OSCAR MICHEAUX\u27S NOVELS: BLACK APOLOGIES FOR WHITE OPPRESSION (PRAIRIE; ILLINOIS)

The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze six of Oscar Micheaux\u27s seven popular stylized Afro-American novels published between 1913 and 1947. Essentially a conservative agrarian capitalist who believed that Blacks could succeed in a Jim Crow America only by going west and homesteading, Micheaux grew up in a modest black farm family near Murphysboro, Illinois at the turn of the century. As a novelist he is not polished; he possesses neither an excellent prose style nor the more appealing flourishes of the metaphorical or the rhetorical. Yet Micheaux\u27s thesis is curious for it makes statements about life from a portrayal of the worst side of black experience in America. Most of Micheaux\u27s novels turn on a myth of black inferiority which his protagonist, even though black, is able to transcend because of his conservative philosophy. How his story is retold again and again throughout his works is the subject of this dissertation. The importance of studying Micheaux\u27s writings is not so much in his literary value as in his unwitting illustration of how oppressive myths were forced on Blacks. In chapter one I explore The Conquest which concentrates on that part of his life after leaving home and becoming a homesteader in South Dakota. Chapter two focuses on The Forged Note and concerns his experiences after he is unsuccessful at homesteading. In this novel he is peddling his first book and seeking material for his second. Chapter three returns to his first story and concerns how he in both The Homesteader and The Wind From Nowhere attempts to transform the original tragedy into a success story. Chapter four treats Micheaux\u27s effort to transform his myth to the detective story format in The Case of Mrs. Wingate and The Story of Dorothy Stanfield; in these he is interested in attracting an audience to his novels at the end of his career. In chapter five, I place Micheaux in a context which suggests how his myth reflects and perpetuates black exploitation