Outsider Citizens

The Remaking of Postwar Identity in Wright, Beauvoir, and Baldwin

Sarah Relyea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135488796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Outsider Citizens examines a foundational moment in the writing of race, gender, and sexuality––the decade after 1945, when Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and others sought to adapt existentialism and psychoanalysis to the representation of newly emerging public identities. Relyea offers the first book-length study bringing together Wright and Beauvoir to reveal their common sources and concerns. Relyea's discussion begins with Native Son and then examines Wright's postwar exile in France and his engagement with existentialism and psychoanalysis in The Outsider. Beauvoir met Wright during her postwar tour of America, chronicled in America Day by Day. After returning to France, Beauvoir adapted American social constructionist concepts of race as one source for her philosophical investigation of gender in The Second Sex, while also rejecting 1940s psychoanalytic theories of femininity. Relyea examines later representations of race and gender in a discussion of James Baldwin's critique of postwar American liberalism and ideals of innocence and masculinity in Giovanni's Room, which represents the remaking of white American identity through the risks of exile and the return of the gaze.

Chapter One
Introduction: Postwar Theories of Identity

When W.E.B. Du Bois began his sociological research on black American life, in the 1890s, his purpose was to describe black Americans with greater accuracy and to use his findings as the basis for projects of social reform. As Adolph Reed, Jr., has stated, "Science and reform were linked in his thinking; he saw the former as giving direction to the latter" (47). Du Bois hoped that science could be used to disperse the veil that set black Americans apart from the whites among whom they lived. However, the scientific paradigm on which he relied endorsed contemporary concepts of a soul that expresses the race. In 1903, he proposed in The Souls of Black Folk that black Americans live in a condition of "double consciousness," defined by the fact that:

the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness. . . . One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body. (364-65)

Double consciousness refers to the conflict between two national "souls" within one body, as though national identities evolve from events in human history to become forms of inborn consciousness.¹

By 1940, Du Bois and other American sociologists and anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, had challenged and refuted definitions of race based in biology.² Du Bois argues in Dusk of Dawn that the concept of a group consciousness or soul of the race is a myth, and that race is a cultural fact with no power to determine individual human beings:

Human beings are infinite in variety, and when they are agglutinated in groups, great and small, the groups differ as though they, too, had integrating souls. But they have not. The soul is still individual if it is free. Race is a cultural, sometimes an historical fact.... I recognize it quite easily and with full legal sanction; the black man is a person who must ride "Jim Crow" in Georgia. (665—66)

Here the concept of group consciousness has ceded to a theory of race as a statistical and legal myth. Boas argued a similar point as early as 1911.³ Du Bois further proposes that the myth of race, and the discrimination it perpetuates, impose a burden on the consciousness and agency of black Americans:

A man lives today not only in his physical environment and in the social environment of ideas and customs, laws and ideals; but that total environment is subjected to a new socio-physical environment of other groups, whose social environment he shares but in part.... I was not an American; I was not a man; I was by long education and continual compulsion and daily reminder, a colored man in the white world. . . . All this made me limited in physical movement and provincial in thought and dream. (652—53)

According to Du Bois, the white world responds to the black world through repressed and irrational thoughts, which become the sources for myths of race. Through the influence of psychoanalysis, Du Bois argues that "the present attitude and action of the white world is a matter of conditioned reflexes; of long followed habits, customs and folkways; of subconscious trains of reasoning and unconscious nervous reflexes" (679). Since the sources of white racism are unconscious, slow progress should be expected in the work of eroding superstitious racial beliefs.

Du Bois is a precursor to the writers discussed in this study, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and James Baldwin. During the 1940s and 1950s, Wright, Beauvoir, Baldwin, and others whose status as citizens was vitiated by their identities as outsiders, adopted social constructionism to interpret the myths of identity—what Beauvoir refers to as notions of "the eternal teminine, the black soul, the Jewish character" (TSSxx; LDS 1: 12)—that shaped their lived experience.⁴ Although Beauvoir analyzes gender rather than race, her work shows the importance of American research on race and social constructionism for postwar concepts of identity. Beauvoir formed a connection to social constructionism in the late 1940s, beginning with America Day by Day (1948), where she first combined it with existentialism, through The Second Sex (1949) and her work on the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes. In America Day by Day, Beauvoir details her travels in the United States, supplementing her descriptions of the South with a summary of Gunnar Myrdal'S American Dilemma (1944), a massive study incorporating contemporary research on the environmental causes of racial differences. Beauvoir read An American Dilemma with enthusiasm as she was completing America Day by Day, and the parts of her book written after her reading of Myrdal draw on his arguments regarding the conflicts in American society and the social construction of race. Beauvoir builds on some of the same arguments in The Second Sex, where she renders them in existentialist terms for her philosophical investigation of "whether and how 'women' exist" (Bauer 50). Myrdal is the textual source for her comments in the introduction to The Second Sex on the paradigm shift in the study of group characteristics: "The biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro; they regard any characteristic as a secondary reaction [une réaction secondaire to a situation" (xx, TM; LDS 1: 12). Beauvoir applies a central concept of existentialism to argue that characteristics interpreted in terms of the "eternal feminine" exist as an effect of woman's situation—woman's engagement in the world, including both the contingent conditions of her existence and the manner in which she assumes those conditions—rather than as an unchanging essence. But she also argues, following Du Bois and Myrdal, that situation must be acknowledged as contemporary fact: "To refuse the notions of the eternal feminine, the black soul, the Jewish character, is not to deny that there are today Jews, Negroes, women: such denial does not represent a liberation for those concerned, but rather an inauthentic flight [une fuite inauthentiqueY]" (xx, TM; LDS 1: 13).⁵ According to Beauvoir, women as such undeniably exist today; "the problem is to know whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated [doit se perpétuer]" (xxx, TM; LDS 1: 25).

Beauvoir combines Myrdal's arguments with philosophical arguments against essentialism, to produce an analysis of gender that is strikingly similar to Du Bois's concept of race as a statistical myth. The arguments advanced by Beauvoir respond to the hollowness of concepts of the "eternal feminine," as revealed by modern psychology. Beauvoir borrowed the term from Goethe's Faust (TSS 180; LDS 1: 295). However, she probably also encountered it in Helene Deutsch's Psychology of Women (1944—1945), where Deutsch makes convoluted and unconvincing attempts to combine the concept of the "eternal feminine" with psychoanalytic views regarding women's "bisexual disposition":

absurd and paradoxic as it may sound, the psychic structure of woman does not consist exclusively in the "eternal feminine." It is true that femininity is her essential core, but around this core there are layers and wrappings that are equally genuine elements of the feminine soul and frequently very valuable ones. . . . We find that they stem from the active, sometimes masculine components that, even though always more or less present in woman, originate in the masculine part of the bisexual disposition. (1: 141—42).

Deutsch's notion of a "feminine soul" composed parrly of "masculine components" originating in woman's "bisexual disposition" involves evident contradictions. In The Second Sex, the concept of the feminine soul cedes to the existentialist concept of situation.⁶

Gender is a myth that has become "fact"—this is the theory announced and developed in philosophical terms by Beauvoir. She argues that femininity is an unnatural condition elaborated by culture:

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate defines the figure that the human female takes on within society [revêt au sein de la société]; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this product [élabore ce produit], intermediary between the male and the eunuch, which is described as feminine. (267, TM; LDS 2: 13)

To the extent that femininity assumes a stubborn facticity, it is because human civilization has produced gender as seemingly natural. Since the invention of femininity cannot be traced to any historic event, such as the migration or enslavement of a people, femininity seems to be natural to the human female. Beauvoir therefore poses the problem of women's existence in philosophical rather than historical terms. And her philosophical terms open up a radically skeptical understanding of both gender and sexual difference:

The perpetuation of the species does not entail sexual differentiation. Sexual differentiation may be assumed by existents in such a manner that it enters into the concrete definition of existence: so be it. It nonetheless remains true that a consciousness without a body and an immortal man are strictly inconceivable, whereas one can imagine a society reproducing itself by parthenogenesis or composed of hermaphrodites. (7, TM; LDS 1: 40)

Many early commentators on The Second Sex ridiculed such views, by which Beauvoir expands the borders of skeptical inquiry formulating a new conceptual framework in which the meanings of gender and sexual difference are existentially open and unfinalized.⁷ She uses this approach to argue that the situation of women, which now produces femininity, will continue to change with the development of human culture.

Like Du Bois, Wright, Myrdal, and others concerned with myths of the outsider during the 1940s, Beauvoir conceptualizes human life as a changing construct rather than a fixed essence. At the same time, World War II and its unimagined brutality, particularly the Nazi genocide of the Jews and America's development and use of atomic weapons, led to new awareness of the dangers posed by a human nature evolving in random, Darwinian terms. As I argue in Chapter 4, these dangers are a central theme of Wright's postwar novel, The Outsider (1953). Beauvoir responded to the problems posed by the war by developing an existential ethics based on Heidegger's concept of "human reality" and each person's relation to it. She argues that although each consciousness is formed in the movement of society, one's actions may nevertheless reject or confirm the common choice:

Heidegger had convinced me that "human reality" is accomplished and expressed in each existent; conversely, each person commits to and compromises that reality as a whole; depending on whether a society is aiming at the advancement of freedom, or is content to endure passive bondage, the individual comprehends himself [se saisit] as either a man among men or an ant on an anthill; yet each one of us has the power to challenge the collective choice, to reject or confirm it. (PL 373, TM; FA 538)

The Second Sex applies a similar model to each woman's relation to collective myths of the feminine.

When the individual's ethical relation to society is considered in such terms, the assertion of group identity, solidarity, and separatism—for example, through nationalist movements—becomes ethically ambiguous. It negates each person's choice by subsuming him or her within the group, which is defined through its opposition to another group. Beauvoir argues that women, although segregated and excluded from much of social life, have never formed a separate group to oppose the dominant caste, as blacks and Jews have sought to do. And according to Michèle Le Doeuff, "so it was in France after the war. Citizenship fell from heaven upon French women," who were granted the vote in 1944 without having asked for it, and who then faced a question that continues to haunt us: "Since we have now achieved political representation and everything is settled, how does it happen that I have so much trouble inserting myself into, and participating in, the human Mitsein?" ("Transatlantic Critique" 28—29). That is, why do women remain subordinated within the mitsein—the fundamental condition of being-with-others—which Heidegger defines as a component structure of human worlds and a necessary condition of our being?

Whereas black subordination was increasingly seen as a recent and historically determined phenomenon that could be challenged by blacks as a group, Beauvoir could plausibly argue in 1949 that women had never posed themselves as a group separate from men. Many critics have assumed that the absence of group solidarity among women in The Second Sex has largely negative implications for freedom. Toril Moi, however, has argued that although "the revolutionary option" seems to be impossible for women in The Second Sex, they may pursue freedom "with less violent struggle than other groups" (208). In the circumstances of the early postwar years, a less violent approach had many advantages, as Beauvoir suggests when she represents group consciousness as a dangerous fantasy of exterminating the other:

The proletariat can propose to massacre the ruling class, and a sufficiently fanatical Jew or Negro might dream of monopolizing the secret [d'accaparer le secret] of the atomic bomb and making humanity wholly Jewish or black; but woman cannot even dream of exterminating the males. . . . She is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another. (TSS xxv-xxvi, TM; LDS 1: 19—20)

In 1949, after the genocidal nationalism of the Nazi era and during the early years of the Cold War and nuclear arms race, Beauvoir understood the indivisibility oi men and women within the human mitsein less as a danger than as a possible means of human solidarity and survival. The foremost concerns of The Second Sex are the ethical and psychological meanings of the human mitsein—the tension between individual identity and being-with-others that is fundamental to human consciousness—and the fate of women, who remain subordinated and oppressed within the mitsein. Beauvoir argues that the condition of women as a group will change with the movement of society as a whole, and moreover that women can organize among themselves to move society in a new direction.⁸ However, her position would seem to preclude specifically separatist goals.

The convergence of existentialism with analyses of race in America Day by Day and The Second Sex was part of a more general postwar phenomenon. Existentialism defines human consciousness as the negation of the world; consequently, it becomes manifest through our continual and improvised surpassing of the given situation. Wright represents black Americans, who confront an oppressive society, as figures for the negating activity of consciousness and, therefore, as emblematic of modernity. Wright's understa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Introduction: Postwar Theories of Identity
• Chapter Two Internalizing the White Gaze: The Problem of Violence in Native Son
• Chapter Three Sociology and Philosophy: An American Dilemma and the Making of The Second Sex
• Chapter Four The Vanguard of Modernity: Richard Wright's The Outsider
• Chapter Five Sexual Dialogics: Psychoanalysis and The Second Sex
• Chapter Six Identity Undone: James Baldwin and the Destiny of America
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index