Reversed Naturalism?

One of the details in Native Son that I found myself paying attention to was the weather… which sounds pretty boring. But, Richard Wright’s details and descriptions in this regard fascinated me, particularly the presence and role of snow throughout Bigger Thomas’ story. 

What makes snow unique and significant is both its color and how once it falls, it seems to almost “take over” the world around us and blankets all that it touches. While reading Native Son, I began to see it as a metaphor for the entire “white world” around Bigger. Throughout the novel, there were two white storms approaching him. For instance, I find it interesting that the first time snow appears in the novel is when Bigger is getting a tour around the Dalton home by Peggy, the housekeeper (Wright 58). Arguably, this would later be the location where his future is defined and Bigger essentially becomes trapped by the white folks of Chicago. The possibility of snow is only beginning to appear at this moment and although minimal, it’s significant, almost foreshadowing Bigger’s fate in the end and beginning to fully trap him in this “whiteness” and systemically racist society.

However, the presence of snow starts to become even more compelling as the story continues on. We see the snow get progressively thicker and more intense, and the exact contexts in which Wright chooses to highlight the weather changes are even more interesting.

Take the passage on pages 67-68, for example, where Jan and Mary are entering Bigger’s car.

“Move over, Bigger,” she said.

He moved closer to Jan. Mary pushed herself in, wedging tightly between him and the outer door of the car. There were white people to either side of him; he was sitting between two vast white looming walls. Never in his life had he been so close to a white woman. He smelt the odor of her hair and felt the soft pressure of her thigh against his own. Jan headed the car back to the Outer Drive, weaving in and out of the line of traffic… The sky was heavy with snow clouds and the wind was blowing strong.

As Bigger is physically surrounded by these two white people, one of whom is to become a defining character in his life, the weather and anticipation of snow start to become much more intense. Furthermore, the snow only truly begins to fall at the end of Book One, directly after Mary’s death and after Bigger puts her in the furnace. As he begins to walk home after exiting the Dalton’s, the narrator notes, “he went out of the back door; a few fine flakes of snow were floating down. It had grown colder” (93). After this moment, Bigger’s life is changed forever and will be even further dictated by the racist society surrounding him.

Therefore, as Bigger is drawn deeper into the effects of the white people around him and systemic racism, the “white curtain of falling snow” progressively gets more intense, overwhelming, and choking (164). On page 116, the snow is “as deep as his ankles” as he heads back to the Dalton home, and when he returns to their house once again after picking up Mary’s trunk, “the snow was falling so thicky that he could not see ten feet in front of him” (153). The storm soon turns into a “blizzard” right before Bigger leaves the false kidnap note at the Dalton’s house, and the narrator notes that “around him were silence and night and snow falling, falling as though it had fallen from the beginning of time and would always fall till the end of the world” (184). At this point, Bigger is fully emersed in his plan and getting further entangled in the situation and its consequences, mirroring the growing presence of the storm that seems will “always fall till the end of the world” (illustrating a sense of permanence and that there is no going back).

Moreover, directly after the media reporters find parts of Mary in the furnace, Bigger jumps out of the window, and “snow was in his mouth, eyes, ears; snow was seeping down his back” (220). This moment may demonstrate how Bigger is now fully thrown into this situation, as the snow is taking over his senses and therefore his experience of life. The snow further impacts Bigger when later, while trying to escape the police by running outside, the narrator states “running around, he crouched so long in the snow that when he tried to move he found that his legs had lost all feeling” (247). Certainly, his escape was even more challenging because of the snow, and it continues to affect him until he gets trapped upon the snowy water tank, where he becomes “half-frozen” (269). The impact of the snow seems to get more and more dramatic as he tries to run away, and lastly, at the very end of Book Two, Wright states “two men stretched his arms out, as though about to crucify him; they placed a foot on each of his wrists, making them sink deep down in the snow. His eyes closed, slowly, and he was swallowed in darkness” (270). Bigger is now forced “deep down” into the snow, and it ultimately overwhelms him, just as the white policemen surrounded and overpowered Bigger in the end. The snow both illustrates the progression of Bigger’s situation in the context of the white people around him while also ultimately trapping him, rendering his escape more complex, and leading to his defeat.

To further illustrate this idea, one passage at the beginning of “Flight” states, “to Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead…  As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond certain limits, there was no need to fear that white force” (114). Could this “great natural force” be exactly like the blizzard? Bigger did seem to pass a “limit” in Book One: his action crossed a threshold which he had never gone past before. Now, that “white force” began to face him more strongly, just as the snow progressively did as well. The “stormy sky looming overhead” turned into much more, both literally and metaphorically.

While the snow plays an essential role in certain plot points (eg. covering the car that Bigger left in the driveway to complicate the mystery, or making it harder for Bigger to potentially escape Chicago), I feel that this symbolic aspect of the snow and how it communicated emotion to readers plays an even more important role in the novel. I feel that Wright definitely included these connections with a specific purpose in mind and not only to form an interesting parallel. As he described in his essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” “always I tried to render, depict, not merely to tell the story. If a thing was cold, I tried to make the reader feel cold, and not just tell about it” (458). Therefore, we not only read about what happens to Bigger Thomas through the plot, but in a way, we also “feel” the worsening blizzard that surrounds him. We experience, even if subconsciously, the increasing severity and overwhelming quality as the snowstorm progresses while it reflects and directly accompanies Bigger’s story.

Native Son is certainly a naturalist novel, showing the huge impacts of Chicago’s environment and systemic racism on Bigger Thomas’ entire life. However, could it also be the other way around? Could this book, as Wright wrote it, illustrate reversed naturalism in a particular way? Perhaps symbolically throughout the novel, Bigger’s situation and the dynamics of society around him are actually the ones determining the natural environment, just as their environment is simultaneously defining them.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. Reissued ed., Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.