Racial Identity and the Blues in Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew

• Main Authors: Louise Yi-ning Chen, 陳怡寧
• Other Authors: Raphael J. Schulte
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/72646985617811386637

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 英國語文學系 === 89 === Langston Hughes was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s’ America. Like other blacks, he faced the dilemma of double-consciousness. My thesis focuses on his attitude toward dual-identity in The Weary Blues, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” and Fine Clothes to the Jew. His essay plays a significant role as a bridge between the two books of poetry. Created and defined first by W. E. B. Du Bois, double-consciousness was a problem of identity confronted by black writers and artists. For a black, being an “American” means to see his self through the eyes of the whites and the veil of primitivism; while being a black means to express his individuality and racial reality. In other words, in double-consciousness, the blacks had to “negotiate between representations of self, and representations of blackness fixed in the minds of audience accustomed to white caricatures” (Krasner 9). In my discussion, I argue that there is a progressive change in Hughes’s attitude toward double-consciousness. In The Weary Blues, Hughes is ambiguous about his identity. On the one hand, he declares black solidarity, unity, and achievement. On the other hand, in his portrait of the blacks, he cannot escape the stereotypes of primitivism. His poetry implies a compromise with the white audience. However, in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes begins to identify with the black proletariat, whose culture was a “vulgar secret shame” in the eyes of the black middle class. Despite his class-consciousness, Hughes’s presentation of the black masses is still in the shadow of primitivism. Not until Fine Clothes to the Jew does Hughes present a realistic portrait of the black masses. In the naturalistic tradition of the blues, Hughes’s presentation of the black proletariat subverts the white primitive stereotype and poetical framework. Therefore, his identity becomes clearer, when he chooses not to be an “American” in primitivism but to be a black in blues realism. Standing with the black proletariat and the blues tradition, Hughes’s poetry becomes a literary model in the 1920s.