The Importance Of Sexuality In James Baldwin's Come Out The Wilderness?

Whilst growing up and going through puberty, one is expected to go through many awkward, downright mortifying experiences before making it through to the other side, the side of young adulthood. The cracking of voices, the sudden acquisition of body odor, and the occasional menstrual mishap while wearing one’s favorite pair of jeans are trying but normal experiences for the pubescent population. Sure, one is likely to remember some of those experiences forever and to have learned lifelong lessons. What if though, someone goes through something acutely distressing and takes that experience in as a lifelong lesson? This is what happens to Ruth, a character in James Baldwin’s “Come Out the Wilderness.” At seventeen, her older brother enters …show more content…
One who is meant to love and protect her is now becoming a violent and oppressive figure, accusing her, “‘You dirty…you dirty…you black and dirty—’” (Baldwin). This utterance is what truly leaves the lasting negative impression upon Ruth’s adult sexuality. Initially, her older brother is identifying her as filth, even going so far as to eliminate the verb “are” from his accusation, pushing Ruth and her relation to something irreversibly contaminated closer together. In the end though, he is not satisfied with just telling her, “‘you dirty…you dirty’” (Baldwin); he feels the need to express to Ruth that she is “‘black and dirty’” (Baldwin, emphasis added). The older brother is twisting the screws of self-hatred harder, damaging and skewing her perception, not only her of sexuality, but of her race. Again, this is not a white man forcing to light the binary oppositions correlated with sexuality, gender, and race, but a black male …show more content…
He had wounded her so deeply she could not face his eyes” (Baldwin). Thus, when opportunity presented itself in the form of a black musician named Arthur, Ruth leapt at the chance to leave her family and the shame behind. She believed that “through him, she got over feeling that she was black and unattractive” (Baldwin, emphasis added). However, as her later relationship with Paul, a white painter, will show that a freshly traumatized teenage Ruth portentously predicted “that nothing would ever make her clean” (Baldwin). The event with her brother in the barn skewed her ideas concerning female sexuality and race and those issues are a recurring theme throughout “Come Out the Wilderness.” Regularly, Paul uses “his you-can’t-say-I-haven’t-been-honest-with-you tone” to let Ruth know that he is “nourishing the hope that the gallery owner’s daughter might find him interesting…Paul was always preparing the way for one unlikely exploit or flight or another” (Baldwin). But why would she stay with him, knowing that he would never give her monogamy or children or anything else that she