Criminal Responsibility in "Native Son" and "Knock on Any Door"
1977; Duke University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2925424
ISSN1527-2117
Autores Tópico(s)Modern American Literature Studies
ResumoAMERICAN FICTION for almost two centuries has been examining assumptions and values relevant to crime in our society. Literary works have tended to arrive at a consensus on most such questions, substantiating the view that all fundamental customs and institutions are built on a bedrock of universal, deep mental structures.' Thus few writers have presented criminals who are not responsible for their acts, since character, as literary critics use the term, derives from the moral choices an individual makes throughout his life. Depriving him of their responsibility, for good or ill, dehumanizes him. rare instances when he has not been allowed to choose his own moral values and accept the consequences of implementing them have been the embodiments in fiction of contemporary intellectual movements. As Richard Altick has pointed out, Much imaginative literature . . . gives ideas a local habitation and a name, expressing them, illustrating them, working out their consequences through metaphor, character, situation, plot, setting, and whatever other devices serve to make them apprehensible to the writer's intended audience, who are people firmly rooted in place and time.2 Thus heredity dominated the naturalistic determinism-influenced by European thinkers like Darwin, Lombroso, Kraepelin, and Zolawhich underlay Frank Norris's McTeague and Stephen Crane's The Blue Hotel. Theories about the genesis of crime then modulated to environmental determinism, prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century. In this paper I shall discuss Richard Wright's Native Son and Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door. These two novels of the 1940S presented arguments for lifting the burden of
Referência(s)