From Pastoralism to Industrial Antipathy in William Attaway's Blood on the Forge
1975; Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center; Volume: 36; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/274641
ISSN2325-7199
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoWilliam Attaway's Blood on the Forge W/HE,N Blood on the Forge by black novelist William Attaway was V published in 1941, it received little notice. The book, nevertheless, represented a literary achievement in its own right, and at the same time it realistically portrays the transition of a people from a structured, authoritarian, rural existence to an industrialized urban frontier (Attaway himself was a part of that northward migration of blacks coming from rural Mississippi to Chicago). On the one hand, Blood on the Forge continued a long tradition of and anti-pastoral literature proceeding from early nineteenth-century Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland in the Gilded Age, and ultimately to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and William Faulkner. At the same time, the novel is worthy of special attention as a powerful plea in behalf of a struggling race. In this sense Attaway rejects the traditional forms of agrarianism which call for a return to nature, and sounds the theme of alienation that marks the modern existential novel. In Blood on the Forge, the earlier paean to the qualities of the simple country landscape suddenly becomes an angry repudiation of life as destructive to human values. The focus then shifts from delicate scenes of lavish woods, succulent orchards, and flocks of sheep an idealization of nature from a distance as the moral symbol of the good life -to the horrible fact that man has already been swallowed up by the machine. This transition from bucolic nostalgia to industrial antipathy represents a literary consummation, but at the same time and most tragically, an individual act on the part of Southern blacks. In the first part of the novel, the author explores the futile attempts of a family of black farmers to apply agrarian values to a bleak environment in the red clay hills of Kentucky during World War I. Attaway's Joads are three brothersthe elder Big Mat, who represents the plodding strength and endurance of all Southern Negroes under their particular color-caste system; Melody, whose blues singing recreates and sustains the myth;1 and Chinatown, whose lazy, happy-go-lucky attitude reflects in part a psychological response to the subjugated position of Negroes. Throughout this pastoral section of the novel, Attaway testifies to the myth's fragility when faced by the reality of such an existence an existence characterized by images of hunger (one of Melody's songs is the Hungry Blues), barrenness (the soil as well as
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