Document Type
Article
Abstract
Critics (all of them) have read "Bright and Morning Star" as a continuation of the leftward tending political consciousness developed in Uncle Tom's Children, a pattern culminating in the multiracial march of workers and peasants in "Fire and Cloud." On this view, Aunt Sue's revolutionary heroism guarantees the survival of the multiracial collective of communists. While "Bright and Morning Star" does carry forward previous aesthetic and thematic patterning of the collection, the story does not point to Sue's revolutionary political consciousness but to her false consciousness, anticipated precisely by Brother Mann in "Down by the Riverside." The consequence of this consciousness is that rather than guaranteeing the party's survival, she unintentionally all but guarantees its destruction.
Repository Citation
Meyerson, Gregory. "Aunt Sue's Mistake: False Consciousness in Richard Wright's Bright and Morning Star." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 4, 2008, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss4/12