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Essay on Criticism paper on The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman
Wallace Thurman's first novel, The Blacker the Berry, appeared at an extremely productive time for this young turk of the Harlem Renaissance--and in many ways, this novel reflects his complex interrogation of racial, sexual, and cultural identity more completely than any of his other works. Three and a half years after arriving in New York City, he had a banner year in 1929 with the publication of The Blacker the Berry and the Broadway production of the play he co-wrote with William Jourdan Rapp, Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life. These two works and other shorter writings of the late 1920s reveal how much the transformational allure of Harlem had fascinated Thurman. Taken in such a context, Blacker is clear testament to the vivacity and variety of this place Thurman calls the "city of surprises."
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Wallace Thurman's first novel, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) takes its title from an old folk saying, “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” It is an autobiographical satire whose neurotic, dark-skinned protagonist, Emma Lou Morgan, internalizes biases against dark-complexioned people after a midwestern upbringing by colorstruck relatives mimicking racist societal values. Like Thurman, Emma Lou goes to the University of Southern California and then to Harlem. Unlike Thurman, who was primarily drawn to the artistic renaissance blooming there, Emma Lou hopes Harlem will enable her to escape finally the harsh intraracial prejudice that is exacerbated by her sex and egocentrism.
Among the mundane settings of Harlem tenement buildings, employment agencies, public dance halls, rent parties, cabarets, and movie houses, Emma Lou has numerous opportunities to overcome her obsession with color and class consciousness. She is, indeed, discriminated against by both blacks and whites, but not to the degree that she believes. In a crowded oneroom apartment filled with liquor-gorging intellectuals resembling Langston Hughes ( Tony Crews).......
