On October 24th, the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Department had the pleasure of hosting Marlon Ross, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, for the Queer Theory Lecture talk in honor of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Ross’ talk, “Hysteria and Domestic Economy of Labor in Wright’s Native Son,” uses the acclaimed 1940 novel as a case study of the relationship between black gender ideology and hysteria. Hysteria is defined as the loss of bodily control due to panic, but psychoanalysts like Freud have long characterized it as a primarily white, feminine response to trauma. Ross argues that Wright’s depiction of the pivotal murder scene - in which the protagonist of Native Son murders his white lover and has to hide her body from the family he works for - is an exemplification of this hysteria. However, the protagonist of Native Son is described as a hypermasculine, black ghetto youth of the early 1900s. Why, then, does Wright choose him as the vehicle of traditionally racialized and feminized hysteria? Ross says the answer lies in the history of racial and class violence in the United States.
Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, psychologists attempted to project hysteria onto industrialization, social ills, and labor unrest. Later, white Americans projected mass hysteria onto black men to justify keeping African Americans on plantations long after emancipation. The KKK engaged in violence in response to this perceived hysteria, burning down homes and lynching black Americans who would leave sharecropping for the city. The black men who made it to the cities were limited in economic mobility and struggled to leave domestic jobs for industrial jobs, often instead choosing to make a living on the street.
In Native Son, the protagonist works for a white family, and has to exaggerate his servitude to cover up the death of the daughter. He is hysterical about keeping silent about his crime and the danger he has put himself in. Thus, Wright’s Native Son demonstrates industrial hysteria - through the struggle of black man to be seen as a masculine, industrial laborer - and racial hysteria - through the bending of hysteria across racial and gender lines in the wake of violence.
This talk’s research is part of a chapter in Ross’ upcoming book The Color of Manhood: The Black Manhood Imaginary in and beyond the Civil Rights Era, which is to complete the intellectual and cultural history of black manhood identity initiated by Manning the Race. The synopsis was written by Zara Thalji, a Trinity Student.
Gender, Sexuality Feminist Studies