N°021_Vol.2_01

Introduction: In Native Son by Richard Wright (1940), violence permeates American society to such an extent that it leads one to believe it has become a part of the American social fabric. In such a context, retributive justice is typically administered to counter violence. However, as many critics commonly agree, Wright lambasts the American retributive justice system, which appears flawed as it fails to protect every American citizen from rampant violence. Not only does it fail to protect every citizen from violence, but it is also used by the Prince as a political weapon to oppress Bigger Thomas, the rebellious black protagonist of the novel, and other like-minded Blacks.  Analyzing violence in Native Son, Stiepanow (2017, p. 123) understands it as the result of “the metaphorical line running between the concepts of lawfulness and lawlessness [which] forms a conceptual boundary and leads to a conflict between the system and the individual.” This system, according to Stanton (1969, p. 56), “imposed upon Bigger confines him to shame-ridden non-existence by prohibiting any significant act, except crime.”  Grenander (1977, p. 222) points to the “philosophical and scientific weaknesses in a value structure that attempts to deny personal responsibility” as a cause of violence in Native Son. Tuitt (2000, p. 203) argues that “in Native Son the literary text is used to confront the violence of the law through a narrative ploy,” as though to suggest that the law itself is the source of violence that oppressed individuals deploy violence to deal with.

To understand Wright’s perception of violence in Native Son, this paper deems it critically rewarding to address the issue from a Foucauldian perspective by asking the following questions: (1) What is the root cause of violence in the novel? (2) How does the Prince proceed to take revenge on the violent individual? (3) To what extent does the Prince’s revenge reveal the flaws of the retributive justice system? To address these issues, I hypothesize that (1) Wright portrays violence in the novel as a means of self-creation, in an attempt to counter the Prince, (2) who uses the law as a tool of domination over the oppressed and retributive justice as a weapon against those who question his power, (3) a situation that significantly exposes the flaws of the whole retributive justice system. My whole analysis is based on the Foucauldian theory of justice, which rests on the general presupposition that justice is a system of social, economic, and political domination in which the Prince imposes his value system and uses the judicial apparatus to punish those who contravene it (Foucault, 1975). Throughout my analysis, I first explore violence in Native Son as a means of self-creation which challenges the Prince’s authority. Then, I analyze the Prince’s use of the law and the retributive justice system, respectively, to dominate marginalized individuals and to take revenge on them for their disobedience. Ultimately, my analysis assesses the extent to which the Prince’s revenge exposes the flaws of the retributive justice system as a whole.