Native Son

In science and psychology, the observer effect is an event in which the act of looking changes the thing that is being looked at. Wright explores something similar throughout Native Son, portraying Black characters who feel (and are) surveilled by white people and changed by the experience of being watched.

Theater critic Hannah Miao describes the phenomenon of the white gaze as “being watched from a lens of otherness that is sometimes violently obvious, and sometimes so subtle that you find yourself wondering whether you made it up entirely. It is fetishization and repulsion, appropriation and persecution, misrepresentation and erasure, all at once” (Miao, Hannah. “'Fairview' and Tackling the White Gaze.” The Chronicle, 17 Oct. 2019, www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/10/fairview-and-tackling-the-white-gaze-5da7b82701a0f.). The perpetual white gaze makes every Black action a kind of performance. Bigger describes the constant besiege of the white gaze, feeling white people take up residence inside his chest and stomach. He has not only had it impressed into his brain what he can and can’t do with his life, but also feels that there is no escape, no private place to escape their gaze. From the moment he wakes up, he has no privacy. When Mary tells Bigger that she wants to see how he lives, her request isn’t as harmless as she thinks.