TYPESCRIPT: "Introduction to 'Native Son.'
WORKING TYPESCRIPT
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. Typescript: “Introduction to Native Son.” Arlington, VT: January 1,
1940.
4 typescript leaves, emended in pencil.
A brief but powerful condemnation of American society for its treatment of its black citizens, told through the scrim of an analysis of Native Son, by one of the women to whom Eleanor Roosevelt referred as the “ten most influential women in the United States.” Edited in pencil by Fisher, who softens her language only slightly with her emendations.
Fisher’s guiding analogy is that of the production of “neuroses in sheep and psychopathic upsets in rats and other animals” in a lab environment. She notes the goal of the National Youth Commission, which has made “an investigation as to what is offered Negro Youth by the U.S.A.,” concluding that, as Fisher summarizes, “our society puts Negro youth in the situation of the animal in the psychological laboratory in which a neurosis is to be caused, y making it impossible for him to try to live up to those never-to-be-questioned national ideals, as other young Americans do” (2).
Native Son is the first report in fiction we have had from those who succumb to these distracting cross-currents of contradictory nerve-impulses, from those whose behavior- oatterns give evidence of the same bewildered, senseless tangle of abnormal nerve- reactions stuied in animals by psychologies in laboratory experiments.
She likens Wright to Dostoevsky – “the author of this book, as has no other American writer, wrestles with utter sincerity with the Dostoievski subject, -- a human soul in hell because it is sick with a deadly spiritual sickness” (3). This book “can be guaranteed to harrow up any human heart capable of horror, compassion or honest self-questioning” (3).
But society doesn’t get the same result when bringing to bear the same stimuli on all black people. She mentions Bigger’s mother and sister: “There is no sounder stroke of realism in ‘Native Son’ than the portrait of Bigger’s sweet-natured, infinitely patient, unrebelling door-mat of a mother” (3).
Fisher closes – not surprisingly – by expressing admiration for Wright’s concision:
Mr. Wright does not show us the Negro boy denied from his childhood on, this and that and the other outlet to his native power which would have been open to any white boy. He knows he does not need to. With a bold stroke of literary divination, he assumes that every one of his American readers will know all that without being told. And he is right. We do. (4)
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