PORGY – DuBose Heyward (1925)
Publication: Published in September 1925, Porgy was a national best-seller, hailed as a giant step forward in the depiction of American Negro life.
Critical Reception: Porgy was lavishly praised by critics both north and south. James Southall Wilson, writing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, said that "No more beautiful or authentic novel has been published in America for a decade." For the first time in America, Wilson wrote, a white writer had created "a real negro, not a black-faced white man." Porgy "thinks as a negro, feels as a negro, lives as a negro. White men enter his life only as his life touches theirs; not as their lives touch his." In previous fiction, Wilson wrote, the Negro existed "as part of the white man's life," and was shown "in his relations with the dominant race to point a moral or prove a purpose." Heyward, "with all the sympathy of a poet," created "a real man as he lives within his own race." Most telling, Wilson noted that in Porgy Heyward gave freedom to the negro's soul in the region of art," where the white man had also held "dominion over him."
Widely considered to be an “unpatronizing” treatment of African American life.
Precedent Literary History:
Essay by Heyward in 1924: “The New Note in Southern Literature”: "psychologically true . . . picture of contemporary southern Negro life." Heyward claimed that such a picture would at least have "the virtues of honesty and simplicity," and it would leave "an authentic record of the period that produced it." Heyward was thus striving for a degree of verisimilitude in depictions of black life that, prior to Porgy, had been largely absent from southern literature.
Paul Green’s play, In Abraham’s Bosom
Julia Peterkin’s novels
T. S. Stribling’s novels
Irwin Russell’s 1878 poem, “Christmas-Night in the Quarters “
Thomas Nelson Page’s best-selling stories and novels of the 1880s were apologias for the plantation ideal. His black characters authenticated a version of the pastoral, the old south as tragic Eden.
Joel Chandler Harris’s tales of Uncle Remus, which debuted in 1876, were an advance in literary depictions of blacks. This character, tricky and sly, is never dependent on whites for his identity and in fact uses slave folklore to subvert the ideals of the white planter society.
Sentimentalism in Porgy:
Part of the impulse that animates Porgy derived from the preservation movement in Charleston in the early 1920s. Tourists discovered the old city, seemingly untouched by time, on their way to Florida during the great real-estate boom there in the 1920s, or as an alternative to Europe, closed off since the war. Heyward memorializes the “old” Charleston in the opening paragraph of the novel, where he announces that Porgy "lived in the Golden Age," an age "that never existed except in the heart of youth," and "an age when men, not yet old, were boys in an ancient, beautiful city that time had forgotten before it destroyed." (11) In much of Porgy Heyward writes as a memorialist for this older way of life. While the novel does depict African Americans in a nonsentimentalized way, Heyward does not propagandize for the “New Negro” in a new social order.
See also the opening epigrammatic poem to the novel, concerning “freedom.”
Dignity and Triumph:
Stresses the Negroes' racial memory, a link with their cultural heritage. In his craps games, Porgy cups the dice, fondles them ritualistically and tells the dice: "Oh, little stars, roll me some light! . . . . Roll me a sun an moon!" (18) Porgy has moments of moral victory, too, as he kills the murderous Crown who has come to steal his Bess. As Maria listens across he courtyard, she hears "a sound that caused her flesh to prickle with primal terror. . . . It was Porgy's laugh, but different. Out of the stillness it swelled suddenly, deep, aboriginal, lustful" (172). This scene evokes a complex, even eerie reaction. Even in the comic scenes Heyward avoids stereotype and ridicule. Porgy's flight from the police in his goat cart is comic but it is deepened and exalted by the pathos of man's fight against insuperable odds. Thus too in the hurricane scene when the Negroes gather in the great ballroom and barricade themselves against the onslaught of the storm: "You an' me, Bess, . . . We sho' is a little somet'ing attuh all" (148).
Role of Music and Racial Identity:
The description of the Jenkins Orphanage Band in Porgy, for example, in which the theme of liberation is linked to racial character, depicts verbally what Hutty did visually: "Bare, splay feet padded upon the cobbles; heads were thrown back, with lips to instruments that glittered in the sunshine, launching daring and independent excursions into the realm of sound." Yet the improvisations always return to the "eternal boom, boom, boom of an underlying rhythm," and meet "with others in the sudden weaving and ravelling of amazing chords. An ecstasy of wild young bodies beat living into the blasts that shook the windows of the solemn houses." (113)
Community;
Heyward shows that Porgy's strength comes from community—a collective faith emanating from Catfish Row. Its inhabitants are bound to each other emotionally and psychically, intensely aware of their roots and their beliefs. In contrast, Charleston appeared to Heyward to be only loosely bound by distant social relations, by hospitality, but not necessarily by true fellow feeling. Heyward also envied the Gullah people their robust health and strength. Crown, for example, has “the body of a gladiator” (16). The stevedores all possess “vast physical strength in a world of brute force.” Heyward had always equated virility with triumphing over high odds. His physical frailty was a hindrance that he fought all his life to overcome.
Ethnicity:
Ethnicity is also a prominent feature of Heyward's Gullahs. This element is not much in evidence in the work of Stribling, Roberts, and other early southern renaissance writers. As such, Porgy aligns less with white writers' depictions of black characters and more with black writers' work, notably that of Jean Toomer and, later, Zora Neale Hurston. Although the voice of Porgy is unmistakably that of the white aristocrat who is only mildly receptive to social reform, Heyward depicts Porgy as representing southern Negroes' African roots, their racial uniqueness, and their nonwestern exoticism, untouched by white culture. It is remarkable that a genteel white southerner should be writing about these elements of black culture in 1925 with such empathy and intensity.
Primitivism:
Heyward focuses on primitivism by employing nonsanitized Gullah dialect, spirituals, group emotions, and by highlighting the African American’s savviness in outwitting the white man. Contact with the white world is minimal.
Note how the work of Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston also emphasize community rather than history.
Racial Dualism as Oneness:
A paradox. Once Heyward examined the Gullah world with sympathy and depth, it seemed not so very different from his own, confirming W. E. B. DuBois's observation in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the Negro and the American existed within the same individual. According to DuBois, to deny either of the two was to deny the essence of one's being. After the Civil War, Charlestonians withdrew into a narrow world in which poverty reigned on both sides of the color line. Charlestonians felt imprisoned by that restrictive environment and rued their fate, whereas the Gullahs reveled in an atmosphere of liberation and mobility. Porgy's goat cart symbolizes this mobility; in the opera (which offers a somewhat more optimistic view of Negroes than the novel does)it gives him the ability to pursue Bess, thus making him an heroic figure as he challenges the prevailing odds and the dominant cultural opinion that his race would be forever denied opportunities to advance.
Providence:
A fear of sudden tragedy also hangs over the Gullah community in ways similar to Heyward's white society. This fear created similar black and white cultures of ritual and memory based on shared emotions and beliefs. The two communities also shared a reverence for Providence (recall Janie's constant ruminations on the mystery of the divine plan). These beliefs gave rise to superstitiousness among blacks and whites. Heyward seems to lightly mock his characters' belief in the validity of omens (the buzzard that alights outside Porgy’s room after he murders Crown; the belief among the blacks that the last man to leave the graveside service will be the next to be buried [32]). Porgy was among the earliest works by white authors to explore conjuring—a complex system of magic created by a syncretistic blend of Christianity and African Old World religions; it is deeply rooted in African religious views about magic, the universe, the spirit world, and the nature of existence.