The Man Child -- Thoughts

If I were to read "The Man Child" as a short story that was completely separate from the Going to Meet the Man collection, I would probably look at it as a sort of pseudo-thriller, pseudo-biblical story. There are many elements of the story that remind me of John Steinbeck's East of Eden, such as the emphases placed on family lines (in The Man Child we get that whole scene where Eric and his dad survey the land, in East of Eden there are various generations of brothers that struggle in a Cain/Abel dynamic), essential (raw) evil (in East of Eden, Adam Trasks' wife Cathy is the embodiment of satanic evil. She is cold and calculated, she waits for her time to strike, and when she does she is ruthless and unforgiving. In The Man Child, Jamie may be said to exhibit many of these same characteristics), and prophesy (in East of Eden, Samuel, the representation of the biblical prophet "Samuel", can sense the evil in Cathy. Similarly, in The Man Child, Eric's mom has this same sense of foreboding towards Jamie--this was, to me, the most striking similarity between the two.).

My initial plan for this late-as-hell blog post was to compare the two and make an argument that they might both be based on similar biblical stories/themes (essentially, if a is based on b and c resembles a, perhaps c is based on b?). However, it quickly became apparent that this probably is not the case. First of all, there are some major discrepancies between the story structures:

(1) As Mr. Mitchell pointed out in class, Jamie and Eric's father have been friends forever. They fought in wars and stuff together. It seems much more likely that something changed between Jamie/Eric than that Jamie was an embodiment of evil the whole time and waited decades to perform his act of evil. A sort of literary Occam's razor, which is far from deductive, but is the best that we can do in cases without a ton of textual evidence.

(2) While both stories (East of Eden and The Man Child) emphasize the continence of family lines, they do so in somewhat different ways. The Man Child does this in a very Lion-King-esque, father-to-son, inheritance sort of way. East of Eden is based on the story of Cain/Abel, and thus most of the dramatic elements / conflict arise from intra-family conflict, whereas The Man Child is a bit different. Perhaps Jamie could be seen as a symbolic "brother" of Eric who is in a Cain/Abel-esque competition for Eric's father's love/inheritance. Just like Cain killed Abel out of jealousy, perhaps Jamie killed Abel out of jealousy. However, if Baldwin really wanted to make biblical allusions, I don't think he would make it such a puzzle. Suggesting anything more than that the Eric/Jamie relationship has super loose similarities to Cain/Abel would be grasping at straws. Occam's razor again.

Here was the nail-in-the-coffin for me in regards to changing the way I read "The Man Child". We've seen that Going to Meet the Man has been thematically consistent. In various forms, the collection has dealt with disenfranchisement of rights and identity: disenfranchisement within the family, within society, to the hands of drugs and to the hands of perceptions-about-drugs, to the hands of tradition, etc (the more I list the more vague and arguable they'll probably become). If we were to say that The Man Child was primarily about biblical jealousy and the battle of good versus evil (which is what East of Eden and the story of Cain & Abel is "about"), then it wouldn't be very consistent with the rest of the novel, would it? Sure, it's not impossible that Baldwin wasn't influenced by biblical stories when writing The Man Child. The story itself certainly has the gut-level prophesy-esque doom woven through it. However, this will probably forever be nothing more than conjecture.

Okay, so how is "The Man Child" about disenfranchisement? (P.S. I know I'm not really using this word correctly as it's normal usage is for suffrage rights, but I think it fits my purposes here if we can suspend strict definitions... to be disenfranchised from X in this context is to have a stronger power, whether that's a father-figure or a social class, take X away from you). Well, we have two main disenfranchisements:

(1) Jamie being disenfranchised materially (land), which brings about a sort of a mini class-war, or class resentment by Jamie towards Eric's father. Eric's father has a wife, a son, land, money, while Jamie is a lone drunk. Before the last couple pages I think most readers have a decent amount of sympathy for Jamie because of this.

(2) Eric's parent's being disenfranchised emotionally as their son is murdered. They are also disenfranchised of that "family line" discussed at the beginning of this blog post because (a) Eric, their heir, is dead and (b) Eric's mother can't have any more children.

Baldwin uses extremes to prove a point--he uses extreme cases of disenfranchisement to showcase the dangers and the pain of disenfranchisement--, which is usually what a lot of good literature does in order to highlight the kernels of truth that we might not see otherwise.