Word: nat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nat and the Trap...
...glad that the ten black writers who responded to William Styron's Nat Turner [July 12] weren't around when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. If this novel had been repressed because of stock characters and a failure to understand the Negro character, I don't know what would have happened to the abolition movement...
...identifying Styron's personal opinions as the most crucial aspect of the controversy, you partially fall into the same trap as those black critics who denounce Nat Turner from nonesthetic, and therefore shaky, platforms...
Perhaps the most absurd criticism comes from a Boston psychiatry professor, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, who with utter seriousness takes Styron to task for referring to Nat Turner by his first name. "Is this familiarity by the author part of intuitive white condescension and adherence to Southern racial etiquette? Is this reference and the entire book an unconscious attempt to keep Nat Turner 'in his place'? Would the novelist expect Nat Turner to address him as 'Mr. Styron'? Perhaps no one can ever know the answers to these questions...
...important question to ask is: What is Styron's own attitude on ra- cial questions? The Confessions of Nat Turner is a clear enough reply. Styron obviously believes in a darkly militant way that any brutish black uprising is the inevitable result of white persecution. The effect of both, the persecution and the uprising, adds up to tragedy...