An Arty but Superficial Take on <em>Native Son</em>
This article contains spoilers for Native Son.
Just over a year after the author Richard Wright published his first novel, Native Son, in March 1940, the text was adapted for the first time. In March 1941, Wright and the playwright Paul Green staged a contentious, Orson Welles–directed production at New York’s St. James Theatre. Ten years later, Wright played his own protagonist in an unfortunate Argentinian film adaptation, Sangre negra (“black blood”). By 2014, there had been yet another Native Son film and two more plays.
It might seem, then, that Wright’s novel is the kind of story that lends itself easily—or at least fruitfully—to visual renderings. But as source material, follows Bigger Thomas, a poor black man living in Chicago during the Great Depression. Bigger is hired as a chauffeur by Mr. Dalton, a wealthy white man whose daughter, Mary, soon takes an interest in the young black man. In the novel’s climactic event, Bigger accidentally suffocates Mary one night after helping the drunken girl to her room and fearing her blind mother would sense his presence if she heard Mary’s lustful banter. Realizing he’s killed her, Bigger frantically carries Mary’s body to the Dalton family’s furnace, then decapitates her corpse so it will fit inside. The point, Wright insists throughout the text, is that Bigger was conditioned to become a criminal by a country that viewed all black men as savages. His violence was an inevitability.
