enclosing 
panoptic forces in The Street?  The white man in the next room waiting to take sexual advantage 
of her, Junto, who manages to elude such a gruesome end.  As a recruited force, and through 
93 
Lutie?s killing of him, Boots, in fact, takes the fall for Junto, demonstrating the use that the New 
Overseer can draw even from the ultimate, sacrificial expendability of the black recruit. 
Lutie?s awareness of Junto?s panoptic power increases incrementally, and it climaxes in 
the form of a revelatory hallucination; she realizes that the ?creeping, silent thing? (418) that she 
had sensed in the movie theater and in the beauty parlor was now in her living room, in the form 
of Junto sitting on the studio couch.  Though she quickly realizes that this is just a figment of her 
imagination, the real Junto turns out to be actually waiting for her in Boots? apartment the next 
night, when she returns to get the two hundred dollars Boots had promised.  This materialization 
of the source of all that has apparently been working against her provides for the true horror of 
The Street and Lutie?s understanding of that horror.  But before this horror is to be explored and 
defined further, it is necessary to point out Petry?s particular strategy for highlighting this real 
horror of the text?by first providing an arguably more simplistic and clich?d version of the 
Gothic, a version that provides something of a stylistic diversion.  
   
II. The Gothic Diversion 
Slavery, again, as a central and often-explored subject of the American Gothic, is much 
more strikingly real-life and closer to home in its horror.  The methods of torture, both physical 
and psychological, within it, if it were not all so true, as documented in the various slave 
narratives, remind one of the sort of sensationalist violence found in the traditional European 
Gothic.  Slavery, however, has that much more poignantly felt ?too soon? factor, especially 
given how its historical resonance is felt even today.  Harriet Jacobs? description of her extended 
stay in the attic space, for example, in spite of its seriousness and verisimilitude, almost reads 
like the prototypically gothic storyline of a powerful and sadistic male pursuer tormenting a 
94 
hapless maiden by imprisoning her in a dungeon or the castle catacombs; as Jacobs concludes, 
?He had an iron will, and was determined to keep me, and to conquer me? (176).  At one point, 
Jacobs even specifically refers to this hiding place as ?my dungeon? (277); indeed, her incredibly 
long stay is a kind of self-imposed prison sentence.  And it is Dr. Flint?s vindictive machinations 
that have put her in this position of torment.  As Jacobs describes, ?To this hole I was conveyed 
as soon as I entered the house.  The air was stifling; the darkness total [?] The rats and mice ran 
over my bed; but I was weary, and I slept such sleep as the wretched may, when a tempest has 
passed over them? (262).  Not only does she have ?to sit or lie in a cramped position day after 
day, without one gleam of light? and endure being bitten by ?hundreds of little red insects? 
(264), but she also has to hide from her own children (263).  This is not only echoed by Petry in 
the claustrophobia of Lutie?s apartment building; it evokes the sort of ordeals associated with 
torturous and inhumane imprisonment?the hot box, or the live burial (such as only up to the 
neck, or a momentary underground burial?both of which are known to involve agitated 
vermin), making Dr. Flint into a kind of inquisitor/master torturer once removed. 
Fittingly, Petry does not make much of a leap for anyone to detect the Gothic in The  
Street.56  She outdoes Jacobs, however, in deliberately gothic coloration; it seems her desire to 
make it so obvious as to be downright campy.57  Petry does not make it hard for readers to see 
Jones the Super as a vampire; she appears, in fact, to be deliberately leading readers in that 
direction.  Jones? deep revulsion at the sight of the big golden cross that Min hangs over her 
headboard, given to her by the ?root doctor? David the Prophet (140), and the hissing sound 
Jones makes when Min makes the sign of the cross at him (358) particularly evoke the 
                                                            
56Jackson calls The Street Petry?s ?book of social criticism and macabre tragedy? (227). 
57To a subtler degree, this diversionary tactic of placing the clich?d Gothic before the truer horror within the text 
shows up in other works by Petry as well.  Take, for instance, how ?Like a Winding Sheet,? a story that will end in 
domestic violence, begins with Johnson, the perpetrator of that violence, having the feeling that he should not leave 
the house because it is Friday the 13th. 
95 
superstitious and clich?d stuff of horror cinema; and, in a nightmare of Lutie?s, Jones and his dog 
?become one? and bite her arm off, calling to mind the animal transformations in such 
prototypical works as Bram Stoker?s Dracula.  Jones? underground-ness, which has apparently 
been a required condition of every job he has ever held, certainly makes him seem like one of the 
undead; and Petry?s descriptions of him are at times corpse-like, with his ?dull, scarred, worn 
flesh? and knuckles that are ?knobs that stood out under the skin? (12).  Such dwellings as he is 
accustomed to occupying?be they cellars, basements, furnaces, or ship holds?certainly evoke 
the crypt, or at least an underground cave, both typical haunts for vampires.  However, this 
apparent campiness precludes and highlights the truer horror of Lutie having to abandon her son 
at the novel?s conclusion.  
 Jones is not the only encrypted member of the undead for Petry.  Just as she has Jones 
transform into a vicious dog in Lutie?s nightmare, she has the entire local populace do some 
nocturnal shape-shifting as well in that same nightmare, just before Lutie awakens in terror: 
She screamed and screamed and windows opened and the people poured out of 
the buildings?thousands of them, millions of them.  She saw that they had turned 
to rats.  The street was so full of them that she could hardly walk.  They swarmed 
around her, jumping up and down.  Each one had a building chained to its back, 
and they were all crying, ?Unloose me!  Unloose me!?  (193) 
And such vampiric imagery, for Petry, is not exclusive to The Street; in her short story about the 
1943 Harlem riot, ?In Darkness and Confusion,? a key reason that the street inhabited by he and 
his family is not ?a good [one] to live on? is the ?shadowy, vague shapes? emerging from the 
darkness, ?lurking near the trees? and ?dodging behind them,? and the ?disembodied figures? in 
the street that ?slept? in the morning (260).  However, Petry?s heavy-handed gothic window-
96 
dressing provides a purposefully transparent symbolism; just as she makes recognizing certain 
superficial features of The Street as gothic not much of a reach, she also does not make it hard to 
ascertain the metaphorical significance of her characters? vampirism, undead-ness, and 
underground-ness.  The characters? monstrosity is indicative of their being darkly transformed by 
malignant external forces within their environment, all of which can be traced back to some 
white hegemonic power manipulating them for its own interests.  Indeed, this sense of external 
forces acting upon unwitting victims calls to mind naturalism while replacing it with the Gothic?s 
sense of a more materialized source of those forces.  This increased tangibility of the source of 
those forces points toward the conclusion that The Street favors the gothic over the naturalistic, 
as Evie Shockley appears to believe in her summation that The Street is a tale of ?Harlem?s 
horrors? with the ?street? representing the new medieval monastery, convent, or dungeon as the 
new site for panoptic female victimization (439).   
With Jones in particular, Petry makes it clear that Jones? grotesque appearance as well as 
his sexual obsession with Lutie stem from the prejudicial treatment he has suffered at the hands 
of the dominant white culture for all of his life.  Limited job opportunities had led him first to 
working in a ship?s hold, in which he felt ?buried alive?58 (86), and that live burial would 
continue throughout his life in the subterranean dwellings he had to inhabit as the superintendant 
of various buildings.  His worn hands and knobby knuckles are the result of years of ?hauling 
ashes [and] shoveling coal? (12); and Mrs. Hedges perhaps sums it up best when she concludes 
that Jones? living ?in basements such a long time? has made him ?queer,? with ?notions in his 
head about things? (114).  More succinctly, after hearing Jones? dog howl after Jones has kicked 
it, she says that he is ?cellar crazy? (301).  He had done so, tellingly, because Lutie?s son Bub 
                                                            
58This is obviously evocative of a central theme (perhaps ?obsession? is the better word) of Edgar Allan Poe.  Evie 
Shockley, in fact, made it the title of her work on The Street, ?Buried Alive:  Gothic Homelessness, Black Women?s 
Sexuality and (Living) Death in Ann Petry?s The Street.? 
97 
had quickly run off, having refused Jones? devious offer of ?detective work,? actually a ruse of 
vengeance against Lutie to lure Bub into stealing mail and getting arrested.  Similarly, Lutie feels 
that Jones is ?something less than human? for his having been ?chained to buildings until he was 
like an animal? (191).  Jones, then, was not born a monster, but made into one, his evilness the 
direct result of what has been denied him in terms of professional and socioeconomic mobility, 
as well as a comfortable living space.  The same goes for the rest of the inhabitants of ?the 
street,? especially the kind the ?shadowy? and ?disembodied? kind mentioned by William in ?In 
Darkness and Confusion.?   
Lutie too, in The Street, notices the vampire-like nocturnal criminals, but more clearly 
voices an understanding of what made them the way they are?that they ?carr[y] with them the 
horror of the places they lived in, places like her own apartment? (153); and this is but a more 
sinister extension of what she notices earlier while riding a very crowded train?with its 
passengers maintaining their own ?private worlds? to create the ?illusion of space between them 
and their fellow passengers? (27), and the crowd obviously feeling happier and freer as it 
expands off the train and out of the station (58).  Petry also demonstrates an awareness of how 
otherwise decent people can be driven to monstrosity in her short story ?Like a Winding Sheet? 
as well, with the main character Johnson, who will ultimately turn to brutally beating his wife 
Mae at the end of the story, appearing at the beginning of the story wrapped in his bedsheet ?like 
a winding sheet,? or a ?shroud? (199)?again, a representation of someone who was ?buried 
alive? and thus driven to desperate and misdirected measures.  Given this apparent warping of 
otherwise upstanding characters towards violent and criminal behavior, one can see Petry?s 
strong candidacy for major realism/naturalism author.  However, clearly at work upon her are the 
very human sources of Junto and his minions.  
98 
 Mrs. Hedges and Min are also ingeniously rendered by Petry so as to initially appear 
simplistic in their gothic representation.  Upon Lutie?s first encounter with her, Mrs. Hedges 
seems downright witch-like?a ?snake charmer,? as Lutie puts it, who ?sat in her window in 
order to charm away at the snakes, the wolves, the foxes, the bears that prowled and loped and 
crawled on their bellies through the jungle of 116th Street? (8).  Like a sorceress, Mrs. Hedges 
possesses a seeming omniscience and demonstrates a powerful sense of influence and control 
over the neighborhood she continuously surveys.  The power she exercises over Jones, especially 
in her prevention of his attempted rape of Lutie, is particularly striking.  And the almost 
ghoulishly ugly Min resorts to a form of voodoo or black magic in her visit to the ?Prophet,? 
David, and her acquisition from him of the red liquid, candles, powder, and big golden cross she 
will use against Jones (135)?all in order to protect herself against Jones? violent outbursts and 
the possibility of his kicking her out of his apartment.       
 Very early on in The Street, and after her first encounters with Jones, Mrs. Hedges and 
Min, Lutie has a sense of ?the street? as a darkly transformative force; the significance of the  
physical and moral distortion that the three of them have experienced is not lost on Lutie.  
However, though she is aware, Lutie is also foreshadowingly dismissive of the street?s warping 
effects:    
the same combination of circumstances had evidently made the Mrs. Hedges who 
sat in the street-floor window turn to running a fairly well-kept whorehouse?but 
unmistakably a whorehouse; and the superintendent of the building?well, the 
street had pushed him into basements away from light and air until he was being 
eaten up by some horrible obsession; and still other streets had turned Min, the 
woman who lived with him, into a drab drudge so spineless and so limp she was 
99 
like a soggy dishrag.  None of those things would happen to her, Lutie decided, 
because she would fight back and never stop fighting back.  (57) 
We find out that even Lutie, in her earlier days with her ex-husband Jim, had resorted to taking 
in and exploiting State children as income, even though for Lutie it ?didn?t seem quite right that 
two grown people and another child should be living on the money that was supposed to be used 
exclusively for the State children? (170).  Though certainly doing better than Jones, Mrs. 
Hedges, and Min in appearance, it soon becomes obvious that Lutie?s denial of the street?s 
having any effect on her, and thus her belief that she can succeed in combating its forces, is 
wishful thinking on her part.  Again, those ?forces? have a human source, and this human source 
has very specific intentions for Lutie.  Such intensions make Junto seem like the stalker, would-
be rapist, and sadistic patriarch of archetypal gothic literature?a dimension of Petry?s Gothicism 
that demonstrates the fine line between the campy and the more realistically appropriate.   
There is a hint of her obliviously including herself in her statement, ?No one could live 
on a street like this and stay decent? (229), when onlookers show no interest in a poor-looking 
woman?s having had her purse snatched; they appear, in fact, to even be annoyed by it.  Lutie 
apparently does not realize that by ?no one? she is including herself.  The point, of course, is that 
no one is safe.  The more obvious monstrosity and disfigurement of such extreme characters?or 
rather, gothic clich?s?as Jones, Mrs. Hedges and Min is then metaphorically indicative of a 
much more general monstrosity and corruption within the entire urban populace.  This populace 
shares a common victimhood through the white panoptic forces acting upon them, drastically 
reducing their choices and routes for social mobility and socioeconomic escape, thus driving 
them toward the evil of fewer healthy alternatives for such.  The source of these panoptic forces 
100 
is Junto, owner of Junto?s Bar and Grill, and his tactics?as well as his particular targeting of 
Lutie?make for an especially revealing examination of the New Overseer?s ingenuity. 
 
III. The Horrible Choice 
According to Foucault, the ?delinquency from above [is] the source of misery and the  
principle of revolt for the poor? (287).  This explains the motivation behind the ?terrible 
honesty? of African-American literary protagonists in their often violent actions against the 
white panoptic forces working against them.  But the extent and magnitude of those forces are 
simply too overwhelming to combat; furthermore, the New Overseer?s strategy of recruitment 
provides a disorienting line of false equivalence between himself and the delinquent forces that 
he enlists.  Those delinquent forces are made up of members of the same community that he 
oppresses and exploits, so his recruiting of them is nothing more than another trajectory of that 
oppression and exploitation; and the false equivalence allows for those recruits to take the fall for 
him as he conveniently slips away.  As is demonstrated by Bigger in his murder of Bessie and by 
Lutie in her murder of Boots, the target of such protagonists? ?terribly honest? revolts are often 
such fall-taking recruits?members of their own community who, in their recruited service for 
the New Overseer, are actually just as oppressed and exploited as they are. 
 What Petry demonstrates, especially through Johnson (from ?In Darkness and 
Confusion?) and Boots Smith, is how black migrant women are perhaps more intensely targeted 
within white panopticism because both black and white men use women?black women?to 
contest their senses of manhood and power.  Given the white power structure?s historical 
targeting of black men?s sense of adult, patriarchal masculinity?a patriarchal masculinity that 
apparently, and unfortunately, must involve the sexual conquest of women?the reasserted 
101 
confidence and rebellion of characters such as Bigger and Boots must involve the sacrifice of 
black women?s sense of sexual freedom and integrity.  Even within his service to Junto, Boots 
demonstrates aggressively vengeful feelings toward white people, especially while driving in his 
car, as Lutie notices: 
And she knew, too, that this was the reason white people turned scornfully to look 
at Negroes who swooped past them on the highways.  ?Crazy niggers with autos? 
in the way they looked.  Because they sensed that the black men had to roar past 
them, had for a brief moment to feel equal, feel superior; had to take reckless 
chances going around curves, passing on hills, so that they would be better able to 
face a world that took pains to make them feel that they didn?t belong, that they 
were inferior.  (157-158) 
More sinister towards Lutie, however, is how Boots demonstrates a vengeful wish towards Junto 
in his aggressive attempt to have sex with her before Junto does: 
He closed the door quietly behind Junto.  He hadn?t intended to in the beginning, 
but he was going to trick him and Junto would never know the difference.  Sure, 
Lutie would sleep with Junto, but he was going to have her first.  He thought of 
the thin curtains blowing in the wind.  Yeah, he can have the leavings.  After all, 
he?s white and this time a white man can have a black man?s leavings [?] Junto  
had pushed him hard, threatened him, nagged him about Lutie Johnson.  This 
would be his revenge.  (423) 
But the result of this racially-motivated vengeance is not Junto directly, but Lutie as an object 
sexual stake-claiming; and Lutie?s reaction is not against Junto directly, but the more immediate 
threat of Boots.  The terrible revolts of characters such as Lutie, Boots, and Bigger, then, miss 
102 
the true source of oppression entirely and are instead misdirected towards black-on-black 
violence and murder.  Through his ingenious system of recruitment, the New Overseer has 
arranged so that, in their intended targeting of him, the reactionary forces of black insurrection 
often end up consuming members of their own community and not the real forces of white 
panoptic power.  Petry also demonstrates this hopeless impotence of black migrant revolt in her 
other works, such as in ?In Darkness and Confusion,? which is a fictional depiction of the 1943 
Harlem riot sparked by the rumor of a white cop?s shooting of a black soldier.  Seeing the 
frightened white faces ?with satisfaction? (284) the black mob pushes forward with increasing 
mass and intensity, indiscriminately smashing, among other things, store-fronts in their path.  
Even the usually mild-mannered William and his sickly wife Pink are enthusiastically swept up 
in the riot?s force, with William even proud of Pink as she smashes store-fronts.  However, as the 
adrenaline apparently ebbs, William loses strength and feels more and more like he is ?in a 
nightmare? (288), and Pink ultimately collapses and dies (295).   
 But William and Pink?s shared motivation for getting involved in the riot is the news 
given to William by son Sam?s friend Scummy that Sam, who is now in the army, was shot, 
court-martialed, and given twenty years hard labor for not going to the ?nigger end? of the bus 
(268).   This provides the consummation of all of their parental fears concerning Sam, not only in 
terms of the street?s possible influence upon him but of the possible violent consequences of 
white discrimination against him in a place like Georgia, where he was stationed.  Like Lutie 
with Bub, William and Pink worry about the prospects of a young man like Sam?s being raised in 
?hell-hole flats? (278) and growing up to have ?a woman to beat? (279)?ending up like Bigger 
and Boots, for example.  They have long wanted to move for his sake but, of course, cannot.  
This financial and socioeconomic incapability demonstrates what is perhaps the most cruel facet 
103 
of white panoptic strategies?that of manipulating and persecuting black migrants through their 
families, especially though their children.  And, again, however righteous this motivation for 
vengeance might seem, Petry?as well as Wright?show little faith, at least in their literary 
representations, in the possibility of triumph in the face of the New Overseer?s juggernaut force.  
For instance, during Pink?s most majestically violent moment?of tearing away the gate to the 
liquor store and yelling to everyone to drink up?Petry indicates that the gate had ?won? 
anyway, given Pink?s resulting weakness and the blood dripping from her hands (293-294).  
Though the gate represented for Pink ?the world that had taken her son? and she ?was wreaking 
vengeance on it? (294), the world that it represents clearly, and horribly, wins.  A comment made 
by a nurse to Pink when she had lost her last child is recalled by William??You people have too 
many children anyway? (284)?and illustrates the sense of cheapness and expendability with 
which the dominant white power structure views black migrant life.  And the machinations of 
Junto upon Lutie demonstrate how the New Overseer of that power structure is willing to use and 
manipulate that black life for its own sinister purposes and desires.59 
 According to Petry herself, in a 1946 interview with James Ivey for The Crisis, her 
making of Lutie Johnson into ?an intelligent, ambitious, attractive woman with a fair degree of 
education? was part of her aim ?to show how simply and easily the environment can change the 
course of a person?s life?; more particularly, she wanted to show ?why the Negro has a high 
crime rate, a high death rate, and little or no chance of keeping his family unit intact in large 
northern cities? (71).  Even with the intellectual and moral superiority she holds over the likes of 
Bigger Thomas, Lutie nonetheless falls victim to the very human machinations that make up that 
                                                            
59This panoptic unscrupulousness is perhaps anticipated by Jacobs in her disturbing account of the fake letter sent by 
Dr. Flint to her grandmother, trying to have Jacobs? children sent up North.  He is clearly not above using Jacobs? 
children and her sense of motherhood against her.  The threat to her children, especially Dr. Flint?s plan to have 
them sent with her to the plantation to be ?broke in? (238) is what finally spurs Jacobs into making her escape and 
resorting to the desperate plan of hiding in the attic. 
104 
?environment.?  Lawrence P. Jackson sees this as the key to how The Street manages to express 
?more direct bitterness than had been in the pages of Native Son? (232).  Lutie?s fate in 
particular, though she manages to save herself from Boots and ultimately Junto, illustrates how 
white panopticism specifically targets black migrant women as sexual prey and commodities 
and, like Jacobs? Dr. Flint of old, has no qualms with using the instinctual pressures and 
obligations of family ties, especially maternal ties, to manipulate and isolate those black migrant 
women.  And the often criminal extremes to which these women are driven serve to only confirm 
and perpetuate the dominant culture?s negative stereotypes of them; as Scott points out, Lutie?s 
killing of Boots serves as ?a realization and fruition of her ultimate destiny [?] to  become a 
criminal (a criminal, a negligent mother, a victim of her own unrealistic aspirations)? (111).  It is 
further heartbreaking how Lutie, as Thelma J. Shinn describes most Petry protagonists, is ?the 
individual with the most integrity [who] is not only destroyed but is often forced to become an 
expression of the very society against which [she] is rebelling? (110).  Of course, Lutie is not 
literally destroyed, but she is forced to become the abandoning mother in spite of her refusal to 
compromise her sexuality.60  To escape, Lutie is put into the position of making a horrible 
choice?the thing unspeakable for a mother to do, abandon her child.  The extremity of her 
decision, however, perhaps says less about her qualifications as a mother than it does about the 
levels of evil and malice within the system she must negotiate. 
 
  
                                                            
60According to Jackson, Lutie?s sex drive is sublimated as opposed to the other characters in the novel who are 
dominated by theirs (230). 
105 
 
 
 
Chapter Four:  ?The New Root? 
Of the three authors, Ralph Ellison perhaps represents the most clear-cut and self-
conscious rewriting of the slave narrative and the naturalistic African-American migration 
narrative for the mid-twentieth century with Invisible Man.  Ellison?s novel shares in common 
with Wright?s Native Son and Petry?s The Street the story of a black migrant?s disillusioning 
confrontation with the northern urban environment, as well as the presence of a white panoptic 
influence within that environment, but this panopticism is perhaps most central to Ellison?s 
work.  In fact, it is specifically brought up within the novel.  Ellison?s ?invisible? protagonist 
encounters one of the black veterans he had first seen at the Golden Day bar again on the bus 
headed North.  This vet explains to him not only how Washington is ?just another southern 
town? (154), but also warns the narrator about what ?they? might do to him up there??they? 
being ?the white folks, authority, the gods, fate, circumstances?the force that pulls your strings 
until you refuse to be pulled any more [?] The big man who?s never there, where you think he 
is? (154).  The ?white folks? and ?authority? is indeed a clarification of what they so closely 
precede, the ?gods, fate [and] circumstances??providing what is perhaps the most explicit proof 
among the three authors of an awareness within the text of white panoptic power. 
As an individual, what Ellison?s narrator particularly feels being put upon and ascribed to 
him by the New Overseer is ?invisibility??that is, a refusal of others, especially white people, to 
truly see him.  This invisibility seems related to the ?melting pot? to which the vet refers when 
he warns the narrator of venturing up North??out of the fire and into the melting pot? (152).  
106 
This ?melting pot? is, of course, one of those enduring poetic images of America as a land of 
supposed equality.  However, the notion of invisibility points to the risk within this image to 
oversimplify the idea of equality and pervert its meaning towards homogeneity, voicelessness, 
and expendability?everything that denies the individual character, freedom, and even life.  
Under the endorsement of the doctrine of the melting pot, the white hegemony thus legitimizes 
its practices of panoptic surveillance by minimizing the importance of the individual.  Sanctified 
under the cover of this tacit pseudo-patriotism, the forces of white panopticism can thus observe 
and locate with greater ease any individuals who ?step out of line.?  More sinisterly, then, 
invisibility on the part of the New Overseer may not, after all, be an ignorant assumption against 
African-American individuality, but a deliberate strategy against that individuality to quell in 
advance any potential threats against white hegemonic power. 
The motive behind Ellison?s increased specificity of the humanity behind these ?forces? 
is perhaps made clear through the limitations he saw in the naturalistic approach, as he expresses 
in Shadow and Act: 
Thus to see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical 
fluidity and freedom, I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the 
narrow naturalism which has led, after so many triumphs, to the final and 
unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction.  I was to dream of 
a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting 
the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth 
its images of hope, human fraternity and individual self-realization.  (105) 
Ellison?s problems with naturalism, therefore, are not only that its free-floating and seemingly 
nonhuman nature runs the risk of masking the true human source of the forces acting upon the 
107 
individual migrant, but that its bleakness offers for him as an author no alternatives for the 
ingenuity of the American individual.  For Ellison, this ?invisibility? that white panoptic power 
has forced upon the black migrant population to stifle individuality has clearly replaced the more 
nebulous forces of naturalism.  What happens to the black migrant population, both collectively 
and individually, is no accident of fate, and there are specific, human perpetrators behind the 
?forces? acting upon that population. 
Accordingly, like James Baldwin, Ellison took considerable issue with Wright?s apparent  
dismissal of individuality?black individuality?in works like Native Son and Black Boy.  
Viewing Native Son as an example of the ?protest novel,? Baldwin saw a failure in its ?rejection 
of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his 
categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended? (?Everybody?s Protest 
Novel? 1659).  Ellison saw a similar, presumptuous monolithism in Black Boy.  At first, he 
seems to offer a token of understanding by granting that Wright?s experience as a black migrant 
was somewhat typical and representative: 
For certainly in the historical sense Wright is no exception.  Born on a Mississippi 
plantation, he was subjected to all those blasting pressures which in a scant eighty 
years have sent the Negro people hurtling, without clearly defined trajectory, from 
slavery to emancipation, from log cabin to city tenement, from the white folks? 
fields and kitchens to factory assembly lines, and which, between two wars, have 
shattered the wholeness of its folk consciousness into a thousand writhing pieces.  
(?Richard Wright?s Blues? 131) 
However, Ellison insists that ?Black Boy describes this process in the personal terms of one 
Negro childhood? (131), that individuality should not be lost within common experience. 
108 
Ellison?s decisions in developing his protagonist reflect his own steps in moving away 
from the influence of Wright, demonstrating, according to Jackson, his fear of being deemed 
?simply another protest writer, wrapped in the shroud of Richard Wright? (Ralph Ellison 393-
394).  Initially, this stemmed from, according to Jackson, Ellison?s private reservations 
concerning the ?bitter pessimism about the American scene? and ?reluctance to show an 
optimistic hero contending with postwar philosophical tools? (204) demonstrated in Wright?s 
work.  But later, after the Harlem riot of 1943, Ellison himself had grown more pessimistic, as 
Jackson writes:  ?Less and less did he feel that black life was a journey [?] Ellison thought of 
black life as a maze? (373).  Nonetheless, by the time he had finished writing and publishing 
Invisible Man, Ellison was hoping for ?a different sort of triumph [?] a success that while not 
necessarily refusing liberal largesse, would enable him to stand as an independent artist and not 
the icon of a social movement? (327).  The individual, then, is what Ellison ultimately decided to 
make his focus, by means of a style much more absurd and surreal than that of Wright.  He, of 
course, understood the risks in doing so?with the ?black Left,? according to Jackson, 
concluding that he was merely ?trying to earn bourgeoisie success by way of abstract 
symbolism? and the ?radicals accus[ing] him of being an Uncle Tom and a sellout? (Indignant 
Generation359).  But, as Ellison demonstrates by projecting through his ?invisible? narrator, 
individualism proves to be a potential strategy against the New Overseer, whose strategies of 
corralling and surveillance essentially assume that all members of the black population its seeks 
to control are the same.  Such essentializing pressures also find their way, via internalization, 
into the black population itself, creating a form of unconscious self-policing that further adds to 
individual marginalization within communities and further ensures the success of the New 
Overseer?s strategy of Label, Isolate and Control.  Such a new and sophisticated updating of the 
109 
old plantation owner?s slavery and the old overseers? panoptic strategies demands an equally 
subtle (if not more subtle) mind to counter them?a more ?intellectual rebel,? as Pryse writes, 
who ?no longer confronts a tangible bondage? (4, italics added). 
Through the very magnitude of his particular portrayal of white panopticism, Ellison 
perhaps makes more explicit than both Wright and Petry the connection between the past?in the 
space of the South?and the present, in the space of the North.  The sheer scope of the white 
panoptic power in Invisible Man is terrifying in how it refuses to limit itself to assumptions of 
geography, space, and urban development.  The incredible reach of the North?s new slavery in 
Ellison?s novel is evidenced by the protagonist?s being so strongly influenced and moved by 
those same panoptic forces while he is still in the South?chiefly through the college he attends 
and its president, Dr. Bledsoe?well before he even reaches the North.  It is perhaps 
understandable, then, that the justified paranoia felt by Ellison?s narrator achieves a 
conspiratorial pitch much more elaborate and intense than what is experienced by either Bigger 
Thomas or Lutie Johnson.  Such depths of conspiracy call for an exceptional cleverness on the 
narrator?s part, such as the cleverness demonstrated by Frederick Douglass in his triumph over 
the slave-breaker Edward Covey.  And that is where his ?invisibility,? which he had first 
lamented, comes in.   
Invisible Man is the only representative work of these three authors in which Douglass?
a portrait of him, anyway?makes an actual appearance and plays a pivotal role.  Brother Tarp 
hangs the portrait on a wall in front of Ellison?s ?invisible man,? saying, ?You just take a look at 
him once in a while [and after the ?invisible man? thanks him] Don?t thank me, son [?] He 
belongs to all of us? (378).  And the broken chain link that Brother Tarp gives to him as a gift 
further solidifies the connection by drawing a clear parallel between Brother Tarp and Sandy 
110 
Jenkins, who gives Douglass the supposedly magical root that allows him to stand up to Edward 
Covey and beat him, thus reclaiming his manhood, by using Covey?s own reputation as a slave-
breaker against him.  Ellison?s protagonist has only a vague awareness of the chain link?s 
importance, with Brother Tarp?s seniority making him feel ?joined [?] with his ancestors? 
(389); and Brother Tarp himself seems only half-conscious of the significance in this gift-giving, 
which further adds to its uncanniness:  ?but I think it?s [the chain link] got a heap of signifying 
wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what you?re fighting against [?] I guess it?s 
kind of a good luck piece? (388).  Whether Brother Tarp realizes it or not, he is the new Sandy 
Jenkins, a Sandy Jenkins for the new slavery of the twentieth century.  Brother Tarp?s own story 
attests to how the Emancipation Proclamation failed to magically and instantly fix everything for 
African-Americans?how a black man from the South could be unjustly imprisoned and put on a 
chain gang just for telling a white man no, losing his wife, children, and land in the process 
(387).  After finally breaking the chain (the source of the link he gives as a gift) and escaping to 
the North, and having lived there for nineteen years, six months, and two days, what he tells 
Ellison?s protagonist says it all:  ?I?ve been looking for freedom ever since, son? (388).  That 
chain link, then, is the magical root for the twentieth century?s new slave narrative, as provided 
by Ellison in his solidifying of the twentieth-century African-American migration narrative?s 
potential to be that new narrative.  What defines that potential is the return and renewal of a 
successful strategy against the forces of white oppression, the twentieth-century version of what 
Douglass had achieved against Covey with the help of the root. 
Ellison makes the need for tricksterism in his protagonist more urgent, given the reach 
and scope of white panopticism in his novel.  Housing discrimination, which served as the chief 
means of corralling black people for surveillance and positioning them towards crime in both 
111 
Native Son and The Street, is certainly present in Invisible Man (particularly with the eviction of 
the elderly black couple from the South and the angry mob that it inspires), but not nearly to the 
same degree.  It seems, in fact, to fall into the background of the text.  The chief source of white 
panopticism in Invisible Man is the Brotherhood, headed by Brother Jack?a source that at first 
seems to sympathize with the black community for its housing discrimination-based grievances.  
The impassioned speech that the narrator gives in reaction to the old couple?s eviction is, after 
all, what attracts the Brotherhood to him in the first place.  However, the Brotherhood?s true 
intentions prove to have little to nothing to do with urban black plight and more to do with 
exploiting the aggrieved black populace for its own Communist agenda, made painfully obvious 
to the narrator when he realizes that the Brotherhood has ceased its activity in Harlem (427).  
Brother Jack indeed comes to actually resemble an overseer in the way he works to remove race 
as a concern from the narrator?s consciousness; and there is also the disciplinary, even 
oppressive tone of Brother Jack?s commandments, such as ?You?ll learn and you?ll surrender? 
(465).  And the narrator?s full realization of Brother Jack and the Brotherhood?s malevolence 
leads to his understanding of the connection between his troubles in the South and his troubles in 
the North: 
It was a joke, an absurd joke.  And now I looked around a corner of my mind and 
saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into one single white figure.  They were 
very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and 
neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me.  I was simply a material, 
a natural resource to be used.  I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of 
Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the 
same?except now I recognized my invisibility.  (508) 
112 
Within his own particular migration experience, Ellison?s narrator realizes not only that the 
North is no better than the South, but that the representatives of white panoptic force on both 
sides of the Mason-Dixon line are apparently in cahoots against him.  This is best illustrated by 
the connection that Dr. Bledsoe has in the North through Mr. Emerson, to whom Bledsoe sends 
the narrator.  Before this, the narrator is expelled and relocated from the black college in the 
South for inadvertently showing the condescending white patron Mr. Norton sides of the local 
black community that the politicking black college president Mr. Bledsoe did not want seen?as 
Bledsoe writes in his confidential letter to Emerson, the narrator is a ?delicate? instance who 
?threatens to upset certain delicate relationships between certain interested individuals and the 
school? (191).  Essentially left hung out to dry, the narrator thus finds himself in a vulnerable 
enough position, far away from home, to be targeted for recruitment and exploitation by Jack and 
the Brotherhood.  Towards the end of the text, shortly after he has fallen through the manhole, 
the narrator finally concludes that North and South both have had a hand in positioning and 
isolating him:  ?and I lay the prisoner of a group consisting of Jack and old Emerson and 
Bledsoe and Norton and Ras and the school superintendent and a number of others whom I 
failed to recognize, but all of whom had run me? (569).  Both sides seem to have worked 
together, as the engraved document shown to him by his dead grandfather in a dream, to ?Keep 
This Nigger-Boy Running? (33). 
 Through this realization of the scope and reach of what is working against him, Ellison?s 
protagonist, again, recognizes his ?invisibility.?  However, he comes to see this invisibility as an 
advantage.  As Marjorie Pryse writes, Ellison?s narrator ?affirms invisibility because he has 
transformed it, underground, and by his art, from a symptom of personal disorder to a symbol of 
social rebellion; it becomes his modus vivendi, where the self may correspond to no definition of 
113 
identity but its own? (12).   ?Invisibility,? as defined through the panoptic gaze of his white 
oppressors, entails a denial of humanity and individuality through an essentializing and 
opportunistic exploitation based on race; ?invisibility? means an erasure of personhood, being 
seen as a means and tool rather than a human being.  The narrator?s strategic reappropriation of 
invisibility comes closer to the word?s true meaning, for it allows him to quite literally hide, to 
drop off the map of white panopticism, thus working directly against panopticism?s operating 
?by means of general visibility? (Foucault 171, italics added).  Invisibility, for the narrator, is 
then a strategy against the enforced visibility of white panopticism; and the useful 
reappropriation of the concept of invisibility is proof of Lacan?s conclusion that traumatic 
repetition is not necessarily a sign of uncomplicated victimhood, but a ?resistance of the subject? 
through ?repetition in act? (51). 
In light of this strategy on the part of the protagonist, what Ellison?s narrative 
accomplishes is not only a revelation of the magnitude of white panoptic surveillance but the 
effect of the New Overseer?s panoptic gaze upon the perception of its black subjects?not only 
the way they perceive their new urban surroundings but their self-perception as well.  Through 
the often extremely surreal depiction of the absurd and nightmarish situations in which his black 
migrant narrator finds himself, Ellison demonstrates how the New Overseer?s white panoptic 
gaze actually distorts perception, even distorting reality.  
 
I. The Distorting Gaze 
According to Marjorie Pryse, Ellison?s style is ?the amalgamation of naturalism, 
expressionism, and surrealism, or magical realism? (62, italics added); surrealism in particular 
seems to be Ellison?s stylistic preference over naturalism.  With Invisible Man, Ellison 
114 
stylistically reveals how the white panoptic gaze ultimately distorts perceived reality with full-
blown, nightmarish surrealism to communicate his protagonist?s disillusionment with 
hallucinatory intensity.  This surreal style evokes a sort of acclimation sickness of the senses, 
which Ellison has his narrator define later in the novel; speaking of African-Americans like 
himself who have migrated to the northern cities from the South as ?us transitory ones [?] who 
shoot up from the South into the busy city like wild jacks-in-the-box broken loose from our 
springs?so sudden that our gait becomes like that of deep-sea divers suffering from the bends? 
(439-440).  Indeed, Thomas Heise describes the jarring shift of scene for a black migrant from 
the agrarian to an industrial environment as something of a time rush that affords little to no time 
for adjustment (140).  Furthermore, what he describes as ?the more insidious and often invisible 
machinations of northern racism? (139) compound the acclimation sickness with further 
concentrating pressures metaphorically indicative of urban segregation; this segregation, he says, 
?condenses the geographical expression of class difference? (136), creating the ?pressurized 
terrain of the ghetto? (139).  Ellison?s connecting of the oppressive panoptic forces in the North 
with those forces in the South?which, in fact, prove to be emissaries of the northern forces?
further allows for the possibility that this ?sickness? of disorientation is a symptom of the New 
Overseer?s reality-distorting gaze, and that it is the white panoptic gaze itself that further induces 
the migrant?s disorientation by shuttling him so rapidly from South to North, as the recruited 
force of Dr. Bledsoe does, delivering the narrator into the hands of Mr. Emerson and then 
Brother Jack. 
 Two key metaphors in Invisible Man for the distorting influence of this white panoptic 
gaze are Brother Jack?s glass eye, which, as an eye that cannot actually see, becomes proof to the 
narrator of his ?invisibility? (his ignored humanity and individuality) under that gaze; and the 
115 
Liberty Paints factory where the narrator briefly works upon his arrival in the North.  The 
company?s slogan, visible on a huge electric sign, ?KEEP AMERICA PURE / WITH / 
LIBERTY PAINTS? (196), screams white supremacy, as does the slogan for one particular color 
of paint??If It?s Optic White, It?s the Right White? (217).  The punchline, of course, is that the 
secret ingredient to this Optic White is ten drops of a ?dead black? liquid that must be thoroughly 
stirred into it the white base (200), a rather tragicomic metaphor for African-Americans? 
historically hidden, forced and thankless contribution to the economic and structural 
development of America through slavery and other forms of economic exploitation.  That 
Liberty Paints has hired African-Americans as scabs to replace fired white workers, and the old 
black factory worker Lucius Brockway?s conclusion that ?we the machines inside the 
machine?(219), lends further credence to this historically symbolic irony.  This stunning 
contradiction in terms?African-Americans? contribution to the fabric of American society and 
their simultaneously being denied a place within or identification with that society?is the basis 
for the dominant white culture?s distorting panopticism. 
 The boiler explosion, with its ?bath of whiteness? resulting in the narrator?s sense of 
?black emptiness? (229-230), provides for the surrealistic climax to this episode with further 
symbolism for the narrator?s negative ?invisibility? within the standards of the dominant culture.  
And the particularly strange scene that follows the boiler explosion, of white company scientists 
hooking the narrator to some sort of shock therapy machine, confirms the dominant culture?s 
agenda to deny the black subject of any sense of individual grievance that could lead to protest 
and revolt; the ?machine,? without the ?negative effects of the knife,? produces the ?results of a 
prefrontal lobotomy,? leading the subject to ?experience no major conflict of motives, and what 
is even better, society will suffer no traumata on his account? (236).  By ?society,? the white 
116 
scientist obviously means the dominant culture?s system of norms and its wish to not have any 
disgruntled individuals undermine those norms.  Such preventive ?therapy? on the part of the 
white hegemony and its panoptic forces confesses that hegemony?s fear of internal disturbances 
created by those who are marginalized by its power; and it further confesses an awareness of the 
subjugated black populace as the dominant culture?s own ?dark unconscious? (139), as Thomas 
Heise describes.61  But the anger and dissatisfaction which the white scientists treat as symptoms 
of a psychological disorder are in fact the appropriate responses to the social forces of racial 
inequality in the urban environment.  The trick is that the scientists? ?cure? is actually the cause 
of the disease, and the disorientation experienced by Ellison?s invisible man?the ?amnesia, 
mental fragmentation, and the release of repressed desires? (Heise 144)?becomes a 
representative for perhaps every individual member of the subjugated black populace.  The 
?cure? may relieve the anger and dissatisfaction, but it does so through distorting the subject?s 
perception, not by sharpening it.  The object is to numb and to cloud, to the point of warping.  
Wright?s Fred Daniels, of course, counters the example of Ellison?s protagonist as an example as 
perhaps a more successfully brainwashed subject?his obviously misguided and indoctrinated 
sense of guilt ultimately leading him to resurface from his underground sanctuary and run back 
(lethally) into the arms of the policemen from whom he had escaped and who have been 
pursuing him.  He apparently lacks the ingenuity which makes Ellison?s protagonist more 
capable of using the ?invisibility? assigned to him as an advantage, succumbing easily and 
quickly to the pressures of lonely isolation and the seeming impossibility of individual self-
realization and self-making. 
                                                            
61Heise draws this metaphor from the ironically underground location of the LaFargue Psychiatric Clinic, the first 
clinic of its kind in Harlem. 
117 
 Such internalization of the dominant culture?s norms and panoptic maneuverings is 
evident in Invisible Man well before the narrator sets foot in the North.  It is demonstrated to a 
great degree by the narrator himself and his fellow students while attending the black college in 
the South.  The college?s anti-individualism proves to be just another form of social engineering, 
similar to and even anticipating the norm-enforcing surveillance that the narrator will experience 
up north; it proves, in fact, to be an extension of those white panoptic forces in the North the 
more the connection between Dr. Bledsoe and powerful northern white people such as Mr. 
Norton and Mr. Emerson is made clear.  Sure, one does not get the sense that Dr. Bledsoe has 
any love lost for such rich white patrons and colleagues, but the security he has found and 
established for himself by showing those white patrons what they want to see??playing their 
game,? so to speak?is such that he will fiercely protect it, sacrificing such individuals as the 
narrator who demonstrate a core averseness to that game.  The students are thus conditioned to 
have the same standards as the school officials, whose standards are in fact those of the rich 
white people from the North to whom they must cater for patronage (with the officials? 
internalization of those standards obviously being much less na?ve).  It is the students then, of 
whom the narrator is one, who are the most-affected victims of the New Overseer?s distortion of 
perception. 
Officials and students thus both come to be embarrassed by the likes of the sharecropper 
Jim Trueblood, who had impregnated his own bed-sharing daughter during a lucid dream (49) 
and thus brought disgrace upon the local black community.  The narrator himself, who is driving 
the visiting Mr. Norton around, is ashamed of the Black Belt ?peasants? with whom Mr. Norton 
is strangely fascinated; and he resents those ?like Trueblood, [who] did everything it seemed to 
pull [those affiliated with the school] down? when the students and school officials felt that they 
118 
were ?trying to lift them up? (47).62  What the narrator does not seem to fully appreciate is how 
Mr. Norton is apparently not the only white person interested in Jim Trueblood; it is the local 
white officials who actually protect Trueblood from the disapproval and wrath of those affiliated 
with the college.  Trueblood is, of course, oblivious to how the sympathy and support given to 
him by local white officials is a kind a recruitment; they are using him as a means to limit and 
contain the black college?s power, waving him as an embarrassing and grotesque stereotype in 
the college?s face.  The white officials like Trueblood not only for his usefulness in shaming the 
college (even regularly giving him food, water and work) but for what they see as his thorough 
fulfillment of all of their racist expectations and beliefs concerning African-Americans.  Similar 
to their northern counterparts, these southern white officials are working to reductively distort 
the collective self-image of the local black population, especially those with aspirations of social 
mobility, to ensure the standards of white supremacy. 
If there is one space in Invisible Man where Ellison concentrates his surrealism toward 
the depiction white panopticism?s distorting effects upon the psychological well-being of its 
black subjects, it is the bar and brothel known as the Golden Day.  It is especially significant for 
its depiction of those effects upon black subjects in the South?either before they even 
experience the disillusionment of northern migration or after they have decided to return to the 
South out of homesickness and lack of better options.  Both instances provide the narrator with a 
warning of his possible future should he continue along his path of naively conforming to and 
following the standards of the dominant culture.  The defining absurdity of the Golden Day scene 
is how a large group of insane black veterans keep a regular appointment at the bar and brothel 
as a kind of field trip??therapy,? as one vet (or ?patient?) calls it (81).  This insanity manifests 
                                                            
62The same goes for the Golden Day, the local bar and brothel that, according to the bartender Big Halley, the school 
has been trying to close (75). 
119 
itself in ways such as one veteran acting as the leader of the march toward the Golden Day and 
banging on the hood of the narrator?s car with his cane, only to be instantly checked by the 
narrator?s lie that Mr. Norton (in the back seat) is his war-time Commander-in-Chief (72); 
another vet thinking that Mr. Norton is his grandfather, Thomas Jefferson (78); and another vet 
thinking that John D. Rockefeller stole the formula for changing blood into money from him 
(81).  But it quickly becomes evident that the insanity of these veterans is the result of 
traumatically frustrating and disappointing experiences borne of the dominant culture?s panoptic 
racism.  These are men who, it must be remembered, did everything right?not just as veterans 
who served their country only to be denied the equality that country is supposed to promise, but, 
as the narrator points out:  ?Many of them had been doctors, lawyers, teachers, Civil Service 
workers; there were several cooks, a preacher, a politician, and an artist.  One very nutty one had 
been a psychiatrist? (74).  The explanation of one vet to Mr. Norton of how he used to be a 
doctor is particularly telling; referring to the ?semi-madhouse? (the Golden Day, the black 
veteran community, the South in general), he says, ?I escaped for a while?I went to France with 
the Army Medical Corps and remained there after the Armistice to study and practice? (90). 
Also surreal, even cartoonish, is the attendant that is sent along to chaperone the veterans, 
?a kind of censor, to see,? absurdly, ?that the therapy fails? (81).  By ensuring that the therapy 
perpetually fails, it is clear that the aim of the local dominant white power structure is not to 
cure, but to manage, to keep in place, just another kind of ghettoization.  This attendant is the 
?giant? Supercargo, who is usually dressed in a ?hard-starched white uniform? (82).  His giant 
blackness enveloped in such stiff whiteness makes him an absurd caricature of the black brute 
doing the bidding of some distant white master; his concern for the dominant white initiative is 
made clear through his yelling from upstairs, ?I want order down there, [?] and if there?s white 
120 
folks down there, I wan?s double order? (82).  As perhaps a more crude and less sophisticated 
version of Dr. Bledsoe, Supercargo also represents the recruited black arm of the New 
Overseer?s white panoptic force; and he too becomes a part of the paranoia inspired by the New 
Overseer?s apparent omnipresence, as one vet named Sylvester explains??Sometimes I get so 
afraid of him I feel that he?s inside my head? (84).  The Golden Day itself is then a white 
panoptic tool, a way of keeping the aspirations of those affiliated with the college in line through 
the shame of the bar and brothel?s enduring presence; though the school had tried to make the 
Golden Day ?respectable,? the local white power structure ?had a hand in it somehow and they 
got nowhere? (73).   
That the Golden Day is a white panoptic tool is further affirmed by the significance of 
Mr. Norton?s almost fateful presence there.  To the frightened narrator, the face of Mr. Norton, 
who is passed out under the stairs, is ?like a formless white death, suddenly appeared before me, 
a death which had been there all the time and which had now revealed itself in the madness of 
the Golden Day? (86).  Furthermore, as the former doctor tells Mr. Norton, ?To some, you are 
the great white father, to others the lyncher of souls, but for all, you are confusion come even 
into the Golden Day? (93).  The irony of Mr. Norton?s unwitting arrival in the midst of the 
bedlam within the Golden Day is that he, through his financial patronage of the college, 
contributes to the great white panoptic scheme of which both the school and the bar are a part.  
Seemingly unconscious of his own part in the scheme, Mr. Norton has to have his panoptic status 
bitterly pointed out to him by this former doctor?that he, ?for all [his] power,? is ?not a man 
[?] but a God, a force? (95). 63  This, tellingly, is what upsets Norton into finally leaving the 
Golden Day?not the insanity, drunkenness, prostitution, or violence!?as the narrator  
                                                            
63Mr. Norton?s obliviousness to his own white panoptic significance is perhaps best explained by Richard Dyer:  
?White people have power and believe that they think, feel and act like and for all people [?] Most of this is not 
121 
confusedly ponders while driving Norton back to the school:  ?In the Golden Day he had seemed 
more curious than anything else?until the vet had started talking wild? (98).  Given his guilty 
patronage of the college, which comes out of a vague and self-righteous feeling that African-
Americans are closely connected with his ?destiny? (41), Norton seems to affirm Sartre?s 
conclusion that some colonialists ?reject their objective reality? and ?do every day in reality what 
they condemn in fantasy,? succeeding only in finding ?moral comfort in malaise? (xxv-xxvi).  
Even in his apparent lack of awareness of his own place within the panoptic scheme, it is clear 
that Norton, from the dominant white perspective, is a hypocrite and has no moral qualms with 
the decadence within the Golden Day.  The alcohol and sex it offers are in fact key components 
of the white panoptic apparatus for controlling the black community, both through the public-
image shaming of those affiliated with the school and the rebellion-quelling intoxicants offered 
as ?therapy? to those driven crazy by the dominant culture?s false promises. 
The insanity of the veterans and the surreal fiascos typical within the Golden Day serve 
as a prophetic caution to Ellison?s protagonist.  At this point, he has only a vague awareness of 
this caution, a feeling of discomfort upon realizing that the vets ?were supposed to be members 
of the professions toward which at various times [he] vaguely aspired? (74).  The former doctor 
in particular serves as a kind of ghost from the future, having himself been a student at the 
college and now wishing that someone had warned him back then so that he ?wouldn?t be the 
casualty that [he is]? (91).  Even after returning to the South out of nostalgia, he came to realize 
?that my work could bring me no dignity,? having been beaten and run out of town in the middle 
of the night by a white mob for simply saving a man?s life with his medical knowledge (92).  
Though he has no solution, only bitterness, for his victimhood at the hands of white panopticism, 
                                                                                                                                                                                                
done deliberately and maliciously [?] goodwill is not unheard of in white people?s engagement with others.  White 
power none the less reproduces itself regardless of intention, power differences and goodwill, and overwhelmingly 
because it is not seen as whiteness, but as normal? (9-10). 
122 
this former doctor does provide the narrator with an important warning against that 
panopticism?s methods of indoctrination and internalization.  Talking about the narrator (with the 
narrator right in front of him) to Mr. Norton, the vet says, ?Behold! a walking zombie!  Already 
he?s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity.  He?s invisible, a walking 
personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir!  The 
mechanical man!? (94, italics added).  Aside from the opening lines of the Prologue, which 
obviously narrates from the future, long after the events of the Golden Day, this is the first 
mention of invisibility in the narrator?s story of how he got to his underground space.  This is 
perhaps where the seed is first unconsciously planted for what Ellison?s invisible man must 
reappropriate in order to survive and thwart the effects of white panopticism, thus anticipating a 
similar scene of bedlam on a much larger scale to come later in the invisible man?s journey 
north?the riot in Harlem, which will be discussed further along in the chapter. 
The beginnings of clarity seem to come for Ellison?s narrator during Dr. Bledsoe?s 
furious interrogation of him for allowing Mr. Norton to see the Black Belt ?peasants?; in 
response to Dr. Bledsoe?s saying, ?Nigger, this isn?t the time to lie.  I?m no white man,? the 
narrator feels ?as though he?d struck me [?] He called me that?[?] He called me that? (139).  
This is the man who, to the narrator, was ?the example of everything I hoped to be:  Influential 
with wealthy men all over the country; counsulted in matters concerning the race; a leader of his 
people; the possessor of not one, but two Cadillacs, a good salary and a soft, good-looking and 
creamy-complexioned wife? (101, italics added).  The final detail of the ?creamy-complexioned? 
wife makes it especially clear that Bledsoe?s standards of personal success are white ones, not 
only internalized by him but passed down as objects of aspiration for the students he 
indoctrinates and influences.  Furthermore, the zeal with which Bledsoe ?plays the game? has led 
123 
to an internalization on his part so deep as to create an effect of racial doubling.  This seems to 
be confirmed not only by his use of the racist epithet towards the narrator, but in how he 
resembles the New Overseer in his panoptic maneuvering against the old vet at the Golden Day, 
hinting at having him investigated (140) before apparently having him shipped off on a bus the 
next day (152).  The tragedy of Bledsoe is how, in what he sees as his practical acceptance of 
dominant white standards and having to ?act the nigger? (143) to achieve his success, he has 
essentially become what he hates?through internalization and recruitment, just another arm of 
white panoptic force.  His admission to the narrator that ?I?ll have every Negro in the country 
hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am? (143) reveals this in an 
especially chilling way, even harkening back to the less insidious methods of certain white 
people in the post-bellum South, and further revealing how his brutal administrative 
machinations have nothing to do with black social uplift and everything to do with his own 
selfish aims.  The doubling effect that defines the extreme example of Dr. Bledsoe is prime 
testimony to the distortion produced by the standards imposed by the white panoptic gaze; it is a 
distortion that warps even one?s own sense of racial identity and individuality, and we get the 
sense that, in his moment of shock at Bledsoe?s calling him ?nigger,? the narrator has 
unconsciously begun to dodge the bullet of white indoctrination through Bledsoe. 
Ellison?s surrealism is appropriate in communicating the distorted world in which the 
narrator finds himself, with even the likes of the Brotherhood (both its white and its black 
members, under Brother Jack), who claim to be working against the white status quo, actually 
sharing in its panoptic functions against African-Americans.  Furthermore, the way in which this 
world betrays all hopeful migrant expectations?offering not only no relief from the racism 
experienced in the South, but not even the directness and honesty of that southern racism?draws 
124 
an unexpected connection between the white panoptic strategies in both the North and the South.  
As Ellison writes in his ?Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke? essay: 
Down at the deep dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and 
the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral 
becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one 
has the power to sustain), the white man?s relish is apt to be the black man?s gall.  
(104) 
Northern white panopticism, for the purposes of maintaining its own power, produces 
contradictions and inversions that sicken the black migrant?s perception?of his surroundings, of 
himself, of his ambitions, of his hopes?through the confusing disillusionment of the new 
northern slavery.  Not only does this new slavery?s initiating system of housing discrimination 
and surveillance-segregation undermine the fundamental assumptions of public versus private, 
but this is a slavery in which the New Overseer has blurred his own identity through the 
recruitment of a seeming myriad of lesser overseers who double him in spite of their own race, 
politics, or personal agendas (especially blurring the lines between black and white as 
demonstrated by the recruited forces of Bledsoe and the black members of the Brotherhood).  
Not knowing who to trust?even himself, given his increasing awareness of his own cultural 
indoctrination?the shocked migrant is no longer certain of the difference between moral and 
immoral as defined by white ?rightness,? a standard which obviously does not keep the African-
American in mind as a priority.  Now aware of his own indoctrinated, distorted ideology, 
Ellison?s protagonist realizes that the supposed ?reality? has been taught to accept is not reality 
at all, but the warped interpretation of reality prescribed and projected by the New Overseer?s 
white panoptic gaze.   
125 
 However, all is not bleak in this invisible man?s realization.  Hardly.  For within the 
distortion he recognizes the ?beautiful absurdity of [his] American identity,? an identity that ?the 
Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons? refuse to see from within the ?confusion? 
and ?impatience? (559) of their narrow agendas and the panoptic projections of those agendas.  
Even in the hectic and desperate negotiation of his heavily conspiratorial environment, the 
invisible man recognizes ?the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and 
desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running? (559).  This, of course, sets him up 
perfectly for the disguised blessing of falling through the manhole and finding himself 
underground, for it is in this underground space where he will further refine his own sense of 
identity and individuality beyond the warping expectations and standards created by the reality-
distorting effects of white panopticism. 
 
II. The Cure Underground 
One cannot help but notice the similarities between the underground space described in 
the Epilogue and Prologue of Invisible Man and the sewer into which Fred Daniels finds 
temporary refuge in Wright?s ?The Man Who Lived Underground.?  Both Daniels and Ellison?s 
narrator find themselves in a space that is away from the oppressive white world above them?
that ?wild forest filled with death? aboveground, as Daniels describes it (1433).  However, 
Daniels? underworld proves to be just that?a hell, in which the sense of squalor and inferiority 
instilled upon him by the white world prove to be so internalized that he finally and desperately 
resurfaces.  Through his ?invisible? narrator, seizes a chance at realizing the underground?s 
potential as a space of counter-strategy against white panopticism; his more obvious realization 
and utilizing of the underground?s potential for protest is proof of a tricksterism that brings him 
126 
closer to the Douglass victory over Edward Covey.  As an example of what Henry Louis Gates, 
Jr. describes as the Signifying Monkey, Ellison, as an African-American writer, employs a 
?double-voicedness,? or a repetition ?with a signal difference? (51), not only in terms of his 
white influences (especially with naturalism) but with the influence of Wright and even Douglass 
as well.64 
As opposed to Wright, the underground space represents for Ellison a means of evading  
the white panoptic gaze.  The uncovered manhole into which Ellison?s protagonist falls then acts 
as a kind of wormhole to a space that lies off of the panoptic map.  Given that Brother Tarp?s 
chain link is one of the defensive weapons used by the protagonist to make his way through the 
perilous and apocalyptic landscape of the riot?and how, as previously mentioned, this chain 
link is the new magic root given to Douglass by Sandy?one is reminded of Paul Gilroy?s 
punning of ?rooted? and ?routed? (3); Ellison?s narrator finds the individualism self-realization 
achieved by Douglass via Sandy?s root through the alternative route of the underground space. 
 Wright?s underground, best portrayed in ?The Man Who Lived Underground,? more 
typically fits the formula for Heise?s African-American ?narratives of descent,? with the ghetto 
acting as America?s toilet and blackness as its waste (129).65  The virtually constant rain in 
Wright?s short story (rather than the intensely present snow in Native Son) indeed gives the 
sense that Fred Daniels has actually been flushed from the world above to the other below.  In 
this sense, the underground for Wright is not a space for evading white panoptic power, but a 
space included within the mechanism of that very power.66It becomes a metaphorical 
                                                            
64As Gates elaborates, ?Black texts Signify upon other black texts? (xxvii). 
65Notice Memmi?s choice of words in describing the colonizer?s need to degrade the colonized:  ?His disquiet and 
resulting thirst for justification require the usurper to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the 
ground at the same time? (53, italics added). 
66However, it should not be ignored, as Michel Fabre points out, that ?The Man Who Lived Underground? is ?a 
parable of black life in American? that anticipates Ellison?s ?invisibility? (102). 
127 
intensification of what the ghetto already is, a space for quarantining African-Americans who 
have become objects of the dominant white culture?s ?social anxieties about civic disorder, 
disease, and madness? (Heise 141-142)?especially the rioting ?kind,? how the police officers 
who finally shoot and kill Fred see him (Heise 142).  As a metaphorical space, the sewer in ?The 
Man Who Lived Underground? ?materializ[es] the ideology of racial abjection? (Heise 148) of 
an entire demographic under the ?duress of institutional racism and violently enforced spatial 
isolation? (Heise 146).  Furthermore, Fred?s inability to reappropriate the underground space in 
which he finds himself proves how the sewer as an underground space, according to Heise, ?does 
not liberate [the] mind [but] rots it? (144); it reflects not only a lack of cleverness on Fred?s part, 
but the depths of internalization that white panoptic power is capable of inspiring in its black 
subjects.   His attempt to overcome the norms and standards of the dominating white world 
above by papering the walls around him with money proves an especially telling failure; amused 
at this money wallpaper, he does a little wishful thinking:  ?He had triumphed over the world 
aboveground!  He was free!  If only people could see this!  He wanted to run from this cave and 
yell his discovery to the world? (1433).  However, in very little time, his underground room 
becomes terrible to him:  ?The spell was broken.  He shuddered, feeling that, in spite of his fear, 
sooner or later he would go up into that dead sunshine and somehow say something to somebody 
about all this? (1435).  Indeed, his prior wish that someone aboveground could see his wallpaper 
reveals a begrudging adherence to dominant white opinion and a nagging desire to please it,67 or 
at least impress it; in short, he still cares what the dominant culture thinks of him.Fred?s ultimate 
decision to resurface and turn himself in reveals the depths of his internalization of dominant 
                                                            
67As Memmi writes:  ?The colonized does not seek merely to enrich himself with the colonizer?s virtues.  In the 
name of what he hopes to become, he sets his mind on impoverishing himself, tearing himself away from his true 
self? (121).  Daniels? case is also an unfortunate example of failed revolt on the part of the colonized subject, who, 
at the height of his revolt, ?still bears the traces and lessons of prolonged cohabitation [with the colonizer]? and 
?fights in the name of the very values of the colonizer? (129). 
128 
white standards.  The sewer was not a sanctuary but just another zone for the New Overseer?s 
pressurizing forces of concentration; though seemingly apart from the white world above, it is in 
fact a part of it?its filthy and cramped environment proving metaphorically contagious to the 
black subject, who internalizes the sense of uncleanliness and worthlessness that the dominant 
culture assigns to him. 
Fred does get a vague sense of the guilt-trauma that the urban North?s environmental 
racism imposes on him: 
Why was this sense of guilt so seemingly innate, so easy to come by, to think, to 
feel, so verily physical?  It seemed that when one felt this guilt one was retracing 
in one?s feelings a faint pattern designed long before; it seemed that one was 
always trying to remember a gigantic shock that had left a haunting impression 
upon one?s body which one could not forget or shake off, but which had been 
forgotten by the conscious mind, creating in one?s life a state of eternal anxiety. 
(1436) 
The language of trauma used by Wright in this passage hints at an awareness of the connection 
between the old slavery of the South and the new slavery of the North, not to mention once again 
communicating the disillusionment felt by southern black migrants who found themselves 
fleeing from one form of slavery and into the waiting arms of another.  This perhaps makes 
Wright?s decision to not overcome the underground space in his fiction even more surprising; 
whether through oversight on his part or a more deliberate decision borne of pessimism, Wright 
seems to have either forgotten or ignored both the physical and the symbolic importance of the 
underground space in the history of successful African-American protest even in the days before 
emancipation.  Ellison, again, perhaps represents a more successful rediscovery of this important 
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symbolism, reappropriating and reutilizing the underground space as a zone of evasion and 
escape.68 
Wright projects his pessimistic take on underground symbolism, with historical and 
traumatic imagery similar to that of the previous passage, onto hospitals as well, as shown in a 
particular episode of Black Boy: 
The hospital kept us four Negroes, as though we were close kin to the animals we 
tended, huddled together down in the underworld corridors of the hospital, 
separated by a vast psychological distance from the significant processes of the 
rest of the hospital?just as America had kept us locked in the dark underworld of 
American life for three hundred years.  (314) 
Ellison also has his sentiments concerning hospitals and sanitariums.   One clinic in particular is 
somewhat more hopeful as an example, and it provided him with the subject matter and guiding 
metaphor for his essay ?Harlem is Nowhere??the LaFargue Psychiatric Clinic in Harlem, ?the 
only center in the city wherein both Negroes and whites may receive extended psychiatric care? 
(320).  Its importance for both black and white Americans is key to its metaphorical significance, 
for Ellison sees it as ?an underground extension of symbolically addresses the problems of 
American democracy on racial lines.  Notice the sense of disequilibrium in Ellison?s description 
of entering the clinic:  ?One must descend to the basement and move along a confusing mazelike 
hall to reach it.  Twice the passage seems to lead to a blank wall? (320).  Such frustration speaks 
accurately to the American illness that the LaFargue Clinic represents for Ellison, but the clinic?s 
                                                            
68As Gates seems to point out, Ellison nonetheless owes Wright for ?The Man Who Lived Underground? as a text 
upon which to so successfully ?Signify?:  ?If Daniels?s fate is signified by the objects over which he stumbles in the 
darkness of the sewer, Ellison Signifies upon Wright?s novella by repeating this underground scene of discovery but 
having his protagonist burn the bits of paper through which he had allowed himself to be defined by others? (106).  
Burn, of course, as opposed to decorating the walls with them in hopes that someone (most likely white, from the 
world above) will see. 
130 
location provides an important emphasis on the neurotic state of uncertainty in the African-
American?s sense of identity; they are beings who ?in responding to the complex forces of 
American have become confused? (321), who are ?not quite citizens and yet Americans? (322).  
The necessity of the LaFargue Clinic, then, is the address ?the sickness of the social order? and 
?the sense of unreality that haunts Harlem? (327).  
 Ellison takes the title of ?Harlem is Nowhere? from a customary phrase in Harlem:  in 
response to ?How are you?? one answers ?Oh man, I?m nowhere? (323).  This strange answer 
also finds its way into Invisible Man through Ras, who yells accusingly at the protagonist, ?You 
are nowhere, mahn.  Nowhere!? (375); and both instances communicate the African-American?s 
sense of being lost in American society.69  As Ellison elaborates, ?One?s identity drifts in a 
capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable.  One ?is? 
literally, but nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a ?displaced person? of American 
society? (325).  This sense of being ?nowhere? goes hand in hand with the ?invisibility? 
representing, as he wrote in his working notes for Invisible Man, the ?great formlessness of 
Negro life wherein all values are in flux? (?Working Notes? 343).  For Ellison, then, the 
?nowhere? of the underground is a site of refuge, for it lies under the New Overseer?s white 
panoptic radar; as opposed to Wright, and through the example of the LaFargue clinic, the 
underground for Ellison is not the site of waste and sickness but the cure. 
 Another, perhaps less obvious underground space provides an epiphany for the narrator, 
one that runs counter to his present attempts at survival through conformity to the norms of both 
the dominant white culture and his own self-preserving community.  While in the subway, he 
spots three boys in zoot suits, ?as though I?d never seen their like before? (440).  Their stark 
                                                            
69Interestingly, Petry seems to anticipate this in ?In Darkness and Confusion? when William tells the crowd, ?Good 
people of Harlem [?] We don?t belong anywhere? (291).  
131 
individuality inspires the narrator on many levels?mainly, that their apparent lack of concern 
for appearing ?normal? seems to offer a refreshing sense of freedom and confidence among 
them; and that they do not lament belonging altogether to one or the other world (black/white, 
North/South, urban/rural) but rather celebrate their transitional cultural status?speaking a 
?jived-up transitional language full of country glamour? and thinking ?transitional thoughts? 
(441).  These young men are unknowingly the invisible man?s salvation, for it is perhaps in their 
marginal tricksterism that the seed is planted within him to seek the path of individualism as a 
means of thwarting white panopticism.  Their colorfulness, their individuality, in fact provides a 
counter-distortion to the New Overseer?s distorting panoptic gaze:  ?These fellows whose bodies 
seemed?what had one of my teachers said of me???You?re like one of these African 
sculptures, distorted in the interest of a design.?  Well, what design and whose??  (440)  The 
answer is one?s own, as opposed to the normative design of that the dominant culture wishes to 
impose upon you.  The recollection of his teacher?s comment makes the connection between the 
narrator and the three young men clear, and thus begins the invisible man?s questioning of the 
Brotherhood in earnest; the three young men are, after all, ?men outside of historical time [?] 
untouched [and] didn?t believe in Brotherhood, no doubt had never heard of it? (440).  In 
pondering how these very boys might be ?the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something 
precious? (441), the narrator entertains a trickster version of history, one counter to the more 
rigid and scientific version central to the Brotherhood?s ideology:  ?What if Brother Jack were 
wrong?  What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the 
boys his ace in the hole?  What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of 
paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise!? (441)  This other underground space, 
which prefigures the one in which the narrator finds himself at the novel?s conclusion, thus also 
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demonstrates an opportunity for success through reappropriation and shirking of the strategies of 
indoctrination and internalization which can paralyze the migrant with a false sense of fixity. 
 According to Ellison himself, in ?Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,? Invisible Man  
runs counter to the more negative impression one gets of the underground, as utilized by Wright 
in ?The Man Who Lived Underground?; speaking of his protagonist, says that ?his movement 
vertically downward (not into a ?sewer,? Freud notwithstanding, but into a coal cellar, a source of 
heat, light, power and, through association with the character?s motivation, self-perception) is a 
process of rising to an understanding of his human condition? (111).  The protagonist?s means to 
this rising toward self-realization is a stubborn, solitary individualism; and it is this extreme 
individualism that allows him to avoid the usual pitfalls laid by the New Overseer and his 
various recruits.  More sober and comfortable in his solitude than any protagonist created by 
Wright, Ellison?s invisible man is thus less vulnerable to the New Overseer?s strategies of 
indoctrination and recruitment, becoming more mindful and weary of those who have been 
recruited as well as more mindful of and less affected by internalization of white norms. 
 
III. The Individual Resisting Murder 
As a zone that lies off of the New Overseer?s panoptic map, the underground space for 
Ellison is a reappropriated site of refuge; but one can still see a nod to both Wright?s more 
pessimistic view and Petry?s gothic rendering of tenement life as entombment in the invisible 
man?s eulogy for Tod Clifton.  However, Ellison finds a way, through his narrator, toward 
identification with each individual within the black community: 
Now he?s in this box with the bolts tightened down.  He?s in the box and we?re in 
there with him, and when I?ve told you this you can go.  It?s dark in this box and 
133 
it?s crowded.  It has a cracked ceiling and a clogged-up toilet in the hall.  It has 
rats and roaches, and it?s far, far too expensive a dwelling.  The air is bad and it?ll 
be cold this winter.  (458, italics added) 
In translating Tod Clifton?s coffin into the cramped ghetto apartment space, the invisible man 
attempts ?to remind the mourners of their reality,? a process which ultimately permits him ?to 
see the individuality of faces in the crowd; each individual becomes a manifestation of the dead 
man? (Pryse 3)??OUR HOPE SHOT DOWN,? as the black-boarded signs at Clifton?s funeral 
read (450).  Through his narrator, Ellison seizes an opportunity that Wright apparently had 
missed?to relate the all-too-typical experiences of mid-twentieth-century African-Americans at 
the hands of housing discrimination and urban segregation on an individual level.  This eulogy 
scene thus anticipates the narrator?s artful reutilization of the underground space in which he 
finds himself for more potentially beneficial purposes; and the means to such a reappropriation 
of a space treated more pessimistically by both Wright and Petry is the invisible man?s 
rediscovery and reaffirmation of his own individuality (not beyond race but within it).  And the 
way toward that individual self-realization is yet another reappropriation?of the notion of 
?invisibility,? which the narrator explains on the novel?s first page:  ?I am an invisible man [?] I 
am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me [?] When they approach me 
they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination?indeed, everything 
and anything except me? (3).  From this refusal of those who look upon him to see beyond their 
own stereotyping expectations and monolithic assumptions the narrator draws the advantage of 
literal hiddenness, turning white panopticism?s enforcing of visibility through surveillance on its 
head.  In its attempts to make the black population more visible through concentration into 
ghettoes, white panopticism does not foresee the potential for backfire within its own 
134 
homogenizing assumptions?assumptions that seem to dismiss, at white panopticism?s peril, 
individual ingenuity?concerning a particular demographic. 
As residual evidence of Wright?s treatment of the underground space presents itself in 
Invisible Man before Ellison reappropriates it, the same can be said for ?invisibility.?  The 
ambiguous anonymity?or invisibility?that the city affords is certainly not lost on Wright 
either.  He describes in Black Boy how he was passed by a white man soon after his arrival in 
Chicago:  ?I did not exist for him; I was as far from his mind as the stone buildings that swept 
past in the street.  It would have been illegal for me to sit beside him in the part of the South that 
I had come from? (262).  The anonymity afforded by the metropolis initially seems to transcend 
racial difference, with each person seeming ?to regard the other as a part of the city landscape? 
(262).  Ellison too conveys this vague and ultimately misleading sense of hope in Invisible Man 
through the protagonist upon his first arriving in Harlem:  ?a new world of possibility suggested 
itself to me faintly, like a small voice that was barely audible in the roar of city sounds? (159); 
and like the anonymous white man taking no notice of Wright, the urban crowd nonchalantly 
passes Ras while he stands on a ladder and tries to incite black anger.  But fear and dread are not 
absent in the black migrant?s experience either?Wright ponders:  ?Should I have come here?  
But going back was impossible.  I had fled a known terror, and perhaps I could cope with this 
unknown terror that lay ahead? (Black Boy 262); and Ellison?s invisible man has a vague sense 
of ?playing a part in some scheme? before dismissing his suspicions as ?all fantastic? (170).  
Also, the sense of identity erasure, or at least the threat of identity erasure, is ever-present in the 
yam he tries to eat, bought from a street vendor trying to capitalize on his Southern past.  The 
fact that it is frost-bitten is symbolic enough to give him pause:  ?What and how much had I lost 
by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?  What 
135 
a waste, what a senseless waste!? (266)  Both authors thus demonstrate an understanding of what 
Kenneth W. Warren describes as the ?powerful organizing force? that coincides with the 
?emergence of the metropolis,? with the cityscape ultimately acting as a ?psychic map? for 
?renegotiating personal and group identity? (398).  Such a reworking of one?s identity upon 
meeting the new urban environment?especially if one is coming from a narrow-minded and 
small rural town, and one is feeling the detrimental effects of such a town?s discriminations?
would certainly be liberating for some.  However, with this apparent fresh start often comes the 
removal of one?s old comforts and support systems.  For a black migrant, such removals often 
result in exposure to new means of the same old discriminations?namely, of white 
panopticism?s strategy of rendering black migrants ?invisible? through the homogenizing effects 
of ghettoization and capitalizing upon the black migrant community?s self-defensive tendency 
towards anti-individualism.  All of this is to ensure a group vulnerability with minimal individual 
variations to maintain the dominant white power structure. 
 What Ellison seems to be more consciously hitting upon is the New Overseer?s use of 
anti-individualism as a panoptic strategy.  Again, this applies not only to the literal North but the 
North?s apparent panoptic reach into even the South, especially through the institution of the 
black college which the invisible man attends.  Thinking of the ?faded and yellowed? pictures of 
the school?s early days displayed in the library while driving Mr. Norton around, he remembers 
the ?photographs of men and women in wagons drawn by mule teams and oxen, dressed in 
black, dusty clothing, people who seemed almost without individuality, a black mob that seemed 
to be waiting, looking with blank faces? (39, italics added).  These photographs represent the 
school?s historical ties to not only the hardship of pre-emancipation days but the continuing 
discrimination throughout the Reconstruction, with the school?s current students being the 
136 
inheritors of the resulting disappointment and disillusionment even into the twentieth century.  A 
big part of that disillusionment is the assigning of the African-American individual to being a 
mere part of a purely historical ?black mob.?  As a part of the institution of the school, under the 
ever-watchful panoptic eye of the recruited Dr. Bledsoe, the narrator is under constant pressure 
to not only avoid embarrassing the community and institution to which he belong, but to not 
betray or disappoint the assumptions and expectations of northern white patrons like Mr. Norton. 
As Ellison writes in ?An Extravagance of Laughter?: 
I, who was an unwilling and not always conscious embodiment of that historical 
complexity, and a symbol of the Civil War?s sacrificial bloodshed [?] Thus in 
my dark singularity I often appeared to be perceived more as a symbol than as an 
individual, more as a threatening sign [?]  than as a disinterested seeker after 
culture.  (624) 
Made into more of a representative than an individual human being, the narrator feels like one of 
the figures in the photographs who ?had never seemed actually to have been alive, but were more 
like signs or symbols one found on the last pages of the dictionary? (39), consigned solely to the 
group-burden of historical significance without any individual humanity in the here and now, and 
certainly no individual hopes for the future.  Through the historical window provided by these 
photographs, the narrator thus gets an intimation of how, according to Derrick A. Bell, ?the 
degree of progress blacks have made away from slavery and toward equality? had depended on 
?whether allowing blacks more or less opportunity best served the interests and aims of white 
society? (39); and that racial integration is only even partially embraced when it can occur ?on a 
basis that insures white dominance and control? (43).  Racial integration, the new ?freedom,? is 
137 
then merely a newer and more subtle form of slavery, a mere token ?freedom? of convenience 
for the dominant culture. 
 White panoptic maneuverings against black individuality, of course, continue in the 
North through the Brotherhood.  And once again, Ellison?s migrant protagonist is saddled with 
the identity-narrowing burden of history, but from another trajectory?in fact, the opposite 
trajectory.  Whereas the communal and institutional pressures acting upon the narrator?s 
individuality in the South work to erase his identity through an arguably excessive focus on race, 
Brother Jack expresses a fundamental impatience with focusing on race at all; he snaps at the 
narrator, ?Why do you fellows always talk in terms of race!? (292), and later coldly belittles the 
narrator?s sense of ?personal responsibility? for the deceased Tod Clifton (463).  However, the 
panoptic pressures exerted through the white Brother Jack and the black Dr. Bledsoe share the 
common aim of identity erasure for an elusive and intangible ?common? or ?greater good.?  As 
Brother Jack explains to the narrator, ?But you mustn?t waste your emotions on individuals, they 
don?t count [?] Those old ones [?] It?s sad, yes.  But they?re already dead, defunct.  History 
has passed them by.  Unfortunate, but there?s nothing to do about them [?] History has been 
born in your brain? (291).  And the narrator does seem to at least initially, and superficially, buy 
into this, explaining at one point how he is merely ?a cog in a machine? and that ?We here in the 
Brotherhood work as a unit? (396-397). 
However, the Brotherhood and Brother Jack?s lack of concern (rather, use) for race is not 
rooted in na?ve liberal optimism, and their motivations toward a ?greater good? is no equally 
shared sacrifice.  Their neglect and seeming ignorance of the racial component is, in fact, a 
convenient means of perpetuating the sufferings that are a result of racial difference.  As Cheryl 
Harris points out, ?The law?s approach to group identity reproduces subordination, in the past 
138 
through ?race-ing? a group?that is, by assigning a racial identity that equated with inferior 
status, and in the present by erasing racial group identity? (53).  The Brotherhood is then 
assuming a pseudo-objective pose, with their embracing of the ?norm of colorblindness? actually 
helping to achieve the ?protection of the property interest in whiteness? (60).  Similarly, Ian 
Haney Lopez explains the ?perversity of color-blindness??how ?to banish race-words redoubles 
the hegemony of race by targeting efforts to combat racism while leaving race and its effects 
unchallenged and embedded in society, seemingly natural rather than the product of social 
choices? (177).  Race-blindness, then, ironically does not target the harmful effects of racism, but 
the very efforts to do something against such harms through willful and convenient ignorance 
and neglect.  Ellison?s narrator gets an early sense of these sinister contradictions within Brother 
Jack?of Jack?s supposedly being an agent working against social oppression while also 
expressing a desire to control and manipulate the masses:  ?Say what the people want to hear, but 
say it in such a way that they?ll do what we wish? (359).  Brother Jack?s cynical, dehumanizing 
and de-individualizing use of African-American recruits such as the narrator and Tod Clifton 
reveal him to be just another kind of overseer; take, for instance, how he finds the narrator?s 
speeches too ?wild,? that he needs ?training,? to be ?tamed? (351). 
This resemblance of Brother Jack to the pre-Emancipation overseer is certainly not lost 
on the narrator, who flat-out confronts Brother Jack with this realization, calling him the ?great 
white father? and ?Marse Jack? (473).  But again, this uncanny resemblance to the old plantation 
owner and the old overseer is no mere repetition; there is a development from the old slavery, an 
increase in both the cunning and the reach of white panoptic power?chiefly through the 
mechanisms of indoctrination and recruitment.  Its recruitment especially of other African-
Americans creates the sense of a double-bind experienced by Ellison?s invisible man, both sides 
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of that bind pitting the issue of race against the invisible man?s individual identity.  Consider the 
message in the mysterious letter received by the invisible man while he is still a member of the 
Brotherhood: 
Do not go too fast.  Keep working for the people but remember that you are one 
of us and do not forget if you get too big they will cut you down.  You are from 
the South and you know that this is a white man?s world [? ] go easy so that you 
can keep on helping the colored people.  They do not want you to go too fast and 
will cut you down if you do.  (383) 
He later thinks that the handwriting of the letter strongly resembles that of Brother Jack, but this 
is never proven to be anything more than a strong suspicion.  The language of the letter is 
tellingly ambiguous; the ?us? and the ?they? can both go either way, speaking of the white 
Brotherhood or the narrator?s community of fellow African-Americans.  More horrible still to 
the narrator is how those pronouns could mean the white Brotherhood and his own seemingly 
monolithic black community.  Therein lies the challenge to Ellison?s protagonist:  to not fall into 
the same confusing trap that Wright?s Fred Daniels did?according to Fabre, of failing to elude 
the burdens of culture and heritage (99)?left feeling lost and without options and running, 
toward his death, back to the white world that, although it oppresses him, is the only one he 
apparently knows.  Evidence such as Daniels? delight in precious objects, even the money he 
attempts to reappropriate as wallpaper, points toward panopticism?s internalizing effects upon 
the oppressed subject who, according to Foucault, is ?subjected to habits, rules, orders, an 
authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to 
function automatically in him? (129).  And Ellison?s protagonist certainly comes close to falling 
into the same trap, before he fully realizes the importance of his own individual identity; as Pryse 
140 
points out, ?once in the North, even after Bledsoe?s letter to Emerson destroys his dream of 
reintegration with his college, Invisible Man continues to associate the pursuit of identity with 
membership in an organization?Men?s House, the union meeting at Liberty Paints, finally the 
Brotherhood? (10).  The disillusioning outcomes of associating himself with these groups, 
however, prove crucial to the narrator?s development. 
 Ellison understood that the price of black individuality was potentially great.  White 
panopticism?s internalizing effects upon its black subjects works hand in hand upon Ellison?s 
invisible man with the anti-individualistic communal pressures of his fellow African-Americans. 
As Ellison explains in ?Richard Wright?s Blues,? ?The pre-individualistic black community 
discourages individuality out of self-defense.  Having learned through experience that the whole 
group is punished for the actions of a single member, it has worked out efficient techniques of 
behavior control? (140).  Out of this defensive anti-individualism, Ellison clarifies how the 
?warmth? shown within a southern community?s?especially a black southern community?s? 
regard for its members, compared with the ?coldly impersonal relationships? of the ?urban 
industrial community,? is accompanied by ?an equally personal coldness, kindliness by cruelty, 
regard by malice? (140).  The black individual who breaks away from the community, then, ?is 
apt to be more impressed by its negative than by its positive character? and ?becomes a stranger 
even to his relatives? (140).  His family and community?s gestures of protection are thus 
interpreted as ?blows of oppression?from which there is no hiding place? (141).  The decision 
of black individuality is then for Ellison a painful one, and the steps toward the realization of that 
individuality are equally painful.  His surrealism, which is his stylistic communication of the 
distorting effects of the white panoptic gaze, communicates also the individual?s ?awaken[ing] to 
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the nightmare of his life? (?Richard Wright?s Blues? 142) once he rejects the patterns of both 
communal conformity and cultural indoctrination. 
Ellison also realized the sinister willingness of the New Overseer to exploit such self-
defensive and communal anti-individualism and how collective rebellion often played right into 
the hands of white panopticism.  This is why what is perhaps the chief manifestation of white 
panoptic power in Ellison?s novel is the riot in Harlem.  The riot is the ultimate diversion 
strategy of white panopticism in the text, making clear to the narrator the Brotherhood?s 
intentional absence in Harlem and its cold-blooded willingness to sacrifice individuals for what it 
sees as the greater good of its political aims.  As the narrator tries to explain to Ras: 
They planned it.  They want the mobs to come uptown with machine guns and 
rifles.  They want the streets to flow with blood, black blood and white blood, so 
that they can turn your death and sorrow and defeat into propaganda [?] It goes, 
?Use a nigger to catch a nigger.?  Well, they used me to catch you and now 
they?re using Ras to do away with me and to prepare your sacrifice.  (558) 
This riot is, of course, rendered in highly surrealistic tones by Ellison.  Once he hears the 
shooting ?like a distant celebration of the Fourth of July,? the narrator experiences the ?sudden 
and brilliant suspension of time? (535) that signals the oncoming intensifying of the surrealism:  
two policemen do not merely shoot, but ?thrust flaming pistols before them? (535); the crowds 
rushing by him are ?dark figures in a blue glow? (538); mannequins from a looted department 
store, resembling gruesomely murdered white women, are hanged from lampposts and other 
surrounding structures (556); Ras the Destroyer appears on ?a great black horse [?] in the 
costume of an Abyssinian chieftain; a fur cap upon his head, his arm bearing a shield, a cape 
made of the skin of some wild animal around his shoulders [?] A figure more out of a dream 
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than out of Harlem? (556); the spear thrown by Ras misses the narrator and instead pierces one 
of the hanging mannequins (557); and, achieving an almost cartoonish level of violence, the 
spear thrown back at Ras by the narrator rips through both of Ras? cheeks and locks his jaws 
(560).  If the New Overseer?s white panoptic gaze distorts the migrant?s sense of reality, then 
Ellison hints strongly with his nightmarish surrealism that the riot bears bears all of the distorted 
hallmarks of white panopticism?s sanction.  As an extreme example of white panopticism?s 
exploitation of the black community?s anti-individualism, the riot thus confirms for Ellison?s 
narrator how collective action can, in fact, be a trap. 
 Speaking of his invisible man?s painful process of awakening to self-realization, as well 
as the dangerous potential for that character?s becoming entangled in the same web of violence 
as a Bigger Thomas, Ellison explains how the South?s ?regressive character? (borne of both 
oppression by the dominant white culture and the black community?s defensive anti-
individualism) can jar certain black individuals into a kind of existential crisis.  Such a crisis 
leads many of these individuals to ?flee hysterically into the sleep of violence or the coma of 
apathy again? (?Richard Wright?s Blues? 142).  The invisible man thus possesses the same 
potential for ?terrible honesty? as the considerably more violent Bigger Thomas.  His ultimate 
avoidance of committing murder and the same level of violence perpetrated by Bigger, however, 
does not diminish his ?terrible honesty? credentials.  Although the invisible man?s more 
subversive strategies from his underground space may at first seem less ?terrible? in its honesty 
than Bigger?s more straightforward criminality, it in fact has the potential to be seen as more 
unsettling by whites for its avoidance of the doomed stereotype fulfillment through violent crime 
that the dominant white structure has come to count on and to use.  Ellison seems to stress the 
importance of individuality by stressing the Brotherhood?s specific use of mob violence, in the 
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form of rioting, as a white panoptic strategy of stereotype fulfillment of black criminality 
through anger-baiting.  In surveying the nightmarish chaos of Harlem in riot, Ellison?s narrator 
understands how Brother Jack had ?stumbled upon? a collectively angry black population and 
used them ?to prepare a sacrifice? (564), remembering Brother Hambro?s talk of ?sacrifice? for 
the greater good of the Brotherhood (501-502).  Given Brother Jack?s willingness to coldly 
exploit those same African-Americans that the recruits for the Brotherhood, the narrator again 
sees how Jack and the Brotherhood are just another version of what he thought he had escaped in 
the South, how black migrants like himself end up stuck on the same ?old sacrificial merry-go-
round? (505).  He tries, of course, to explain this to the black people rioting around him?how 
?they?ve played a trick on us, the same old trick with new variations? (560)?but he cannot reach 
them through their blind, long-contained rage.  Not that Ellison, through his invisible man, sees 
the rioters as entirely foolish and misguided; Ellison himself was all too familiar with the trauma 
that a riot can leave behind, having been only eight years old in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the 
1921 summer riot in that city.70  An eight-year-old Ellison realized all too early, according to 
Jackson, ?the danger of having brown skin, and as an adult he would never underestimate the 
potential scope of white violence? (The Indignant Generation 37).  His identification with the 
rioters in Invisible Man, as well as his sympathy for their motivations, is made clear through his 
narrator?s knowing that ?we cared? (560)?not ?they,? but ?we,? and the italics are his own.  His 
observation of the rioters is no distant, abstract condescension; he is among them, one of them, 
                                                            
70According to Jackson, during the ?Tulsa Race Riot? of June 1, 1921, ?the once prosperous black neighborhoods 
and businesses were obliterated after systematic bombing, looting, and burning by Tulsa whites.?  The riot began on 
May 31 during a violent clash outside of the jailhouse where police held a black teen, Dick Rowland, on charges of 
assaulting a white elevator operator, Sarah Page.  A large group of armed black men, mostly veterans, came to 
protect Rowland until the trial, then thousands of armed white men showed up to lynch Rowland.  One might 
certainly see some autobiographical inspiration for the absurd horror of the final riot scene in Invisible Man given 
the extreme, almost apocalyptic reaction of the white population:  ?After airplanes dropped turpentine balls and 
dynamite over the black community, whites burned down Tulsa?s entire proud black business community and shot 
scores of black men, women, and children? (The Indignant Generation 37). 
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and fully understands their anger and impulses toward violence; as he recalls, again pondering 
the negative psychological effects of ?invisibility?: 
you often doubt if you really exist.  You wonder whether you aren?t simply a 
phantom in other people?s minds.  Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper 
tries with all his strength to destroy.  It?s when you feel like this that, out of 
resentment, you begin to bump people back.  And, let me confess, you feel that 
way most of the time.  (4) 
 One can spot the murderous impulse within Ellison?s narrator relatively early in the text 
when, after having realized the trick Dr. Bledsoe has played on him by sending him north with 
false hopes to Mr. Emerson, feels that he ?owe[s] it to the race and to myself? to kill Bledsoe 
(194), hardly able to sleep for ?dreaming of revenge? (195).  However, Ellison?s ?invisible man? 
achieves his ambiguously hopeful position at the end of the novel by ultimately resisting the 
impulse to murder?the act which sealed the far less fortunate fates of Lutie and Bigger, and 
which proves to be a trap of stereotype fulfillment set up within white panopticism.  This 
happens first by accident, then as a conscious decision?first with his falling through the 
manhole fortunately cutting short a likely murderous pursuit of Brother Jack, then with his 
decision to not slit the throat of a white man who has just bumped into him and insulted him.  
Sure, he does beat and kick the man into bloody submission (thus maintaining his credentials for 
?terrible honesty?!), but he does not kill him (4-5), and this is the move toward nonviolence that 
so separates him from both Bigger Thomas and Lutie Johnson.  He, in fact, is first more 
successful than both Bigger and Lutie for at least attempting to confront the direct source of the 
white panoptic oppression, Brother Jack, as opposed to Bigger?s and Lutie?s displaced and 
misdirected killings of Bessie and Boots, respectively; but it is his serendipitous fall into the 
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underground and resulting decisions to not murder that allow for at least the hope, the potential, 
of a more successful rebellion. 
 
IV. Rediscovering the Trickster 
The chain link given as a gift by Brother Tarp is only one of the weapons used by 
Ellison?s narrator to fight his way past the white police officers and the followers of Ras 
pursuing him through the chaotic atmosphere of the Harlem riot toward the novel?s end?the 
other weapon being the briefcase given to him by white people as part of a scholarship prize for 
winning the battle royal at the beginning of the novel.  The narrator thus reappropriates both 
black and white gifts (the ?gift? of the briefcase, considering those who bestow it upon him, 
perhaps is more deserving of being placed within sarcastic quotation marks than the chain link) 
to make his way through the chaos of the riot toward his happily accidental discovery of the 
underground space?again, making it clear that the white panoptic pressures working upon him 
are not always, well, white.  But even the case of Dr. Bledsoe demonstrates how even the most 
supposedly covert act of only showing/telling white people like the rich patrons from the North 
what they want to see/hear nonetheless internalizes Dr. Bledsoe within the system of white 
panopticism through indoctrination and recruitment.  Even the invisible man himself realizes 
upon seeing the Harlem riot that, even in his dishonesty toward the Brotherhood, he was 
nonetheless working for the interests of the organization.  The trap that consumes Bledsoe and 
that the invisible man barely avoids follows Foucault?s description of panopticism?s internalizing 
mechanism:  
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes 
responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously 
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upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he 
simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.  
(202-203) 
Outright deception, then, is not the answer; it is not a matter of picking a side, but negotiating the 
very boundaries that define the separation between black and white, good and bad.  Such 
ambiguous measures?the aim of which is to baffle both the direct forces of white panoptic 
power and fellow members of the black community who have been unwittingly recruited by it?
call for the subtlety of archetypal tricksterism, the ?masking? discussed by Ellison in ?An 
Extravagance of Laughter? as ?more than the adoption of a disguise [but] a playing upon 
possibility, a strategy through which the individual projects a self-elected identity and makes of 
himself a ?work of art?? (629). 
In ?Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,? Ellison writes about how he knew ?the trickster 
Ulysses just as early as [he] knew the wily rabbit of Negro American lore? (112), stressing his 
familiarity with both the ancient trickster figures of canonical western literature and those of 
African-American folklore, the point being the actual cultural plurality of the American identity.  
Such a deliberate and unashamed owning of every facet of one?s individuality and one?s 
Americanness provides the means for the narrator to, as Fanon says, ?to liberate the black man 
from himself,? escaping the ?zone of nonbeing? (xii) and ?double narcissism? of white people?s 
feeling of superiority and black people?s need to prove themselves (xiv).  Rather than lament his 
sense of dislocation for having to negotiate the margins of the American identity?s absurd 
landscape, the invisible man learns to embrace it, to slip the rigid prescriptions of both the 
dominant culture and his own minority community through accepting contradiction and 
doubleness:  ?too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much 
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through love as through hate.  So I approach it through division.  So I denounce and I defend and 
I hate and I love? (580, italics added).  The distortion-sickness created by the white panoptic 
gaze stifles the subject?s true, American state of cultural multiplicity; the overarching reason for 
the invisible man?s staying in his ?hole,? after all, is that ?up above there?s an increasing passion 
to make men conform to a pattern??the dominant culture?s norms?in spite of how ?men are 
different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health? (576).  The 
trick, then, is to side-step the New Overseer?s indoctrinating notions of cultural exclusivity by 
freely borrowing and reappropriating the past which is every individual?s?especially American 
individual?s?common inheritance.  To do so is the only means of escaping detection by white 
panopticism as well as white panopticism?s psychological consequences rendered upon its black 
subjects. 
The invisible man?s own reappropriation of ?invisibility? is then both a reclamation and a 
self-affirmation?the initially woeful ?I am an invisible man? (3) that opens the novel repeated 
with celebratory self-discovery; after realizing that his problem was ?that I always tried to go in 
everyone?s way but my own,? and after years of ?trying to adopt the opinions of others? he 
finally ?rebelled,? he says, ?I am an invisible man? (573), with the italics emphasizing his 
redefining of the concept.  Such a trickster-like decision to work from the boundaries seems the 
only sane and remotely effective alternative within a society under the distorting white panoptic 
gaze, what the invisible man describes as ?one of the greatest jokes in the world???the spectacle 
of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving 
toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray.  None of us seems to know who he is or where 
he?s going? (577).  Within his tricksterism, the invisible man inverts his ?invisibility? towards a 
moral ambiguity?or ?irresponsibility,? as he calls it?that refuses the historical burden and anti-
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individualistic double-bind imposed by the dominant culture?s norms and the New Overseer?s 
controlling, panoptic strategies:  ?Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility [?] Responsibility 
rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement? (576).   
 Ellison?s ironic means of achieving his protagonist?s self-reclamation through 
tricksterism, again, and more so than both Wright and Petry, links him back to the strategies of 
Douglass.  According to Lewis Hyde, there is a considerable degree of the trickster in Douglass? 
successful escape of the slavery in the South.  Though Hyde grants that ?it may seem odd to seek 
out a vein of trickster consciousness in a person as serious and moralizing as Frederick 
Douglass? (226), he points out how Douglass? strategies undeniably involve identity inversion 
and a consistent willingness to work from the boundaries of southern slave society: 
Frederick Douglass, in any event, may have been a moralist by temperament, but 
he was born into a world where two distinct moral systems conflicted, and found 
himself forced to mediate between them.  He was the child of a white man and a 
black woman in a world where the races were radically separated.  After his 
escape he was a ?free slave,? a remarkable contradiction in terms.  He also had a 
strong will to test the forbidden, and it kept him on the edge, where others might 
have accepted the portions they had been offered.  (227) 
Like Douglass, the invisible man recognizes how he has no conceivable stake in obeying the 
rules and norms set by the dominant white society whose interests are against his very 
existence?rules and norms that, in fact, are part of that society?s panoptic strategies against him 
and the rest of the urban black community.  As a black migrant from the South confronting the 
uncanny new slavery of the North, the invisible man too is the paradoxical ?free slave,? left with 
the marginal spaces between the New Overseer?s rigid definitions as his only resort.  As 
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Douglass ?dwelt on the boundaries of plantation culture [and] became a cunning go-between 
[and] a thief of reapportionment who quit the periphery and moved to the center? (Hyde 227),  
Ellison?s protagonist also steps ?outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and [?] into 
chaos? (Invisible Man 576).  Given the unknown that is the new urban environment, such a 
willingness to embrace the ?chaos? serves as an alternative to counter the rigid confines of the 
New Overseer?s prescribed ?reality.?   
Again, the key to this formidable, responsibility-shirking ?invisibility? is the invisible 
man?s newly refined individuality.  It is this staunch individualism that allows for his much more 
effective and ambiguously hopeful means of protest, as opposed to the failures of Wright?s and 
Petry?s respective protagonists.  As Heise points out, the arson of the black tenement by its own 
tenants is an example of how collective action can be ?suicide? (161), whereas Ellison?s 
protagonist ?heroically? burns the papers in his briefcase that have rigidly identified him up to 
this point (162).  Whereas the collective decision to burn the tenement implies a permanent loss 
and self-destruction, the invisible man?s act of burning implies a phoenix-like rebirth.71  But this 
individualistic ?invisibility? is also the key to a new kind of ?terrible honesty,? for if the invisible 
man refuses the responsibility placed upon him by the New Overseer?s normative standards, then 
the New Overseer is dealing with a much wilier and more subtle adversary, one who does not 
play by the rules made to keep him in his place to begin with.  Ellison?s protagonist has, in 
effect, refused the ?certain significant generality [?] between the least irregularity and the 
greatest crime? of which Foucault speaks, with the mere ?departure from the norm? suddenly 
equated with the worst criminal offence (299).  Moreover, that same adversary, although he has 
managed to resist murder up to this point, remains ominous for his refusal of blame if that 
                                                            
71As Jonathan Baumbach writes in ?Nightmare of a Native Son,? ?The hero?s final loss of illusion forces him 
underground into the coffin (and womb) of the earth to be either finally buried or finally reborn? (14, italics added). 
150 
murder were to have been committed; speaking of the man whose throat he could have slit, 
Ellison?s narrator explains, ?Take the man whom I almost killed:  Who was responsible for that 
near murder?I?  I don?t think so, and I refuse it.  I won?t buy it. You can?t give it to me? (576). 
In fact, he seems to lay all of the responsibility on the man he nearly killed:  ?He bumped me, he 
insulted me.  Shouldn?t he, for his own personal safety, have recognized my hysteria, my ?danger 
potential??? (14)   
One must remember that even though Ellison has spared his narrator from committing 
murder, he nonetheless understood that, pondering the invisible man?s clarity through self-
realization, ?the penalty of wakefulness is to encounter ever more violence and horror than the 
sensibilities can sustain unless translated into some form of social action? (?Richard Wright?s 
Blues? 142, italics added).  And the invisible man makes it clear that ?despite Brother Jack and 
all that sad, lost period of the Brotherhood, I believe in nothing if not in action,? and ominously 
defines his ?hibernation? underground as ?a covert preparation for a more overt action? (13).  
Unlike Wright?s Fred Daniels, who resurfaces out of a desperate sense of loss and indoctrinated 
dependence upon the dominant white world aboveground, Ellison?s invisible man hints at a 
resurfacing that is far from victimized, beaten, and dependent?out of realizing ?that even an 
invisible man has a socially responsible role to play? (581).  Even as opposed to his initial, 
unintentional inspiring of the black mob to attack the police officer out of indignation for the old 
black couple?s eviction, the invisible man?s future individual action hints at something that will 
far less play into white panopticism?s hands.  His resurfacing will not be the surrender that 
Fred?s was, but the fruits of a long and ponderous underground preparation for something quite 
against the interests of the New Overseer.  And he will resurface with the terrible zest of a 
trickster-being unconfined by any expectations confining his self-image and behavior.  As if to 
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firmly establish his invisible man?s credibility within ?terrible honesty,? Ellison writes that his 
narrator?s ?memoir? is ?one long, loud rant, howl and laugh,? with ?Confession, not concealment 
[as] his mode? (111).  This is not the kind of one-dimensional lying that makes recruits such as 
Dr. Bledsoe, but a more fundamental redefining of norms and self that flirts with changing the 
rules of the game entirely. 
  
152 
 
 
 
Chapter Five:  Conclusion 
 As has already been mentioned at the conclusion of the first chapter, James Baldwin 
acknowledged how Bigger Thomas serves as a kind of warning, that within every African-
American is this ?dark and dangerous and unloved stranger? (?Many Thousands Gone? 1669).  
Of course, Baldwin would also take issue with Wright?s apparent decision to make Bigger an 
inarticulate and purely representative character, an anti-Uncle Tom devoid of individuality and 
any real significance beyond his race.  However, in 1963, fourteen years after ?Everybody?s 
Protest Novel? and three years after Richard Wright?s death, Baldwin?s The Fire Next Time 
would be published, a work written in a much different spirit, one that seem much more aligned 
with Wright?s apparent anger and pessimism.  In it, Baldwin apocalyptically insists that the 
?American Negro past? could very well ?rise up [and] smite all of us,? that a ?bill? is coming 
?that I fear America is not prepared to pay? (103).  And it is ?intransigence and ignorance of the 
white world? that will make this ?historical [?] cosmic vengeance [?] inevitable? (105).  The 
begrudging influence and legacy of not only Wright, but Petry and Ellison as well, thus becomes 
apparent.  This legacy is not only one of these authors? ?terrible honesty,? but the motifs of 
continued racism (the ?new slavery?) as depicted in their particular brand of post-naturalist, 
panopticism-centered revisions of slave narratives.   
 Baldwin also views the middle of the twentieth century as an especially appropriate time 
for ?terrible honesty? from an African-American perspective, given the disparity between a 
supposedly unanimous war-born patriotism and continued prejudice and inequality?even to 
153 
black soldiers and veterans:  ?The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War 
marks [?] a turning point in the Negro?s relation to America.  To put it briefly, and somewhat 
too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded? (54).  That Baldwin 
is writing this in hindsight, after all of the three authors? representative works have been 
published, is especially poignant.  One can see in Baldwin?s retrospect the defining significance 
of Wright, Petry, and Ellison?of their far more provocative approach to exposing and 
portraying the very human forces of white panopticism acting upon African-American urban 
migrants, and the resulting anger and hatred felt by those migrants.  Since the Emancipation, 
white oppression has not gone away; it has merely adapted and refined the strategies of the 
oppression, particularly its panoptic strategies.  What, then, is the incentive for African-
Americans to ?behave? or ?play nice??  Beginning with Wright, the apparent answer is that there 
is no incentive, for the dominant white culture has made it all too clear that it is not interested in 
equality or relinquishing power.  In this sense, slavery never ended.72  There is, therefore, no use 
in being polite.  In fact, to be anything less than explosively blunt, as Baldwin seems to hint, 
would be detrimental to not only the African-American community but America in general: 
?Any attempt we make to oppose these outbursts of energy is tantamount to signing our death 
warrant? (91). 
 The major issues having to do with post-naturalist, African-American narratives of urban 
migration thus continue from the time of Wright, Petry, and Ellison.  Be it surveillance, 
recruitment, indoctrination/internalization,  distortion, the predatory male gaze, or ?quarantining? 
and/or ?entombment? through ghettoization, the work of these three authors certainly did not end 
with them; they had created something that would persist in its confrontational and interrogating 
                                                            
72The title of Douglas A. Blackmon?s 2009 work on post-Emancipation oppression of African-Americans is self-
explanatory:  Slavery by Another Name:  The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World 
War II.   
154 
spirit.  Among other examples, one can, for instance, undoubtedly see the ?rage? which Baldwin 
saw at the center of Wright?s use of violence in his works (Nobody Knows My Name 188) in the 
unflinching literary assault perpetrated by Amiri Baraka.  Petry?s issues of motherhood and 
sexual predation, as well as her diversionary gothic stylings, reverberate in the works of Toni 
Morrison, especially Beloved.  And the African-American individual?s negotiation of a perilous 
and conspiratorial white-dominated urban society through tricksterism, as evidenced by Ellison 
with his invisible man, resurfaces quite recently with Easy Rawlins in Walter Mosley?s Devil in 
a Blue Dress.  What is key throughout this continuation of the issues and tropes established by 
Wright, Petry, and Ellison is the consistent reminder of slavery?s legacy?a reminder that, 
whether comparatively or impressionistically (as is often the case in Baraka?s plays), serves as 
both an uncanny haunting and warning towards vigilance against continued white oppression. 
 
I. Slave Narrative, Revisited 
To begin a concluding examination of slavery as a consistent motif in post-Wright  
African-American literature, it is perhaps instructive to begin with the striking case of Margaret 
Walker?s Jubilee, a bona fide neo-slave narrative, written in 1966, six years after her friend 
Wright died.  Jubilee is not about the ?new? slavery, but the old slavery; it is a slave narrative, 
written from a 1960s African-American female perspective, based upon the stories she had heard 
as a child from her grandmother about her great-grandmother, who was the real-life Vyry, the 
novel?s protagonist.  It thus serves as a fresh reminder of both the origins of the strategies used 
against black slaves and the eerie similarities between those strategies and the updated methods 
of the twentieth century.  Walker foreshadows the continuing struggles and worries of post-
Emancipation African-Americans through Vyry?s uneasy feeling that, even after the Union 
155 
soldiers have pillaged the plantation and announced the slaves? freedom, ?an ominous presence 
were all around her and some terrible thing of frightening dimensions, and yet indescribable, 
hung over her head? (287).  This premonition comes just before she is assaulted by a white 
scavenger (and rescued by Innis Brown), who serves as a kind of representative and prophetic 
metaphor for all of the continued dangers and oppression that post-bellum African-Americans 
will still face.  Similarly, though she has Randall Ware, the free black man who is the father of 
Vyry?s children, say this within the context of the Reconstruction, Walker transparently allows 
the significance of it to reverberate and apply to the time in which she is writing it:  ?All the 
violence and killing that colored people have suffered since Freedom may just be a drop in the 
bucket to what they put on us in slavery time, but God only knows what it will be in the future? 
(482).73 
 As far as surveillance goes, Walker?s descriptions of the plantation?s panoptic strategies 
for isolating and containing threats against its stability sound disturbingly non-dated, even 
current.  She describes, for instance, how, in the how, in the spring of 1851, a supposed well-
developed plot for an uprising among the slaves of Lee County, with the assistance of free black 
people and white abolitionists, became known to the county?s High Sheriff (81), as well as the 
ensuing crack-down to make an example of those supposedly plotting the uprising by hanging 
them (82).  This crack-down involves ?clamp[ing] down harder on the movements of all blacks, 
enforc[ing] the curfew laws and all of the Black Code, thereby rigorously maintaining control 
over their [the plantation owners?] property, both land and chattel slaves,? as well as moving 
abolitionists and free black people out of Georgia through intimidation (82).  Even on the 
                                                            
73With perhaps less obvious prophecy, Walker earlier has Randall comment on continued racism during the 
Reconstruction:  ?Well, they?re not going to have it the same way.  Freedom won?t mean much more than they can?t 
sell us on the auction block [?] But they mean to keep us  down under some kind of different system, controlling 
our labor and restricting our movements, and not allowing us to vote, and trying to keep us ignorant? (472-473).  
Such methods are certainly not absent in the present day. 
156 
plantation, then, there was a kind of ghettoization and movement control, to keep slaves from 
different plantations from talking too much and sharing ideas with each other, as well as keeping 
those same slaves from the ?contamination? of abolitionist ideas.  Also, Randall Ware?s 
particular troubles as a free black man prove how, similar to the examples of both Wright?s 
Cross Damon and Ellison?s invisible man, white panopticism especially targets black individuals 
who do not conform to (thus confirming) the dominant culture?s proscriptions of whites? 
?natural? superiority in terms of intelligence, education, and self-sufficiency.  The white power 
structure seems to take special pains to prevent the free black individual?s ?contaminating? 
example from influencing their (presumably) indoctrinated slaves.  As the example of Randall 
Ware documents, a free black man?s legal status was kept ?flimsy? because he must always have 
a white guardian who can speak for him, and this white guardian must be ?a property owner of 
some means.?  Technically, free black people were attached to the land of their white guardians 
?in much the same manner of a serf or slave,? with their legal status ?similar to that of an 
indentured servant whose time was not his own.?  Also, free black people were forced to renew 
their ?free papers? by paying ?an exorbitant tax which increased annually.?  These free papers 
must always be found on their persons, and when they traveled from place to place, they ?must 
buy a permit and register in each county [they] entered so that [their] movements could always 
be checked?; and if, for any reason, these yearly paper assessments could not be produced, these 
free papers could be taken away and freedom could be revoked (92).  Undoubtedly, similar to the 
absurd experiences of Ellison?s invisible man, this created the hopeless and paranoid sense of 
constantly being followed, watched, scrutinized, and manipulated in terms of one?s 
movements?all to divert the free, intelligent, and successful black individual?s upsetting 
influence upon the fictions that make up the dominant white ideology.   
157 
To further aid in surveillance, there was also recruitment on the plantation, in the form of 
black ?drivers? and ?trusted slaves? (82) who would act as spies, to further control the 
movements of the slave community from within.  However, as the case of Bigger Thomas 
illustrates, such recruitment is not always a reciprocally conscious decision on the part of the 
slave; rather, he/she is driven towards or accused of a violent act that sets them up to fulfill and 
justify the black criminal stereotype and be used as a sacrificial example of the white 
hegemony?s supremacy and rightness.  Walker provides the stunning example of how two black 
women accused of killing their master and his mother by poisoning their food are convicted of 
murder and sentenced to be hanged (83).  The plantation owners mandate that their slaves 
witness the hanging, which is on (cruel irony of cruel ironies) the Fourth of July (120).74  One is 
reminded not only of the black migrant community?s self-defensive disavowal of Bigger upon 
his capture, but of the similar reaction to Joe Hamilton?s arrest and life sentence in Dunbar?s The 
Sport of the Gods.  The purpose, of course, is not only to terrorize the black population with the 
threat of severe punishment, but to perpetuate the black population?s indoctrinated sense of 
inferiority and self-loathing through the increased and mandated conspicuousness lent to a 
disgraced representative of their community.     
 Such brutal example-making reaffirms an already-existing and deeply-seeded 
internalization of white ideology by oppressed black subjects.  This, like the phenomenon of 
communal black anti-individualism discussed by Ellison in ?Richard Wright?s Blues? (142), is, 
again, an attempt at communal self-preservation.  Take the examples that Walker provides 
through Uncle Joe and Caline:  Uncle Joe, at the secret slave meetings, dismisses talk of freedom 
as ?foolish and dangerous,? preferring to accept ?what God told Ham? (that slavery is 
                                                            
74This calls to mind Frederick Douglass? provocative 1852 ?What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?? speech, in 
which he concludes, ?What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? [?] to him, your celebration is a sham? 
(344). 
158 
punishment for being black) and ?waiting on the Lord? for freedom (51); and Caline, 
demonstrates an intraracial class snobbery through her belief that house servants and field hands 
?just don?t mix,? and insisting that she ?ain?t no yard nigger [and] don?t have nothing to do with 
yard niggers? (85-86).  Even Vyry herself demonstrates internalization of dominant white 
standards:  when Innis tells her that he was a field hand, she looks ?disappointed,? because 
?[y]ard niggers and field hands didn?t set so high with her? (294); and she does not like the new 
black community of which she has become a part because they are ?too low-class and just 
nothing but riff-raff? (365); and Innis finally calls her out on it, saying, ?You ain?t never been 
much for field hands no-how.  I knows your kind of dicty Big House Miss Ann?s nigger 
servants? (450).  A considerable part of Vyry?s triumph at the novel?s conclusion is her eventual 
acceptance and even love of the community to which she now belongs, perhaps best represented 
through her ultimate choosing of the less educated but loving, devoted, and (most importantly) 
present Innis Brown over the more educated and financially successful but absent Randall Ware 
as her husband.  A considerable part of post-bellum black subjects? triumph, then, is to 
essentially stop being subjects by undoing the psychological damage perpetrated upon them by 
the dominant white culture through indoctrination and internalization. 
 Isolation was an essential prerequisite for the surveillance of slaves on the plantation.  
Similar to not only Petry?s renderings of inner-city tenements as tombs and torture chambers, but 
to both Douglass? and Jacobs? ominous descriptions of plantations? typically isolated locations,75 
Walker describes the remoteness of the plantation of John Dutton, Vyry?s master and biological 
father, in gothic terms; it is like ?a great feudal, medieval castle surrounded by water and 
inaccessible except by a drawbridge over a moat [?] in a most inaccessible section of Georgia ?
deep in the forest, miles from the cities, and impossible to travel on foot? (35).  Such Gothicism, 
                                                            
75My Bondage and My Freedom (48-49); Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (160-161). 
159 
whether purposeful or accidental, is, again, useful in its truer-to-life portrayal of the plantation 
owner and overseer as a mad, sadistic patriarch tormenting the victims hopelessly trapped within 
his lair or domain.  However, the new plantation for the twentieth century is, again, the ghetto, to 
which African-American migrants are consigned within the city; yet Walker shows how the 
plight of African-Americans just after the Emancipation, even in a rural setting, anticipates the 
strategies of ghettoization to which the white power structure would resort both later in the post-
bellum period and into the twentieth century.  Innis explains to Vyry how, based on a 
conversation he had with an interrogating local white man, so long as they remain living at the 
undesirable and isolated location of the river bottom, the local white people have no problem 
with them:  ?I told him we was living in the country, and when he asked on whose land, I told 
him we was in the woods and the river bottom and wasn?t nobody nearbouts to us with no land 
[?] He act kinda satisfied, leastwise he didn?t say nothing else? (328).  Through consistently 
being denied better options, Innis, Vyry, and Vyry?s children are thus moved by racial 
discrimination into the river bottom, a space, like the ghetto, that the vast majority of the local 
white people neither want to live in nor visit?in their minds, the perfect place for a black family 
to live, out of sight and out of mind. 
 Even beyond Walker?s more literal revisiting of the slave narrative from a twentieth-
century standpoint, slavery persists as an image in African-American literature after the middle 
of the twentieth century.  In Lorraine Hansberry?s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Beneatha?s 
response to Asagai?s notion of curing ?the Great Sore of colonialism with Independence? seems 
appropriate, coming from a disillusioned young African-American living under housing 
discrimination in the late 1950s:  ??Independence!?  But then what?? (1780)  Her response calls 
to mind the Emancipation and the continued racism and discrimination that would none the less 
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follow it to the present day.  More impressionistically, the image of the slave is a consistent trope 
in the plays of Amiri Baraka.  During the Prologue for The Slave, for instance, Baraka has the 
black revolutionary leader Walker Vessels come out as ?an old field slave? (43), and, as he exits 
the stage, Vessels grows ?anxiously less articulate, more ?field hand? sounding? (45).  Similarly, 
in Dutchman, Lula taunts the well-spoken and well-dressed Clay by calling him ?an escaped 
nigger? (1895).  Even in the brief glimpse of northern city life that Toni Morrison allows in 
Beloved reveals a disheartening continuation of the old way of thinking.  Upon arriving in 
Cincinnati to seek work from the white Bodwin siblings, Denver is met by a black housekeeper 
and old friend of Baby Suggs, Janey Wagon, who explain to Denver how the Bodwins are ?good 
whitefolks? who she ?wouldn?t [?] trade for another pair.?  Just after, as s he is about to leave 
the Bodwins? home, Denver notices a very racistly rendered black boy figurine on a shelf by the 
back door??a blackboy?s mouth full of money,? with his head ?thrown back farther than a head 
could go? and his moon-like bulging eyes ?all the face he had above the gaping red mouth,? and 
?At Yo Service? painted across the pedestal on which he knelt (300).  It is a sober reminder to 
the young Denver of what she, in fact, must do for the sake of earning money and keeping her 
family together (not to mention a demeaning and painfully ironic object of welcome to those 
applying for positions as ?the help?!).  After Douglass and Jacobs, after Dunbar and Weldon 
Johnson, and after Wright, Petry, and Ellison, slavery persists not only as a fact of history, but as 
a haunting and sobering metaphor for continuing white oppression and the continuing 
contradictions between America?s proclamations of equality and its shameful hypocrisies against 
that equality, particularly hypocrisies against the African-American community. 
 
II. The New Overseer Continues 
161 
Also persistent in African-American literature after Wright, Petry, and Ellison are the  
issues associated with white panoptic forces within slavery (both old and new)?as previously 
mentioned:  surveillance, recruitment, indoctrination/internalization,  distortion, the predatory 
male gaze, and ?quarantining? and/or ?entombment? through ghettoization.  The key differences 
in how these issues are handled by later African-American authors are an increased and more 
consistent self-consciousness and awareness of white panopticism in general and a hopefulness 
that goes even beyond Ellison?s ambiguity.  How different African-American authors from the 
1960s to the present react to the continuing issues of white panopticism within these differences, 
of course, varies?in terms of anger, irony, flamboyance, and humor.   
 Surveillance, by definition, is perhaps most central to white panopticism.  Other issues of 
white panopticism seem to simply be extensions of it and ways of gathering information on how 
to further refine it.  Surveillance, within the context of white panopticism, thus becomes 
synonymous with the white gaze, whether that gaze be individual or collective, and is thus the 
most poignantly felt feature of white panopticism.  Accordingly, Amiri Baraka specifically 
identifies the white gaze as an essential cause of African-American grief in his poem ?Words?:  
?But the attention.  To be always looking, and thinking.To be always under so many things? 
gaze, the pressure of such attention? (177).  However, he also identifies it, not only specifically 
but violently, as a specific target of the African-American artist in another poem, ?State/meant?:  
?The Black Artist must demonstrate sweet life, how it differs from the deathly grip of the White 
Eyes.  The Black Artist must teach the White Eyes their deaths, and teach the black man how to 
bring these deaths about? (169-170).  Baraka seems to understand the complexity of the 
traumatic effects that the white gaze has upon the African-American psyche?how the 
surveillance it creates becomes bound up with and motivationally distributed among other 
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features of white panopticism, such as recruitment and ghettoization, to undermine through a 
seemingly perpetual visibility African-American individuality, identity, and indepedence.   
 The isolating motives behind ghettoization are merely a concentration of surveillance 
within a more limited space.  It is a means of separating through difference and denial the black 
community from the white status quo, whose peace of mind and self-image are maintained by a 
continued subjugation of the Other that reaffirms, justifies, and perpetuates white supremacy.  
With A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry revisits the opening of Native Son?complete 
with the beginning sound of an alarm clock (1729) and protagonist Walter Younger?s working as 
a chauffeur for a rich white man, Mr. Arnold (1734)?which focuses on the pressures of housing 
discrimination working upon the Thomas family (with, of course, an ending that is far less 
bleak).  In Hansberry?s play, Walter bitterly understands this enduring discrimination, as he 
explains to his mother why he is going to do ?business? with ?The Man,? Mr. Karl Lindner of 
the Clybourne Park Improvement Association:  ?Mama, you know it?s all divided up.  Life is.  
Sure enough.  Between the takers and the ?tooken? [?] Some of us always getting ?tooken?? 
(1784).   
Mr. Lindner presents an ironic case for the new, kinder, gentler slavery.  He is a soft-
spoken and gentle man?a very different manifestation of white hegemony from anything seen 
in Wright, Petry, or Ellison?who is offering Walter?s mother her money back with interest for 
the house in Clybourne Park, a completely white neighborhood, on which she had placed a down 
payment (1772).  However, it is all too clear that Lindner, as a part of this euphemistically titled 
?Improvement? Association, is attempting to pay the Younger family to maintain housing 
discrimination and segregation.  Directly, he is certainly less brutal than the typical ?enforcer,? 
but his aim is no different.  His hints about ?some of the incidents which have happened in 
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various parts of the city when colored people have moved into certain areas? (1771) and how 
?people can get awful worked up when they feel that their whole way of life and everything 
they?ve ever worked for is threatened? (1773) are perhaps as much veiled threats as practical 
warnings.  Lindner?s presence, however timid it is on its own, is none the less ominous for the 
authority and institution that backs it. 
 Baraka also addressed ghettoization and housing discrimination in his reinterpretation of 
Dante?s Inferno, The System of Dante?s Hell, in which he obviously depicts the ghetto as a hell, 
with the punishments tormenting the ?souls? there indicative of the negative psychological 
effects of environmental racism.  One James Karolis, for instance, dies in a bathroom of ?old age 
and segregation? (28), and one bar has an actual white stripe down the center of it to separate 
black people from white people (133-134).  The ghetto, for Baraka, is a negative space (at least 
before reappropriation), not unlike Ellison?s ?nowhere? of Harlem in that ?This place is not 
another? (27).  And the ?souls? are not of the damned but of ?lying saints,? ?martyrs,? and 
?industrial Negroes? (29)?victims sacrificed to the dominant white initiative, not as lucky as 
Ellison?s invisible man, who discovers the salvation of individuality in spite of both the white 
panoptic pressures and communal black pressures acting upon him.  For Baldwin also, the new 
slavery of ghettoization apparently played a big part in the more bitter and ominous approach he 
took with The Fire Next Time:  ?Here was the South Side?a million in captivity?stretching 
from this doorstep as far as the eye could see? (61).  Toni Morrison, however, with Sula, seems 
to entertain more irony with ghettoization, with ?the Bottom? where the black people of 
Medallion, Ohio, are consigned actually being the hills that overlook the valley of Medallion 
proper where all of the white people live (4).  
164 
 The ghetto?s isolation, squalor, and discomfort serves as a tangible environmental sign of 
white panoptic power that works to not only instill a sense of self-loathing within the sequestered 
black population, but manipulate that self-loathing toward an internalization of whiteness as the 
Norm that aids in both conscious and unconscious recruitment (for even the scapegoated black 
criminal, in spite of how violently he attempts to rail against the white hegemony, is a recruited 
force).  As Baldwin says in The Fire Next Time, ?Negroes in this country [?] are taught really 
to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world [?] White people hold the 
power, which means that they are superior to blacks [?] and  the world has innumerable ways of 
making this difference known and felt and feared? (25-26).  He also points out how ?Negro 
servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white 
people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified 
to the intrinsic superiority of white people? (22).  Both statements can be applied to the black 
protagonists of Baraka?s plays, who demonstrate both a helplessness and a rage in the face of 
their own internalization, conscious or unconscious, of the forces working against them, to an 
extent that often makes them further vulnerable to those same forces.   
In The Slave, Walker rails against the established definitions of white ?logic? to a 
fundamental degree, concluding that ?just because they?re right?doesn?t mean anything.  The 
very rightness stinks a lotta times? (45).76  In Dutchman, Lula seems to actually sense Clay?s 
suppressed feelings of guilt for his own assimilation into white society, and she uses this guilt to 
goad him towards a violent outburst.  She tells him, ?And why?re you wearing a jacket and tie 
like that?  [?] Boy, those narrow -shoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel 
oppressed by [?] Your grandfather was a slave, he didn?t go to Harvard? (1891).  Even while 
                                                            
76Baraka makes specific reference to Native Son in The Slave.  Reacting to Walker?s violent display, Grace says, 
?Mrs. Vessels is playing the mad scene from Native Son [?] A second -rate Bigger Thomas [?] You still at it, huh,  
Bigger?? (57) 
165 
trying to get him to dance with her, she calls him a ?middle-class black bastard? and says, ?You 
ain?t no nigger, you?re just a dirty white man? (1895).  She even seems to hit a note of 
sympathetic rebellion, telling him, ?Don?t sit there dying the way they want you to die? (1896).  
However, even this is a deliberate provocation which leads to the violent outburst which results 
in Clay?s being stabbed to death by Lula.  If Lula?s provoking and then stabbing of Clay in 
Dutchman proves anything, it is how a chief strategy of white panoptic power is to manipulate 
black subjects toward a violence and/or criminality that legitimizes the dominant white culture?s 
subjugation of black individuals.   
In Great Goodness of Life, Baraka provides what is perhaps his strongest and most 
upsetting metaphor for an individual black man?s self-denying and self-betraying assimilation 
into white-dominated society.  Court Royal proclaims his innocence by saying, more than once, 
?I?ve worked at the Post Office for thirty-five years.  I?m a supervisor.  There must be some 
mistake? (227).  The ultimate, self-betraying confirmation of his internalization of the standards 
of white society, however, comes in his denial of knowing the many-faced ?murderer? that he is 
on trial for harboring?those many faces representing Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, Dr. Martin 
Luther King, Jr., Marcus Garvey, Medgar Evers, and several anonymous young black boys killed 
by the police (234)?as well as his giving the ?final instruction? to the young black man who had 
been pleading with him from the shadows at the beginning of the play.  This ?final instruction? is 
the shooting of this young black man in the face with a silver bullet from a pistol made of 
diamonds and gold (237), indicating Court?s acceptance of white materialism over his own 
racial/historical identity, further confirmed by Court?s coming back to reality and his assimilated 
existence from this apparent impressionistic dreamscape, saying, ?Hey, Louise, have you seen 
my bowling bag?  I?m going down to the alley for a minute? (239).  Baraka manages to make 
166 
Court?s almost cheerfully oblivious survival somehow more tragic than both the arguable 
martyrdom of a Bigger Thomas or Lutie Johnson and the ambiguously hopeful potential of an 
invisible man.   
As Ellison establishes with Invisible Man, the surveillance of the white gaze not only 
sees, but distorts, for its panopticism is a function of its desire to control any potential threats to 
its endurance.  The alienating effects of white panopticism upon black subjects through 
indoctrination/internalization are, then, not grounded in truth, but the standards of the dominant 
white ideology.  Stylistically, there are not only echoes of Ellison?s surrealism in African-
American ventures into impressionism, or at least flirtations with it.  Morrison?s Sula continues 
the surrealistic approach with a whimsical distance that resembles a fable.  One man?s, 
Shadrack?s, attempt to come to terms with his traumatized, post-World War I sense of societal 
aloofness results, by the end of the novel, in the absurd death of most of the population of the 
Bottom.  Shadrack?s initially solitary annual parade-celebration of his self-created National 
Suicide Day holiday, insidiously finds its way sympathetically into the collective psyche of the 
black population in the Bottom (14-15).  After the death of the outrageously and scandalously 
individualistic Sula, the Bottom?s social stability degenerates because, without Sula, the 
townspeople no longer have the common source of ?evil? to inspire their collective and 
communally-binding moral indignation.  So on the first Suicide Day after Sula?s death, most of 
the Bottom follow Shadrack on his parade, vandalizing the construction site at the tunnel where 
black workers were denied employment, and most of them drowning in the process (161-162).  
The novel?s conclusion should be bleaker, with so many people dead, including the title 
character, and yet its absurdity and distance render it somehow less bleak than, say, The Street 
and in the same neighborhood of ambiguity as Invisible Man. 
167 
Again, Baraka is perhaps the most obvious example of an impressionistic interpretation 
of white panoptic distortion.  In Great Goodness of Life, his depiction of Court Royal?s court-
appointed attorney, John Breck, is especially grotesque in its representation of the attorney?s 
self-debasing, automaton-like enslavement to the dominant white society through his service 
within its legal system:   
[A bald-headed smiling house slave in a wrinkled dirty tuxedo crawls across the 
stage; he has a wire attached to his back leading offstage.  A huge key in the side 
of his head.  We hear the motors ?animating? his body groaning like tremendous 
weights.  He grins, and slobbers, turning his head slowly from side to side.  He 
grins.  He makes little quivering sounds]  (228)  
Breck speaks via ?deliberating motors? (228), telling Court that his only chance is to plead guilty 
(229).  Momentarily (and absurdly) distracted from his inexplicable and perilous situation, Court 
asks Breck what happened to him, and he tells him he?s always looked like this (229).  Upon his 
initial refusal to plead guilty, Breck leaving, crawling away:  ?Goodbye, dead sucker! [?] 
Hahahaha, ain?t I a bitch?I mean, ain?t I?? (230).  Even Court himself, in a similarly absurd and 
even comic manner, suddenly does ?a weird dance like a marionette,? speaking gibberish, with 
everybody laughing, then abrupt cessation.  
 There is a single moment of similar representation in A Raisin in the Sun, but with more 
of a flirtation with impressionism than a complete embracing of it.  It is perhaps the most 
disturbing moment in the play, when Walter horrifies his family by getting down on one knee, 
apparently rehearsing what he will say to Mr. Lindner while accepting the buy-back of the 
Clybourne Park house: 
168 
Maybe?maybe I?ll just get down on my black knees [?] Captain, Mistuh, 
Bossman.  [He starts crying.]  A-hee-hee-hee!  [Wringing his hands in profoundly 
anguished imitation.]  Yassuh!  Great White Father, just gi? ussen de money, fo? 
God?s sake, and we?s ain?t gwine come out deh and dirty up yo? white folks 
neighborhood?[then breaking down completely]  (1786)  
What begins as a half-comical imitation quickly starts to resemble a regressive possession, as 
though, in that moment, Walter actually becomes a slave.  Such stylistic representations of the 
white panoptic gaze?s distorting effects, again, have a way of conjuring the ghost of slavery, 
revealing the perpetuation of slavery through new forms and strategies as perhaps the chief aim 
of white panoptic distortion. 
 There are also, however, less grotesque and more straightforward portrayals of the 
dominant white culture?s attempts to distort reality?by distorting the facts through 
misinformation.  Even in the midst of the heavy impressionism of Great Goodness of Life, for 
example, Baraka has the judge order that the newspapers be called and given the ?official 
history? of the death of the black ?Prince? on the stretcher (a thinly veiled reference to Malcolm 
X), saying that ?We banged him down [but] A nigger did it for us? (233-234).  At varying levels 
of intensity, then, African-American literature after Wright, Petry, and Ellison still addresses the 
distorting effects of the white panoptic gaze on the two fronts of subject matter and stylistic 
mimesis of that subject matter. 
 In spite of the differences of approach among these various African-American authors 
since Wright, Petry, and Ellison?as well as the variety in what particular issues and tropes of 
white panopticism on which these authors choose to focus??terrible honesty? seems a 
requirement in how they present their work.  In their choosing to address the same issues of 
169 
white panopticism, urban migration, and urban racism, those African-American authors 
following Wright, Petry, and Ellison unavoidably cross paths with the legacy of these three 
authors.  And, in the wake of Wright, who arguably marks the beginning of this ?terrible 
honesty,? to coyly return to an approach even remotely safe and disingenuous seems 
unthinkable.  Therefore, and appropriately, this ?terrible? attitude persists in the African-
American literary treatment of social ills with which black Americans have been long familiar. 
 
III. The Terrible Legacy 
Amiri Baraka certainly upped the ante on Wright?s shot across the bow in terms of anger,  
brutality, and honesty in his work.  Indeed, Baraka seems to be the next logical step beyond 
Wright in his use of even less subversion and irony in favor of a purer and far less ambiguous 
provocation.  In fact, Baraka seems to define a bona fide literary theory for unapologetic candor 
in African-American literature.  To him, black art is fundamentally ?terrible?; he 
confrontationally defines the fundamental aim of black art as the creation of poems and other 
literary works ?that kill [?] Setting fire to whities ass? (?Black Art? 219), and that the role of 
the black artist in America is ?to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it? 
(?State/meant? 169).  And ?A POEM SOME PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO UNDERSTAND? 
almost reads like an advertisement, based upon personal experience, for ?terrible honesty?:  ?I 
had thought, before, some years ago / that I?d come to the end of my life. / Watercolor ego. / 
Without the preciseness / a violent man could propose? (210).  He seems to come to the extreme 
conclusion that any approach short of downright dangerous is weak and ineffective?that a 
patient, nonviolent approach would make for a help that would simply not arrive in time to serve 
the very urgent matters at hand, those matters being the continued and systematic oppression and 
170 
destruction of the African-American population.  As he expresses at the conclusion of ?A POEM 
SOME PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO UNDERSTAND,? ?We have awaited the coming of a natural 
/ phenomenon.  Mystics and romantics, knowledgable / workers / of the land. / But none has 
come. / (Repeat) / but none has come. / Will the machinegunners please step forward?? (210-
211) 
 With Dutchman, Baraka provides an especially extensive meditation on what he sees as 
the necessary danger and terror behind all black art.  In this play, he seems to expand his 
exploitation of white fears to encompass the very motives behind African-American literature 
and art in general, undercutting and undermining whites? shallow patronage of black music and 
other arts.  After being extensively taunted by the white Lula with racial epithets, with her 
sexuality, for not fulfilling her stereotypical expectations, and for being dressed in a suit (like a 
white man), Clay finally explodes, slapping her twice before saying: 
I could murder you now [?] And all these weak -faced ofays squatting around 
here, staring over their papers at me.  Murder them too [?] They say, ?I love 
Bessie Smith.?  And don?t even understand that Bessie Smith is saying, ?Kiss my 
ass, kiss my black unruly ass.? [?] All the hip white boys scream for Bird 
[Charlie Parker].  And Bird saying, ?Up your ass, feeble-minded ofay!  Up your 
ass? [?] Bird would?ve played not a note of music if he j ust walked up to East 
Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw.  (1896-1897) 
Through Clay?s catharsis, Baraka presents black art as an alternative not so far removed from 
violent revolt, if not murder.  Furthermore, he provides Lula with an unsettling and apocalyptic 
image of what might apparently might happen in the absence of black art, if African-Americans 
should decide to completely internalize white logic (the stinking ?rightness? mentioned by 
171 
Vessels in The Slave).  He tells Lula to warn her father against ?preach[ing] so much rationalism 
and cold logic to these niggers,? and rather let them ?sing curses at you in code?; for if he should 
continue his indoctrination of black people concerning the supposed historical superiority of 
white education and intellectualism, maybe those same black people will ?begin to listen,? and 
with ?no more blues? and the ostensible triumph of the white way over black art, ?all of those 
ex-coons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and 
sane, and they?ll murder you.  They?ll murder you, and have very rational explanations.  Very 
much like your own? (1898).  The ?terrible honesty? of African-American art is, Baraka seems 
to argue, is thus an uneasy necessity, a means of letting play out through fiction the potentially 
violent frustrations that are the result of a long history of cultural subjugation. 
 If Baraka?s artistic methodology is shocking, especially to American white people, 
Baldwin points out the hypocrisy within such shock and indignation, pointing to the fact that, in 
the turbulent and revolutionary history of the United States, ?violence and heroism have been 
made synonymous except when it comes to blacks? (The Fire 58).77  The real reason, Baldwin 
continues, for this outrage, as well as its resulting indoctrination of African-Americans that non-
violence is a perceived virtue in black people, is that white people ?do not want their lives, their 
self-image, or their property threatened? (59).  Such threatening stirrings simply go against the 
dominant culture?s interests, for it upsets their notions of superiority and exposes their hypocrisy. 
However, what these members of the dominant culture do not seem to understand is how such 
revolutionary gestures are, indeed, quite American and quite fitting as artistic and activist 
contributions to American society.  It is in this ?terrible? revolutionary spirit that black writers 
and artists prove their very status and credentials as Americans, for the fate of African-
Americans is inextricably bound with the fate of the nation within which they have historically 
                                                            
77Baldwin is specifically referring to white indignance towards Malcolm X. 
172 
experienced so much strife and subjugation.  Unavoidably, they have a stake in the fate of 
America as well, and the ?terrible? contribution of black artists in particular attests to the 
urgency of that stake.   
 Along with fiction, the ?terrible honesty? of these authors has also apparently inspired a 
more vigilant awareness of the various methods and manifestations of white panopticism, as 
evidenced by a similar honesty taken within recent social-sciences works.  Michelle Alexander?s 
2012 work The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, for instance, 
sheds light on the continuing methodologies of slavery and Jim Crow within the American 
criminal justice system, pointing out how, rather than relying on race, ?we use our criminal 
justice system to label people of color ?criminals? and then engage in all the practices we 
supposedly left behind,? and that it is ?perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly 
all the ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans? (2), the vast majority 
of these ?criminals? being unfairly and disproportionately targeted African-Americans.  She 
further points out the connection between this mass incarceration and other discriminating 
trajectories of white panopticism?how these ?criminals? are ?subject to legal discrimination in 
employment, housing, education, public benefits, and jury service, just as their parents, 
grandparents, and great-grandparents once were? (1-2).  The last detail is especially significant in 
how it communicates the tragic and depressing consistency with which limitations have been  
historically imposed upon the civil liberties of African-Americans.  She provides the particularly 
stunning and historically charged real-life example of Jarvious Cotton, whose great-great-
grandfather could not vote as a slave.  His great-grandfather was beaten to death by Ku Klux 
Klan for attempting to vote.  His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation.  
His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests.  And today, Jarvious Cotton 
173 
cannot vote because he, ?like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and 
is currently on parole? (1).78 
 In the same spirit, Tom Burrell addresses the negative effects of stereotyping advertising 
upon African-Americans?what he describes as ?the mindless perpetuation of the ?black 
inferiority? or BI campaign? (1)?in his 2010 work Brainwashed:  Challenging the Myth of 
Black Inferiority.  Burrell goes beyond the obvious grocery-listing of black stereotypes 
perpetuated within advertising to also examine what he sees as the misguided cultural 
assumptions behind this stereotyping that attempts to legitimize it and make it ?okay.?  To him, 
the myth of a ?post-racial society? in the Age of Obama is solidified through the perpetuation of  
the illusion that anyone can succeed?what he calls the ?paradox of progress??thus weakening 
the impulse to understand or help those, perhaps borrowing a phrase from Invisible Man, ?still       
scorched at the bottom of America?s melting pot? (4).79  It fuels the perception that ?all is well 
and ?racism is dead,?? and suggests that ?those still wallowing in poverty made conscious 
choices to live in that stratum? (4).  Such assumptions perpetuate the modern-day enslavement of 
less fortunate members of the African-American community by encouraging apathy and social 
neglect.  And this is compounded with the obviously negative effects upon individual and 
collective African-American self-image and self-esteem that the stereotyping advertising images 
themselves create. 
 
The new levels of artistic provocation introduced by Wright, Petry, and Ellison were a 
reaction to the clincher of continued discrimination against African-Americans even into the 
                                                            
78The influence of the ?terribly honest? African-American writers on Alexander?s work is clear from the title of her 
work?s sixth and particularly incendiary chapter, ?The Fire This Time,? an obvious nod to Baldwin?s The Fire Next 
Time. 
79?Out of the fire and into the melting pot? (Invisible Man 152). 
174 
middle of the twentieth century, almost eighty years after the actual freeing of the slaves and 
even amidst the supposed patriotic unanimity of World War II.  Central to the urgency within 
these authors? artistic reactions is an increased cognizance of the game rigged against them and 
their fellow black citizens by the dominant culture through white panopticism.  Their ?terrible 
honesty? is a direct response to those panoptic strategies, which these authors recognized as the 
means through which the dominant white culture perpetuates the goals of slavery even after 
slavery?s supposed abolishment.  Authors before them certainly recognized this, but it is these 
three, beginning with Wright, who seem to have taken the initiative to an intensity and a 
consistency never before seen.  And, as evidenced by the works of other and later black writers 
such as Baldwin, Baraka, Morrison, Ishmael Reed, the early work of Nikki Giovanni, Alice 
Walker, and Walter Mosley?as well as the nonfictional social studies of Alexander and 
Burrell?the daring steps taken by these three authors marked a development from which there 
was no going back, given the recognized urgency of what is at stake.   
  
175 
 
 
 
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