Urban Hester as a “Vagabond” and the Quest of Subjectivity in Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood

Abstract

Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood, which is one of her The Red Letter Plays, is a contemporary American urban version of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter with an impoverished African American woman, Hester La Negrita, who lives with her five fatherless children under the bridge as a social outcast. Ironically, the hypocritical mainstream, who represents public constitutions—religion, medical service, church, and welfare—and calls Hester a slut, sexually takes advantage of her by using their superior socio-economic status. Indeed, they are all responsible for Hester's promiscuity and her social marginalization. According to Zygmunt Bauman, there are two categories of people in modern consumer society: economically privileged tourists and less privileged vagabonds. From Bauman's metaphorical point of view, Hester is a vagabond who is shunned and marginalized in a capitalist American society. However, Hester challenges the mainstream's views on her personal life, refuses to be judged by the social norms, and tries to recover her autonomous subjectivity even if she has to kill her son for it. Although Hester is the less privileged, downtrodden black woman, she, like classical tragic heroes, evokes the feelings of horror and pity in the Aristotelian sense of the word. In that sense, Hester is a contemporary American tragic hero, and In the Blood is a modern American tragedy.