Down By the Riverside and A Raisin in the Sun: A Literary Comparison

"A Raisin in the Sun" and "Down by the Riverside" are both two different medias of African American protest literature that approach themes of racism and racial segregation through different lenses. They portray a black family, specifically focusing on the the masculine "head" of the family, suffering through the racism inherently present in their environments. However, the tone of both of the stories differs dramatically, as well as the the portrayal of racist behavior. 

 Hansberry's play embodies a socialist-driven naturalism, and portrays characters as products of the environment and social conditions. She emphasizes the deterministic influence of a systemic racism and economic inequality and how that realistically shapes an individual's life. Wright's short story, on the other hand, embraces a bleaker view of racism and segregation in a more holistic, inevitable view: characters are trapped under an endless cycle of poverty and oppression, and there is little hope or potential for change.

The major difference between the two types of protest literature is in the perspectives on an individual's capability of social change. Richard Wright's socialist-driven naturalism dramatically portrays racism as an inherently systemic form of segregation by a greater power, with the individual, Mann, unable to change anything and his death is an inevitable part of story. Mann's agency as a character is limited: instead, he is a plot device used to further the meaning of the ending.  Him and his wife die because of systemic constraints of his society. A Raisin in the Sun encourages a realistic hope for the future through an individual's action: while the end of the play wasn't a happy ending, through the family's actions, they were at least able to move on to the next stage of the life. They aren't stagnant characters, and their actions change the potential of their future. 

Both modes of protest literature encapsulate and illuminate the injustices of racism: both Walter and Mann (and their families) suffer through racial segregation and discrimination, even though one family struggles in a much more intense and depressing manner. In terms of the civil rights movement, Wright portrays the problem of systemic racism needing a "systemic" solution: that is, the entire overthrowal of the system. Hansberry's answer is a more personalized one, placing part of the weight of the solution on an individual person and what actions they can take. I think both of these views show different perspectives of the fight for racial equality during the civil  rights movement. Hansberry's literature fosters the idea that even an individual can make a difference, and it's not entirely hopeless. Wright's literature encourages an idealistic hope for a different future, one requiring an entire overthrow of the current oppressive society. 

"Up from Slavery" and "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" : A Literary Analysis

 What is the purpose of an autobiography? Yes, it's a personal narrative of someone's life, but it's also a deliberative self-reflection for an audience. An autobiography is written for the intention of being published: Not only does it point out important milestones of an individual's life, but also their own emotional analysis of the world around them. In the case of black autobiographies—particularly those stemming from the African American experience—many illustrate a black person's journey as they struggle against racial oppression and eventually pursue liberation. The two black autobiographies we've discussed in class, "Up from Slavery"  by Booker T. Washington, and "Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl", by Harriet Jacobs both portray this upward journey. However, the differing historical context and intent of these memoirs provide distinct insights about slavery.

Booker T. Washington

Harriet Jacobs

Even the titles of each individual narrative presents a different tale: one, a girl presents her life as a slave, particularly emphasizing the cruelties of slavery in order to "arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition to millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse" (Jacobs 5). Jacobs focuses on the horrors of bondage, specifically as a female slave, in order to garner sympathy and advocate for abolition. A large portion of the story focuses on the physical and psychological consequences of slavery on her body and psyche. She delves into the moral and ethical impact of being owned by somebody and dealing with a loss in agency. Eventually, she becomes a free woman—not without sacrificing her bodily autonomy and "purity", living in hiding in a crawlspace for 7 years, and surviving years of abuse from her master. 

Washington's story is different. He starts off as a slave and eventually reaches freedom, just like Jacobs. However, most of his autobiography is devoted to his life after slavery, as he was freed during a young age and lived the majority of his life during post-Reconstructionist America. His story isn't a long, arduous struggle to freedom—moreover, it focuses on the bittersweet question of: What's next? Rather than focusing on the brutal impact of slavery, Washington writes a narrative of self-improvement through adversity, focusing on uplifting himself particularly through education. Part of Washington as a prominent figure in America at this time, wanted to inspire African Americans to achieve economic independence and social advancement: "Up from Slavery" is reminiscent of these motives. In a seemingly hopeless time period where black people suffered under Jim Crow doctrine and horrific racial violence, Washington's autobiography promotes a journey of optimism. 

While both authors acknowledge the ghastly reality of slavery, Washington presents the aftermaths of slavery in a more ambivalent and optimistic light, claiming that "the black man got nearly as much out of slavery as the white man did" (Washington Chapter I), as slavery provided African Americans with skills and opportunities for advancements. As his intent in his narrative is to emphasize racial progress through "casting down your bucket where you are", Washington looks at slavery as a form of resilience that has been overcome. He focuses on the positives of the circumstances around him and doing the best he can do instead of dwelling on the negatives. Jacobs is much more pointed about the viciousness and inhumanity of slavery than Washington. Her intent is to expose slavery's horrors, and as someone living directly in the antebellum era, can't just brush over slavery as an unfortunate history. She can't focus on improving herself by looking at the positives of slavery—instead, she focuses on the negatives to inspire action. 

The Postmodernist World of Libra

 As the last blog post of the year, I come back to the classic idea of postmodernism expressed throughout the book we’re currently reading in class. Libra is perhaps one of four books I’ve read in this semester that really accentuates the concept of postmodernism in literature and what it means to write historical fiction. Don Delillo has written such a fascinating novel on his own depiction of the JFK assassination and conspiracy, and it’s quite a wild ride and experience not only reading the novel, but discussing it in class and analyzing the writing itself. Libra contains postmodernist elements of metafiction and employing multiple perspectives in a nonlinear, fragmented narrative. 

A very notable postmodernist characteristic of Libra is the writing structure and style itself. Instead of many modernist books that lay out a singular, linear storyline, Don DeLillo employs multiple perspectives and fragments of the plot the reader has to try to piece together to understand the full story. What I find most interesting about Libra in this case is how complicated the plot becomes, in which each perspective often does not provide the full narrative of the plot because the people in the plot simply don’t know the bigger picture. Lee Harvey Oswald himself doesn’t understand to what extent he’s being manipulated while the CIA agents plotting their plan don’t know all the elements of the assassination, even the man who came up with the idea himself!

Another postmodernist element of Libra, and my favorite part, is Nicholas Branch’s role in the story as a play on metafiction and essentially a self-insert of the author. Metafiction is the concept where a work of fiction is self-aware of its status as a constructed narrative, and Nicholas Branch is a key example of this notion. As the readers read a pieced together conspiracy plot on JFK’s assassination, at the same time, so is Nicholas Branch. Nicholas Branch’s goal in the novel and as a character is to uncover the “secret” truth of the JFK assassination, which is also the main objective of the novel itself. Branch often provides an introspective on the author’s own process in writing Libra and his thoughts on uncovering the “truth” of a conspiracy as well: Branch often laments on the overwhelmingly display of evidence provided to him and his struggle to uncover the “actual proof”. His character serves not only as an interesting way of breaking the 4th wall but also as a tool for Don DeLillo to explore the tension between a fictional narrative of history and the ambiguity of a singular historical grand narrative. 

Does Nurture Override Nature? Starring: Rufus

I think all of the people who've read Kindred can agree that Rufus committed terrible actions. He raped a woman he claimed he loved, indirectly played a role in her husband's death and turning her into his slave, and forced her to live through an abhorrent pretense of affection and childbearing under the constant fear of violence. This women, who you might know better as Alice, eventually killed herself due to Rufus deciding SELLING HER CHILDREN (even if it was a only as a reversible punishment) was a good move. Of course, don't forget Rufus' role in Dana's own traumatic experiences, including separating Dana from her husband (through refusing to send Kevin her letters and then lying about it), shoots at her, sends her to work in the fields where she is severely whipped as a ridiculous punishment for her not saving his father, and directly causes Dana to lose an ENTIRE ARM. Gee, Rufus, good job! 

Yet, as a child, Rufus seems innocent and kind, helping Dana escape the plantation and acts friendly towards Nigel. What happened to that version of Rufus? It leads us to a bigger question that Kindred explores within the novel: Nature V.S Nurture. With even Dana, who directly experiences violence through Rufus' actions, struggling to distance herself from him and see him as a "bad" person, it leads to a couple of questions: Is Rufus a "bad" person, or is he simply a product of his environment? And perhaps a better question: if Rufus's horrible actions can be proven by environmental factors, does that excuse or remove the blame from Rufus?

Of course, many external factors during Rufus' life play a role in how Rufus perceives the world and one could argue there is a direct influence on the environment on Rufus's actions and behavior. For example, Rufus, with his father portraying relationships as ones that can be violent with enforced punishment, his mother painting an overbearing, almost obsessive idea of love, and living during a time period with a normalization of the commodification and ownership of human beings, obviously did seem to play a role in Rufus's incredibly twisted impression about love and thus his relationship with Alice and Dana. 

However, even with these outside factors perhaps providing an explanation for Rufus's shockingly awful character, it does not justify Rufus as a "good" person or mitigate the harm he's played a role in. Sure, the factors may have influenced his actions, but he, like anybody, has the capability and willpower to chose the right decision. Rufus had so many chances within the book to turn Alice and Dana's situation around in a positive way, yet every time he chose the option leading to his own best benefit. If Octavia E. Butler wanted to portray Rufus really as a "good" person, she would have shown him rising ABOVE his environment and still choosing to be benevolent throughout the pressure. Alas, Rufus allows himself to succumb to his selfish and base desires, turning himself into quite a despicable person by the end of Kindred. 

Ismael Reed—Full of Mumbo Jumbo or Literary Genius?

One of the unique ways that sets Mumbo Jumbo aside from other historical fiction novels is Ishmael Reed’s positioning of photos, artwork, diagrams, signs, and texts that at first glance have little to no significance to the actual chapter. Many of these insertions often have no captions or any further explanation past the media itself. Sometimes, they even seem nonsensical in nature. They do provide context—but even context to the images remains uncertain and dependent on the reader. A “classical” (modernist) historical fiction author might argue that Reed’s inclusion of non-textual devices is ridiculous and demeans the genre, claiming the novel’s title aptly describes its essence. I say this annoyance around Mumbo Jumbo is because critics hate what they don’t understand, and Reed revels in the postmodernist narrative of nonsense and disorder.

To embrace literary postmodernism means to embrace the spirit of deconstructing the meaning of literature as a rational concept of “correct” aspects and “wrong” aspects. Furthermore, to understand postmodernism texts from modernist texts, one must perceive the written work as not only a total fictional narrative but a subjective portrayal able to recognize its existence past the constraints of a single perceived analytical interpretation by readers. Postmodernist works acknowledge their status as fiction and their actuality in the external world. Traditional literary conventions are discarded, subverted and parodied, and objectivity of the world portrayed within the narrative is manipulated by the author. 

Ishmael Reed reconstructs the entire literary genre of historical fiction through Mumbo Jumbo. Modernist historical fiction typically depicts a fictional plot based on historical events, often implementing this method through taking people from actual history and actual events. The reader is aware that the novel is a modified version of an imagined history—something based on fact but remains fictional. Mumbo Jumbo strays from the carefully construed guidelines between fantasy and reality by turning not just history into fiction, but fiction into history. Let me explain. Unlike the “classical” writers of the genre, Reed structures his book similar to a history textbook or a documentary, following the path of a disease (Jes Grew) to its origins and resolution. He includes visual evidence, whether text or imagery, to support a fabricated tale of epidemics and murder within an early 20th century New York. The images and text, while often left to interpretations, are cited by sources (many of plausible credibility) which exist in a bibliography. All of these elements of Mumbo Jumbo speak to a revolutionary shift from historical fiction into fictionalized history—one self-aware of its fictional and historical nature. It leads to a couple of questions: What is history but a fabricated explanation of facts? Who's to say the Jes Grew movement in Mumbo jumbo never happened, when Reed delineates the epidemic through “real” events in the historical timeline of reality? If so, how objective is historical “truth” if its very essence can be manipulated? Perhaps there isn’t an answer to any of these questions, and there never will be. Maybe Jes Grew did happen, maybe it didn’t. Who knows? I certainly don’t. 

Ragtime and the Conflict Perspective

Sociology is the study of society and human interactions, and the novel Ragtime is all about exploring the intricate and often complicated dynamics and interactions between groups or individuals in a society. Ragtime is not your typical book—it does not focus on one specific plot, have a single perspective, or even give reasoning to why events occur. Instead, it dances around different, seemingly unrelated characters and their actions, only often at the end do the characters even interact with each other, or the reason for their significance in the book is revealed. Ragtime’s goal is not telling a fictional story to entertain, but modeling the frenetic business of an emerging American time period. Less important are the characters themselves, but their interactions with others and their interaction with the fictionalized historical narrative. The question becomes not, “What is the plot?” but instead, “How do the characters and the world create a plot?”. Notably this is best highlighted by the fact that there isn’t really a plot in Ragtime but instead differently sized conflicts between people, whether internally 

or externally against a system. The biggest conflict (Coalhouse) starts abruptly, ends abruptly, and the book moves rather rapidly from there. 

So how would a reader begin to understand the absolute absurdity of E.L Doctorow’s Ragtime? Perhaps through the lens of sociological perspective, “a framework for thinking about, describing, and explaining how human activities are organized and how people relate to one another and respond to their surroundings”. The four main sociological perspectives, functionalist, conflict symbolic interaction, and feminist interaction all focus on different “slices” of reality and together they help acquire a bigger picture of humanity. I want to focus on the conflict perspective of society on Ragtime to piece together an overall sense of the historical world that El Doctorow has fictionally crafted.

The conflict perspective focuses on conflict as an inevitable fact of social life and the agent of social change. There is a continuous struggle between advantaged groups and disadvantaged groups, and the social arrangements that arise between the protection of the privilege. El Doctorow’s depiction of class and race struggles adds context to the historical world he's created within Ragtime and creates an unbiased portrayal of what the world may include, encompassing a wide variety of characters from either side of the conflict. A typical 20th century American nuclear family model (plus Mother’s Younger Brother), vs a struggling Jewish immigrant family living cent by cent displays the ongoing class conflict happening within the time period. In addition, J.P Morgan’s wasteful, privileged obsession about the meaning of life as an extremely powerful American tycoon vs Tateh’s experience of worker union strikes and the danger associated with them is another example of showing two sides of the overall conflict between the rich and poor. El Doctorow enhances the irony between including both sides of the class divide through forcing them to interact through mysterious circumstances, whether it be through poverty balls, Evelyn Nesbit pretending to be a poor woman and contemplating kidnapping Tateh’s daughter for her own self-interest, or even the meeting of Little Boy and Little Girl and their different viewpoints life through their lived experiences. In general, El Doctorow likes to create instances where stark difference in class dynamic is both inherent and absurd—portraying a rich murderer living a life of luxury in prison in one story while in another a woman is forced to offer her body for financial necessity and as a result cast aside from her home.

Additionally, much of the second half of Ragtime explores the underlying conflict of race through Coalhouse Walker, Mathew Henson with the Eskimos, immigrants and how the white people in the novel respond to their actions. Coalhouse Walker is driven to acts of violent revenge as his attempts to regain his sense of respect as a human being towards the white people in power cause the death of his fiancé and eventually, his death as well. He’s forced to pay a toll for discriminatory reasons, his car is desecrated with fecal matter and destroyed, and Coalhouse is pressured to just forget about both incidents and move onto his life, simply due to his race. As an intelligent, distinguished man who refuses to give in to the racist system of the time, he is rewarded with Father’s internal opinion that he (Coalhouse) didn’t know his place as a black man, and “even Mathew Henson knew his place” (Doctorow 162). On Father’s trip to the North Pole, his narrative portrays the typical white man’s opinions towards others during this time, as his thoughts constantly undermine Mathew Henson simply because of his race, although Father has done nothing to contribute while Henson has done almost everything. Peary, the person in charge of the expedition, often refers to the Eskimos providing their very necessary input to travel through the Arctic as dogs, and Father as well sees them as primitive people obsessed with having sex. Ironically enough, Father himself cheats on Mother with an Eskimo woman. 

In summary, E.L. Doctorow employs the conflict perspective throughout his novel to show the social 

innerworkings and forces that supply motives for interactions and actions of the people within his historical world. The often depressing contrast between advantaged groups and disadvantaged groups suits Doctorow’s satirical undertones and his playful irony of what is ethical and what is right. 

Doctorow, Edgar Lawrence. Ragtime. Random House, 1975.