Day: October 13, 2021

James Baldwin’s relationship with his stepfather informs his work, and his life, by complicating his experience, comprehension, and analysis of Black masculinity. 

 James Baldwin was raised in Harlem with his mother and his stepfather, David Baldwin. James was the eldest son out of nine children. In his biographical article about Baldwin titled “The Enemy Within”, Hilton Als situates Baldwin tightly around his stepfather, marking David’s existence as essential to understanding James. As he moves through James Baldwin’s development as a writer and as a man, he continuously nods back to David Baldwin. “By 1948, he was no longer the ugliest boy his father had ever seen but a promising young writer who was considered very smart by the older editors he worked for” (Als). Even in marking Baldwin’s success, Baldwin biography roots James in David Baldwin. 

Baldwin reaffirms Als’ negative characterization of David most notably in Notes of a Native Son, which begins with David’s death. Upon reflection, he writes, “I do not remember, in all those years, that one of his children was ever glad to see him come home” (Notes of a Native Son 65). He expresses both resentment for and unfamiliarity with his stepfather. However, as James grew as a writer and man, he began to see the roots of David’s bitterness as having “had something to do with his blackness, I think—he was very black— with his blackness and his beauty, and with the fact that he knew that he was black but did not know that he was beautiful. He claimed to be proud of his blackness, but it had also been the cause of much humiliation and it had fixed bleak boundaries to his life” (Notes of a Native Son 64). James acknowledges that David’s struggles were due to his identity as a Black man. Being his paternal figure, this inevitably confused and frustrated James’ own conceptualization of Black masculinity.  

Baldwin explores this confusion and frustration through Black male characters in his fiction. Go Tell It on the Mountain is directly reflective of James and David. In the novel, the father character, Gabriel, is identical to David Baldwin. Gabriel was a preacher, as was David. Further, the novel circulates around Gabriel’s intense, familial, and religious bitterness. Baldwin writes that his stepfather “hat[ed] and fear[ed] every living soul including his children who had betrayed him, too, by reaching towards the world which had despised him” (“Notes of a Native Son” 66). In a similar tone, Gabriel tells John that “white people were never to be trusted, and that they told nothing but lies-he, John- would find out as soon as got a little older, how evil white people could be” (Go Tell It on the Mountain 34). David Baldwin, and his bruised Black masculinity, informs Baldwin’s work in fiction. 

In his essay titled “Nobody Knows My Name”, James reflects on a trip to the South. He writes about the potency of Southern racism against the Black men: “How many times has the Southern day come up to find that black man, sexless, hanging from a tree!” (“Nobody Knows My Name” 204). More directly, he recounts his own experience while in Atlanta, specifically with an old Black man who directed him onto his first-ever segregated bus. This man enchanted James. “His eyes seemed to say that what I was feeling he had been feeling, at much higher pressure, all his life. But my eyes would never see the hell his eyes had seen. And this hell was, simply, that he had never in his life owned anything, not his wife, not his house, not his child, which could not, at any instant, be taken from him by the power of white people…And for the rest of the time that I was in the South I watched the eyes of old black men” (“Nobody Knows My Name” 204-205). In this essay, Baldwin observes the Black man’s struggle with his own masculinity, describing his hell as having not ever been able to own anything. This struggle fascinates and saddens Baldwin. A physical reflection of both James and David, this older Black man served as a reminder for James of the realities of Black masculinity throughout recent generations— a consistent struggle with identity. As is evident in his work, his fascination resided here. 

After some initial biographical research on the life of Virginia Woolf, who is one of my options for primary texts, it became clear that she had grown up with a fascination for natural history and the taxonomic ecology of the time. In his biography of her, Nigel Nicholson mentions that, “Virginia Woolf was a keen hunter of butterflies and moths. With her brothers and sister she would smear tree trunks with treacle to attract and capture the insects, and then pin their lifelike corpses to cork boards, their wings outspread.” Later, with the transition in scientific thought, Woolf’s eco-consciousness shifted as well to reflect a culture turning away from taxonomic classification to holistic ecology (Alt). This consciousness of the natural world comes through in her writings, as well as an emphasis on space/place as a whole. The historical context in which Woolf was writing also contributes to her feminist writings, with the growing suffrage movement and her interactions with “radical” feminists throughout her education at King’s College. 

Woolf’s childhood also greatly informs her passion for the natural world. She grew up summering in natural locations in England, when her family wanted to get away from Kensington. For example, since she was born in 1895, her family would summer in St. Ives in Cornwall, a retreat from city life and the blooming industrialization and modernization of the turn of the century (“Virginia Woolf”). These early memories of the pastoral escape and summers by the sea informed her later novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf experienced a long list of childhood traumatic events, from losing a parent, dealing with deadly infectious diseases, and sexual assault from her two half-brothers. These tragedies within the home and struggles with mental health may also contribute to her interest in writing and the outside/natural world as a place of literary imagination and perhaps safety. 

Alt, Christina. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 2010, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511762178. https://dickinson.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01DICKINSON_INST/1d86qtd/cdi_proquest_ebookcentral_EBC554749  

Nicolson, Nigel. “Virginia Woolf.” The New York Times: on the Web, The New York Times, 2000, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/n/nicolson-woolf.html?scp=4&sq=virginia%2520woolf&st=cse.  

“Virginia Woolf.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 27 Mar. 2020, www.biography.com/writer/virginia-woolf. 

Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, lived from 1813 to 1855. In his work, Fear, and Trembling, he engages with the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of his son Issac. 

Scholars point to Kierkegaard’s exploration of literary figures like Don Juan, the wandering Jew, and Faust during his time as a student as an early pretext for his desire to find existential models for his own life. He is now widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. His theories and ideas contributed largely to Western philosophical thought. 

However, his existential beliefs revolve in large part around his love Regina Olsen. Scholars believe that Kierkegaard’s experience of love and the loss of love directly influences Fear and Trembling. 

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard says that “I am convinced that God is love…” (Fear and Trembling). He takes Abraham and Issac’s story as metaphorically tied with parts of the human experience rather than being a literal anecdote on the necessity of physical sacrifice. In this essay, I will connect Abraham’s intention to sacrifice Issac to Kierkegaard’s wrestling with the idea of love from his own experiences. In conjunction, these two scenarios serve to illuminate the more significant concept of selfless love in the Bible. 

In the first part of the book, Kierkegaard gives alternative examples and auxiliary stories of what happened on Mount Moriah. In the first interpretation, Abraham scolds his son and tells him that he desires to sacrifice him rather than God’s. Shortly after that, he cries out to God: “Lord in heaven, I thank you; it is surely better for him to believe I am a monster than to lose faith in you” (Kierkegaard 9). Thus, Abraham portrays to his son that he is assuming responsibility for killing him instead of leaving the responsibility to fall on God. In doing so, Abraham prevents his son from losing faith in higher sovereignty by making the decision a personal one. 

Kierkegaard’s existential views spur significantly from the sense of loss and despair he felt after his separation from Regina. Thus, this quote reflects Kierkegaard’s plea to humanity not to blame the love itself for its failure but instead blame oneself through the mouth of Abraham. 

The second section of the book is titled, A Tribute to Abraham. On the surface, the passage speaks to the moral perfection of Abraham. Yet, it more generally describes the qualifications for a perfectly righteous man and the force of love and its significance to humanity. He ties the genuine struggle with God to achieving greatness over all others. “For the one who struggled with the world became great by conquering himself, but the one who struggled with himself became great by conquering himself, but the one who struggled with God was greater than everybody” (Kierkegaard 13). 

His struggle with his loss of love allowed Kierkegaard to see the finitude of life. Similar to Abraham, Kierkegaard wrestled with God, or love, in the surrendering of that thing in which they loved. For Abraham, it was Issac, and for Kierkegaard, it was Regina. Abraham struggled with God, Kierkegaard with love by coming to terms with the idea of love in its most brutal state. They both loved the one whom they were ready to lose. Kierkegaard believed that love in its purest form was utterly unselfish, an idea repeated in the Bible repeatedly. For Abraham to be willing to sacrifice his son reinforced the concept of this selfless love. To love someone dead, or lost, would mean that you can not receive anything in return. 

Kierkegaard’s writing on Abraham in Fear and Trembling shares parallels to his own life. The willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, one of his most loved possessions, represents the highest form of love. Likewise, Kierkegaard’s love of Regina, who he lost, is also the highest form of love he could give her. Thus, in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s life is paralleled to Abrahams by the metaphor of sacrifice and selfless love.