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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2014
"A Primitive and Frightening South":
Gender and Sexual Violence in Twentieth
and Twenty-First Century Southern Fiction
Cameron E. Williams
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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
“A PRIMITIVE AND FRIGHTENING SOUTH”:
GENDER AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN
TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
SOUTHERN FICTION
By
CAMERON E. WILLIAMS
A Dissertation submitted to the
Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2014
Cameron Williams defended this dissertation on December 9, 2013.
The members of the supervisory committee were:
Timothy Parrish
Professor Directing Dissertation
Reinier Leushuis
University Representative
Celia Daileader
Committee Member
Diane Roberts
Committee Member
The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and
certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................... iv
INTRODUCTION: “GOTHIC DOOM AND GLOOM”: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE IN THE
SOUTH ............................................................................................................................................1
1.
E(RACE)ING FEMALE SEXUALITY: THE DISCOURSE OF INCEST AND
REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMANHOOD IN THE SOUND AND THE FURY AND TO
KILL A MOCKINGBIRD .......................................................................................................11
“THE IMPULSE TO INCEST”: SOUTHERN FICTION’S FIXATION ...................12
THE “BLACKNESS” OF FEMALE SEXUALITY ....................................................15
THE SOUTHERN LADY: THE “LILY-PURE MAID OF ASTOLAT” ....................17
“HOT HIDDEN FURIOUS”: RACIALIZING CADDY COMPSON.........................19
MAYELLA EWELL’S INTERRACIAL TRANSGRESSION: “WHITE TRASH”
SEXUALITY IN TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD ..........................................................32
2.
“THE LAST TABOO”: RAPE AND MASCULINE EXPRESSION IN DELIVERANCE
AND KARATE IS A THING OF THE SPIRIT ......................................................................49
“READING RAPE” IN SOUTHERN FICTION: THE CULTURE AND ITS
COMPLEX ..................................................................................................................51
THE 1960S AND THE “NEW” THREAT TO SOUTHERN MANHOOD ...............57
ED, BOBBY, AND THE “PENALTY FOR SODOMY”: ENCOUNTERING
“PRIMITIVE” MANHOOD IN DELIVERANCE .......................................................59
“OF WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SUNTAN OIL”: FORGING AN ALTERNATE
MASCULINITY IN KARATE IS A THING OF THE SPIRIT .....................................76
3.
LOVING THE PAST THAT IS DEAD: NECROPHILIA AND MASCULINITY IN
CHILD OF GOD AND TWILIGHT ......................................................................................90
THE UNRELENTING PRESENCE OF THE PAST ..................................................92
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE (DON’T) TALK ABOUT
NECROPHILIA .........................................................................................................100
“THEY SAY HE NEVER WAS RIGHT AFTER HIS DADDY KILLED HISSELF”:
UNBURYING THE PAST IN LESTER BALLARD’S NECROPHILIC, GENDERBENDING PRESENT ..............................................................................................105
“A MODEL OF SARTORIAL ELEGANCE”: THE NECROPHILIAC AS EFFETE
ARISTOCRAT IN TWILIGHT ..................................................................................120
EPILOGUE: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND GENDER REPRESENTATION IN
CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN CULTURE ...........................................................................130
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................137
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................149
iii
ABSTRACT
This dissertation interrogates the intersection of gender representation and sexual violence in
twentieth and twenty-first-century Southern fiction. It looks specifically at incest, rape, and
necrophilia, three forms of sexual violence that appear time and time again in the fiction of the
region. These are forms of sexual violence that in fact have a long and storied place in the
South’s narrative and cultural history. By exploring the South’s historical preoccupation with
sexual violence, this dissertation reveals the extent to which these narratives of incest, rape, and
necrophilia are tangled up with—and in some cases responsible for producing—the South’s ideas
and myths about gender, as well as sexuality, race, and class. This dissertation argues, then, that
Southern writers—William Faulkner, Harper Lee, James Dickey, Harry Crews, Cormac
McCarthy, and William Gay—in their treatments of sexual violence, engage images of Southern
manhood and womanhood as a means of resisting, challenging, or complicating the South’s
complex system of gender, sexual, class, and racial politics. Ultimately, this dissertation hopes to
prove how these writers demonstrate an engagement with the South’s mythologies, and how
even though these writers seem to want to push against them, they very often reaffirm their
value.
iv
INTRODUCTION
“GOTHIC DOOM AND GLOOM”:
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE IN THE SOUTH
Mention “the South” and a catalogue of stereotypes typically comes to mind. More often
than not, the South is considered wild, backwards, violent, perverse, and this is an image that a
number of Southern writers, critics, and historians have helped to perpetuate. W. J. Cash, largely
considered the defining historian of the South, terms the central theme of Southern culture “the
Savage Ideal,” the determination of (white) male society to maintain those customs, traditions,
and “routines of mind” that had been honored and passed down over the course of the South’s
development. Influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner’s idea of the frontier as key to defining
American society, Cash views individualism and self-reliance as certain values that are central to
the Southern way of life. But Cash sees also what Bertram Wyatt-Brown, in his introduction to
The Mind of the South, calls the “darker aspects” of frontier life: violence, lawlessness, and
crudeness, Cash claims, are an endemic part of Southern culture (xviii). In The Mind of the
South, Cash describes the typical (male) Southerner as a violent “hell of a fellow,” an absolute
romantic, but also a complete hedonist (45).
C. Vann Woodward, though critical of Cash’s monolithic notion of the South, also looks
to history to explain the myth behind the region. In The History of Southern Literature, Louis
Rubin cites Woodward’s assertion that
[t]he South’s distinctiveness is rooted in its having had a different historical
experience from the nation at large: where America has known only success and
affluence, the South has known failure, defeat, and poverty; where the nation has
thrived on its myth of innocence, the South has experienced, in the awful burden
of slavery, the reality of evil and a sense of guilt; where the country as a whole
has been optimistic and secure in its progressivist creed, the South’s historical
experience has generated pessimism in Southerners, an awareness of the
limitations of the human condition, and a realization that everything one wants to
do cannot be accomplished. (425)
As Woodward points out, the South has a long history of violence, one that has indeed
contributed to its association with what Teresa Goddu refers to as “gothic doom and gloom” (3).
1
Eudora Welty, one of the South’s most prominent women writers, when asked to comment on
the use of violence in her own work, once said that “[w]ar, bloodshed, massacre were all a part
of the times” (qtd. in Harrison 77). History, she claimed, “tells us worse things” than fiction, and
certainly Southern history in particular seems even to tell us far worse things than American
history in general. It seems banal to say that the time of slavery was one of the darkest and most
violent periods in the South, but the extent of the horror and the lingering effects of this violent
“peculiar institution” continue to be underestimated. Some sixty million slaves died during the
period of American slavery; others were subjected to violent, brutal, and dehumanizing
conditions. Few abuses were off-limits: beatings, hangings, imprisonment, even mutilations were
not uncommon treatments. Female slaves were frequently subject to rape at the hands of their
masters, and those who fled were punished severely. Equally violent were the efforts to fight the
brutalities of slavery. Abolitionary activities—mostly illegal and aggressively suppressed by “the
institutions of social coercion” of individual Southern states—such as Nat Turner’s 1831
insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, or John Brown’s infamous raid on Harper’s Ferry in
1859, were repressed by violent legal action (Curry 315). Both Brown and Turner, only two
examples of many attempts at rebellion, were taken alive, tried, and eventually executed. Only
through a presidential proclamation in 1863 was slavery ultimately abolished, “a proclamation
that was enforced by the federal government in the most costly, in terms of human life, violent
legal action in U.S. history” (315): the American Civil War, which claimed the lives of nearly
700,000 soldiers, both Union and Confederate, black and white.
The legal abolishment of slavery was by no means the end of violence in the South. In
spite of the emancipation of slaves, racism against blacks intensely prevailed. African-Americans
living in the South after the end of the Civil War in the late nineteenth century (and well on into
the twentieth century) were frequently, terrifyingly, unjustified victims of lynching and other
forms of mob violence. Gary M. Ciuba, in Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern
Fiction, cites H.C. Brearley’s finding that out of “1,886 lynchings in the United States from 1900
to 1930, almost 90 percent took place in the South” (3). This statistic confirmed, particularly in
the mind of many Northerners, the South’s proclivity for violence, a reputation “that had been
noted in travel accounts from the late eighteenth century” and that had become well-known a
good thirty years before the outbreak of the Civil War (3). While the South insisted that its
reputation for bloody violence was exaggerated by Northern journalists, statistics prove that the
2
South’s 1850 murder rate “was seven times that of the North” (Bruce qtd. in Ciuba 4). In 1880,
H.V. Redfield, who pioneered the study of “Southern violence,” found that Southerners1 “kill
one another at a rate about eighteen hundred per cent greater than does the population of New
England” (qtd. in Ciuba 4). Between 1920 and 1924, the homicide rate in the South was over two
and half times that of the rest of the United States (Brearley qtd. in Ciuba 4).
As critic Richard Gray too confirms, the South’s association with violence and depravity
is linked with its having undergone “a process of transition … marked by considerable turmoil
and ugliness” (qtd. in Kreyling 111). One of the most obvious products of this process: its
literature. Countless poems, stories, and novels that have “fixed the image of the South in art”
and in the minds of people the world over have come “along with and directly out of the turmoil
and even the violence of the changing South” (111). Indeed, Southern writers seem almost
incapable of ignoring the troubled history of their region; as Lewis P. Simpson remarks in The
Fable of the Southern Writer, Southerners in general and Southern writers in particular are
inclined to see their lives as “always in a dramatic tension with history. […] Accepting such a
vision of the past—out of the fear, it may be said, of the alienation of memory by history—the
southerner was, as [Robert Penn] Warren observed, truly ‘trapped in history’” (77). William
Faulkner—almost inarguably the most notable writer of the twentieth century and of “the
multifaceted place (and metaphor) called the South” (Roberts xi)—is one such writer who
inevitably inherited “the images, icons, and demons of his culture” (xi). Fred Hobson calls
Faulkner “a dispenser of Southern Gothic, a chronicler of a primitive and frightening South”
(“William Faulkner” 437), and certainly, though Faulkner is not an exclusively tragic writer, the
overwhelming majority of his work is rife with representations of violence and corruption. His
“perverse” South is peopled with, as Joel Williamson confirms in William Faulkner and
Southern History, “characters who are sadistic, masochistic, or both” (369). Sanctuary’s (1931)
sociopathic Popeye, who infamously rapes Temple Drake with a corncob, is perhaps the most
shockingly sadistic example; equally perverse is Light in August’s (1932) racially ambiguous,
arguably masochistic “lustmorder,”2 Joe Christmas, the culprit behind Joanna Burden’s
gruesome murder.
1
In Texas, Kentucky, and South Carolina.
In “Southern Expressionism: Apocalyptic Hillscapes, Racial Panoramas, and Lustmord in William Faulkner’s
Light in August,” Jeffrey Stayton refers to Joe Christmas as “a southern version of Expressionism’s ‘New Man’: a
2
3
According to Williamson, Faulkner’s most notorious characters, like Popeye or Joe
Christmas, behave as they do because they “lived and moved upon a marital and sexual
landscape that was in shambles.” He explains:
It was littered with fragments left by a destructive social order—love without
consummation, sex without love or marriage, adultery, rape, attempted rape, rape
with an inanimate object, rape using another male, incest, miscegenation,
prostitution, homosexuality, androgyny, bestiality, voyeurism, nymphomania,
pedophilia, necrophilia, impotence, and, finally, frigidity, both male and female.
Moreover, sex of any kind was very often associated directly with physical
violence. Sometimes it was sex with violence; sometimes, curiously, it was
violence instead of sex. (369)
Williamson’s analysis is especially insightful, for he here points to what is a troubling pattern in
Faulkner’s fiction: the way that violence, more often than not, in some way, shape, or form,
becomes sexualized, and often perversely so. What is perhaps more troubling is not how the
targets of this violence are almost always women, but how critical studies of Faulkner’s
treatment of what I, for the purposes of this dissertation, will refer to as “sexual violence”3 (and
scholarship on Faulkner and “sexual violence” is surprisingly limited) tend to either ignore this
entirely or to understand this as a typical representation of Faulkner’s gender and sexual politics.
Williamson himself explains that Faulkner’s men used violence as a sexual surrogate in order to
evade “the loss of one’s sense of self and power” and compares the connection between violence
and sex to the sacrificial lamb: “Because the danger of loss of self in sex is so great—the
implication of escalating and engrossing commitment so awesome, so beyond one’s clear and
comfortable powers,” he writes, “some ritual sacrifice must be made to honor and meet the
mystery” (390). In other words, violence is what makes Faulkner’s men “men.” Leslie Fiedler
takes this a step further to suggest that Faulkner’s women—who are either “great, sluggish,
mindless daughters of peasants, whose fertility and allure are scarcely distinguishable from those
of a beast in heat,” or “febrile, almost fleshless but sexually insatiable daughters of the
Lustmorder (sexual murderer) who misdirects his impotent rage at his emasculated self and ambiguous identity into
misogynistic violence” (32).
I use the term “sexual violence” to describe any unwanted sexual advance or non-consensual sexual act or
unwanted attempt to obtain a sexual act. The forms of sexual violence dealt with in this study—incest, rape, and
necrophilia—as they occur in the texts I examine, are committed—attempted or otherwise carried out—against an
unwilling party.
3
4
aristocracy” (321)—often “enjoy an occasional beating at the hands of their men” (320). Other
critics, such as Richard Gray, have similarly written of how Faulkner typically ascribes women
with the role of “other,” associating their sexuality with “evil” and thereby legitimating the acts
of violence committed against them. Gray explains that women, in Faulkner’s novels, “constitute
and embody the world outside the Self […] they represent the alien and unknown…call[ing] into
question established codes, habitual methods of mediating, organizing, and explaining
experience” (189).
But to understand “gender” in Faulkner in such narrow terms is problematic for two
reasons. Firstly, it is to disregard Faulkner’s knowledge of and possible investment in some of
the South’s most predominant (and most disconcerting) “structuring myths,” particularly those
that dictate gendered behavior. This includes the codes of Southern womanhood that were
operative during his time and which were responsible for producing and reproducing the
controlling images of white and black female sexuality that have been fixed in our collective
minds: the Southern Belle, the Confederate Woman, and the Mammy are but a few examples of
such archetypal representations.4 Diane Roberts, in Faulkner and Southern Womanhood,
convincingly demonstrates the ways in which Faulkner engages these “stock characters” as a
way of accepting, “sometimes rejecting,” the “matter of the region” about which he wrote (xi).
To understand Faulkner’s response to these images—“reimagining, revising, recovering” (xii)—
or to read them “against the Souths that created them for different social purposes, or reinvented
them at crucial moments in history,” she suggests, is helpful in understanding Faulkner “as a
writer making fiction out of a time and a place” (xii). Certainly, understanding history is part of
understanding Faulkner. As mentioned previously, Faulkner is very much “a product, as well as
a producer” of his time and region (Roberts xi); his knowledge of Southern “structuring myths”
would, therefore, also include codes of Southern manhood. As Craig Thompson Friend and
Lorrie Glover affirm in Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, this is
an area that recent criticism has largely neglected.5 Like womanhood, Southern masculinity is
subject to similar stereotyping; as Friend and Glover explain, “the power of that hegemonic
version of southern manhood”—a version cemented in our cultural consciousness by W.J. Cash
4
Notably, these myths are in and of themselves a form of violence, indicative of an oppressive structure of gender
and sexual politics that legitimates both white and black women’s place in white patriarchy.
Friend and Glover indicate the tendency of masculinity studies—“[t]hroughout the 1990s”—to concentrate on “the
nineteenth-century North” (xiv).
5
5
and Bertram Wyatt-Brown and which values honor, individuality, “valor through vengeance,”
mastery, violence and vigilantism—“has persisted in the historiography” (viii). Roberts’ study of
Faulkner takes as its focus Southern womanhood and therefore does not address issues of
masculinity in any great detail, but I see Faulkner’s representations of manhood as working in
much the same way as his depictions of womanhood. The stock images of women he frequently
employs—the Southern Belle or the Mulatta, to name but two—do, after all, have similar male
counterparts in the Gentleman and the Mulatto.
Secondly, it does not justly explicate the complex and inextricable linkage between
Faulkner’s treatment of violence, sexuality, and his representation of gender. This is important,
for it seems as though Faulkner rarely, if ever, deals with sexual violence without activating or
reactivating certain “stock” images of womanhood and/or manhood.6 And it is through acts of
sexual violence—incest, rape, and necrophilia7—that Faulkner responds to the South’s
complicated network of politics, specifically those relating to gender, class, sexuality, and even
race.8 The Sound and the Fury (1929), a text I will examine in this dissertation, is one such
example. Numerous studies have been devoted to exploring Quentin Compson’s incestuous
desire for his sister, Caddy, the vast majority of which typically offer a psychoanalytic reading of
incest, as it functions in the novel, as in some degree Oedipal in nature.9 While such an analysis
is of course valuable, it overlooks a central and crucial part of The Sound and the Fury: the
novel’s racial politics. According to W.J. Cash, white, upper-class women like Caddy Compson
were regarded as “The South’s Palladium […] the lily-pure maid of Astolat” (86) and were
therefore required to be chaste and pure, virtuous and honorable. Caddy—Faulkner’s selfproclaimed “heart’s darling”—flagrantly defies this code; she assumes certain “masculine” traits
and claims her own agency by exploring her sexuality in spite of the restrictions against it. In so
This is not to say that Faulkner doesn’t engage these images elsewhere, particularly in moments not involving
some sort of sexual violence. It is when these images, as this dissertation hopes to prove, are linked with instances of
sexual violence—that the sex and gender “double-helix” is enacted—that they achieve what I deem their most
profound significance.
6
I’ve chosen to examine incest, rape, and necrophilia because of the ways these forms of sexual violence are
themselves commonly and stereotypically associated with the image of the “backward Southerner.”
7
Williamson explains that most every culture possesses a tendency “to weave together sex and violence” and
suggests that in the South, “because race came to be so thoroughly mixed with sex, and because slavery and race
were themselves deeply and inextricably mixed with violence, sex has had a particular aura of violence” (William
Faulkner and Southern History 389).
8
9
e.g. Karl F. Zender, John T. Irwin, and Diane Roberts.
6
doing, she disrupts Quentin’s sense of order and “contaminates” the Compson family name.
Moreover, she is accused of doing “like nigger women do, hot hidden furious in the dark woods”
(Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 92). In the South, and especially in the realm of The Sound
and the Fury, sexuality is blackness; it is considered “illicit” and “negro.” Caddy is thereby
doubly othered—she is a woman and, when she becomes sexual, she is racialized. As I will
argue through an analysis of the discourse of incest, in her attempts to resist the confines of
“ladyhood,” Caddy becomes something else entirely: a jezebel. As I will further argue, though
Faulkner seems to be using the theme of incest to push against conventional Southern social
codes he is actually, however unknowingly, still participating in—and further perpetuating,
potentially endorsing—a discourse that has shaped, and continues to shape, Southern American
cultural and racial fantasies and anxieties.
It is imperative to discuss Faulkner’s treatment of violence, sexuality, and gender in such
detail because of the ways in which his writing informs both the style and content of other
Southern writers. In the fiction of many of Faulkner’s followers, such as Harper Lee, James
Dickey, Cormac McCarthy, Harry Crews, and William Gay—all authors who will be examined
in this study—representations of violence are frequently and similarly—and as in Faulkner, often
perversely—sexualized. And as is true of Faulkner, in their treatments of incest, rape, and
necrophilia, these writers seem to unfailingly (re)activate certain codes of womanhood and/or
manhood. I offer a reading of the sexual and racial politics of Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird (1960), for instance, as working in much the same way as in The Sound and the
Fury. Throughout Lee’s novel—a fixture on most elementary/middle school reading lists and on
which the scholarship is therefore impressively limited—Scout Finch staunchly resists what she
views as the oppressive confines of white “ladyhood.” As will be discussed in Chapter One,
Scout, like Caddy—“always a king or a giant or a general” (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
173)—assumes a number of masculine characteristics and is quick to anger when Jem teases her
for acting “like a girl” (Lee 69). The novel, published at the high point of the Civil Rights
Movement, can be and is often read as a criticism of the hierarchical system that places women
and “ladies” in different categories and places blacks as inferior to whites. And yet, Mayella
Ewell’s willingness to break the miscegenation taboo because “she never kissed a grown man
before an’ she might as well kiss a nigger” (260) and the insinuated, doubtlessly non-consensual
relationship between Mayella and her father—Tom tells the courtroom: “She says what her papa
7
do to her don’t count” (260)—I argue, reaffirms the negative association between lower-class
white women—“poor white trash”—and illicit sexuality.
This dissertation aims to investigate why (sexual) violence—specifically incest, rape, and
necrophilia—is a topic to which Southern writers continue to return. It furthermore looks to
explore how their treatments of such violence engage images of Southern manhood and/or
womanhood and thereby become a means of responding to the South’s intricate and complex
system of gender, class, sexual, and racial politics. I hope to demonstrate that while these writers
seem to link sexual violence and gender in particular to push against conventional Southern
codes, they often end up redrawing some very familiar lines in the sand. This dissertation then
assumes a third goal: perhaps not to answer but to explore the question, “What is it that makes
‘the matter of the region’ so seemingly impossible to shake?”
Chapter One will examine incest in The Sound and the Fury (what is essentially imagined
or suggested rape between family members) and To Kill a Mockingbird. This chapter begins by
examining a question posed by Karl F. Zender: “What does incest mean in William Faulkner’s
fiction?” (739). I contest psychoanalytic readings of The Sound and the Fury that understand
“incest” as Oedipal and, as mentioned previously, explore the ways in which the discourse of
incest, throughout the novel, is racialized. In so doing, I offer a historical analysis to
contextualize the association of black women with illicit sexuality. This chapter also engages
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the classical and grotesque bodies, which helps to illuminate the
difference between white and black female sexuality as understood in the South. I take a similar
approach to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, as detailed previously.10 Admittedly, the incest
that occurs between Mayella Ewell and her father in Lee’s novel is only ever briefly insinuated
and can be easily overlooked if not careful. But as I maintain, that “white trash” Mayella is the
only sexual character in the novel and the only character to transgress the town’s rigid
miscegenation taboo reinforces the very social structure that the novel ostensibly seeks to
combat—that is, the almost invisible divide between the “white trash,” the sexual, and the black.
The analysis I offer here also looks at the image of the Southern Gentleman, seen through
This portion of Chapter One has been published—under the title “E(Race)ing Female Sexuality in Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird”—in the 2013 Cambridge volume, Constructing the Literary Self: Race and Gender in
Twentieth-Century Literature.
10
8
Atticus Finch, as another means through which class and race divisions are not only made
conspicuous, but are valorized.
While Chapter One deals primarily with images of womanhood and female sexuality,
Chapter Two takes images of masculinity as its main focus. This chapter looks closely at maleon-male rape in James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) and Harry Crews’s Karate Is a Thing of the
Spirit (1972). This chapter situates these novels within a framework of Southern masculinities
and contextualizes the social and political atmosphere out of which both novels emerged. This
chapter argues that Deliverance and Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit address the 1960s’ South’s
“crisis of masculinity” brought about by a renewed interest in women’s rights, the Civil Rights
movement, and the Gay Liberation movement and places each novel’s representation of male
rape within the context of the South’s “rape complex.”
Chapter Three continues the investigation of Southern manhood and performance by
juxtaposing the treatment of necrophilia in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God (1973) and
William Gay’s Twilight (2006). Like Ed Gentry, Lester—a lower-class outcast—and Fenton
Breece—an effete aristocrat—seem acutely aware of the performative nature of gender; in this
chapter, I examine the ways that Child of God’s Lester Ballard and Twilight’s Fenton Breece
“perform” masculinity, most often in an effort to be accepted by other members of their
community. In so doing, Lester and Fenton victimize women, eventually resorting to killing them
and sexually abusing their corpses. This chapter therefore further argues that it’s through these
acts of sexualized violence that McCarthy’s and Gay’s novels also engage a variety of stock
images of white Southern manhood and womanhood, images ranging from representations of
“white trash” masculinity and femininity to aristocratic notions of “gentlemanliness” and
“ladyhood,” issues these authors are otherwise thought to avoid or ignore.
The epilogue will synthesize the discoveries made in the previous chapters and will
further expand upon two questions previously posed: 1) Why is sexual violence—specifically
incest, rape, and necrophilia—a topic to which Southern writers continue to return?; and 2) Why
is it so difficult for Southern writers to escape the history of the South? While I don’t necessarily
seek to answer these questions, I do hope to provide some new ways of understanding the
intimate connection between violence, sexuality, and gender as they function in Southern
literature.
9
Ultimately, I hope for this dissertation to contribute to studies of Southern literature and
to perhaps correct the lack of scholarship dealing with sexual violence and representations of
gender. I hope to demonstrate the ways in which Faulkner, Lee, Dickey, Crews, McCarthy, and
Gay, through their respective treatments of incest, rape, and necrophilia, engage codes of
Southern manhood and womanhood as a means of responding to—resisting, complicating, and
somehow possibly endorsing—the South’s multifaceted network of gender, class, sexual, and
racial politics. In linking sexual violence with certain “stock” images of manhood and
womanhood, Faulkner, Lee, Dickey, Crews, McCarthy, and Gay above all offer an examination
of the human condition, an examination that speaks volumes about emerging definitions of
Southern identity.
10
CHAPTER ONE
E(RACE)ING FEMALE SEXUALITY:
THE DISCOURSE OF INCEST AND REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMANHOOD
IN THE SOUND AND THE FURY AND TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
Karl F. Zender poses what seems a simple enough question in “Faulkner and the Politics
of Incest” when he asks, “What does incest mean in William Faulkner’s fiction?” (739). But, as
numerous notable scholars have long contended, this question is far from simple. Part of the
reason for this is because so much of Faulkner’s fiction, as Joel Williamson writes, is “fraught”
with incest (387); in William Faulkner and Southern History, Williamson locates representations
of incest1 in a number of Faulkner’s early works. These texts include the unpublished Elmer
(1925), in which the titular character possesses “strong but diffused sexual feelings for his sister
who was both ‘Diana like’ and resembled his mother,” an early draft of Mosquitoes (1926)
wherein “eighteen year old Patricia Robyn, called ‘Pat,’ crawled into bed with her older brother
and nuzzled him about the neck and face,” and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which Charles Bon
uses the threat of incest “as retribution for the sins of his father” (387). Recent criticism has also
turned its eye toward the arguably subtle themes of incest in Faulkner’s “pulp” novel, Sanctuary
(1931). John T. Matthews, for example, writes of “the elliptical nature” of Temple’s abuse at the
hands of her father and brothers (qtd. in Scheel). Though none of the characters physically
engage in any act of incest, he suggests, the threat looms heavy over the entire course of the
novel. Kathleen M. Scheel, conversely, asserts that the incest in Sanctuary does not stay “safely
within the realm of male fantasy” but is “a real victimization” that Temple not only experiences
but represses, a victimization that furthermore compels her to “reenact the initial event” (“Incest,
Repression, and Repetition-Compulsion”). According to Diane Roberts, Temple is not the only
object of incestuous desire; Horace Benbow is also “unadmittedly aroused” by thoughts of Little
Bell, his own daughter (137).
Yet of all Faulkner’s depictions of intrafamilial transgressions, it is Quentin Compson’s
incestuous desire for his sister, Caddy, that scholars have most struggled to analyze. Quentin’s is
what Williamson calls “[t]he most powerful and complicated case of incestuous feelings” in all
of Faulkner’s oeuvre, a longing to “possess [Caddy] to the exclusion of all others” that is at once
1
The representations of incest Williamson discusses are limited only to brother-sister relationships.
11
compounded and complicated by the need for her to “remain pure and untouched” (387). What,
though, as Zender inquires, does this incest mean in Faulkner’s fiction? Cleanth Brooks insists
that it “expresses ‘alarm at the breakdown of sexual morality’ by attempting to define a ‘point
beyond which surely no one would venture to transgress,’” while John T. Irwin sees incest as it
“joins with doubling, repetition, and revenge to enact a doomed oedipal struggle against the
priority of the father over the son and of the past over the present and the future” (qtd. in Zender
739). Zender himself views incest, specifically as it functions in The Sound and the Fury (1929),
not only as a means of obviating Caddy’s sexuality and attempt to deny the Compson family’s
descent into “the modern age,” but also as it “intimates a balked desire to encounter time and
sexuality positively, to reach that moment of emotional transition in which male entry into the
‘dark ditch’ of sexual maturation merges with acceptance of death and change” (747, 48).
Because Faulkner is often regarded as the “father” of Southern literature, the exemplary
Southern writer, his incest narratives have received the most significant critical attention.
However, as Minrose Gwin observes, narratives of incest have circulated in and about the culture
(and fiction) of the South practically since its inception (qtd. in Barnes 4). Rather than simply
asking what incest means in Faulkner’s fiction, it may make more sense to ask what incest means
in the fiction of any Southern writer. Why is this a trope to which so many Southern writers
continue to return?
“THE IMPULSE TO INCEST”: SOUTHERN FICTION’S FIXATION
In Incest and the Literary Imagination, Elizabeth Barnes points out that incest narratives
“have historically been aimed at marginal or underprivileged groups as a way of demonizing
them” (3). In the South, especially, incest has typically been associated with rural, lower-class
white culture; it is a “vice of the poor,” says Elizabeth Wilson, a vice of which middle-class
families have historically denied the existence and have instead “projected onto the lower
classes” (qtd. in Barnes 4). Erskine Caldwell’s sensationalist novel, Tobacco Road (1932), is
quite possibly the most well-known work of Southern fiction to capitalize on this dynamic.
Caldwell, a native Georgian writing during the Depression era, depicts what Malcolm Bradbury
describes as the “base underside to the Southern Agrarianism that developed as a cultural and
literary tendency during the 1930s” (135). Tobacco Road depicts the difficult life of the Lesters,
12
a stereotypically poor white tenant family struggling to survive during the Great Depression in
Georgia, as a life of “degeneracy, primitivism, and cunning,” and one in which incestuous
relations—particularly between pater familias Jeeter Lester and one of his daughters—are more
than commonplace (Bradbury 136). Kenneth Burke explains Caldwell’s tendency to put his
characters in situations wherein they behave “with the scant, crude tropisms of an insect,” and
Caldwell himself—a subscriber to the naturalist mode of literature—once said his goal was to
describe to “the best of” his own ability “the aspirations and despair” of the people about whom
he wrote (qtd. in Bradbury 136). Dorothy Allison, on the other hand, another Southern “realist”
writer, offers a different perspective of incest as it occurs in poor white families. In Bastard Out
of Carolina (1992), Allison’s treatment of the violation against Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright
by her stepfather, Daddy Glen, along with Bone’s subsequent “coming-of-age,” work against
Caldwell’s stereotyped portrayal of poor white Southerners by “attempt[ing] to recover positive
meaning from the designation ‘white trash’—a concept the author herself personally embraces”
(Duvall 369).
But just as incest has been a “vice of the poor,” it has equally been viewed as “the
prerogative of the rich.” Barnes explains:
[I]n medieval and early modern literature in particular, incest frequently
represents aristocratic privilege. Although on the one hand incest was considered
the vice of the untutored and uncultured, on the other hand it represented a way
for the powerful to maintain and solidify their political control. Relying on the
theories of sociologists like Raymond Firth, Frank Whigham argues that the
impulse to incest functions as a response to the fear of contamination on the part
of the elite by invasion from the lower classes. (4)
Self-proclaimed “Virginia gentleman,” Edgar Allan Poe, offers a disturbing critique of this
“privilege” in his gothic short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). A common
interpretation of the story’s conclusion holds that the aristocratic Usher family’s long history of
intermarriage is singularly responsible for the destruction of the House of Usher, a term that
refers both to the house itself and to siblings Roderick and Madeline. 2 In this regard, Poe’s
narrative suggests the opposite of Whigham’s analysis: that “contamination” of the elite comes
The narrator describes the Ushers as a family whose tree, “all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period,
any enduring branch” (Poe 127).
2
13
not from an “invasion” of lower class outsiders, but from within. Similarly, “Venus, Cupid, Folly
and Time” (1959), Peter Taylor’s more contemporary nod to Poe, explores the implied
incestuous relationship between the elderly and once aristocratic Dorset siblings and its impact
on the Chatham community’s younger generation. In what Minrose Gwin and Trudier Harris call
“a disturbing examination of social behavior” (“The Contemporary South” 587), Taylor’s story
reveals the dangers of the “social inbreeding of the cultural elite,” the evils of the Southern
community that closes itself off to “new blood” (Duvall 369).
Incest has historically, and perhaps more sinisterly, also been linked to conceptions of
race. In the South, this served as what Sander Gilman describes as “an effort to perpetuate and
reinforce certain racial and ethnic stereotypes” (qtd. in Barnes 4), which was ultimately a means
of maintaining white patriarchal control. In fiction, particularly in Southern Gothic fiction,
representations of incest are often closely tied to ideologies of slavery. Teresa Goddu, in Gothic
America, acknowledges that many of the tropes prevalent in gothic fiction—the popularity of
which coincided with the increasingly heated debate over the institution of slavery—such as “the
terror of possession, the iconography of entrapment and imprisonment, and…familial
transgressions,” were also present in the Southern slave system (73). Incest was an especially
common trope in “Tragic Mulatta” narratives—a brand of fiction often employed by both
abolitionists and supporters of slavery—such as Richard Hildreth’s The Slave (1836), Thomas
Dixon’s Sins of the Father (1910), or even Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses
(1942). Because interracial relationships were “a source of great anxiety” and because it was not
uncommon for white slave owners to rape and reproduce with their female slaves and their own
mulatta daughters, or for sons of plantation masters to do the same to their mulatta half-sisters,
Southerners like Henry Hughes were inclined to understand “miscegenation” and “incest” as one
and the same (Roberts 80).3 In Treatise on Sociology (1854), Hughes declares that
“[a]malgamation is incest”: “The same law which forbids consanguineous amalgamation forbids
ethnical amalgamation. Both are incestuous” (qtd. in Roberts 80).
3
Gayl Jones interrogates the effects of this—from an African-American female perspective—in Corregidora
(1975). Jones’s novel tells the story of Ursa Corregidora (U.C.), who inherits the trauma of rape and incest passed
down through three generations of women. U.C. grew up hearing the stories of her great-grandmother’s and
grandmother’s history as slaves and the violent sexual abuse they each endured at the hands of their tyrannical
master, Corregidora.
14
Notably, Zender’s discussion of incest in The Sound and the Fury points to a connection
between Caddy’s sexuality and the transgression of class and racial boundaries. However, while
he acknowledges Quentin’s comment about Caddy behaving “like nigger women,” his remark
about Caddy kissing “some darn town squirt,” and Quentin’s fixation on “the little Italian girl’s”
immigrant status, he refrains from exploring this connection (which he makes somewhat
reluctantly) in any great detail (748). In fact, most scholarship overwhelmingly ignores the
novel’s racial politics, perhaps one of the most crucial aspects of The Sound and the Fury.4 I
refer to the politics of race as crucial because of the ways in which they are so closely bound
with the novel’s sexual politics. That is to say, Faulkner constructs sexuality—specifically,
female sexuality—not only as “evil” and “dirty,” but as black. As Diane Roberts explains in
Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, female sexuality is blackness; in the South, she claims, the
“very nature of sexuality” is considered “illicit” and “Negro” (116). And Faulkner is not the only
Southern writer to play with this convention: as this chapter seeks to prove, Harper Lee’s
examination of class and racial politics in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), seen especially through
the implicitly incestuous relationship between Mayella Ewell and her father and her interracial
transgression with Tom Robinson, sheds a similar light on the nature of female sexuality in the
South. Therefore, my general purpose in this chapter is to examine the ways in which the
discourse of incest, in both Faulkner’s novel and Lee’s, becomes racialized. Although Faulkner
and Lee seem to be using the theme of incest to push against conventional Southern social codes
they are actually, however unknowingly, still participating in—and further perpetuating,
potentially endorsing—a discourse that has shaped, and continues to shape, Southern American
cultural and racial fantasies and anxieties.
THE “BLACKNESS” OF FEMALE SEXUALITY
Illicit sexuality has long been associated with “blackness”; as Roberts reminds us, “the
Spirit of Fornication in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) is ‘a little foul, ugly Ethiop’” (73).
Tracing representations of interracial sex from the Early Modern period to the present, Celia
Most scholarship also ignores Caddy. As Linda W. Wagner writes: “The centrality of Caddy Compson to The
Sound and the Fury is one of those critical commonplaces that may become blurred through the years. Every reader
respects Caddy; Faulkner himself told us the book was about Caddy” (49). And yet, as Wagner observes,
contemporary criticism is seemingly more interested in the other, predominately male characters (with the exception
of Dilsey). There are, Wagner writes, “comparatively few studies that deal primarily with Caddy” (49).
4
15
Daileader explains that “masculinist racist hegemony” perpetuated myths of black male
hypersexuality as a means of controlling white female sexuality. Daileader recounts the
testimony of medieval women accused of witchcraft who claim to have had sex with a “black”
devil. These women repeatedly mention the devil’s penis, reporting its “massive size and shape”
and its appearance as “black and covered with scales” (Friedman qtd. in Daileader 1). The devil
described here, she affirms, “oddly prefigures the modern myth of the hypersexual black male”
(1).
This figure assumed a dominant role in pervading Southern racial myths. Because of the
antebellum South’s insistence on maintaining white patriarchal control, of preserving a racial
hierarchy sustained by the institution of slavery, the image of the “black beast rapist” was
deployed by white Southerners as a way to legitimate denying black slaves any kind of freedom
or autonomy. Abolition granted to slaves by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 intensified the
white South’s terror of losing authority and concretized the need for the demonization of black
men. As Martha Elizabeth Hodes explains in White Women, Black Men, without slavery, white
Southerners needed another means by which to maintain their established racial hierarchy.
Because of their potential to gain more economic and political power than women, newly freed
black men were viewed as posing the most dangerous threat to white patriarchy; it was black
men who singlehandedly possessed the ability to destroy the South as white patriarchs knew it
(147). To quell “the alarm of diminishing white supremacy,” white Southerners “fastened on the
taboo of sex between black men and white women with newfound urgency,” claiming that such
relations would “destroy the white race” (147).5
But slavery had allowed for—almost encouraged—sex between white men and black
women, and control of women’s bodies—both white and black—was not something that white
patriarchs were ready to relinquish.6 While the image of the fearsome hypersexual black male
was used to inhibit interracial sex between black men and white women, his counterpart, the
sexually aggressive black female—the jezebel—was used by white men to justify the sexual
exploitation of black women. Christine Palumbo-DeSimone acknowledges Alice Walker’s
observation that prescribed notions of black female identity, these racial myths, in American
5
This was the impetus behind the decree “amalgamation is incest.”
Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) reveals the horror of “the constant
battle of entitlement” between white male slaveowners and their black female slaves and “exposes the sexual
advances of white slaveowners as uninvited and unwelcome” (Love 497).
6
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culture have, for generations, been “powerfully deterministic” (125). From “mules” to
“mammies” to “whores,” the “folklore” of black womanhood “has been used to legitimate and
perpetuate the oppression of black women in white patriarchy […] primarily because her persona
as someone who shoulders cultural ‘burdens’ has served the mythology so well” (125). The
jezebel played a key role in the South’s collection of racial myths, particularly in the way that
this figure was used to serve certain social and political functions—namely, upholding white
patriarchal order. In a region where sexuality often operated as a mode of oppression, the jezebel
further perpetuated myths of black “animal” sexuality and became another image by which to
control female sexuality, allowing white men “the convenience” of deeming black women as
subhuman (Roberts 74).
THE SOUTHERN LADY: THE “LILY-PURE MAID OF ASTOLAT”
White women, on the other hand—particularly Southern white women of the
aristocracy—were required to be paragons of chastity and virtue. Allison Glock describes the
Southern Lady in “Southern Women: A New Generation of Women Who Are Redefining the
Southern Belle”:
It is not posturing, or hyperbole, or marketing […] Southern women, unlike
women from Boston or Des Moines or Albuquerque, are leashed to history. For
better or worse, we are forever entangled in and infused by a miasma of mercy
and cruelty, order and chaos, cornpone and cornball, a potent mix that leaves us
wise, morbid, good-humored, God-fearing, outspoken and immutable […] To be
born a Southern woman is to be made aware of your distinctiveness. And with it,
the rules. The expectations. These vary some, but all follow the same basic
template, which is, fundamentally, no matter what the circumstance, Southern
women make the effort. Which is why even the girls in the trailer parks paint their
nails. And why overstressed working moms still bake three dozen homemade
cookies for the school fund-raiser. And why you will never see Reese
Witherspoon wearing sweatpants […] It…means never leaving the house with
wet hair…Because wet hair is low-rent […] When you are born into a history as
loaded as the South’s, when you carry in your bones the incontrovertible
17
knowledge of man’s violence and limitations, daring to stay sweet is about the
most radical thing you can do. (56)
Glock’s article appears in the August/September 2011 issue of Southern lifestyle magazine
Garden & Gun, which is why I reproduce this portion at such length: it is evidence of the
tenacity of the South’s structuring myths, confirmation of their persistence, and, most
importantly, an indication of the extent to which Southern women have been conditioned to
accept their roles in society. While Glock seems to suggest that to embrace “the rules” and
“expectations” of womanhood is “radical,” she makes visible some of the darker aspects of being
a Southern woman. She not only articulates the class distinctions that separate women from
“ladies” (“wet hair is low rent,” “even the girls in the trailer park paint their nails” [56, emphasis
mine]), but furthermore reveals—through reference to never seeing Reese Witherspoon in
sweatpants—that there are certain things that “ladies” should never do, that some “unsightly”
behavior should not be visible but should only be performed in private.7
Glock’s is not a “re”definition. What she essentially does instead is describe what has
long been considered the ideal Southern Lady: the ideal lady represents the clean, closed,
classical body, and is virginal, graceful, and passive. Richard Gray, in Writing the South, reminds
us of Faulkner’s sense of “regionalism” and explains that Faulkner was acutely aware of—and in
some cases, largely invested in—many of “the South’s structuring myths,” including the cult of
Southern Womanhood, which made possible the association of white, upper-class women with
“the very notion” of the South (189). The cult of Southern Womanhood relied on a clear division
of roles, and black women—who occupied the lowest stratum of the South’s social hierarchy—
were thereby assigned the “sexual function.” Of course, black women were not the only women
to ever engage in sexual relations, but “were those with whom the sexual dimension of
experience was habitually and mythically associated” (Gray 189). This, Gray explains, made it
infinitely easier to transform the majority of white women into angelic emblems of perfection
and purity, women whose sexuality was minimized to the point of complete absence. On their
bodies were written expressions of the South’s ideal; Gray cites W.J. Cash’s claim that the white
woman became “the South’s Palladium…the shield-bearing Athena gleaming whitely in the
clouds…the mystic symbol of its nationality…the lily-pure maid of Astolat” (189). Cash
Glock also writes that Southern women “like men and allow them to stay men” (56), an issue that subsequent
chapters will address.
7
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certainly recognizes a model that largely defined the Southern way of thought, a model through
which it became possible “to contain [female] sexuality by compartmentalizing it” (189), to
suppress it to the point of near erasure.
“HOT HIDDEN FURIOUS”: RACIALIZING CADDY COMPSON
Whereas “whiteness” defines “normal” sexuality in which men are active and women are
passive, “being Black signals the wild, out-of-control hyperheterosexuality of excessive sexual
appetite” (Collins 129). Are these definitions mutually exclusive? If to be black means to
possess an insatiable animal sexuality, does it mean that one who has a sexual appetite must be
“black”?
For Jason and Quentin Compson, it seems that the answer is a resounding yes. This
explains the Compson family’s near fanatical concern with issues of female virtue. Caddy is a
character that refuses to be neatly compartmentalized, and once Caddy becomes sexual, she
consigns herself to “a fate worse than death” (Roberts 113). But this fate is two-fold; Caddy
doesn’t just have sex, but is accused of doing “like nigger women do in the pasture the ditches
the dark woods hot hidden furious in the dark woods” (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 92).
Here, gender and race are inextricably bound. Female sexuality isn’t merely something shameful,
but “something dark, something Negro” (Roberts 79), something ultimately evil. My purpose
here is to examine The Sound and the Fury’s inextricable linkage between race and sexuality, for
Faulkner’s is a novel quite literally obsessed with female sexuality, but the ideology behind this
is strangely and ironically “sex-phobic.” In so doing, I will make three interrelated claims: 1)
Caddy is the object of incestuous desire not only for Quentin, but also for Jason, and this
“doubling” compounds the significance of Faulkner’s use of this trope and of its language; 2)
Racializing Caddy through language, for both Quentin and Jason, is not, as Zender suggests, a
simple means of underscoring the transgressive nature of incestuous desire, nor is it an effort
“not to arrest Caddy’s development but to join her in it” (747). Rather, this language functions as
a way for Quentin and Jason to validate their obsessions with Caddy and thereby legitimize their
once compromised masculinity; (3) Though the theme of incest seems to be used as a way for
Faulkner to challenge conventional Southern racial and gender codes, his use of a racialized
19
sexual discourse serves to further perpetuate a discourse that has shaped, and continues to shape,
Southern American cultural and racial fantasies and anxieties.
As a daughter of the aristocracy—at least, insofar as Mrs. Compson sees it, making
frequent references to the importance of “her people,” the Bascombs—Caddy is obligated to
adhere to a strict definition of Southern Lady: she should represent the clean, closed, classical
body, and should be virginal, graceful, and passive. But Caddy defies this expectation and
collapses gender binaries in her ability to negotiate male and female spaces. Quentin recalls how
as a child, “she never was a queen or a fairy she was always a king or a giant or a general”
(Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 173). Similarly, Benjy remembers Mr. Compson placing
Caddy in charge of the three boys on the night of Damuddy’s funeral (24). Much to the chagrin
of Jason and Quentin, the oldest son and heir to the Compson throne, Caddy here assumes the
dominant, masculine role. By usurping Quentin’s position as “eldest son,” she has robbed him of
his cultural identity (Clarke 24). In what is inarguably the most pivotal scene of the novel, Benjy
recalls one of Quentin’s early efforts to restore order and reclaim his role as heir apparent:
Caddy, seven years old, squats down in the creek and muddies her dress. Versh warns her that
she will undoubtedly get a whipping if her mother sees her dress wet and dirty, and so Caddy
decides: “I’ll take it off…Then it’ll dry.” Horrified, Quentin tells her, “I bet you better not.” But
Quentin’s attempt to control Caddy’s body fails; Caddy almost eagerly defies him and orders
Versh to unbutton and remove her dress. Here, Caddy’s dirty drawers are commonly read as
prefiguring menstruation, “the ‘taint’ of female sexuality and pollution” (Roberts 116); what’s
more, Caddy—a young white girl—is being willingly undressed by a black boy, flagrantly
disregarding the rigid miscegenation taboo. Caddy may not physically engage in interracial sex,
but she doesn’t need to—she is polluted, in effect contaminated, the moment she orders the black
servant Versh to undress her, to “uncover her nakedness,” in front of her three brothers.
And it is this language of contamination that saturates the novel: Quentin recalls a
conversation between his parents in which Mrs. Compson tells her husband that Caddy “not only
drags your name in the dirt but corrupts the very air your children breathe” (Faulkner, The Sound
and the Fury 104); Jason too remembers Dilsey wanting to set up a crib for Caddy’s daughter
Quentin in Caddy’s old room. Mrs. Compson vehemently objects: “To be contaminated by that
atmosphere? It’ll be hard enough as it is, with the heritage she already has” (198). Caddy’s
promiscuity is more than a stain on the Compson family name. Her sexuality is described like a
20
sickness; it’s contagious—it corrupts and infects. This language marks most explicitly the
interplay between discourse and power, for Caddy is a figure constructed entirely through her
brothers’ voices, present only through absence. As Deborah Clarke points out, because the
Compson men (notably Quentin and Jason) fail to control Caddy’s body, “they are left to
confront their own impotence and undoing.” The brothers therefore “take refuge in discourse,
using language in an attempt to recover what is irreparably lost—the narcissistic union with the
mother, in this case figured as the sister” (24). Clarke’s argument is compelling, but narrow—the
Compson men take refuge in discourse not to recover a narcissistic union with the mother, but to
regain control of what is “irreparably lost”: their own masculinity.
Critics have noticed that Faulkner’s novel represents a broad spectrum of white
masculinities through Benjy, Quentin, and Jason, with each brother embodying a different
masculine ideal.8 Through their respective narratives, The Sound and the Fury “constructs a clear
historical periodization of Southern manhood, one that situates modern Southern masculinity in
relationship to the ‘aristocratic’ ideal of manhood that preceded it” (Breu 107). This aristocratic
ideal was a masculinity organized around the axioms of “mastery” and “honor.” Such a
paradigm, which has come to dominate the historical perception of white masculinity in the
South, has been used by critics and historians to explain men’s relationships with women,
children, slaves, and other men. “Honor”—an especially important part of constructions of
manhood in the late nineteenth century, the emphasis on which was largely a product of nostalgia
for the romanticized “Old South” meant to underscore the South’s commitment to tradition in an
increasingly modernizing era—was a central facet of men’s “civic identity” and was therefore
most often demonstrated in the public sphere (Friend and Glover viii). “Mastery,” though very
similar to conceptions of honor and an equally important part of men’s identity, was, more often
than not, realized internally through landownership and the successful management of an
independent household that included a subservient wife, children, and (when possible) slaves. To
simultaneously demonstrate self-restraint and authority over the household was the ultimate
mark of an honorable, masterful man. This is not to say that mastery did not have “a profound
public dimension that permeated Southern society”; indeed, the South’s emphasis on
See, for example, Christopher Breu’s “Privilege’s Mausoleum: The Ruination of White Southern Manhood in The
Sound and the Fury.” Breu argues that The Sound and the Fury “enacts a critique of masculinist historicism and the
dominant forms of manhood present in the south” (110). However, as I hope to prove in this chapter, that
Faulkner—a male writer—through his male characters, uses a masculinist, racialized discourse to construct his
female characters serves to endorse, not critique, the South’s dominant manhood.
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individualism and mastery of slaves and women were very much core components of antebellum
culture (x).
The end of the Civil War, the South’s defeat and the subsequent abolition of slavery,
prompted Southern men to reconfigure the conception of manhood that had previously relied on
victory and slavery as the principal means of demonstrating honor and mastery. These ideals
were not eliminated entirely; instead, men were impelled to find other ways of exhibiting an
effective masculinity that still valued the honor-mastery exemplar. While they remained essential
traits, honor and mastery were “co-opted, transformed, and even rejected on occasion by the
diverse men who populated the South” (Friend and Glover x). According to Christopher Breu,
Jason Compson—who has perhaps the most malicious attitude toward Caddy—represents such
an effort, particularly as he continuously (and hypocritically) criticizes aristocratic manhood’s
insistence on demonstrating “honor.” He typifies a masculinity specific to the “New South”: his
ideology—his preoccupation with “the implacable workings of a present and future that he
perceives as hostile to his interests as the twentieth-century heir to the aristocratic lineage of the
past” and his lingering investment in the privileges he believes such a lineage have secured for
him—can be, as Breu maintains, situated within the framework of what critic Kevin Railey
designates as the “specifically southern version of liberalism” that was popular in the early part
of the twentieth century (117). On the surface, this version favored the “egalitarian principles”
championed by late nineteenth-century Populists; this pretense, however, was belied by
adherents’ more pressing concern with sustaining white middle-class male privilege, especially
in the face of “any political or social incursions made by African Americans and women” (117).
If “time and history are explicitly allegorized in Faulkner’s novel…as male”—that is, if
each Compson brother represents a point on the historical continuum of past, present, and
future—then Jason exemplifies “the anxiety-ridden attempt at the reconstitution of white male
privilege in the future-oriented liberal ideology of the New South” (Breu 107, 110). Certainly,
Jason is far more immersed in the future than any of his Compson brethren; however, Jason
hasn’t detached himself from the “past” as much as Breu seems to suggest. Though he
acknowledges Jason’s criticism (and simultaneous invocation) of the aristocratic model of
22
“honor,” Breu fails to acknowledge the ways in which Jason still organizes his perception of
masculinity around its twin ideal: “mastery.”9
For Jason, who constantly harangues his black workers for being lazy yet never lifts a
finger, that mastery—particularly over Caddy—is most effectively realized through language.
And Jason, as indicated by the opening line of his section—“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I
say” (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 180)—is vindictive. Here he is speaking of the female
Quentin, the “product of [Caddy’s] ‘bitchery’” (Roberts 114). For Jason, Quentin isn’t simply
Caddy’s daughter; she is Caddy’s “double.” It is through her that Jason tries to obtain control of
Caddy. While some of his revenge is physical—he frequently threatens to beat her and steals
and/or withholds her money—Jason’s real method of regaining control of Caddy is through
language, calling Quentin a “bitch,” a “whore,” and “a dam little slut” (Faulkner, The Sound and
the Fury 185). And, if Faulkner is as clever and as well read as he evidently wants his readers to
believe—the allusions to various Shakespeare plays, specifically, are numerous —he doubtless
would not have overlooked the suggestive pun embedded within the name Quentin. 10 The
likeness to the early modern word “quaint” (or, cunt) reduces her name of being to the
physiological body part—the ultimate form of objectification. Roberts is right to point out that
Jason is supremely misogynistic: in his view, women should be passive, subordinate, and “must
be controlled by a magisterial phallus” (114). Caddy (and her daughter Quentin) refuses
passivity. Her capacity to move between masculine and feminine realms disrupts Jason’s
understanding of established codes of gendered behavior. But for Jason, to relegate Caddy to the
realm of “feminine” simply isn’t revenge enough for costing him a lucrative banking job. Caddy
must occupy a negative feminine space; to reinscribe Caddy as a slut, a whore, and a bitch—
names that represent a marginal femininity—is to place her as inferior to what he deems his
hegemonic masculinity.
Breu refers to the scene in which Jason complains to the store’s owner about what a nightmare his niece, Quentin,
is in order to demonstrate how, “[e]ven as Jason seems to mock his aristocratic heritage in this passage, he is also
careful to invoke it. Moreover, he suggests that all he has inherited from his aristocratic lineage is the responsibility
(here presented as his paternalist responsibility to protect the honor of the white women he lives with—especially
when they don’t seem to desire such protection—and feed the ‘niggers’ who work on the family estate) without any
of the honor and privilege” (118).
9
10
The title of the novel itself encourages readers to think of Shakespeare. Citing Joseph Blotner, Erin E. Campbell
notes in “‘Sad generations seeking water’: the social construction of madness in O(phelia) and Q(uentin Compson),”
“Faulkner clearly intends us to read with a literal eye on his novel and his South and a figurative one on Shakespeare
and his England. In fact, Faulkner remarked petulantly to a group of friends in New Orleans that ‘I could write a
play like Hamlet if I wanted to’” (53).
23
To further mark her as inferior, Jason uses racial terminology to justify his verbal—and
physical—abuse of the female Quentin. Racializing her, and thereby Caddy, through language
becomes another means by which to control her body/sexuality even after she has been cast out
of the Compson household. It further functions as a way of transforming her into a fungible
object. The practice of slavery had of course been abolished by this point in the novel’s setting,
but there was still a sort of lingering sense among white males that black women were less than
human and could thereby be “owned” in ways that white women could not. In response to Mrs.
Compson’s frets about punishing her for “playing out of school,” Jason says, “When people act
like niggers, no matter who they are the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger” (Faulkner,
The Sound and the Fury 181). As with his remark about “bitchery,” this is seemingly aimed at
Quentin; however, for Jason, Caddy and her daughter are more or less interchangeable. Later,
when driving Quentin to school, he scolds her for skipping class: “Everybody in this town knows
what you are. But I wont have it anymore, you hear? I dont care what you do, myself…But I’ve
got a position in this town, and I’m not going to have any member of my family going on like a
nigger wench. You hear me?” (189). This is especially interesting, considering the ways in which
Jason’s “excessive attention” to Quentin’s body, clothing, and boyfriends suggests what Roberts
refers to as “barely concealed desire” (114). Marianne Hester explains that a crucial aspect of the
construction of male supremacy is “the link between male sexual pleasure and male dominance
on the one hand, and the sexual objectification and subordination of women on the other” (73).
Though this may seem an obvious analysis, it is complicated by the racial implications inherent
in Jason’s misogynist accusations. Jason’s references to treating Quentin “like a nigger” and
refusing to have any member of his family behave “like a nigger wench” conjure images of black
slave women who, more often than not, were “treated” by white men as property to be “used.” I
return again to the figure of the jezebel, a myth that originated during the period of slavery. The
function behind the myth, Collins writes, was “to relegate all Black women to the category of
sexually aggressive women, thus providing a powerful rationale for the widespread sexual
assaults by White men” (81).
Jason espouses a similar philosophy: women who behave in a sexually provocative
manner somehow deserve to be assaulted. They are, to put it crudely, “asking” for it, “trying to
make every man they [pass] on the street reach out and clap his hand on it” (Faulkner, The Sound
and the Fury 139). He furthermore exploits this ideology—taking advantage of any opportunity
24
to abuse Quentin— in order to validate his obsession with Caddy. The scene in which he beats
his “dam near naked” (184) niece—who, it is worth re-mentioning, he accuses of behaving “like
a nigger”—with a belt is strangely, violently sexualized and reads not unlike a rape. And what is
rape, asks Doreen Fowler, “but an attempt to sexually annihilate the female other?” (3). But such
racialized sexual language adds another dimension to this dynamic. To threaten to treat Quentin
“like a nigger” and later beat her with a belt again evokes images of the violent, inhumane
treatment of slave women. This “rehearsal for a rape” also brings to the surface a number of
underlying cultural fantasies. As Roberts observes:
The terror of losing jurisdiction over women’s bodies created discourses of
nostalgia and threat. […] [Joel] Williamson in The Crucible of Race says it was a
“kind of psychic compensation” for white men to project their fears (and their
fantasies) onto “the black beast rapist” and invest all white women with goodness.
The more bestial the black man seemed, the more immaculate the white woman
had to be in contrast. Perhaps white men saw the black “rapist” as the only
creature who could have sex with a white woman without guilt: they had made
her too much the objectification of the combined mother-virgin land to “defile”
her with impunity. (104)
Jason seems to articulate the flip-side of this fantasy: sexually aggressive black women can be
defiled with impunity. By calling her a “nigger wench,” Jason transfigures the female Quentin
into a kind of psychic repository whereby he is able to legitimize and act out his fantasies of
sexually dominating Caddy.11
Like Jason, Quentin enacts a masculinity equally structured around the ideal of mastery.
However, Quentin’s almost ascetic reverence for the past places more emphasis on honor than
Jason’s reluctant and sometimes inadvertent invocations of his aristocratic lineage.12 Quentin’s
obsession with Caddy is also far more complicated than his brother Jason’s. For Quentin,
Caddy’s sexuality is at once frightening and fascinating, and yet it is something that he thinks
about constantly, compulsively. In his analysis of Othello, one of the several Shakespeare plays
11
Breu argues that Jason embodies an ineffective version of manhood because the female Quentin ultimately gets
the best of him at the end (118), but I disagree. Quentin may get her money back, but she is never given a voice;
Jason is the one to tell this story—his voice is in writing—and it is through the telling that Jason is able to construct
Quentin in racial terms.
According to Breu, Quentin is “melancholically and finally suicidally obsessed with a nostalgic fantasy of
antebellum, aristocratic, paternalist manhood” (110).
12
25
to which Faulkner makes subtle reference, Jan Kott points to the scene in which Iago tells
Brabantio that Desdemona and Othello have been making “the beast with two backs” (1.1.113).
He calls this “one of the most brutal and, at the same time, most fascinating representations of
sexual act” (117). Indeed, this image suggests what he refers to as a “modern eroticism, with its
longing for pure animality,” but there is something repulsive, something monstrous inherent in
this act as well. Like Iago thinks of Desdemona and Othello, Quentin thinks of Caddy and Dalton
Ames “Running…running [making] the beast with two backs” (Faulkner, The Sound and the
Fury 148). Quentin finds Caddy’s sexuality equally fascinating, erotic, and repulsive. In this
same internal train of thought, which interrupts what is presumably an external conversation with
Shreve, Caddy becomes “blurred in the winking oars running the swine of Euboeleus running
coupled within.” This is an allusion to the legend of Persephone, in which Euboeleus and his
herd of swine were plunged into a rift that opened in the earth when she was abducted by Hades.
According to Stephen M. Ross and Noel Polk, Ames “comes from a nether world to carry Caddy
off into the darkness”; Quentin is thus left devastated, falling into a metaphorical abyss (126).
However, Quentin’s memory alludes to, but does not directly align Caddy with Persephone. The
bestial language used in these two and other instances—at one point, Quentin describes her eyes
as looking “like cornered rats” (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 149)—serves to animalize
Caddy and demark her sexuality as subhuman. This is seen also when he, like Jason, reduces her
to “one featureless mass of tamed and branded sexuality” (Daileader 13) by calling her a “bitch”
and “whore” (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 159).
Also like Jason, Quentin acts out his desire to control Caddy by projecting his fantasies
onto a substitute figure, a “double” of sorts. As previously mentioned (for it is difficult to offer a
linear analysis of a novel that so fervently rejects linearity), Caddy robs Quentin of his identity as
“eldest son” in her appropriation of masculine traits. She is fearless, obstinate, and rebellious,
while he is a timid, obedient servant of the symbolic order. Where Caddy poses the most severe
threat to Quentin’s masculinity is in the fact that he is still a virgin and she is not. In order to
remedy this problem, Quentin claims to have committed incest. However, it is Quentin’s
encounter with the Italian child that is perhaps his most significant attempt to reassert himself as
head of the Compson patrilineage. Jason seeks retribution on that “contaminated” female body
whose promiscuity he blames for costing him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by subjugating
Caddy’s daughter Quentin; similarly, Quentin acts out his desire to be “eldest son” by playing
26
surrogate big brother to “a little dirty” Italian girl he meets in a bakery. He instantly greets her by
saying, “Hello, sister” (125), and continues throughout the rest of this episode to refer to her as
such. We assume the little girl does not speak English: this is because she never speaks. She is
alone in the bakery, presumably sent by her family on an errand, and so Quentin, in what seems a
purely altruistic gesture, offers to help her find her home. Before leaving the bakery, Quentin
buys the girl a bun to eat, and eat she does. This part of Quentin’s section is rife with references
to the Italian girl’s “chewing mouth” (131). In accordance with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the
grotesque body, the Italian girl is reduced to a gaping mouth, “the most important of all human
features for the grotesque…It dominates all else” (Bakhtin 317). The gaping mouth is also
“reminiscent of the classic male nightmare of the vagina dentata (‘vagina with teeth’), of a
woman’s body as a supreme castrating danger” (Charmé 155). Quentin associates the Italian girl,
and Caddy by proxy, with the open, grotesque body, which stands in contradistinction to the
clean, closed, classical body that Southern aristocratic women are supposed to represent.
Quentin’s fixation on the gaping mouth serves to further confirm his fear of aggressive female
sexuality; the mouth becomes a symbol of sex—Caddy’s sex—an organ that Quentin fears and
reveres. As the mouth, eating, and drinking play a role in the formation of the grotesque body,
other bodily functions—“defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose,
sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body”
(317)—play a role as well. Caddy’s promiscuity and pregnancy align her with the grotesque
body, but Quentin connects her to the grotesque in noticeable other ways, as when he thinks
about Caddy he often sweats profusely and at one point even remarks, “My bowels moved for
thee” (88).
If white Southern aristocratic women were supposed to be the quintessence of purity,
“stainless expressions of the ideal” (Gray 189), representing the clean, closed, classical body,
then the sexual, open, grotesque body—a body that eats, sweats, defecates, copulates, and emits
odors—signifies the white South’s understanding of black female sexuality. It’s no coincidence,
then, that Quentin associates Caddy with the scent of honeysuckle, a motif to which he returns
over and over again throughout his section. Like the scent of honeysuckle, Caddy’s sexuality is
at once “powerful, disruptive…enticing and overwhelming” (Roberts 116). To be sure, Caddy’s
scent plays a decidedly key role in the novel. Benjy, for example, thinks of Caddy—before she
becomes sexual—as smelling like trees; when she begins experimenting with sexuality, she
27
smells of perfume, and when she loses her virginity, she no longer smells of trees. There is,
however, another, more complex layer to the significance of the association between Caddy and
scent, for aside from female sexuality, there is what Gray calls “only one other aspect of
experience, one other corner of his imagined world, that Faulkner describes…so remorselessly in
terms of the olfactory sense”: black people (188). References to “the odor of Negroes” are
apparent throughout Faulkner’s repertoire. Gray explains that these remarks have a positive
function in Faulkner’s works:
[They] express, in peculiarly persuasive because sensory terms, the elusiveness
and omnipresence of blacks. Odor, says Jean-Paul Sartre, is “a disembodied body,
vaporized, remaining complete in itself, and yet transformed into a volatile
essence.” As such, it provides an extraordinarily apt way of registering the nature
and position of blacks in Faulkner’s world, who always seem to be around even
when the white characters refuse to see them, creating subtle feelings of
discomfort and unease. […] They are an absent presence: just as, Sartre indicates,
smell is because it is all around, quite literally part of the air one breathes, but
something that must remain tantalizingly diffuse, undefined and intangible. (187)
While the “positive” nature of such remarks is surely debatable, the similarities between black
people—the absent presence—and Caddy is not. Gray’s description above reads extraordinarily
like a description of Caddy; she is that elusive omnipresence that remains diffuse and intangible.
The sheer fact that female sexuality and blackness are the two things Faulkner depicts through
scent again underscores their indelible association.
If we are to understand the “dirty” Italian girl as Caddy’s “double,” particularly as she
represents the grotesque body, then it should be no surprise to find that her other defining feature
is her blackness: “She gave me a black still look, chewing” (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
128); “She looked at me, black and secret and friendly” (135). Though perhaps not as fiercely as
Jason, Quentin also uses a racialized sexual discourse to construct and control Caddy. He
remembers Mr. Compson telling him, “Caddy’s a woman too remember. She must do things for
women’s reasons too.” Immediately after follows the line: “Why wont you bring him to the
house, Caddy? Why must you do like nigger women do in the pasture the ditches the dark woods
hot hidden furious in the dark woods” (92). This sounds like Quentin is recalling another
conversation between his father and mother, but the use of “Caddy” here makes me think that
28
this is actually Quentin speaking. Benjy recollects Mrs. Compson scolding Caddy as a child for
calling him Benjy in lieu of Benjamin: “‘Candace.’ Mother said. ‘I told you not to call him that.
It was bad enough when your father insisted on calling you by that silly nickname, and I will not
have him called by one. Nicknames are vulgar. Only common people use them’” (64). Roberts
also notes another scene where Quentin thinks of his father’s musings on female “periodical
filth” to argue that though it sounds like his father is speaking, the “fixation with female
‘uncleanliness’ is really Quentin’s” (113). The same thing is happening here. Quentin ascribes
the characteristics of “Negro sexuality” to Caddy in order to validate his virginity; if, as Quentin
tells himself, “a nigger is not so much a person as a form of behavior” (86), and if Caddy is
“black,” it is somehow okay for her to be “unvirgin.”
This makes sense when considering Quentin’s interactions with the few black characters
in the novel. As Gray writes, Quentin envisions himself as a young Southern Gentleman and has
specific notions of The Way Things Should Be, an idealized version of the world that “has
himself as gentleman at its center, and the purity of white womanhood (and of one woman in
particular) as its emblem and apotheosis” (212). Given Quentin’s “model of reality,” and given
his (imagined) status as Southern Gentleman, Gray explains that Quentin tries to appropriate a
“paternalist role” during his encounters with black people, “throwing quarters to grateful
darkies…and making arrangements for Deacon, his black factotum at Harvard, to inherit one of
his suits of clothes after he commits suicide” (212). If this is the dynamic Quentin constructs
between himself and his black acquaintances—that is, if Quentin wants to be regarded as
superior, as paternal, and if Caddy defies Quentin’s attempts to be dominated, it makes sense for
Quentin to think of Caddy as “black.”13 Quentin’s problem with Caddy is that she has disrupted
his sense of symbolic order. Though he will never be able to make her a virgin again, thus reestablishing himself as the more masculine, he can, in a sense, “put her in her place” by
racializing her though language.
Roberts believes, however, that Quentin’s obsession with Caddy stems from the fact that
he wants to merge with her, to become her. If this is the case, and I concede the ways that Caddy
and Quentin are “twinned” throughout the novel, then Caddy’s blackness becomes Quentin’s
blackness as well. At the same time, however, this racialization serves as a way for him to
Craig Thompson Friend and Lorrie Glover explain “paternalism” as a “kinder and more insidious form of power,”
one “often associated with feigned benevolence” (ix).
13
29
distance himself from her. Just as he almost mechanically returns to the scent of honeysuckle—
“the odor of honeysuckle” (Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 129), “the smell of honeysuckle”
(147), “that damn honeysuckle” (149)—he also compulsively references “Little Sister Death, that
never had a sister” (76), “No sister no sister had no sister,” “But no sister” (95, 96). In theory, if
he has no sister to threaten his place in the family, he can resume his position as eldest son.
However, this endeavor to linguistically erase Caddy’s existence fails. Erin E. Campbell posits
that Quentin is acutely aware of the limitations of language, understands its fallibility; he
“desires the silence that patriarchal society enforces upon women because he acknowledges the
tenuous power of language to destroy as well as create” (64). Quentin drowns himself, therefore,
as an effort to gain the agency he imagines that Caddy stole from him.
Throughout The Sound and the Fury, Caddy is doubly othered—she is a woman, and,
when she becomes sexual, she is racialized, and not just by one person in her family, but by at
least two. This is especially interesting considering the way Faulkner openly claimed to regard
his characters, namely Caddy, Quentin, and Jason. Faulkner declared that Quentin was a
character “intimately related to his own personal experience” (Gray 208); “I am Quentin,” he
once confessed. Jason, on the other hand, was admittedly the character of his that he despised the
most. Caddy was allegedly the character that Faulkner loved the most: “To me,” he professed,
“she was the beautiful one…she was my heart’s darling” (208). Yet Caddy is a character who is
never afforded the opportunity to speak for herself; we hear her voice only through the voices of
others; she is that absent presence, intangible. Why, then, if we are to believe that Caddy is
Faulkner’s “heart’s darling,” would he have not one, but two characters—one likeable, the other
not—participate in this racialized sexual discourse when describing Caddy?
To consider this further, I return to Zender’s question: “What does incest mean in
William Faulkner’s fiction?” (739). While I agree that there is no one universal answer to this
question, my goal, it should be said, is not to dismiss, but to put pressure on knee-jerk readings
of incest as it functions in The Sound and the Fury as in some degree Oedipal in nature. Irwin, as
previously mentioned, sees incest as it “joins with doubling, repetition, and revenge to enact a
doomed oedipal struggle against the priority of the father over the son and of the past over the
present and the future” (Zender 739); Roberts similarly explains that Quentin’s obsession with
Caddy and eventual suicide indicate a desire to “become one with his mother, to return to the
womb…[and] partake of the feminine” (122, 23). Certainly a psychoanalytic interpretation of
30
Quentin’s (and Jason’s ) desire for Caddy is a valuable one, but these arguments often tend to
undervalue Faulkner’s knowledge of and investment in the various Southern cultural and racial
mythologies that I have explored. There is, however, something to be said about the “return of
the repressed.” Gray recalls Faulkner’s borderline self-contradictory answer to a question
regarding his feelings about the South: “I love it and hate it. Some of the things I don’t like at all,
but I was born there, and that’s my home, and I will still defend it even if I hate it” (Gray 171).
One of the things that Faulkner claimed not to like about the South was slavery—Malcolm
Cowley refers to Faulkner as “an anti-slavery Southern nationalist” (307)—but Faulkner and his
gothic fiction are self-conscious and often contradictory in nature. Gray also points out that in
much of Faulkner’s work, “Faulkner tended to associate the idea of evil with the black man or
black woman’s potent if shadowy figure; since the black, whether as a slave or more simply the
member of an oppressed race, brings with him a disconcerting reminder of inherited guilt” (186).
Teresa Goddu cites Robert Hemenway’s observation that gothic fiction’s oppositional imagery—
and frequent, if subtle, allusions to race and slavery—carries “a sociological burden even when
there’s no conscious intention of racial statement” (qtd. in Goddu 74).
It seems, then, that incest as it functions in The Sound and the Fury explodes and
challenges the conventional Southern codes of Faulkner’s time. However, I find it difficult to
read this novel as an outright critique. Let it be said that Faulkner is by no means a misogynist,
for “[h]is attitude towards women is far too intricate to be described in such terms” (Gray 191).
Yet even if he engages sensitive subject matter in an attempt to decode and challenge certain
signs and symbols of Southern experience, his treatment of female sexuality is decidedly
problematic. For The Sound and the Fury is ultimately the story of a woman symbolically
killed—cast out of the Compson household and denied a voice through which to tell her own
story—because of her sexuality; in her refusal to adhere to a codified femininity, Caddy poses a
threat to the symbolic order. Faulkner’s articulation of a racialized discourse, as Hemenway
suggests of other gothic fiction, carries with it “a sociological burden even when there’s no
conscious intention of racial statement” and furthermore underscores the ways in which this
discourse has shaped and continues to shape Southern cultural and racial fantasies and anxieties.
Yet I hope to end on a positive note. It is important to remember that whether they find Caddy’s
sexuality horrific or fascinating or both, they cannot stop talking about it; Quentin and Jason are
31
men obsessed with female sexuality. If language does indeed have the power to destroy and
create, Caddy may be silenced, but her body can never be totally contained.
MAYELLA EWELL’S INTERRACIAL TRANSGRESSION: “WHITE TRASH” SEXUALITY
IN TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird takes a similar approach to exploring the intersection
of gender, race, class, and sexuality, but unlike The Sound and the Fury, Lee’s novel deals
directly with the miscegenation taboo, something Faulkner’s only tiptoes around.14 And yet, as
Diann L. Baecker confirms, literary scholars tend to diminish the significance of its racial
themes; instead, they acknowledge race “at the same time that they discuss the novel as though it
mainly concerns Boo Radley or Atticus Finch” (124). This is due in part to the fact that Tom
Robinson’s trial—in which he, a black man, stands wrongfully accused of raping Mayella Ewell,
a young white woman—is viewed as a secondary storyline that serves only to expedite other,
more predominant events, including Scout Finch’s coming-of-age and Boo Radley’s eventual
emergence. When critical discussions of race aren’t eclipsed in favor of other concerns, they are
rarely connected to the novel’s—and the South’s—network of gender, class, and sexual politics.
In fact, meaningful analyses of “sexuality” (outside the context of the rape trial) are noticeably
absent from the register of scholarship on the novel. Also absent are interrogations of incest. As I
argue, Mayella Ewell’s status as “white trash”15 alone links her sexuality with “blackness”; her
willingness to break the miscegenation taboo with Tom Robinson and the fact that she is also a
victim of incest further marks her sexuality as “illicit” and “Negro.” In To Kill a Mockingbird, as
in The Sound and the Fury, incest and race are nearly impossible to untangle, yet criticism of the
novel—which generally lauds both Atticus and Scout for their progressive ideologies concerning
Southern race relations—almost unfailingly overlooks this connection. I seek here to complicate
typical readings of Atticus as the novel’s moral beacon by interrogating the ways in which he
Deborah E. Barker, inspired by W.J. Cash, describes the “Southern rape complex,” which involves “a black male
rapist and white female victim” and wherein “the victim is transformed into a symbol of a threatened white southern
culture while the black male symbolizes the threat” (109). This complex and the miscegenation taboo are intimately
interwoven; both make “white female sexuality socially unacceptable and [render] sexual violence against black
women socially invisible” (109).
14
15
For a helpful history of this term, see Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz’s volume of essays, White Trash: Race and
Class in America.
32
tacitly upholds many of the Southern societal assumptions that the book elsewhere resists. I take
a similar approach in an examination of Scout, whose childhood perspective and seeming
rejection of Southern Womanhood obscure her complicity in reinforcing the association of
gender and class with illicit sexuality and “blackness.”
This chapter has already described the myth of the hypersexual black male—the “black
beast rapist”—in some detail. However, because of the respect To Kill a Mockingbird has
received for its critical examination of Southern race relations, I feel a further explication of the
terror of miscegenation (and the import of the taboo against it) is necessary. To put it simply, the
taboo was instituted in order to maintain white superiority. As Arthur Leonard posits, Southern
whites defined themselves “by their status as white”: they based their identity almost entirely on
what they viewed as the fundamental contrast between themselves and the allegedly “stupid,”
“criminal,” “lazy,” “hypersexual,” Black Other (80). Without the institution of slavery,
interracial relationships threatened to destroy what was essentially the foundation of the mythic
South; to quell this fear, the white South constructed a narrative in which black men, who,
because of their newly acquired economic and political power, “represented a dangerous,
predatory, uncontrollable sexuality” and white women—who, as I have discussed, were
conventionally used as a metaphor for the South itself—“represented a fragile, asexual purity”
(75). It was also at this time, Martha Elizabeth Hodes asserts, that “the subject of sex between
black men and white women came to matter beyond community boundaries”:
Such liaisons were no longer solely local problems about illegitimate children,
dishonored white husbands, or neighborhood identity. The subject now gained a
place in wider ideological dialogues over sectional struggles. At the same time,
community responses to such liaisons more frequently came to pass outside the
realm of law. (148)
Such “community responses” were acts of mob violence, often perpetrated against “entire black
communities” and committed in an effort to “retain a racial hierarchy without the institution of
slavery” (148). Violence against black men was further justified when said to be in the interest of
protecting “white womanhood.”
Typical readings of To Kill a Mockingbird understand Tom’s trial (and his conviction) as
a biting critique of this paradigm, particularly for the value it places on the sanctity of white
womanhood. This at least seems to be the attitude of the novel’s precocious protagonist and
33
narrator, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, who sees the institution of “womanhood” itself as a useless
construct. Throughout her narrative Scout describes the routine and expectations of white
womanhood: “ladies” of Maycomb “bathed before noon,” take three o’clock naps (Lee 6); wear
corsets on Sundays (11); are apparently protected—by law—from being subjected to hearing
“abusive and profane language” (11)16; demonstrate “river-boat, boarding-school manners,”
uphold “any moral [that] come[s] along,” and are “incurable” gossips (172). None of this seems
to appeal to Scout. When Atticus’s brother, Uncle Jack, asks her if she wants to grow up to be a
“lady,” she unashamedly replies, “Not particularly” (105). She later makes her views on being a
lady even clearer when she describes an exchange with Atticus’s sister, Alexandra:
[Aunt Alexandra] was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly
hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she
said I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants. Aunt Alexandra’s
vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing
the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be
a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of
sunshine in pants just as well. (108)
Scout would rather re-enact scenes from Tarzan with Jem and Dill than play with tea sets and
would rather enjoy the freedom of pants than be confined to a dress. Like Caddy, Scout rejects
the expectations of being a lady and instead collapses gender binaries by assuming certain
“masculine” characteristics.17 She enjoys using “profane” language18 that ladies should never
hear—let alone use—and rather than sit passively, she “would just as soon jump on someone as
look at him if her pride’s at stake” (116).
In addition to the fact that Jem and Atticus seem to support and encourage Scout’s ability
to negotiate male and female spaces—Jem’s method of coaxing Scout into doing something she
Scout recounts the time when Arthur “Boo” Radley and some of his friends were arrested as young teens for
“using abusive and profane language in the presence and hearing of a female…they cussed so loud [Mr. Connor, the
town’s ‘ancient beadle’] was sure every lady in Maycomb heard them” (11).
16
That she prefers the androgynous nickname “Scout” instead of Jean Louise (as Caddy prefers her own nickname
to the more formal “Candace”) is further evidence of this.
17
Scout admits she finds “the innate attractiveness of such words” appealing and furthermore confesses: “I was
proceeding on the dim theory…that if Atticus discovered I had picked them up at school he wouldn’t make me go”
(104-05).
18
34
otherwise might not do is to tease her for acting “like a girl” (Lee 50), while Atticus frequently
reminds Scout that he likes her just the way she is (108)—the images of “ladies” we do get
throughout the novel are not especially admirable. Through Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird
appears to ironize one of the presumptions of the Southern rape complex; that is, through a
character like Aunt Alexandra, for example, we see “ladyhood” as an empty (even absurd) term.
Scout describes Alexandra as “one of the last of her kind…born in the objective case” (172); she
sits “sipping, whispering, fanning” during afternoon teatime that she holds with other respectable
women of her society (176), gossips incessantly, and is devoted to her family,19 and while
Atticus is preoccupied with the details of Tom’s case, comes to Maycomb to stay with Scout and
Jem and essentially serve as their “mother.” Alexandra may be a proper lady with impeccable
etiquette, but she is everything but likeable. While Alexandra is caring and devoted and wants
only the best for Scout and Jem, she is also judgmental and elitist, what is really a crime in
Atticus’s “equal” household. 20 The most horrific offense of which she is guilty occurs during the
time that Alexandra is staying at—and imposing her own values and routine on—the Finch
household. In so doing, she suggests that Atticus no longer “needs” the black housekeeper,
Calpurnia. Calpurnia is the cornerstone of the Finch household, considered “a member of the
family” by Atticus and his children alike (182), which is exactly Alexandra’s problem with
keeping her around. This incident occurs moments after Scout details her (and Jem’s) trip to
Calpurnia’s church (for which Cal is vehemently criticized by one especially vocal parishioner
who insists that “those white children” have their own church) and asks for Atticus’s permission
to go visit Cal at her house. Alexandra’s obstinate interjection— “You may not” (181)—and her
immediate request that Atticus “do something about [Calpurnia]” stems solely from her
disapproval of what she sees as an inappropriate relationship between a white family and their
black employee.
19
Notably, Scout recognizes the lack of affection between Aunt Alexandra and her husband, Jimmy. Rather
offhandedly, she observes an important characteristic of Alexandra as she represents the Southern Lady: “[A]s he
never spoke a word to me in my life except to say, ‘Get off the fence,’ once, I never saw any reason to take notice of
him. Neither did Aunt Alexandra” except when, “[l]ong ago, in a burst of friendliness, Aunty and Uncle Jimmy
produced a son named Henry” (103). Alexandra, wife and mother, is oddly asexual; this is yet another instance of
the lack of sexuality in the novel.
It should be mentioned that because the story is told from Scout’s perspective, the portrait of Alexandra is prone
to bias.
20
35
The Finches don’t just represent any old white family; according to Alexandra, at least,
they are not “run-of-the-mill people” but are “the product of several generations’ gentle
breeding” (Lee 177). Aunt Alexandra is “of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a
family had been sitting on one patch of land the finer it was” (173).21 As Scout recounts at the
narrative’s beginning, until Atticus moved to Montgomery to study law (and his younger brother,
following suit, moved to Boston to study medicine), the Finch family had lived at Finch’s
Landing since their ancestor, Simon Finch, “worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia,
thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens […] bought three slaves and with
their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River” (4). It is this belief in the
austerity of her family’s name, her insistence on upholding a social hierarchy—the necessity of
which she believes to be dangerously diminishing as the South gradually becomes more
progressive—that drives her to prevent Scout from fraternizing not only with Calpurnia, but also
with Walter Cunningham. When Scout vocally resolves to invite Walter over for dinner, and
considers even asking him to spend the night sometime, Alexandra replies, “We’ll see about
that,” a pronouncement, Scout notes, “that with her was always a threat, never a promise” (299).
Scout attempts to persuade her aunt further by remarking that the Cunninghams are “good folks,”
but her effort is met with the same firm, yet subtle, decree: “Jean Louise,” Alexandra says, “there
is no doubt in my mind that they’re good folks. But they’re not our kind of folks.” Scout
resiliently presses the matter a third time, imploring her aunt to tell her why Walter can’t come
over, at which point Alexandra says outright: “I’ll tell you why…Because—he—is—trash, that’s
why you can’t play with him” (301).
Scout’s objection to “ladyhood” goes deeper than her distaste for dresses or tea sets: she
is completely at odds with the ideology behind it, particularly for the value it places on judging
others as inferior. The severity and injustice of Alexandra’s judgment of Walter is therefore
underscored in the next several passages in the novel, in which Scout gets angry at Alexandra not
for calling her a problem child, but for labeling Walter “trash.” Jem—who has slowly matured
over the course of the narrative, gradually coming to view himself as a “gentleman” like
Atticus—very wisely tries to explain to Scout that Alexandra is just trying to make her a “lady”
and asks her why she can’t “just take up sewin’ or somethin’” (302). He then tells her, in what
21
Alexandra, not unlike Mrs. Compson, is highly invested in the importance of family name and understands this as
a mark of superiority.
36
seems like an effort to justify, if not valorize, Alexandra’s assessment of Walter: “There’s four
kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there’s the kind
like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the
Negroes” (303). As he continues to describe how each rung of this hierarchy doesn’t “like” those
below them, Scout—vaguely aware of a certain “caste system” that exists in Maycomb, the
workings of which she doesn’t entirely understand—interrupts to describe the similarities
between these four ostensibly disparate groups of people, until she eventually reaches the
conclusion that there is only “one kind of folks. Folks” (304). 22
No character makes the ideology of the Southern Lady look more deleterious than Mrs.
Henry Lafayette Dubose, an old lady of the Old South who, like Alexandra, outspokenly
advocates Maycomb’s class and racial divides. Also like Alexandra, Mrs. Dubose (rumored to
keep a CSA pistol hidden on her person) not only takes advantage of any opportunity to reprove
Scout for being unladylike, from the way she dresses—“What are you doing in those overalls?”
she reprimands Scout, “You should be in a dress and camisole, young lady!” (135)—down to the
way she speaks—“Don’t you say hey to me, you ugly girl! You say good afternoon, Mrs.
Dubose!” (133)—but furthermore condemns Atticus for his “nigger-loving propensities” (144).
It comes as no surprise that Mrs. Dubose disagrees with Atticus’s decision to defend Tom
Robinson against Mayella Ewell’s accusation that he raped her. Also unsurprising is Atticus’s
reaction to this pejorative; he confirms to Scout: “I do my best to love everybody” (144) and
insists that, despite her obvious flaws (including her addiction to morphine), Mrs. Dubose was “a
great lady […] the bravest person I ever knew” (149). This same optimism seems to drive
Atticus’s decision to defend Tom in the first place, even though he knows his effort is a futile
one. Knowing Scout is eavesdropping, he tells Jack: “The only thing we’ve got is a black man’s
word” against a white family’s (117), that, as most people in Maycomb believe, as a white
woman, Mayella holds far more power and credibility than Tom.
But—unlike Caddy Compson—Mayella Ewell is not a lady. She may be white, and she
may be a woman, but she is a Ewell; she is a member of a family that lives immediately outside
Scout explains: “There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older
citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to
one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each
generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is
Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living”
(175).
22
37
“a small Negro settlement,” a family, Scout remarks, that has only the whiteness of their skin to
make them “any better than [their] nearest neighbors” (229).23 In other words, according to the
social hierarchy that dominates Maycomb, Mayella is “trash.” This is something that both
Atticus and Scout make expressly clear; yet as many critics contend, most people who read To
Kill a Mockingbird and are “inspired by [its] power…want to be Atticus” (Althouse 1364). And
indeed, the vast majority of criticism on the novel seems also to regard Atticus as a model
character, lawyer, man, and all-around human being. Steven Lubet examines the way the
character of Atticus Finch is typically understood—as “the ultimate lawyer,” “a moral
archetype…reflecting nobility upon us, and…having the courage to meet the standards that we
set for ourselves but can seldom attain” (1340). Similarly, Marcus Jimison calls Atticus “a
symbol of quiet strength, devotion to the law, and devotion to the principle that all persons are
equal before the law” (2).24 The student-oriented website SparkNotes, which provides detailed
summaries and analyses of classic works of literature, describes Atticus as a character of
“penetrating intelligence, calm wisdom, and exemplary behavior […] the novel’s moral guide
and voice of consciousness”; he is “respected by everyone…the moral backbone of Maycomb, a
person to whom others turn in times of doubt and trouble […] He stands rigidly committed to
justice and thoughtfully willing to view matters from the perspectives of others” (SparkNotes
Editors).25 Even the other characters in the novel reinforce this image. Miss Maudie Atkinson
says Atticus is “civilized in his heart” (Lee 130); Jem and Scout too idolize their father and
regard him as a perfect “gentleman” (131).
Atticus claims to be “in favor of Southern womanhood as much as anybody” (Lee 196),
yet his defense—which is presumably structured as a criticism of the persistent and offensive
23
Here, Scout is specifically describing Bob Ewell, but as her assessments of other members of the Ewell family—
such as Burris (35-37)—suggest, and as Atticus confirms to Jack, the same is essentially true of the “present”
generation (117). Scout also mentions that Mr. Ewell’s skin will only be white if scrubbed “with lye soap in very hot
water” (229).
The few scholars who question Atticus’s reputation as anything other than sterling, such as Joseph Crespino and
Steven Lubet, were met with vehement criticism.
24
25
I include this analysis from SparkNotes because of the frequency with which the novel is taught at the middle and
high school levels. The website, which provides students with a single, uncomplicated interpretation of its major
themes and characters, endorses this “universal” understanding of Atticus as Fair and Decent. I also include this
analysis because of the unfortunate fact that many students use the website as a substitute for reading this and other
novels. Students who have never read (and never intend to read) To Kill a Mockingbird will visit the website, read
this description of Atticus, and take it at its word. After doing so, these students will likely never feel the need to
actually read the novel and will never critically interrogate Atticus’s character.
38
misconception that all black men are sexually aggressive and untrustworthy—relies on another,
equally denigrating stereotype: that lower-class white women such as Mayella Ewell are
incapable of being insulted and as such cannot count on “ideology about female purity to absolve
them of alleged illicit sexual activity” (Hodes 161). In White Women, Black Men, Hodes looks at
nineteenth-century testimonies against the Ku Klux Klan that make visible the ways in which
class distinctions were often employed in cases where black men were accused of crimes against
white women. She contends that while the term “lady” was commonly invoked, particularly
when a white woman accused a black man of rape, “the reputations of white women were
continually assessed by white Southerners in the Klan testimony, with the congressional
committee participating in such dialogues” (162). In one particular case she describes, the
committee asked a witness if the alleged victim was a “respectable” woman. Other cases she
recounts similarly place enormous emphasis on the victim’s “respectability”: in 1869, for
example, Jesse Edwards was hanged in Virginia for reportedly raping and murdering “Miss
Susan Hite, a respectable young lady”; another instance involves a black man in North Carolina,
who was beaten severely for “allegedly assaulting ‘a respectable young lady’”; also in North
Carolina, another black man was hanged for making “a bad proposition to a very respectable
young lady” (161).26
That Atticus, at several points during the trial, uses the word “respectable” to refer to
Tom Robinson—not to Mayella—is therefore noteworthy. His line of questioning intends to call
Mayella’s reputation into question, to show her not only as “mean” and as a “lowdown white
woman,” but as one who isn’t worthy of the designation “respectable.”27 He first does this by
demonstrating her lack of “routine courtesy,” or her unfamiliarity with common manners (Lee
244). When he politely refers to her with such honorifics as “Miss” and “Ma’am,” Mayella
angrily insists that he’s mocking her: “Long’s he keeps on callin’ me ma’am an sayin’ Miss
Mayella ,” she tells Judge Taylor, “I don’t hafta take his sass. I ain’t called upon to take it” (243).
This exchange not only makes conspicuous the class tensions that are at stake, but furthermore
Hodes examines the frequency with which “the allegedly victimized white women” were typically situated as “ladies”: “A
Klan attack on a black man in Georgia was attributed to the fact that he ‘had used this saucy expression to a white lady.’ Another
white Georgian said that freedmen ‘were abusive to ladies.’ In Mississippi, a black man was assaulted for using ‘some improper
language in regard to some white ladies of the neighborhood.’ In North Carolina, one black man was hanged because ‘he was a
great terror to white ladies and impudent to them’” (161).
26
On several different occasions during the trial, Atticus (and Scout) refers to Tom as “respectable” (257, 273), which of course
insinuates that if Tom is respectable, Mayella is not.
27
39
indicates an awareness on the part of Mayella that she doesn’t “deserve” these designations.
Lubet affirms that “Mayella clearly understood that everyone else in the courtroom considered
her trash, hardly worth protecting. Throughout her testimony, as though she herself was on trial,
she was nervous and jumpy. She cried repeatedly and she reacted with ‘terror and fury’” (1345).
Judge Taylor reassures Mayella that she “has not been sassed,” that courtesy is just Atticus’s
“way” (Lee 243); however, Atticus’s questions have all been carefully crafted, though not, as
Scout suspects, entirely in an attempt to paint “before the jury a picture of the Ewells’ home life”
(244), nor is it an effort to sympathetically portray her as “a victim of cruel poverty and
ignorance” (272). Rather, Atticus seems more concerned with situating Mayella as “trash,” as not
worthy of the jury’s respect. Her furious offense to Atticus’s courtesy was therefore not elicited
by accident. Throughout the narrative, we as readers have witnessed Atticus’s almost uncanny
insight into the motivations of other characters: he knows that Mr. Cunningham comes from “a
set breed of men” and would therefore rather go hungry than lose his land (27-28), understands
Boo Radley’s reasons for never coming outside (65), and sympathizes with Mrs. Dubose’s
cantankerous disposition. Surely, Atticus knows enough about the “contentious” (36) ways of the
Ewells to know that Mayella would not respond favorably to being called “Miss” by someone
she seems to see as socially superior to herself.28
Atticus also intends to prove that “white trash” Mayella willingly transgressed the
miscegenation taboo. He asks Mayella if she knew Tom Robinson from before the alleged rape,
if she’d ever asked Tom to come up to her house before, if she’d ever asked Tom to help her
with some odd jobs around the house, and why the other Ewell children didn’t hear her supposed
screams. These questions are intended to show that Mayella was the one to initiate contact with
Tom. Here, Atticus does not simply demonstrate that any encounter between Tom and Mayella
may have been consensual; he invokes “a specific form of the defense that can be particularly
offensive, in both senses of the word,” what Lubet calls “the ‘she wanted it’ defense.” According
to Atticus, Mayella was “the intense aggressor,” she was the one who “schemed and plotted for
‘a slap year’ to get the children out of the house on an opportune day”; Mayella “jumped on
Before leaving the witness stand, Mayella condescendingly refers to the courtroom in general and Atticus in particular as “fine
fancy gentleman” whose “fine fancy airs don’t come to nothing,’” further proof that she is aware of her own social status and
resents those who feel themselves superior to her (251).
28
40
Tom, wrapped her arms around him, demanded that he kiss her, and blocked the door with her
body when he tried to leave” (Lubet 1345).
In the courtroom, Atticus—the novel’s pillar of moral rectitude—constructs a narrative
that is “demeaning and stereotyped” (Lubet 1345), a narrative that Tom’s testimony only further
confirms. What’s more, implicit in Atticus’s defense and Tom’s testimony—that Mayella not
only consented to the relationship but “wanted it”—is the audacious presumption that Mayella is
somehow “unrapeable.”29 To be sure, according to Tom’s testimony, there’s a strange reversal of
gender roles that occurs on the day of the alleged “incident.” Mayella acts aggressively, silently
planning her attack for a whole year, jumping on and grabbing at Tom and furthermore
demanding that he kiss her back. Mayella is also keenly aware that, if she successfully seduces
him, Tom will never be the one to speak of their transgression. If she is the violator, Tom then
becomes the passive victim. This becomes even more apparent when Tom admits that he
couldn’t protect himself from her advances with equal aggression. He tells the courtroom that he
didn’t want to be “ugly to her,” that he “didn’t wanta push her or nothin’” (Lee 260); most
importantly, as Scout admits she later learns, Tom “would not have dared to strike a white
woman under any circumstances and expect to live long” (261). Even if he wanted to strike her,
it would have been difficult for him to do so. As we learn when Tom gets up to take the stand,
“[h]is left arm was fully twelve inches shorter than his right, and hung dead at his side [and]
ended in a small shriveled hand” (248), a disability that, as we infer from one of Scout’s
comments, feminizes him. Scout remarks that if Tom “had been whole, he would have been a
fine specimen of man” (257), which of course implies that his disability somehow makes him
less of a man, not whole, not fully masculine. The terms Scout uses to physically describe Tom
are even vaguely feminine. She calls him “a black-velvet Negro, not shiny, but soft black velvet”
(257, emphasis mine). Scout describes Mayella, on the other hand, like a man, as “thick-bodied”
and evidently “accustomed to strenuous labor” (239).
Mayella is sexually assertive, physically powerful, and, according to Tom’s testimony,
confident that her attempts to seduce him will work. She is also oddly childlike, innocent, and
“somehow fragile-looking” (239). She is at once “a body that cannot be raped and a body that is
raped” (Roberts 176), that has been raped, but not by Tom. In his testimony, Tom reveals
29
Baecker cites Edwin Bruell’s assertion that Mayella is “the kind of backwoods character who ‘rape[s] easily’” (127).
41
another strange detail that makes Mayella’s case even more complex: that Mayella is, more than
likely, a victim of incest. He tells the courtroom that Mayella said “she never kissed a grown
man before an’ she might as well kiss a nigger,” and that “what her papa do to her don’t count”
(Lee 260). Even stranger, Tom drops this bombshell so casually that it can easily—and often
does—either go unnoticed or is promptly “dismissed as irrelevant and unimportant” (Baecker
131). Why, then, is this even a detail at all? Tom gives us an extraordinarily significant piece of
information here, one that is relevant and one that has serious consequences for Mayella,
consequences to which the novel’s previous observations about incest—Scout lightheartedly
confesses that “Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town” (Lee
6); Scout also recalls Atticus jokingly telling Alexandra: “Sister, when you stop to think about it,
our generation’s practically the first in the Finch family not to marry its cousins” (173)—do not
allude. In these cases, incest is treated as just another one of “Maycomb’s ways,” but somehow,
for Mayella, it’s especially damning.
Considering that so much of the narrative takes place in a courtroom and is concerned
with issues of right and wrong, it’s peculiar that To Kill a Mockingbird mentions off-handedly—
only once—the real crime: that Mayella has been raped and physically abused by her own
father. And in the courtroom, Mayella is given the chance to tell her own story, but instead, when
Atticus asks her point blank whether her father has ever beaten her, she angrily maintains: “My
paw’s never touched a hair o’my head in my life…He never touched me” (246).30 While Mayella
conceivably says this in order to avoid facing the wrath of her father, it nonetheless indicates that
she understands what the novel seems to silently condone: that incest—particularly as it occurs
in (and is almost expected of) an impoverished, lower-class family like the Ewells’—is a far less
offensive crime, one barely worth our attention, than miscegenation.
And indeed, Scout’s perspective encourages us to turn a blind eye to this, demands us to
see “incest” as just another one of the Ewell’s many “vices.”31 Importantly, though Tom is the
one to reveal the relationship between Mayella and her father, it is Scout who chooses to disclose
this information to readers only to never speak of it again. We as readers, following Scout’s lead,
Interestingly, when Atticus asks if she remembers Tom beating her about the face, she replies: “No, I don’t recollect if he hit
me. I mean yes I do, he hit me […] Yes, he hit—I just don’t remember, I just don’t remember…it all happened so quick” (248).
Her response hints that Mayella has repressed the incident, a common reaction to a traumatic occurrence.
30
Baecker makes an interesting point about this: “The incestuous relationship of a white trash man with his white trash daughter
is a part of the novel often glossed over by scholars who probably find it unremarkable anyway, as if to say, what else can be
expected from people living so close to Negroes” (129).
31
42
are thereby inclined to dismiss the revelation about Mayella and her father as “irrelevant and
unimportant” (Baecker 131). It is also Scout who relays to readers Atticus’s many words of
wisdom. As Rob Atkinson points out, “[u]nreliable narrators and inconsistent perspectives are, of
course, standard features of sophisticated fiction and film. But Lee gives us no hint of Scout’s
being anything other than right about…Atticus’s wisdom. Harper Lee has given us the Gospel
According to Atticus in the words of his chief disciple” (1370). We take Atticus at his word
because we take Scout at her word. Atticus refers to the Ewells as “the disgrace of Maycomb,”
and Atticus says they are people who “lived like animals” (Lee 40). Atticus describes the Ewells
as “members of an exclusive society made up of the Ewells,” and Atticus explains that the rest of
Maycomb is consciously “blind to some of the Ewells’ activities” (41). But Scout, who questions
so many of Maycomb’s societal rules, unquestioningly conveys to readers this information.
Because Scout doesn’t question it, neither do we.
As in The Sound and the Fury, the discourse of incest, and indeed Mayella’s very
sexuality, is inextricably linked to race. Unlike Caddy in The Sound and the Fury, in To Kill a
Mockingbird, Mayella’s association with illicit, “Negro” sexuality is compounded by her status
as “trash.” What Mayella confesses to Tom—that she “might as well” kiss him, that “what her
papa do to her don’t count”—indicates her tacit awareness that her own sexuality is, essentially,
“blackness.” In this moment, Mayella she sees what little distinction there was between herself
and Tom collapse. Mayella’s very social status has already marked her as “not respectable,” as
“lowdown” and “Negro” (and, it should be reiterated, the entire Ewell family, based solely on the
location of their home outside “a small Negro settlement,” is already associated with “Negroes”);
her sexuality—what is obviously a non-consensual relationship with her own father and a willing
attempt to engage in an interracial relationship with Tom—only “contaminates” her further.
In a compelling essay, Diann Baecker investigates the importance of the “Africanist
presence” in Lee’s novel and looks specifically at Boo Radley as a crucial part of that presence.
She writes:
Boo, a white man, is both associated with the margins and differentiated from the
people who inhabit that place […] He is a part of the margins. After Jem loses his
pants on the Radley fence, Scout lies in bed that night listening to the night
sounds and imagining Boo at every corner: “Every night-sound I heard from my
cot on the back porch was magnified three-fold; every scratch of feet on gravel
43
was Boo Radley seeking revenge, every passing Negro laughing in the night was
Boo Radley loose and after us; insects splashing against the screen were Boo
Radley’s insane fingers picking the wire to pieces; the chinaberry trees were
malignant, hovering, alive.” Here, Boo is associated with nature, as well as with
“every passing Negro,” persons also more closely associated with savage nature
than with the civilizing town. As noted above, marginalized groups tend to share
each other’s characteristics. They collectively form the context within which they
are individually placed so that women, children, and racial minorities are
generally considered like each other (feminine, immature, less intelligent) as well
as being dirty, uncivilized, closer to nature, and any other losing end of a
dichotomy. (128-29).
Baecker makes a convincing case for understanding Boo as a sort of “dark” other, but I find
more important the ways that the “Africanist” characteristics she observes in Boo can also be
found in Mayella. As she claims, “marginalized” peoples do sometimes “share each other’s
characteristics.” Mayella, too, is more closely associated with nature than with “the civilized
town”: when Mayella takes the stand, Scout is reminded of “the row of red geraniums” Mayella
keeps in the front yard (239). Her name itself even contains a reference to the month of May, a
month named after the Greek and Roman goddess of earth and spring, Maia; interestingly, it’s in
this same scene that we learn Mayella’s middle name is “Violet” (239). It should also be noted
that Boo never actually appears in the novel until Chapter Twenty-Nine. There are thirty-one
chapters in total. Mayella is similarly absent for most of the novel. She first appears about threequarters of the way through, only to disappear again when the trial concludes.32 Yet each of these
characters, both so central to the plot, is also strangely present. I can’t help but be reminded of
Caddy, which in turn evokes Richard Gray’s assessment of Faulkner’s treatment of “blackness”:
Mayella—like the specter Boo Radley, like Caddy Compson, and like Faulkner’s black
characters—is at once everywhere and nowhere, an elusive omnipresence that remains “diffuse”
and “intangible” (Gray 187).
Mayella is associated with a frightening, aggressive, illicit sexuality which, as I’ve
discussed, is a sexuality stereotypically characteristic of “Negro” women. This, however, is only
one half of the dichotomy. On the opposite end of the spectrum is another, less threatening but
32
Even then, we as readers only hear her story second-hand. Her testimony is recounted through Scout.
44
equally offensive controlling image of black female sexuality: the mammy. According to Diane
Roberts, the mammy’s unflagging loyalty to her white “family” distinguishes her as the
“acceptable face of black servitude” (41). Because of this, the mammy legitimates a repressive
white patriarchal social order that not only demands her subordination but further insists that she
“enjoy” being subservient. Black feminist critic Patricia Hill Collins affirms that the mammy’s
devotion to her white “family,” primarily demonstrated by her ability to nurture and love her
white children “better than her own,” signifies white patriarchy’s concept of “the ideal Black
female relationship to elite White male power” (72). Despite her white family’s claims to love
her back, and despite her position as authority figure, the mammy recognizes and “has accepted”
her role as “obedient servant” (72-73). Moreover, as Collins also identifies, the image of the
mammy figure
buttresses the ideology of the cult of true womanhood, one in which sexuality and
fertility are severed. “Good” White mothers are expected to deny their female
sexuality. In contrast, the mammy image is one of an asexual woman, a surrogate
mother in blackface whose historical devotion to her White family is now giving
way to new expectations. Contemporary mammies should be completely
committed to their jobs. (74)
The asexual surrogate mother in To Kill a Mockingbird is Calpurnia, the Finch family’s hired
black help whose “tyrannical presence” Scout recalls feeling for as long as she could remember
(Lee 7). Scout describes Cal as “something else entirely”; “all angles and bones,” “nearsighted,”
with hands that were “as wide as a bed slat and twice as hard,” Scout remembers Cal always
shooing her out of the kitchen, scolding her for misbehaving, and ordering her to come home
before she was ready (7). In this description alone, Scout reveals Calpurnia’s—and the
stereotypical mammy’s—primary domain: the kitchen. She furthermore discloses Cal’s
authority; shortly after this passage, Scout recalls how her “battles” with Calpurnia were always
“epic and one-sided…mainly because Atticus always took her side” (7). For all her claims
otherwise, Scout (and Jem) loves Calpurnia and couldn’t imagine a life without her.
Scout’s relationship with Calpurnia further evidences the ways in which she tacitly
approves of the same structure she at the same time pushes against. Through Mayella and
Calpurnia, To Kill a Mockingbird articulates the only two available options for female—white
and black—sexuality. Scout vilifies Mayella, but valorizes Calpurnia, giving us no indication
45
that Calpurnia’s position within the Finch household is anything other than standard practice. Cal
does not subvert the image of the mammy, but seems rather like a glowing endorsement of black
female servitude. The scene in which Cal takes Jem and Scout to church with her makes this
most apparent. In the face of Lula’s disapprobation for “bringin’ white chillun to nigger church,”
Cal insists that Jem and Scout are her “comp’ny” (158). Even when Lula venomously retorts,
“Yeah, an’ I reckon you’s comp’ny at the Finch house durin’ the week,” Cal maintains her
composure and assures the children that she does view them as her guests (158-59). On account
of this scene, and the scene in which Atticus refuses, at Alexandra’s behest, to fire Cal because
she’s “a faithful member” of the family (182), readers typically walk away from this novel
thinking how wonderful it is that Cal is “part of” the family, that their acceptance of Calpurnia
makes the Finches—namely, Scout and Atticus—such advocates of racial equality. Because
Scout treats Cal as she seems to treat any other member of her family, everyday readers and
literary critics alike (problematically) seem to overlook her as a stereotype. Diann Baecker is one
such critic. Baecker observes the ways that Cal “fulfills all the functions of a wife in 1930s
Alabama—she cooks, cleans, disciplines the children and essentially provides for the Finch
family as if it were her own” (131). While I admire the positive light Baecker tries to shed on
Calpurnia’s function, to simply see her as “an enabling metaphor for discussing not only racial
identity, but issues of gender and class as well” (131) is to ignore the stereotype, and to ignore it
is ultimately to be complicit in its perpetuation.
The same can essentially be said of the novel’s treatment of Dolphous Raymond, “the
town scandal” who “blurs acceptable social boundaries” (Baecker 131). Dolphous is “always
‘drinkin’ out of a sack’…resides ‘way down near the county line’…with a ‘colored woman and
all sorts of mixed chillun,’” and most significantly, only “pretends to be drunk in order to give
the townspeople a reason for his behavior” (131). For a community—and indeed, a novel—that
treats Mayella’s interracial transgression so critically, how do we make sense of Dolphous’s
portrayal as “sympathetic” (131)? Baecker correctly notes that Dolphous makes visible the fact
that interracial unions are more acceptable between a white man and a black woman than
between a white woman and a black man; she does not, however, interrogate the more disturbing
aspect of this dynamic. Implicit in the town’s reluctant acceptance of Dolphous (and
corresponding condemnation of Mayella) is the assumption that “sexual penetration is a nasty,
degrading violation of the self, and that there are some people (black women) to whom, because
46
of their inferior social status, it is acceptable to do it, and others (white women) who, because of
their superior social status, must be rescued (or, if necessary, forcibly prevented) from having it
done to them” (Leonard 75). This is yet another way that To Kill a Mockingbird reinforces the
very social structures it seemingly seeks to subvert.
Although he is viewed as a “scandal” and as an alleged “drunk,” Scout makes it clear that
Dolphous is an integral and relatively affluent part of Maycomb’s community:
Dill observes that Raymond “doesn’t look like trash” and Jem is quick to explain
that he is not. In fact, “he owns all one side of the riverbank down there, and he’s
from a real old family to boot.” Like Boo, Raymond can finesse his position
between borders by virtue of his unquestionable position within white society.
(131).
Boo’s and Dolphous’s “unquestionable” positions in white society have more to do than just with
their financial statuses. Both Boo and Dolphous are white men. They are therefore pillars of their
white patriarchal Maycomb community and are thereby afforded certain privileges not granted to
certain “others” (read: women, blacks, and the Ewells). For all of its criticisms about gender
expectations, for all of its (arguably ostensible) proclamations of racial and class injustice, To
Kill a Mockingbird is oddly supportive of upper-middle class white masculinity. Atticus is the
Great Southern Gentleman exemplar, but it’s Scout that enforces this image. It’s Scout who
unfailingly admires Atticus, who encourages Jem to pursue his dreams of being a gentleman like
Atticus. And yet, Atticus’s treatment of Mayella during the trial seems to somehow work against
all that he supposedly stands for. If Atticus is so Fair and Right, how are we to make sense of his
collusion in such an ugly stereotype? It’s a difficult road to navigate.
The South’s preoccupation with race and sexuality is so deeply ingrained in the cultural
psyche that often the fiction of the region carries with it what Robert Hemenway calls “a
sociological burden even when there’s no conscious intention of racial statement” (qtd. in Goddu
74). For a socially progressive novel written by a woman, To Kill a Mockingbird’s treatment of
female sexuality—as indelibly associated with class and race—is particularly problematic: it’s
evidence of the tenacity of the South’s structuring myths. It’s important to recognize this, for
ultimately, this is only another reason why To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most significant
pieces of literature to come out of the twentieth century. Still it remained a novel that attempted
to confront the 1960s South’s iniquitous understanding of race relations, a complex novel that
47
has taught and continues to teach us so much about compassion, humanity, and equality. Even as
they confront sensitive subject matter in an attempt to challenge convention, To Kill a
Mockingbird and The Sound and the Fury enact a discourse that nonetheless values ideologies of
Southern womanhood. By understanding the ways in which they engage just as many Southern
structuring myths as they attempt to combat, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sound and the Fury
can only become even more invaluable.
48
CHAPTER TWO
“THE LAST TABOO”:
RAPE AND MASCULINE EXPRESSION
IN DELIVERANCE AND KARATE IS A THING OF THE SPIRIT
The previous chapter focused on incest as it occurs in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), yet, because incest in these novels is fraught with violence (or the
threat of violence), they also make visible the centrality of rape in Southern fiction. Lee’s text
seems to foreground the issue by literally arranging the main narrative around a rape trial; at the
same time, however, To Kill a Mockingbird encourages us to look past Mayella’s rape at the
hands of her father. Faulkner’s novel similarly pushes “rape” to the background. While The
Sound and the Fury never confronts the act of rape directly, we see—particularly through
Jason’s narration and his relationship with his niece, Quentin—the threat of rape as it “circulates
consistently throughout the text but remains safely within the realm of male fantasy and is never
acted upon” (Scheel). Notably, these two texts deploy a heterosexual paradigm wherein women
are placed in the position of (potential) victim and men in the role of aggressive victimizer. The
two works I examine in this chapter—James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) and Harry Crews’s
Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit (1972)—depict occurrences of what Richie Mullen calls “the last
taboo” (qtd. in Sielke, “Voicing Sexual Violence” 171): male-on-male rape.
Because Southern rape narratives are so indelibly interlinked with representations of
gender, and because Dickey’s and Crews’s novels almost exclusively concern (white) men,
Deliverance and Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit have each expectedly generated several critical
discussions of masculinity and performance. Sabine Sielke posits that Dickey’s text dramatizes
“men’s flight from civilization and femininity into nature…by interrogating the postures and
performativity of American manhood,” and that in so doing “exposes the vulnerability and
mutability of masculinity” (“Voicing Sexual Violence” 171). Betina Entzminger looks to
Leslie’s Fiedler’s analysis of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)—as a
homoerotic “tale of men alone in the wilderness”—to suggest that the rape in Deliverance
“reveals that the psyche has been violated through the repression and denial of homoeroticism
that becomes glaringly obvious to readers but to which the characters seem either oblivious or
openly hostile” (99). Drawing on Judith Butler’s theories of performance and identity,
49
Entzminger argues that although Ed recognizes “the performative nature of gender,” he fails “to
challenge conventional definitions of masculinity and femininity” (103).1 Nicholas Spencer also
engages Butler’s theory in an analysis of Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit. Crews’s novel, Spencer
claims, is “centered upon concerns such as the conjunction of the body and language,
performativity and spectacle” and that it thereby “disclose[s] the performative body as the social
text of intersubjective relationships and destabilize[s] definitions of gender, sexuality and
identity” (135).2
The scholarship that examines constructions of masculinity in Dickey’s and Crews’s
novels, however, fails to situate either text within a framework of specifically Southern
masculinities. As Craig Thompson Friend affirms in Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on
Manhood in the South since Reconstruction, Southern manhood converges with the
metanarrative of American manhood just as it also diverges from it. The “long shadow of the
Civil War,” Friend asserts, “stretches across the South, shaping southern men and masculinity”
(vii); other factors—like race, class, and sexuality—have similarly contributed to Southern
individual and community notions of manhood (viii). This chapter seeks to illuminate the
representations of male-on-male rape in Deliverance and Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit by
interrogating the ways in which Dickey’s and Crews’s texts deploy certain “stock” models of
(white) Southern manhood. This chapter furthermore contextualizes the social and political
atmosphere out of which both novels emerged. My readings of Deliverance and Karate Is a
Thing of the Spirit address the 1960s’ South’s “crisis of masculinity” brought about by a renewed
interest in women’s rights, the Civil Rights movement, and the Gay Liberation movement in
order to place each novel’s representation of male rape within the context of the South’s “rape
complex.” In so doing, and by also engaging both Judith Butler’s theories of performance and
Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “carnivalesque,” this chapter asserts that although these novels
Angela Farmer, in “The Worst Fate: Male Rape as Masculinity Epideixis in James Dickey’s Deliverance and the
American Prison Narrative,” considers the ways that Western cultural notions about “consent…dynamism, passivity,
retribution, and acquiescence formulate our ideas about real men.” Farmer discusses the function of male-male rape
“within power structures” and assesses Deliverance’s representation of rape as “part of a system of coercion”—“not
just physical coercion but a coercion of materialization” (106).
1
Little scholarship exists on Crews’s fiction in general and this novel, which is now out of print, in particular. As
Erik Bledsoe writes in the introduction to Perspectives on Harry Crews: “Despite having published fifteen novels,
two collections of non-fiction, an autobiography that ranks among the best works to emerge from the South in the
last twenty-five years, and various other limited editions and collections, Harry Crews is not very well known
outside of a limited circle” (ix). At the same time, as Bledsoe acknowledges, Crews has “a devoted and passionate”
cult following.
2
50
problematize and attempt to subvert conventional definitions of gender and sexuality, that they
reassert the primacy of heteronormative bonds and emphasize “feminization” as a consequence
of “unmanliness” ultimately nourishes many of the fears and anxieties attached specifically to
Southern masculinity.
“READING RAPE” IN SOUTHERN FICTION: THE CULTURE AND ITS COMPLEX
Rape narratives have long been an especially “persistent dimension” of the South’s
literary and cultural discourse,3 and Deliverance and Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit are two
novels that continue to reveal the South’s enduring and complicated “obsession with rape.”
While the South’s “obsession,” like other dominant American rape narratives, is entangled in
constructions of gender and sexuality, Southern rape narratives are perhaps more determined “by
a distinct history of racial conflict” (Sielke, “What We Talk about” 2). So deeply is this
preoccupation with rape and race ingrained in the cultural psyche that in the early 1940s, W.J.
Cash coined a term to describe it: the “Southern rape complex.” According to Cash, the complex
assumes the sexual violation of a white female by an aggressive black man and served as a
figuration of “the ‘rape’ of the South during Reconstruction” and as a means of justifying
retaliatory lynchings (2).4 Cash’s formulation of the complex locates the origins of the twentiethcentury obsession with rape in antebellum slave society, which, as I have described in Chapter
One and as Diane Miller Sommerville confirms, “placed the white woman on a pedestal and
worshipped her as the symbol of virtue, honor, and chastity,” a symbol of “the South itself”
(225). Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman (1905) is possibly the most notorious piece of
twentieth-century fiction to celebrate the South’s frenetic fear of white women being brutalized
by black men. The Clansman, the second novel in Dixon’s Ku Klux Klan trilogy, propagated the
negative image of black men as rapacious, as “innately barbaric and libidinous…black brutes
[who] gratified their lust by raping young (always young, always virginal) white women whose
One of the most famous Southern novels to deal with rape is Faulkner’s Sanctuary, wherein Popeye rapes Temple
Drake with a corncob. Other noteworthy texts include, but are of course not limited to, Faulkner’s Light in August
(1932), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)—Wright’s criticism of the system that oppresses African-Americans by
stereotyping them as subhuman, violent and brutish—Harry Crews’s A Feast of Snakes (1976), Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple (1982), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and Larry Brown’s Father and Son (1996).
3
Deborah E. Barker calls this “one of the most devastating and far-reaching ‘stories’ to come out of the South”
(101).
4
51
only recourse after such a heinous outrage was suicide” (223). According to Lovalerie King,
Dixon’s book blames the presence of freed blacks (“the enemy”) for creating friction between
the (white) North and South and supposes that only their suppression—through the (re)birth of
the Ku Klux Klan—can “rid the emerging nation of the threat represented by the menacing,
power-hungry, lust-filled demon—the Negro” (105).
Almost immediately after its publication, Dixon adapted The Clansman into a play.
Despite the significant criticism the play received (Dixon was condemned by both Northerners
and Southerners for glorifying “old” racist sentiments; performances of the play were also
banned in Macon, Georgia, and Montgomery, Alabama [“Suppress ‘the Clansman!’”]) the play
was enormously popular in parts of the South, drawing in record-breaking audiences in Virginia
and South Carolina. The continued success of Dixon’s play drew the attention of silent
filmmaker D.W. Griffith who, along with Frank E. Woods and Harry Aitken, adapted the play
into the controversial film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Like The Clansman before it, the
release of The Birth of a Nation was met with both acclaim and disapproval.5 King writes that in
a 1915 review in the New Republic, critic Francis Hackett claimed that “Dixon had displaced his
own malignity onto the Negro”; an editorial from the New York Globe similarly decried the
film’s title as “an insult to George Washington because the film was such a distortion of history,
reducing freed blacks to lust-filled fiends who chase after fair white maidens” (105). And yet, no
amount of protest seemed able to quell the film’s popular draw. Only Gone with the Wind would
finally surpass its attendance records in 1939 (105).6
Today, The Birth of a Nation is typically recognized for its contribution to the style and
development of the Hollywood feature film. It’s also regarded as perhaps “the most patently
propagandistic employment and expansion of the southern rape complex” (109). As Deborah
Barker writes, the film not only renders black men as a danger to white womanhood—and
Also according to Lovalerie King, President Woodrow Wilson extolled the film’s genius “while others denounced
it as yellow journalism” (105).
5
6
Ironically, in both novel and film version of Gone with the Wind, Rhett rapes Scarlett. This sequence—which
begins when Rhett snatches up an angry and resistant Scarlett and carries her, struggling, up the stairs to the
bedroom, then cuts to a scene of “Scarlett the morning after, preening and glowing with barely repressed
exhilaration and love”—“presents a most dangerous image of marital rape, for it powerfully advertises the idea that
women secretly wish to be over-powered and raped” (Finkelhor and Yllӧ 14). Furthermore, though it may not
necessarily condone the Southern rape complex, it (like To Kill a Mockingbird) turns a conveniently blind eye to the
problem of white men raping white women.
52
thereby to the very nation itself—but furthermore “blatantly define[d] (white) America through
the threat of the southern rape complex” (110). She explains:
Griffith cinematically reunites the nation by constructing an image of besieged
whiteness and employing a narrative of normative middle-class whiteness. In The
Birth of a Nation, Griffith combines the “racy” elements of the lower-class
entertainment of the penny arcade (sensationalism, sex, and violence) with literary
source material, a higher ticket price, longer viewing time, and an elaborate
musical score (which includes classical pieces), in order to appeal to and define a
white American middle-class audience. (110)
Griffith’s film of course spoke specifically to the South’s struggle to keep its racial hierarchies
intact, yet it also addressed an issue that was becoming ever more visible. On par with the fear
that women’s bodies were vulnerable to “external menace” was white Southern men’s anxiety
that “ladyhood” was no longer “what it used to be” (Roberts 105). It was therefore by no
accident that the production and distribution of Griffith’s film coincided with the progression of
the Women’s Rights Movement across the U.S. The beginning of the twentieth century saw more
and more women joining the (predominantly male) workforce, thereby reducing their reliance on
men for financial support. Also at this time, the move for women’s suffrage was gaining
increasing attention; in 1913, social worker Alice Paul, along with the National American
Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), coordinated the Women Suffrage Procession and
Pageant in Washington, D.C. The parade—which consisted of eight thousand marchers and was,
at the time, one of the largest in D.C. history —took place on the day before Woodrow Wilson’s
inauguration and boasted an estimated attendance of over 500,000 people. Though a mob of
“drunk and disorderly” men disrupted the event by harassing the marchers, causing the
demonstration to rapidly progress into a riot, the parade “generated tremendous publicity and
support for the suffrage movement” and helped convince Congress to “seriously consider and
debate suffrage for women for the first time in the nation’s history” (Buchanan 117-18).7 Perhaps
most frighteningly, women at this time were also making great strides in (re)gaining control over
Paul D. Buchanan describes the parade in detail: “[M]en verbally and physically harassed paraders while police
stood by. The parade quickly descended into a riot, with more than three hundred people injured in the chaos. Since
the local police did nothing to stop the violence, federal troops were called in to restore order and help suffragists
arrive at the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Constitutional Hall. In all it took the women six hours—with
troops escort—to march up the 15th blocks toward Pennsylvania Avenue” (117).
7
53
their own bodies and reproductive rights. In 1916, activist Margaret Sanger opened the first birth
control clinic (what would become Planned Parenthood) and helped to legalize contraception in
the U.S.8
The women’s movement was especially threatening to the fabric of the South’s
“aristocratic, agrarian, and patriarchal” social hierarchy, which depended on women’s silent
acceptance of their roles as wives and mothers (Perry 967). It further posed a direct challenge to
the gendered power structures that Southern men had for so long tried to maintain. Tennessee’s
reluctant ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 finally opened a space for Southern
women to become more vocal and therefore provided them an opportunity to question “the
system white men had devised for their ‘protection’” (Roberts 105).9 It’s unsurprising, then, that
some of the loudest literary voices to come out of the Southern Renascence of the 1920s and 30s
were women’s. Writers like Ellen Glasgow,10 Lillian Helman, and Julia Peterkin are but a few
women whose fiction challenges the traditional roles prescribed for Southern women and
strongly advocates women’s sexual independence. According to Mary Louise Weaks, Glasgow’s
Barren Ground (1925) and Vein of Iron (1935) are two of her Renascence works that “most fully
[explore] the relationship between the southern woman and her culture” (981). Both novels also
emphasize the land as a metaphor for the feminine, a popular trope in Southern literature.
Through restoring the soil, Barren Ground’s Dorinda and Vein of Iron’s Ada restore their own
souls and demonstrate “distinct possibilities for change in women’s lives” (981). In 1929, Julia
A number of studies that examine modern (Southern) literature’s reaction to birth control have recently emerged.
See, for example, Meg Gillette’s “Shopping for Abortions in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and William
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying” or Heather E. Holcombe’s “Faulkner on Feminine Hygiene, or, How Margaret Sanger
Sold Dewey Dell a Bad Abortion.”
8
Carolyn Perry explains that “[a]lthough the women’s movement emerged in the South as in the North during the
nineteenth century, a complex web of circumstances kept a fairly tight rein on its progress. An ideal of womanhood
tied to myths of the Old South—which portrayed women as weak and submissive in relation to men, exalted and
honored in the sacred role of wife and mother—allowed little space for alternate roles” (966-67). This is not to say
that Southern women refused to speak out against oppression, but those who did were often few and far between.
Tennessee’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment—its initial unwillingness and eventual acceptance—speaks
to this dynamic.
9
10
Glasgow had been writing since at least the late nineteenth century and, some say, may have even been partly
responsible for igniting the women’s literary movement well before it’s commonly been given credit. Also,
according to Weaks, “In 1926, a writer for the Saturday Review wrote in reference to Glasgow and fellow [woman]
southern writer Frances Newman that ‘the South must begin to realize that its only salvation lies in taking the girl
babies of good family who look as if they might have brains, and drowning them as soon as possible after birth’”
(982).
54
Peterkin—who, like Glasgow, was a frequent contributor to the literary magazine The Reviewer,
a prominent “showcase” for Southern writers (981)—received a Pulitzer Prize for her
controversial second novel, Scarlet Sister Mary (1928). Peterkin’s novel was an almost instant
bestseller and is now remembered as the first Southern novel to be awarded a Pulitzer11; the
sexual mores of its title character, “Scarlet Sister” Mary Pinesett, were also considered
“obscene” and unwholesome, and the novel was thereby banned in various parts of the country.
Despite this, Scarlet Sister Mary—at the urging of famed actor Ethel Barrymore—was
eventually transformed into a Broadway production. Barrymore herself played Mary. Another
Southern lady to take her cry for sexual liberation to Broadway was New Orleans native Lillian
Hellman. Hellman is largely considered “the South’s greatest dramatist after Tennessee
Williams” and has even, as Fred Hobson writes, “been said to surpass Williams in her
penetrating depictions of southern culture” (“Lillian Hellman” 604). Her first play, The
Children’s Hour (1934), famously deals with the taboo topic of lesbianism. Like Peterkin’s
novel, the topic of Hellman’s play was considered “too” controversial and productions were
banned in several different cities.
The women’s movement challenged Southern men’s authoritative place in society, but
Southern patriarchy also relied on the suppression of African-Americans. That the Southern
Renascence also saw an explosion of literary production from black women writers was thereby
doubly threatening to the South’s gender and racial hierarchy. Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937), Zora Neale Hurston’s “landmark contribution to feminism” (Snodgrass 271), combines
her interest in African-American folklore with her passion for black women’s empowerment. In
a telling look at the effects of racism on black culture, Their Eyes Were Watching God is
Hurston’s most thorough exploration of black women’s struggle for autonomy. Through Janie
Crawford’s journey of self-discovery, Hurston reveals the sexism of the African-American
community and demonstrates black women’s ability to “[attain] personal identity not by
transcending the culture but by embracing it” (Wall 103). And fiction wasn’t the only forum for
black women to speak out against being doubly marginalized. Activists like Nannie H.
Burroughs challenged limitations for black females during the early twentieth century.
11
Peterkin was praised by H.L. Mencken and black writers like James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Dubois for also
challenging racial stereotypes and for writing “genuine” representations “of the Negro as a human being” (Weaks
982).
55
Burroughs—church leader, educator, and black women’s advocate—was a brilliant and
outspoken individual who all but forced her way into the “male-centered” crusade for racial
equality, particularly within the National Baptist Convention (McCluskey 186). Burroughs
proposed that black women could gain empowerment through “respectability” and “economic
self-sufficiency.” In 1909, she founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in
Washington D.C., “the realization of her dream of providing a practical education that would
make black women economically self-sufficient and place them beyond spiritual and moral
reproach” (McCluskey 186).
At the same time that women across the nation (both black and white) sought new
political, sexual, and domestic freedoms, men faced what Bryce Traister calls “crises of
American masculinity” (qtd. in Friend ix). America’s entry into World War I in 1917
exacerbated existing “fears of national and masculine enfeeblement,” while the excess and
prosperity of the “roaring” 1920s and the subsequent economic crisis of the 1930s “‘put a severe
stress on…those who idealized the masculine past’ and its emphasis on aggression and
domination.” World War II and its aftermath, Traister further argues, “transformed men from
their ‘attachment to an all-male world’ of the military to roles as ‘heterosexual domestic and
corporate man’” (ix). Southern masculinity, still suffering from its own unique “crisis” brought
about by defeat in the Civil War, was therefore even more unstable than that of the rest of the
nation. The more Southern manhood was threatened—by war, depression, and, most
significantly, women and blacks—the more myths emerged as a means of keeping the system in
check. The South’s insistence on proliferating the rape complex narrative—through literature and
various other forms of propaganda that averred white women’s purity and black men’s
savagery—therefore spoke specifically to this cultural shift that occurred during the first fortyodd years of the twentieth century. And the rape complex was one of the South’s most insidious
myths. In Dirt and Desire, Patricia Yaeger looks at Jacqueline Dowd Hall’s perceptive
assessment of the rape complex—“with its triumphant protection of white women, its calculated
fear of black men, its ignorance of the abuses of black women”—as “an instrument of sexual and
racial suppression, scapegoating players in the southern game who challenge the established
order”:
Just as “lynching served to dramatize hierarchies among men,” so stories of
female victimization encourage white women to depend on white men. […] [Hall]
56
explains: “A woman who had just been raped, or who had been apprehended in a
clandestine affair, or whose male relatives were pretending that she had been
raped, stood on display before the whole community. Here was the quintessential
Woman as Victim: polluted, ‘ruined for life,’ the object of fantasy and secret
contempt. Humiliation, however, mingled with heightened worth as she played
for a moment the role of Fair Maiden violated and avenged. For this privilege—if
the alleged assault had in fact taken place—she might pay with suffering in the
extreme. In any case, she would pay with a lifetime of subjugation to the men
gathered in her behalf.” (125)
As Hall describes, the Southern rape complex—“‘rooted’ as it was ‘in the deepest of American
communal preoccupations: the conflict between “civilization” and “savagery,” historically acted
out in the destruction of the Indians and the subjugation of African slaves’” (qtd. in Sielke,
“What We Talk about” 2)— “ponder[s] not an alien and uncontrollable part of human nature but
the power dynamics of a particular culture” (“What We Talk about” 2). By placing white women
as victims and black men as villains, the rape narrative helped white men secure their place—as
heroes and saviors—at the top of the South’s gender and racial hierarchies.
THE 1960s AND THE “NEW” THREAT TO SOUTHERN MANHOOD
The women’s movement (and the crisis of masculinity that accompanied it) in the early
part of the twentieth century greatly altered the South and furthermore set the stage for the major
political and social upheaval that occurred in the 1960s, around the same time that Deliverance
and Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit were published. During this decade, Southern masculinity was
again threatened by war,12 a renewed interest in women’s empowerment, the Civil Rights
movement, and sexual revolution. The 60s, unlike the earlier decades of the century, had “the
ever-expanding national media of television, film, and music” to help bring many of these
cultural, social, and political changes and movements to the attention of people across the United
States and thereby cement their place as part of the permanent “fabric” of “everyday life” (3).
Because of televised reports of various protests and demonstrations against segregation in the
According to Bruce Traister, the Vietnam War also brought with it “a greater uncertainty of authority” (qtd. in
Friend ix).
12
57
South, the Civil Rights Movement, for example, also became a matter of “integration” in the
North. Fred Fejes further explains:
The “sexual revolution” was no longer limited to college campuses and trendy
urban centers, but reflected in sex education in high schools, premarital sex, the
growing access to birth control, and the increasing visibility and availability of
pornography. Women’s rights were no longer a matter of concern mainly to
liberal feminists on the East and West Coasts, but reflected in the removal of the
ban on abortion, the enactment of affirmative action plans, and efforts to ratify the
Equal Rights Amendment in state legislatures across the country. (3)
What’s more, the success of these campaigns, along with the widespread publicity they received
and the general, more liberal atmosphere of the 1960s counterculture, inspired what was (and
continues to be13) almost inarguably, one of the most controversial movements of the twentieth
century: the Gay Liberation Movement. While informal organizations and more formal
“homosexual rights” groups had existed in the U.S. since before the twentieth century, it was the
Stonewall riots of 1969—a sequence of violent demonstrations and protests against
discrimination that took place at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village
neighborhood of New York City—that are commonly credited as the turning point of the gay
movement (Carter 1). The Stonewall riots in turn influenced the formation of various activist
groups, such as the Gay Activists’ Alliance (GAA) and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Even
the use of the word “gay” was a radical step; as advocate and writer Dennis Altman proposed in
Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, one of the most important written contributions to the
liberation movement, the term was an upset to normative categories of homo- and heterosexualities.
“For many Americans,” Fejes writes, such changes “disrupted their sense of a coherent,
national moral order” (3). Nowhere was this truer than in the South, where the vestige of
“genteel society” still demanded of its men and women what Angelia Wilson calls gender and
sexual “clarity” (3). As Wilson also points out, the profusion of conservative Christianity in the
13
The topic of gay marriage was an especially hot-button issue in the 2012 election year. The controversy
surrounding North Carolina’s May 2012 ban on same-sex marriage, making the state “the 30th…in the country and
the last in the South to include a prohibition on gay marriage in the state constitution” (Robertson), confirms the
extent of the anxiety still attached to homosexuality in South, and indeed the very nation.
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South has provided it with its moniker “the Bible Belt”14; this “religious positioning,” she
claims—wherein homosexuality is considered both sin and “behavior rather than identity”—
“complements Southern gender norms and Confederate militancy, constituting the Bible Belt as
no less than a living hell for gay men and lesbians” (4). Laws prohibiting same-sex unions have
existed in all fifty states at one point or another, but according to John Howard, sodomy laws
have thrived in the South, where “hostility toward [gay men] fed on the ‘good ol’ boy’ southern
syndrome of exaggerated masculinity” (198). As late as 2003, statutes criminalizing sodomy
were still active in at least eight Southern states, including Mississippi,15 Alabama, Louisiana,
Florida, Virginia, both South and North Carolina, and Florida (198).16
Dickey’s Deliverance and Crews’s Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit are fixed at the
historical moment when the women’s rights, Civil Rights, and Gay Liberation movements
converged, and each novel takes up the concerns and anxieties attached to white Southern
masculinity that were brought about by the changing roles of women and African-Americans, as
well as the increasing visibility of homosexuality. What’s more, as this chapter suggests,
Dickey’s and Crews’s novels each negotiate the South’s crisis of masculinity by (re)invoking—
and ultimately re-envisioning—one of the South’s most pernicious, most enduring myths
intended to secure “the power dynamics of a particular culture” (Sielke, “What We Talk about”
2): the Southern rape complex.
ED, BOBBY, AND THE “PENALTY FOR SODOMY”: ENCOUNTERING “PRIMITIVE”
MANHOOD IN DELIVERANCE
Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Dickey’s Deliverance—published in 1970—invokes the
Southern rape complex inasmuch as it complicates and subverts it. Lee’s (in)version (at least,
according to Tom’s testimony) places Mayella Ewell in the role of active aggressor. She is not
In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor reminds us that “in the South the general conception of man is still,
in the main, theological. […] While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted” (44).
Channeling O’Connor, Bertram Wyatt Brown—in a blurb on the back of Friend’s Southern Masculinity—also calls
the South’s a “Christ- and honor-haunted, racially charged, and conservative culture.”
14
The Mississippi Code at one point referred to homosexuality as “the detestable and abominable crime against
nature committed with mankind or with a beast” (qtd. in Howard 198).
15
See John Howard’s “Southern Sodomy; or, What the Coppers Saw” for an interesting analysis of two relatively
recent Supreme Court cases that attest to the persistence of these statutes in the South.
16
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associated with any “expressions of the South’s ideals,” nor is Tom Robinson any sort of “black
beast rapist.” In fact, Tom is not a rapist at all. The real threat—the man who is actually guilty of
raping Mayella—is Mayella’s own father, a man Scout describes as “dirty,” a man who lives
(literally and figuratively) outside the boundaries of the “civilized” town. In Deliverance, the
sexual violators—the rapists—are not black men, either, but are poor, rural white “mountain”
men who, like Bob Ewell, live outside the borders of “civilization.” What’s more, these men are
so white as to be considered “albinos,” what Sabine Sielke cleverly observes as “inverted black
rapists” (173). And of course, as anyone who has ever even heard of the song “Dueling Banjos”
is aware, the victims of forced anal rape (and threatened oral rape) in Dickey’s text are also white
men. With help from the 1972 John Boorman film version, this scene, “unforgettable” for its
graphic depiction of male-on-male rape, has become so fixed in our cultural consciousness that,
as Eugene M. Longen proclaims, it is next to impossible “not to think of this sex act when we
think of the novel in general—and this seems precisely Dickey’s intent” (“Dickey’s
Deliverance”).
As a novel about four men who set out to spend a weekend alone together, “roughing it”
in the Georgia wilderness, Deliverance has inevitably yielded a surplus of critical studies of
masculinity and performance. Missing from these discussions, as I argue here, are the ways in
which the novel is very much a reaction to—and in many ways also a criticism of—the “crisis of
masculinity” that occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s. Deliverance is a complex novel, one
that subverts our expectations, collapses the binaries that inform cultural perceptions of gender,
primarily those structures that dictate appropriate forms of Southern masculine expression. As I
therefore suggest, through Ed’s narrative, Deliverance complicates the different images of white
masculinity that existed exclusively in the South at this time. That Ed is aware of the
performative nature of gender in general and Southern manhood’s emphasis on public
performance in particular suggests an effort to challenge the fixed notions of gender that
dominate the South. Furthermore, in invoking the Southern rape complex during the infamous
rape scene—where all of the anxieties about gender, sexuality, class, and race that are attached to
Southern manhood converge—Deliverance reflects many of the concerns affecting white
Southern masculinity at this time. This, at the same time—along with the novel’s near-complete
absence of women—serves to also bolster normative ideas about male and female subjectivity in
the South. While Deliverance challenges our perception of Southern norms, it fosters many of
60
the South’s deep-seated anxieties about gender, sexuality, class, and race as well. Ultimately, I
posit that to miss the ways in which Ed’s narrative in general and the male rape scene in
particular reactivates these sexual, class, and racial mythologies and cultural anxieties attached to
Southern manhood is to miss what’s really at stake in Deliverance: affirmation of “old”
aristocratic ideals and of (hetero)normative Southern conceptions of male and female
subjectivity.
Situating Southern men within what Craig Thompson Friend calls the “metanarrative” of
American masculinity—from which Southern masculinity deviates inasmuch as it also
intersects17—is helpful in understanding how Deliverance engages the dominant forms of
manhood in the South. E. Anthony Rotundo’s seminal 1993 study, American Manhood:
Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era, identifies the new
appreciation for what he terms “passionate manhood” that came about toward the end of the
nineteenth century (227). Passionate manhood—which Rotundo also calls “primitive
masculinity”—valued traits that throughout the nineteenth century had been considered
“fundamental qualit[ies] of the male sex,” such as “lust, greed, selfishness, ambition, and
physical assertiveness” (227). As Friend affirms, passionate manhood did not eclipse other forms
of masculine expression, but rather, by celebrating male emotions “through acts of competition,
aggression, force, sexuality, self-fulfillment, and a new attention to the male body,” reshaped
prevailing attitudes about the traits that characterized “proper manliness” (ix). With it came also
what Gail Bederman observes as “a primal virility,” a renewed attachment to nature and a desire
to participate in “savage activities” that directly opposed earlier versions of “civilized” manhood
(qtd. in Friend ix). Michael Kimmel adds that the industrialism of the late nineteenth century—
the turn away from agriculture and “frontier life”—forced a reconsideration of how men could
demonstrate their masculinity. Men looked to sports and leisure, then, for the “boost [they]
needed…to develop some all-male preserves” (9-10). Expressions of passionate manhood
17
In the introduction to Constructing Masculinity, Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson define
masculinity, “the asymmetrical pendant to the more critically investigated femininity,” as a “vexed term, variously
inflected, multiply defined, not limited to straightforward descriptions of maleness” (2). Friend elaborates and
explains that the term “masculinity” came into popular usage around the time of the Great Depression, during which
time it “became the more common term for middle-class white male aggressiveness, sexuality, and physical force”;
manhood, conversely, “became increasingly associated with a rougher and less ‘civilized’ manliness, as found
among immigrants, African Americans, the working classes, and southerners. Redefining masculinity, then, became
a crucial feature of the rhetoric of the New South” (xv). Despite these distinctions, Friend’s study tends to use the
two terms interchangeably; this dissertation chapter does so as well.
61
continued into—and ultimately thrived in—the twentieth century, when two World Wars,
economic fluctuation and depression, and shifting gender roles precipitated a national “crisis of
masculinity.” Passionate masculinity, with its emphasis on aggression, competition, and sexual
prowess, encouraged a “return to sheer primitivism” and thus became the reigning response to
America’s ever evolving socio-cultural scene (Friend ix).
As the men of Deliverance certainly demonstrate, Southern men too responded to their
sense of “masculine enfeeblement” by indulging themselves in “savage activities.” Apart from
wanting a reprieve from the tedium of day-to-day corporate life, “fellow primitives” (Dickey 12)
Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew embark on their weekend camping trip in order to re-establish a
bond with nature. The land they want to explore, soon to be dammed up, is “wild”; as Lewis tells
the others, “I mean wild...We really ought to go up there before the real estate people get hold of
it and make it over into one of their heavens” (4). Ed, above all, wants desperately to do
something he’s never done before: shoot a deer, and with a bow and arrow, one of man’s most
primal weapons. At one telling point in his narrative, Ed also divulges his desire to “satisfy
honor,” and he partly associates this honor with the act of hunting (95). It’s here that Ed most
reveals one of the ways that versions of Southern manhood differed from those of the nation at
large: over the course of the twentieth century, Southern manhood still found itself very much
guided by aristocratic paradigms of honor and mastery. As Chapter One explains, the period of
Reconstruction compelled Southern men to find new ways of exhibiting these traits; in so doing,
honor and mastery were “co-opted, transformed, and even rejected on occasion by the diverse
men who populated the South” (Friend and Glover x). According to Friend, the release of Gone
with the Wind inspired men to see competition as a new way to display honor and power.18
Hunting, in particular, became what historian Ted Ownby describes as a Southern “cultural
institution” at the beginning of the twentieth century (qtd. in Friend xviii). On the second day of
their trip, Ed sneaks off at the crack of dawn—before the other men are awake—in hopes of
hunting and killing a deer. Even though he ends up unsuccessful, he thinks that simply being out
of the tent before the others and staying out “a reasonable length of time” gives him the
appearance of being honorable, of following through on his pledge to shoot a deer: “I might as
After the release of Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler also “became the masculine ideal for many white southern
men because he represented a new form of individualized honor, one that revered drinking, hunting, swearing,
cunning, physical pleasure with women, and even fighting as a powerful remedy for a weakened southern
masculinity” (Friend xviii).
18
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well make some show of doing what I said I had come for,” Ed claims, “That would satisfy
honor” (95).
After returning to camp, Ed confides to Lewis that he missed the shot because he wasn’t
fully concentrating on the deer. In the same sentence, Ed exposes what he views as some of his
own masculine inadequacies and also reveals his—and thusly a version of the South’s—
masculine ideal:
I know you wouldn’t have [missed the shot], Lewis…You don’t need to tell me.
We’d have meat. We’d all live forever. And you know something? I wish you’d
been up there and I’d been with you. I would’a just unstrung my bow and watched
yoUPut it right into the heart-lung area. Right into the boiler room. The pinwheel,
at fifteen yards. What I was really thinking about up there was you. (Dickey 98,
emphasis mine)
As far as Ed knows, Lewis doesn’t need to “make a show” to “satisfy honor”; he is an
accomplished athlete, skilled at such “extremely specialized form[s] of sport” as flycasting,
archery, weight lifting, canoeing, and spelunking, “in all of which he had developed complete
mystiques” (4-5).19 Ed admires Lewis’s athleticism, views his individualism as honorable, and
evidently sees in Lewis the potential power that the command of such traits can afford. On the
very first page of the novel, as the four men trace their future trip on a map, Ed watches Lewis’s
hand draw “a big strong X in a place where some of the green had bled away and the paper
changed with high ground” (3). Ed pays little attention to the location of the X and instead
focuses intently on Lewis’s hand, “for it seemed to have power over the terrain, and when it
stopped for Lewis’ voice to explain something, it was as though all streams everywhere quit
running, hanging silently where they were to let the point be made” (3, emphasis mine). What Ed
here points out is his own respect for—and Lewis’s expression of—mastery, the other pillar of
Southern manhood. Marking an obtrusive X over the “printed woods” (3), shooting deer, and
“colonizing” the land by setting up camp (83)—in other words, “mastering” nature, a decidedly
“feminine” force—therefore seems like these mid-century men’s answer to antebellum
manhood’s drive to demonstrate mastery over women and one’s own household.
As Ed explains, Lewis “liked particularly to take some extremely specialized form of sport—usually one that he
could do by himself—and evolve a personal approach to it which he could then expound” (4).
19
63
That Lewis shows self-control by exercising “incessantly” too marks him as a man of
mastery. For Lewis, the male body is another “mystique”: “It’s what you can make it do,” he
tells Ed, “and what it’ll do for you when you don’t even know what’s needed. It’s that
conditioning and reconditioning that’s going to save you” (Dickey 29). Ed makes no secret of
admiring Lewis’s muscular form. On the second day of their trip when, after canoeing in the hot
sun for most of the morning, the men take a minute to cool off, naked, in the water, Ed can
barely take his eyes off of Lewis: “I had never seen such a male body in my life, even in the
pictures in the weight-lifting magazines […] The muscles were bound up in him smoothly, and
when he moved, the veins in the moving part would surface” (102-03). Ed’s own physique, soft
and covered in thick hair, “like monkey fur” (29), pales in comparison, yet simply being around
Lewis somehow makes Ed feel “a great deal lighter and more muscular” (34).
Lewis—who effortlessly demonstrates both honor and mastery—is hypermasculine,
supremely individualistic, athletic, fit, and powerful; he is the ideal male form. Ed, Bobby, and
Drew are none of those things. Where Ed differs from the others (Lewis included), however, is in
his recognition of and appeal to gender as performance. The day before the men set out on their
canoe trip, Ed returns to work from his lunch break and notices, for what seems to be the first
time, that he works almost exclusively with women. Ed is a proverbial cock in a henhouse; he is
surrounded by women, yet this realization for some reason disappoints him. He thinks to himself
that he is “with them” and “of them” (Dickey 15); he feels isolated—emasculated—and worries
that his work environment has somehow jeopardized his manhood. Ed similarly feels that his
stable relationship with his wife, Martha, has threatened his masculinity. On the morning the
men are to leave, Martha asks if she’s done something to make him feel dejected and in “need”
of a weekend away from her. “Lord no,” Ed assures her, yet in this same instance confesses to
the reader that his ennui “partly was” her fault, “just as it’s any woman’s fault who represents
normalcy” (27). For Ed, normalcy is somehow feminizing. Because of this, he eagerly
anticipates the canoe trip and seems to hope that it will help him redefine his compromised
masculinity. After all, the one thing Ed hopes to do on the trip is shoot a deer; even the simple
act of hunting—“pretending to hunt,” as Ed says (95)—he believes will reveal him as a Hunter
(capital H), as honorable, as a man able to take the life of another creature, and will thereby
allow him to evidence his masculinity by asserting his dominance over another life form. When
the group arrives at the riverbank, Ed catches a glimpse of himself in the rear window of Lewis’s
64
car: “I was light green, a tall forest man, an explorer, guerrilla, hunter” (69). Needless to say, he
“liked the idea and the image”; “[e]ven if this was just a game, a charade,” he tells himself, “I
had let myself in for it, and I was here in the woods, where such people as I had got myself up as
were supposed to be” (69).
Ed continues to “act out” his role as the weekend progresses. While Lewis “believes that
man is in his most natural, true, and powerful state,” Betina Entzminger agrees, “Ed still feels
that he is merely playing a part written for him by others” (103). And certainly, throughout his
narrative Ed almost obsessively compares his experiences to those of characters in movies. When
the men arrive in Oree—the place from which they wish to depart on their canoe trip (what Ed
calls “the redneck South”)—Ed can’t help but compare an old man they encounter to “a hillbilly
in some badly cast movie, a character actor too much in character to be believed” (Dickey 55).
Similarly, no sooner are they on the water than does Ed claim that everything he knows about
canoeing he learned from “movies and pictures of Indians on calendars” (73). Even when held at
gunpoint by the villainous pair of mountain clansman, Ed recalls that he “half-raised” his hands
in the air “like a character in a movie” (111). Ed can’t seem to shake the movies from his mind.
All the world’s a stage for Ed, and as he sees it, he himself is just another performer.
Ed’s perceptive, self-referential awareness that gender comprises an element of public
performance is significant for two key reasons. For one, it situates the narrative squarely within a
framework of Southern cultural history and mythology. As Friend explains, white Southerners
have always felt “the need to publicly demonstrate manliness”; since before Reconstruction
Southern manhood “required regular public performance” as a way of maintaining social,
gender, and racial hierarchies (x). Kris DuRocher, in “Violent Masculinity: Learning Ritual and
Performance in Southern Lynchings,” elucidates the function of public rituals—specifically
lynching—as “culturally constructed spaces that communicate social realities by defining and
setting a common cultural agenda” (47). Southern men were obliged to participate in such rituals
because of the way that public performance “allow[ed] participants to assert a conception of
identity to themselves and to those around them in the larger social context” (47). For Southern
men confronting certain postbellum challenges—economic depression, Populism, and women’s
suffrage among them—lynching became a primary way for white men to maintain supremacy.
The lynching ritual reinforced the rules of white supremacy, “allow[ing] the white community to
model, produce, and reinforce a distinct class, racial, and gendered identity while also sending a
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message to the black community as well as white women and children to obey boundaries set up
by while males,” as well as it also operated “as a space in which white southerners defined and
defended” white masculinity (47).
Deliverance does not include any overt lynching sequence, yet DuRocher’s insightful
description of the very public context of Southern manhood sheds light on much of what’s at
stake in Ed’s narrative, which in many ways evolves from such earlier performances as lynching.
Perhaps most importantly, DuRocher’s analysis of lynching makes frighteningly apparent the
extensive role that violence played in both “creating” and “exhibiting” masculinity (47). I return
again to Ed’s desire to shoot and kill a deer, to exhibit his power and masculinity by taking the
life of another creature. If we understand nature as a feminine force, then even Ed’s excitement
at “colonizing” the land (Dickey 83), or “raping” the wilderness, suggests a certain level of
violence, particularly as it mirrors a comment he makes—before the canoe trip—when
photographing a young female model for the Kitts’ ad. As the girl sits and waits for the shoot to
begin, Ed is somehow reminded of pornography:
I thought of those films you see at fraternity parties and in officers’ clubs, where
you realize with terror that when the girl drops the towel the camera is not going
to drop with it discreetly, as in old Hollywood films, following the bare feet until
they hide behind a screen, but is going to stay and when the towel falls, move in;
that it is going to destroy someone’s womanhood by raping her secrecy; that there
is going to be nothing left. (20-21)
Films clearly aren’t the only things relentlessly plaguing Ed’s mind; violence and power are
there, too. This is put in further perspective when Ed, holding a gun (an obvious phallic symbol),
thinks to himself that he now has “the power” (116).20 In addition to violence, Ed’s various
reflections on “acting it out” evidence the lingering effects of this compulsory “socialization”
that was crucial for preserving the South’s gender hierarchies. According to DuRocher, “Young
boys and girls learned from an early age the consequences if they failed to uphold their adult
gender positions” (47); Ed’s narrative corroborates the damaging consequences of failing to meet
these requirements. For Ed those include being viewed as “effeminate”—hence the scene during
That Ed associates guns—weapons—with power suggests the ways that Ed’s idea of masculinity is variously
defined by appearance, by his ability to achieve a certain “look.” Susan Faludi, in Stiffed, terms this “ornamental
masculinity.”
20
66
which Ed feels threatened by the presence of women in his workplace and must discern a “decent
ass” among them in order to reassure himself of his manhood (Dickey 15)—and thereby weak.
Much of DuRocher’s analysis of Southern manhood and public performance corresponds
to cultural theorist Judith Butler’s critical argument that certain “stylized bodily acts” are socially
constructed and in their repetition over time establish the appearance of what she terms an
“essential” or “core” gender (Butler 14). This intersection marks the second reason why Ed’s
awareness of gender as performance is important: Gender Trouble suggests that we often fail to
identify this “regulatory fiction” because we’ve been conditioned by our culture and our
normative society to accept these acts in order to maintain structures of power (32); recognizing
gender as a social construction, as Ed appears to do, allows one to reexamine, to challenge, and
ultimately subvert society’s fixed notions of gender and identity.21 Ed’s conscious decisions to
“act” his part expose “the multiplicity of identity, the ways in which gender is articulated through
a variety of positions, languages, institutions, and apparatuses” (Berger, Wallis, and Watson 2).
Yet Ed most pushes against the boundaries of masculinity in his homoerotic affection for Lewis.
Certainly, from the very beginning of the novel this affection becomes palpable. Some of the
first words out of Ed’s mouth express reverence for Lewis’s “powerful” hand as it marks a
“strong X” on the map of the river (Dickey 3). Notably, the scene during which Ed makes love to
Martha—and during which he imagines her as the young model from the Kitts’ ad—is
sandwiched between descriptions of Lewis. Thoughts of Lewis are in Ed’s mind the moment
before he and his wife have sex: “I reached for Martha, as I always did…I held her shoulder
lightly, and it was then I remembered I was going with Lewis” (26); after Ed and Martha’s tryst,
he studies his reflection in the bathroom mirror and immediately his mind wanders to Lewis’s
well-exercised figure (29). On the second day of canoeing, when the men take a break to swim in
the river, Ed marvels openly and unashamedly at Lewis’s naked body. Ed, who is frequently
fuzzy on other details, remembers every inch of Lewis’s muscular physique, a body such as he’d
“never seen” in his life (102).22 And Lewis—who devotes a lot of time and energy to
For a fascinating history of Southern gender-bending rituals of inversion, see Craig Thompson Friend’s “The
Womanless Wedding: Masculinity, Cross-Dressing, and Gender Inversions in the Modern South.”
21
I think it’s here important to remember that Ed is the first-person narrator who recalls these events years later, and
there are a number of moments when Ed “can’t remember” certain details. This isn’t to say that Ed is lying, but it
should be recognized that Ed’s telling (and Dickey’s writing) is in itself a kind of performance; and gender, as
Butler posits, is often performed through social and linguistic coding.
22
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maintaining his body, his temple—welcomes the attention: “I could tell by the way he glanced
up at me,” Ed reflects, “the payoff was in my eyes” (102). Lewis responds to Ed’s gaze by
playfully “stirr[ing] the fur” on his shoulder and teases: “What do you think, Bolgani the
Gorilla?” (103). As Friend reminds us, because homosexuality “rubbed against the grain” of
Southern masculinity, men—particularly of this decade—were “very cautious about insinuations
of homosocial activities taken too far” (xxi). Yet there is an intimate moment of mutual affection
that occurs here: Ed and Lewis revel in a non-threatening, homosocial love for each other that
neither one seems to see as anything other than completely natural. There is no joke here, no
“indication of tolerance [that] is ultimately undercut by the punchline, returning homo[erotic]
behavior to the realm of the desperate and deviant” (San Filippo 408). Ed appears not to see his
admiration for Lewis’s body as emasculating or feminizing. In this sense, then, Ed refuses to see
masculinity as “socially fixed and always recognizable” and in so doing, he ultimately
“disturb[s] masculinity” as a static category (Berger, Wallis, and Watson 3).
Even and especially after Ed is almost raped and killed, he continues to mark the ways he
“acts” his part and continues to compare his actions to movies. Shortly after the river claims
Drew’s life23 and breaks Lewis’s leg, Ed thinks to himself what a “good thing” it was to have the
evening shade obscure their facial expressions; although he assures himself his face feels “calm
and narrow-eyed,” he insists that there is something still to “act out” (Dickey 151). Ed similarly,
ready to take action against the mountain man that may be stalking them—and may have sniped
Drew while on the river—reveals his plan to Lewis and Bobby by borrowing a line from a
Saturday afternoon movie: “What I mean is like they say in the movies…It’s either him or us”
(153). In many ways, it is necessary to recognize the pervading tone of satire that tinges Ed’s
pronouncements of this sort, and indeed his entire narrative. Contesting Linda Ruth Williams’s
interpretation of John Boorman’s film version, Sielke advocates a similar interpretation when
suggesting that “Deliverance subjects central American myths to a fundamental reversal”:
[H]ere the flight into nature does not amount to a withdrawal from the familiar
and the sexual. Instead, nature turns out to be the site of sexuality, albeit a
transgressive kind, the habitat of a Southern breed that is “too close to nature,”
Sielke looks at Drew’s corpse as a symbol of the rape, of “the repressed (history) [that] returns with a vengeance”:
“Drew dies under dubious circumstances,” she writes, “only to resurface as a horrific corpse that needs to be buried
again” (“Voicing Sexual Violence” 172).
23
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and whose home is the very space of (ecological) rape and incest. […] The
heroes’ journey into nature itself emerges as a transgressive act, nature not a
“redeeming,” but a “deforming,” site. Just like the mountain men, who lack
fingers, brain power, and skin color…Lewis finds his potency compromised. The
case thus is not one of civilized city slickers versus bestial hillbillies; not
difference, but likeness and “familiarity” are at issue here. The problem is indeed
not…the death or absence of family but “relatives all over the place,” entangling
the protagonists “in a sticky, genetically intensified web made by too much
family,” “of relatedness run wild.” For whereas family done right facilitates
conformity, “family done wrong breaks open the membrane of civilization.”
(“Voicing Sexual Violence” 173)
Deliverance is almost inarguably a novel that turns convention on its head. This is all to
underscore the way that Ed’s narrative, and perhaps the very novel, is itself “a transgressive
act.”24 Deliverance attempts to collapse the binaries that inform cultural perceptions of gender,
primarily those structures that dictate appropriate forms of Southern masculine expression.25
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the rape scene. Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew—uppermiddle-class city boys—look to this trip for a “savage,” “primitive” experience; they find it all
right—in the form of two toothless, overall-clad, inbred hillbillies—and, as vulgar as it may
sound, it literally (for Bobby, at least) rapes them from behind.
At the same time, however, the rape scene redraws some very familiar lines in the sand.
This chapter has insisted on framing Deliverance in Southern mythology because, as I posit, it is
during this scene that culture, history, and myth converge and inevitably explode. In addition to
nurturing anxieties about “homosocial activities taken too far” (Friend xxi),26 it is in the rape
Further proof of this is that Ed narrates this story. Sally Robinson insists that “male power is secured by
inexpressivity” (165), but Ed defies this by talking about his experience.
24
About the film version, Ed Madden—in “The Buggering Hillbilly and the Buddy Movie: Male Sexuality in
Deliverance”—claims that “the [rape] scene remains remarkably resistant to normative readings of gender and
sexual identity, especially when one recognizes the position of the gay spectator, whose response to cinematic
images, as Earl Jackson notes, may be driven by ‘inappropriate’ and ‘transgressive’ modes of identification and
desire” (196).
25
Looking at Boorman’s Deliverance as part of the buddy film genre, Madden argues that “[t]he increasingly visible
gay rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s also made visible the homoerotic possibilities of the
traditional buddy relationship in American cinema—a possibility that surfaces in Deliverance through sexual
violence, which both evokes and forecloses the possibility of homosexuality that subtends the text” (196).
26
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scene—the rape complex reconfigured—that Ed’s27 ruminations on masculinity (which the
narrative has thus far interrogated as a social construct, has played with the idea of performance)
are shattered. When he and Bobby encounter the two hillbilly “mountain men” on the bank of the
river, the first thing Ed notices is that they are carrying with them a shotgun. This alone
ominously foreshadows that what’s to come most likely won’t end well; moreover, the shotgun is
a clear indication that violence will be the driving force behind the masculine performance that is
soon to occur. And indeed, the hillbilly men “perform” an aggressive, violent masculinity when
one anally rapes Bobby and the other threatens to force Ed to fellate him.28 Right before doing
so, one of the hillbillies asks Ed—who has been belted to a tree—if he’s ever had his “balls cut
off” (Dickey 112). Clearly, the intent behind this is emasculation, and it has exactly this effect on
Ed. When one of the men scrapes a knife across Ed’s chest, he admits he “had never felt such
brutality and carelessness of touch, or such disregard for a person’s body”: “It was not the steel
or the edge of the steel that was frightening,” he remembers, “the man’s fingernail, used in any
gesture of his, would have been just as brutal; the knife only magnified his unconcern” (112).
Deprived of his knife and rope and strapped to a tree by his own belt, Ed feels defeated and
furthermore helpless, passive, feminine. And it is, of course, the hypermasculine Lewis who
swoops in to rescue Ed and Bobby, shooting (with a bow and arrow, no less) and killing one of
the hillbillies, seeming validation that Lewis’s brand of manhood is the most successful. This
distraction causes the other mountain man to drop his rifle and allows Ed to break free; Ed
snatches up the gun and acknowledges that now, with the gun (as it is worth re-mentioning, a
noticeably phallic symbol), he has “the power” (116). Ed, incidentally, also says that if he could
have, he would have blown the hillbilly in half, “with one pull of a string.” But Ed doesn’t, and
says that there was “no need” (117).29
27
And, as Entzminger suggests, also Dickey’s (102).
Sally Robinson suggests the opposite: “The novel represents the primal male-on-male violence as a ‘natural’
expression of male sexuality, and in ‘nature,’ gender and sexual orientation become irrelevant. That is, according to
Dickey’s novel, social understandings of gender and sexuality have no place in primal nature; and thus, Bobby is not
‘feminized’ by the rape, and Ed does not endanger his manhood or his heterosexual identity by desiring to ‘make
love’—via an arrow if not a penis—with the mountain man. The male body belongs to the natural and not the
social” (168).
28
Ed’s statement raises a pertinent question: Who is he trying to convince? This serves to underscore the ways in
which Ed’s narrative is, in and of itself, performative.
29
70
The rape scene becomes even more complicated when considering the nature of the
“hillbilly” victimizers. What Entzminger neglects to mention, and what Sielke only hints at, is
that although these mountain men are almost cartoon-like in their comportment, they mark the
class tensions that still occupied the mind of many white Southern men.30 Ed vocalizes his
opinions of “the redneck South” and its inhabitants early on; while Lewis contends that the
mountains are full of “good people” and “lots of music” (Dickey 45), Ed thinks everything and
everyone around him in Oree is “sleepy and hookwormy and ugly, and most of all,
inconsequential”: “There is always something wrong with people in the country,” he tells himself
as he condescendingly counts the number of missing fingers, blind eyes, and “crippling or
twisting illnesses” that surround him (55-56). Aristocratic “notions of white racial purity” are
largely responsible for the persistent denigration of rural, lower-class white Southerners
(Chenault); “at a time when many middle-class whites felt that only blacks and other minorities
were ‘supposed’ to be poor,” impoverished whites were often considered a “disgrace to their
race” (Harkin 177). In “Southern Culture on the Skids,” Jon Smith considers the relationship
between middle and lower class white Southern men. In an incisive exploration of music and
masculinity, Smith suggests that the lack of “a viable middle-class southern white masculine
identity”— he calls the middle class “the great unmarked signifier in the South”—has
encouraged middle-class men to “ape the signifiers of those above and below” them (87). This is
especially illuminating when considering Ed’s position on “country people”: Ed, struggling with
his own lack of “masculine identity,” attempts for the weekend to appropriate “primal”
characteristics typically associated with working-class, impoverished white men, a masculinity
he finds at once alluring and threatening.31
Just as the rape scene brings class tensions to the forefront, it also makes conspicuous the
complex and indelible link between class and race. Clearly, Dickey’s text is enormously
concerned with issues of sexuality and class, “fears” that are ultimately nurtured in the rape
30
Ed makes sure to distinguish their manner of speech from his own; for example, Ed, thinking the men might be
bootleggers, assures them that neither he nor Bobby would report their “still” to the police; confused, one of the
hillbillies replies, “A stee-ul?” (Dickey 109). Also, for a more detailed history of the term and its social and cultural
implications, see Anthony Harkins’s Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon.
31
Ed Madden is another critic who interrogates the figure of the hillbilly to conclude that both novel and film
version of Deliverance suggest that “the deepest fears of the American cultural imagination are not race and gender
but sexuality and class” (196).
71
scene. But to assume that—as many critics do—sexuality, class, gender, and race are mutually
exclusive is problematic. In her analysis of Boo Radley, Diann L. Baecker highlights the ways
that “marginalized groups tend to share each other’s characteristics” (128). Women, racial
minorities, and impoverished white people, she claims, “are generally considered like each
other…as well as being dirty, uncivilized, closer to nature, and any other losing end of a
dichotomy” (129). Although black characters are conspicuously absent in this white-centric
narrative, “blackness” in Deliverance is at once everywhere and nowhere. And as is true of The
Sound and the Fury and To Kill a Mockingbird, that blackness is most often manifested through
marginalized white characters. Not only does Dickey’s novel, through these characters, realign
the impulse to incest with poor Southerners but compounds this by furthermore racializing the
two hillbillies and their deviant sexual behavior.32 The rape scene refigures the Southern rape
complex: the victims here are not passive white women, nor are the rapists black men. Instead,
both victims and victimizers are white men. Yet strangely, this scene still manages to invoke
images of “deviant,” “aggressive” black “beast” rapists, and furthermore aligns that sexuality
with two poor, white hillbilly men. It’s therefore worth noting that the rape occurs in the middle
of the dark woods. As one of the men threatens Ed with his own knife, Ed “look[s] for the sun to
strike it” but dismally remarks that “there was no sun where we were” (Dickey 111). The
woods—wherein reside the sexually deviant hillbillies—have long been considered the site of
savage “‘negro’ sexuality”: writing of the “feminine vegetative metaphor” and its storied place in
Southern fiction, Diane Roberts asserts that it was “common for the daughter of the aristocratic
family to be ‘placed’ in the plantation garden, a hortus conclusus signifying not only the fertile
body of the master’s land but the forbidden body of the master’s daughter” (116). The bodies of
lower-class white women and black women, however, were not privy to this “image of
protection, cultivation, and closure” and were instead “left unprotected (and undeified) in the
rough world” (116-17).
Reading the woods as both “negro” and “feminine” once again underscores the link
between class, race, and gender and serves also to highlight Ed’s reaction to Bobby’s rape.
Sielke notes that the hillbilly “albinos” appear as “inverted black rapists” (“Voicing Sexual Violence” 173). She
also underscores the “larger cultural significance” of Ed’s desire to castrate his potential rapist: “Imagining how he
might ‘cut off the genitals he was going to use on me,’ Ed explicitly envisions the mutilations practiced during
lynchings” (176). Sielke continues to assess the scene in which Ed successfully slays the remaining mountain man
and “works on his victim’s gums” and compares this to “images of black rapists [that] focus on teeth and mouth,
suggesting sexual prowess as well as fear of castration” (176).
32
72
Comparing the rape scene in Deliverance to male-on-male rape within the American prison
narrative, Angela Farmer cites Catherine MacKinnon’s notions that consent in heterosexual
representation is often “bound up with intimidation, coercion, and the size and strength of the
aggressor” (qtd. in Farmer 106). Farmer contends that homosexual encounters work along the
same continuum and points out another aspect of male-on-male rape that MacKinnon’s argument
too considers: the “threat of feminization” (106). She explains:
Given that MacKinnon’s argument hinges on the coexistence of misogyny and
patriarchy, feminization becomes perceived as a negative consequence. […] In the
paradigm where the female is passive and receptive, the female body is defined by
its capacity to be penetrated; it is violable. […] For a man to be raped is for him to
be feminized and, in a misogynistic culture, this is a fate worse than death” (10607).
In a thorough analysis, Farmer underlines the language of feminization at use during the rape
scene. Included in her evidence is the hillbilly’s reference to Bobby’s pants as “panties,” as well
as Ed’s own description of Bobby’s body as “pink” and “hairless.” Additionally, Farmer marks
Bobby—based on his name (“he is not called Rob, Bob, or Robert”) and Ed’s comparison of him
to “a boy undressing for the first time”—as “more ‘boy’ and less ‘man’” (112-13). This analysis
moreover illuminates the significance of Ed’s fears about being “feminized,” fears that he
articulates from the very beginning of the novel.33 It’s clear that Ed associates that which is
negative with women, yet I would argue that—up until the rape scene—Ed’s anxieties function
as (or, more fittingly, are disguised as) a comment on the social construction of gender. That is,
Ed’s remarks of the sort about feeling too much “like” a woman ordinarily occur before he “acts
out” something “manly.” His reaction to Bobby’s rape, however, takes on a completely different
tenor, one that becomes even darker when compounded by the class and race issues also at stake
in the rape scene. Ed thinks of Bobby as now “tainted”: horrified, Ed remembers “how [Bobby]
had looked over the log, how willing to let anything be done to him, and how high his voice was
when he screamed” (Dickey 128).
Interestingly, traits such as “[f]oppishness, passivity, gentleness, interest in home life, even finding friendship
with one’s wife rather than guys” not only “signaled effeminacy and a threat to southern manhood” but were also
associated with Northern men (Friend xiii).
33
73
That after Bobby is violated—in a word, feminized—Ed’s attitude towards him changes
from one of indifference to one of scorn and hostility is noteworthy when considering the
homosocial bonds that underlie the camping trip. Concentrating on “the immanence of” male
same-sex bonds and their “prohibitive structuration” to bonds between men and women, Eve
Sedgwick—taking as her starting point what Gayle Rubin terms “the traffic in women”—claims
that heterosexuality is based, in one form another, on the use of women as symbolic,
“exchangeable, perhaps symbolic property” for the function of “cementing” the bonds of men
with other men (25-26). Importantly, in Rubin’s and Sedgwick’s theories, the homosocial34 bond
makes conspicuous the frequent erasure of women. The male-male bond obscures the female role
either by writing the woman out entirely or by simply writing her off as the villain. As Sedgwick
concludes, men, when “in the presence of a woman who can be seen as either pitiable or
contemptible,” are able to “exchange power and…confirm each other’s value even in the context
of the remaining inequalities in their power” (160). This is especially evident in Deliverance; as
we are to read the “tainted” Bobby as now “feminized” post-sodomy, he becomes at once
pitiable and contemptible as he is unable to successfully complete any of the tasks to which he’s
been assigned. Immediately before Ed remarks that Bobby feels “tainted,” he contemplates
Lewis as the group’s most valuable asset: “The assurance with which he had killed a man was
desperately frightening to me, but the same quality was also calming, and I moved, without being
completely aware of movement, nearer to him. I would have liked nothing better than to touch
that big relaxed forearm as he stood there…I would have followed him anywhere” (Dickey 128).
Placing Bobby as the object of disdain only buttresses Ed’s relationship with Lewis.
It is additionally worth noting that while Ed and the other men embark on a weekend
adventure, Martha, Ed’s wife, stays at home. In fact, the only space Martha ever seems to occupy
is within the domestic sphere. It’s for this reason that Martha, although her part in this text seems
only peripheral (she is, as Sedgwick would agree, more or less “written out entirely”), deserves
critical attention,35 particularly as her character is positioned in a way that rearticulates the few
As Sedgwick writes, the term “homosocial” is formed by an obvious analogy with the term “homosexual”; while
they function on a sort of continuum, the two terms are also meant to be differentiated. One of the conditions of the
homosocial bond requires a certain fear or anxiety about that which could be considered “homosexual.” To an
extent, this is at work in Deliverance: Ed becomes literally sick to his stomach when he witnesses Bobby being
sodomized, and is equally queasy at the thought of having to fellate one of the hillbilly men.
34
74
available options for Southern women and reasserts the place of female subjectivity in the South.
Martha was also at one time a working woman; she was a nurse—not a doctor—a stereotypically
female occupation. She is furthermore a mother, a maternal force, and she for this reason—not
unlike To Kill a Mockingbird’s Aunt Alexandra—appears strangely asexual, even in the scene in
which she and Ed have sex, wherein Ed first (and after) thinks about Lewis. During their
encounter, Ed imagines Martha as the young female model from the Kitts’ ad.36 In addition, Ed
description of Martha’s “approach to sex” is less than flattering; he calls it “practical,”
“deliberate and frank” (Dickey 28). This occurs almost immediately after he admits that to him,
Martha represents “normalcy” (27). In other words, Martha fits assumptions about Southern
white women: she is the veritable “angel in the house,” a devoted, nurturing (house)wife and
mother—is not supposed to be overtly sexual; she is “too much the objectification of the
combined mother-virgin land” for Ed to willingly “‘defile her with impunity” (Roberts 104).
Through Martha, Deliverance reactivates the “ideal of womanhood tied to myths of the Old
South [that] portrayed women as weak and submissive in relation to men, exalted and honored in
the sacred role of wife and mother” (Perry 967). Ed’s narrative concern with masculinity
obscures Martha’s voice and thusly validates the place of female subjectivity in the white
patriarchal South. Ed certainly recognizes the performative opportunities afforded by
masculinity, but femininity seems to be a different thing entirely.
Like Faulkner and Lee, Dickey’s novel never unravels gender from sexuality, class, and
race. And also like the other texts this dissertation has thus far discussed, Deliverance is too
unable to disassociate these things from an act of sexual violence. And sex is everywhere in this
narrative; the rape scene, Eugene M. Longen claims, is merely “part of the pervasive theme of
sex” that runs throughout the novel (“Dickey’s Deliverance”). Additionally, as a number of
scholars—including Angela Farmer and Sally Robinson—have concluded, Deliverance incites
the terror of the male body as violable, as not altogether impervious to penetration, as in other
Martha merely bookends the men’s trip; she is there before they leave and she is there when they get back. During
the trip, however, even when Ed is about to be raped and possibly killed, his mind only fleetingly wanders to Martha
(115). Bobby’s wife is only mentioned off-handedly. Drew’s wife, similarly, appears only briefly at the end.
35
The young Kitts’ model is another woman essentially “written out entirely”—unnamed, she is sex personified—
and her seemingly only function is to help Ed reassert his manhood.
36
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words capable of being feminized.37 To miss the ways in which Ed’s narrative in general and the
male rape scene in particular reactivates these sexual, class, and racial mythologies and cultural
anxieties attached to Southern manhood is to miss what’s really at stake in Deliverance:
affirmation of “old” aristocratic ideals and of (hetero)normative Southern conceptions of male
and female subjectivity. Much scholarship has examined these factors individually; by neglecting
to explore the impact of their myriad intersections, however, it has only just skimmed the
surface.
“OF WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SUNTAN OIL”: FORGING AN ALTERNATE
MASCULINITY IN KARATE IS A THING OF THE SPIRIT
Harry Crews’s Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit similarly incites the terror of the feminized
male body by invoking and reimagining the South’s “rape complex.” As Bobby is violated in the
middle of the Georgia wilderness, John Kaimon is locked in a room in the back of a Florida bar
where he is anally raped by two white men, not hillbillies, but “homosexuals.” And just as Bobby
reacts to his assault by feeling ashamed,38 John Kaimon too feels “shamed beyond saying”
(Crews 91). Like Deliverance, Crews’s text confronts the crisis of masculinity that occurred in
the 1960s and early 1970s and legitimizes “feminization” as part of a net of responses to
emasculation. At the same time, however, it challenges the structures that dictate appropriate
forms of Southern masculine expression. But what Dickey only hints at by complicating the
different images of white masculinity that existed exclusively in the South at this time, Crews
takes to the next level. Crews’s fiction is known for its “assault against conventionality”; Jerrilyn
McGregory sums up the persistent critical response when she notes that his “images exist in
polar opposition to all that is refined, pretentious, and doctrinaire” (97). Karate Is a Thing of the
Spirit is one such assault, a novel that is self-consciously subversive and progressive. Set in
South Florida—a location that suggests a clear and conscious distancing from “The South” and
all things “Southern”—Crews’s novel defines an “alternate” masculinity, one distanced and
distinct from Southern paradigms of manhood that value “mastery” and “honor.” Yet Crews’s
Farmer, specifically, suggests that “our culture has become so ingrained with ideas concerning male rape that we
have established and accepted a system of rhetorical formulation for the violable male body” (105).
37
And Ed’s reaction to Bobby’s rape—remarking that he felt somehow “tainted”—affirms Bobby’s feelings of
shame as “normal.”
38
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fiction nonetheless remains tangled up with history, continually and (un)consciously engaging
the South’s vested system of socio-cultural mythologies and politics. Through the invocation of
the Southern rape complex during the novel’s rape scene in Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit—
where all of the fears and anxieties about gender, sexuality, class, and race that are attached to
Southern manhood converge—Crews’s treatment of male and female subjectivity and
(homo)sexuality invariably fosters many of the anxieties surrounding gender and sexuality in the
South.
It first must be noted that Crews writes in the spirit of farce. Much of his fiction,
including Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, is consciously subversive. Readers have recognized this
by understanding his work as “comic.” The National Review, for instance, once called Harry
Crews “a comic novelist of magnificent gifts,” and indeed his fiction—arguably some of the
South’s most remarkable, most creative, greatest, crudest, and weirdest—is best known for its
trademark brand of black humor. According to Matthew Guinn, Crews is “one of the foremost
contemporary practitioners of the southern grotesque” (105). In particular, the novel deploys
Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque principles of the culture of folk humor” by perverting and
upending established hierarchies; as Jerrilyn McGregory describes, “Crews’s images exist in
polar opposition to all that is refined, pretentious, and doctrinaire. […] An assault against
conventionality, then, represents the essence of Crews’s creative imagination” (97).39 Crews is
perhaps best known for writing about “freaks.” His fiction is peopled with characters that are
usually physically deformed, almost always psychologically damaged, and all too often engage
in behavior largely considered “deviant.”40 They are characters who defy social standards, turn
McGregory examines The Gospel Singer (1968) and A Feast of Snakes as “position[ed]…within the
‘carnivalesque crowd’” (104).
39
40
In the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003), Crews remembers his childhood fascination with
looking through the Sears Roebuck catalogue. “First thing that struck us,” he says in his characteristic growl, “was
that everybody in the Sears Roebuck catalogue was perfect. Wasn’t any bald heads. Everybody had all the fingers
that was comin’ to ‘em. Nobody had any open and running sores on their bodies. But everybody we knew had a
finger missin’ or one eye put out from a staple glancin’ off a post…In our world, everybody was maimed and
mutilated.” This world Crews describes is one he knew all too well. In his memoir, A Childhood: The Biography of
a Place (1978), he recalls “how lonely and savage it was to be a freak” when he was crippled by disease at only five
years old (85). His illness (which was likely polio) caused his legs to cramp and shrivel. “They were bent at the
knees, and the ligaments were slowly drawing my heels closer and closer to the cheeks of my buttocks,” he writes,
“It felt like both legs were knotted from hip to heel” (83). The following year, shortly after regaining his ability to
walk, Crews sustained severe burns to over two-thirds of his body when he was accidentally thrown into a cast-iron
vat full of boiling water. It would take him another year to recover from those injuries.
77
convention on its head. And, as McGregory confirms, those freaks are ultimately a necessary
component of the carnivalesque (98).
In Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, John Kaimon—a penniless, discontented drifter with a
penchant for “getting into other people’s games” (Crews 33)—joins a sort-of fight club karate
commune in Ft. Lauderdale, where he undergoes torturous training, is denied adequate food, and
is forced to strike a mackawari board with such strength and frequency that it mangles his hands
until his deformed knuckles resemble those of the rest of the group, the karateka (24). Apart
from nourishing their own freakish deformities, the other karateka—all “outlaws,” outcasts
banned from fighting other, legitimate karate organizations—worship a man named Jefferson
Davis Munroe, a “midget” karate master who publicly eats beer bottles and slams his fist through
the side of washing machines in order to “demonstrate tranquility” (41). The members of this
group are “tranquility freaks” (24, emphasis mine), and karate is their religion—it is the only
thing in which they believe; as McGregory explains, religion is also one of the “formal
institutions” that the carnivalesque overturns (97). Another lampoon of institutionalized religion
comes toward the end of the novel, when it is revealed that Lazarus obsessively watches
television commercials. His favorite: an advertisement for Buick wherein “several off-camera
voices, coming one right on top of the other, kept saying how they had always wanted something
to believe in and how they had finally found it in their 1970 Buick car” (155, emphasis mine).
The Ft. Lauderdale of Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit appears to be a world that prefers
such transposition. According to Bakhtin, the “carnivalesque spirit” is also often expressed
through inversion, what Bakhtin call “forms of the contrary—the backside, the lower stratum, the
inside out, and the topsy-turvy” (411). Here, for instance, the beauty queen Gaye Nell Odell is
also a dangerous killing machine. She embodies multiple “dualities”—“masculine and feminine,
sex and violence”—Elise S. Lake writes, and “[w]hen Gaye Nell isn’t intimidating the men of
the karateka with her mastery of karate, she is taunting them sexually, then humiliating them
when they succumb” (89). In another example, Kaimon visits the men’s restroom at The Iron
Horse where he encounters a woman exiting one of the stalls. While Kaimon admires her “good
ass and her good legs,” the woman walks to one of the urinals, lifts her skirt with one hand, and
“with the other hand took hold of one of the biggest peters” Kaimon claims to have “ever seen”
(Crews 70). Lazarus later explains that The Iron Horse is a drag bar: “Everything’s in drag in
here,” he tells Kaimon, “Men dressed like women. Women dressed like men. And some dressed
78
like both. Miniskirts and jockstraps” (71). These examples most specifically speak to the novel’s
attempt to overturn fixed notions of gender. In “The Performative Body in Karate Is a Thing of
the Spirit,” Nicholas Spencer discusses the ways that prescribed modes of gender “are selfconsciously performed, inverted, amalgamated, and seemingly subverted” throughout Crews’s
novel.41 Specifically, Spencer asserts that
[w]orking in The Iron Horse has made Lazarus regard the “normal” world as
“strange.” The fact that he winks as he says this, as well as his comment that
perverts who think they are normal are not allowed in the club, indicates that the
notion of normality has not merely been relocated in “perversity” but has been
radically problematized—nothing can really be normal if it is only (per)formed as
such due to its position within a semiotic gender code. (142)
Outside of The Iron Horse, Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit continues to make visible an
awareness of gender as performance. At one point, Gaye Nell deploys a lexical shift by telling
Kaimon to hit the mackawari board “like a girl” (Crews 62). Coming from Gaye Nell, the
strongest of the karateka, the phrase “like a girl” is not here an insult but an expression of
encouragement.
The novel is also farcical in its self-awareness, consciously engaging and sometimes
rejecting images of Southern culture and tradition. Kaimon’s prized possession is a jersey “with
the head of William Faulkner embossed on the back in aluminum paint” that he made himself
while living in Mississippi (Crews 22). The monolithic figure of Faulkner as the father of
Southern literature continues to reappear throughout the novel. Instead of keeping a diary,
Kaimon writes letters to Faulkner in which he describes his day-to-day activities as well as his
innermost thoughts, desires, fears, and anxieties. The novel is also rife with references to any
number of Faulkner’s novels.42 In one of the most remarkable examples, when first meeting
Kaimon, George repeatedly “hisses” into his ear the word “Sanctuary!” (28). George—who later
rapes Kaimon—here not-so-subtly alludes to the famous corncob rape scene that occurs in
Faulkner’s text. While the invocation of Sanctuary foreshadows Kaimon’s rape, it also suggests
Spencer utilizes Judith Butler’s ideas about drag performances as “simultaneously reinscribing and challenging
the gender norms they imitate, such as those of ideal feminine types” (141).
41
Kaimon tells Belt, in one particularly funny moment of solipsism, that all of Faulkner’s “stuff” is “full of freaks”:
“It’s the one thing everybody agrees on. It’s just one freak after another in Faulkner’s work” (142).
42
79
the ways that Crews’s novel dissents from Faulkner’s by “refiguring” the rape in Sanctuary.43
Unlike Popeye, who rapes Temple Drake with a corncob because he’s impotent, George and
Marvin are hypersexual. They are constantly making sexual innuendoes and unwanted advances
toward Kaimon. They are sex personified, but it’s a dangerous, threatening sexuality. And of
course, therein lies the principal way that Crews flips Sanctuary on its head: through
representation of male-on-male rape. If “sexual violation seems to reaffirm a woman’s
femininity yet emasculates the male victim,” then male-on-male rape thereby applies “a shift in
gender position” (Sielke, “Voicing Sexual Violence” 171).
Sanctuary is perhaps one of Faulkner’s most sensationalist texts, shocking because of its
unconventional treatment of sexuality. It’s also often regarded as one of Faulkner’s most violent
texts. Written in 1929, when romanticized myths of the Old South flourished, Sanctuary
interwove sex and violence in order to dispel that myth of the South as “a land of moonlight and
magnolias, of sweethearts and gentle lovers” (Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern
History 392). Rather, Sanctuary demonstrated how sex and violence were everywhere— not
exclusively “among the blacks”—and that “the purest of the pure in Southern white culture, an
upper class young white girl, Temple Drake, can wade right in and find the water fine” (392).
Violence in Sanctuary, according to Olga Vickery, is furthermore emphasized because of its
“curious power” to inspire in readers two conflicting but equally corresponding reactions: “one
social and conventional, the other distinctively personal and exploratory” (127). As Vickery
explains, it thereby “both confirms and disorders familiar patterns of thought and action, and in
so doing, it forces a re-evaluation of self and society, together with a subsequent adjustment of
one to the other” (127).
The references to Sanctuary in Crews’s novel therefore also serve to highlight the
significance and the intensity of the violent, sexual energy that imbues the whole atmosphere of
Crews’s novel. And it is through acts of violence that Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit ultimately
departs from carnivalesque mockery and becomes something far more serious. In the opening
chapter, Gaye Nell nearly beats another, nameless karateka to death. Before doing so, she strips
and slowly parades naked in front of the other students. When one of the students briefly glances
at her naked body, she immediately kicks him in the sternum: “She screamed—kyaied—and
43
It furthermore makes evident the ways that all Southern fiction, in some way or another, consciously or not,
“refigures” Faulkner’s fiction.
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from where she stood, in a single sweeping movement she caught him in the middle of the chest
with the steelhard point of her heel” (18). Similarly, Gaye Nell’s method of teaching the other
students is to stand in front of them, naked, while they release their sexual frustration by
repeatedly hitting the mackawari board. The backdrop of karate’s institutionalized violence44—a
sexualized violence, no less—is then punctuated by other insinuations of sexual violence. George
and Marvin unsuccessfully attempt to rape Kaimon once at the beginning of the novel (29);
shortly after following the group of karateka back to the Sun ‘N Fun Motel, Kaimon admits that
he’s been raped at least once before: we are told that “a motorcycle gang whose members wore
swastikas and German helmets” once offered him a place to sleep for a night, but Kaimon “got
very little sleep because the members of the motorcycle gang circumcised him, raped his mouth,
anus, and armpits and did some other things to him that he had never thought of” (46). After one
of Gaye Nell’s “lessons” at the mackawari board—during which she of course removes her gi
and instructs Kaimon to place his hand on her naked breast—Kaimon lays across the room from
her, “thinking about raping her” (57). This incident notably occurs on the same day that Lazarus
takes Kaimon to The Iron Horse, where he is then raped by George and Marvin; when Gaye Nell
overhears Kaimon hint at this as he reads aloud his letter to Faulkner, she “rapes” him.45
Kaimon’s response to being sexually abused? He feels “an enormous rage” build inside himself,
feels “like he could chew iron”; his rage “threaten[s] to burst out of him in a scream” (89); he is
“filled with a rage to strike, scream, and kick” (96).
The threat of violence—of rape—“circulates consistently” (Scheel) throughout Karate Is
a Thing of the Spirit, and yet, Crews’s treatment of Kaimon’s rape at the hands of George and
Marvin is strangely, coyly intent on concealing the act itself.46 Kaimon reveals the fact that he
has been violated by George and Marvin in his letter to Faulkner, which—because his hands are
in plaster casts from striking the mackawari board—he “writes” by speaking the words out loud.
Notably, this section of the novel is the only one told from the first-person perspective. Here,
According to Gaye Nell, the karateka practice only “nonviolent violence” (131), a paradox remarkably
carnivalesque in its expression of “forms of the contrary.”
44
45
I put the word rape in scare quotes here because Kaimon only later calls his encounter with Gaye Nell a rape. In
the moment, Kaimon does not put up any resistance to Gaye Nell’s advances.
About Sanctuary, Sielke says: “Constantly shifting between disclosure and concealment, and highly elliptical in
structure—with rape as its central deletion—Sanctuary underlines that rape cannot be named, just as the line
between innocence and evil cannot be located” (“Rape and the Artifice” 87).
46
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Kaimon is afforded the chance to discuss the details of the incident at The Iron Horse; instead,
his narrative ends when he tells Faulkner that George locked the door: “And he locked it! The
sonofabitch locked it” (Crews 76). When the story picks up again, it returns to third-person
omniscient point of view. Having overheard Kaimon’s admission, Gaye Nell asks him to tell her
what happened after George locked the door. After avoiding the question by talking about
Faulkner, Gaye Nell “slipped the question in” again; Kaimon answers, “Fucked me,” then
promptly feels “appalled that he had answered” (80). Gaye Nell continues to fish for information,
but instead of answers, she gets silence: Kaimon “had his tongue caught between his teeth” (80),
“kept his tongue caught between his teeth” (81). Apart from admitting that the rape happened,
the only detail Kaimon willingly divulges is that he was at one point rubbed with cocoa butter
(81).
Kaimon is clearly hesitant to talk about the rape. The novel itself is similarly vague when
it comes to broaching Kaimon’s violation; subsequent mentions of Kaimon’s rape—even of the
time he was raped by the German motorcycle gang—come in the form of fleeting, fragmented,
half-veiled hints. For example, when it’s time for Kaimon to teach his first karate class, he thinks
briefly “of being stripped and stroked by two imitation men, of what had happened to him last
night” (Crews 89). Later, we learn that Belt understood Kaimon’s “undoing” as a result of
having his hands “pasted up in plaster”; though Kaimon doesn’t disagree, the omniscient
narration reveals that Belt was wrong, Kaimon’s hands are not the problem: “It was his asshole.
[…] It burned…But it didn’t burn nearly as bad as his shame. […] A girl had broken his hands
and then two girls had hemmed him up in a crummy dressing room under a first-class
homosexual hangout and put it to him in spite of his best efforts. And he was shamed beyond
saying” (91). Additional reminders of Kaimon’s rape occur through the return of George and
Marvin, characters whose presence punctuates the entire novel. When Kaimon must encounter
the two again—as George, Marvin, and a group of their “homosexual” friends come to the Sun
‘N Fun for a workout—he speaks not a word of the incident. However, as we find, Kaimon sees
them in the swimming pool and on so doing feels “his asshole suddenly burning more than his
head, anger rising in him, his bruised and tender hands clenched into fists” (108).
Spencer’s “The Performative Body in Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit” offers an analysis
of the novel’s concern with the performative power of language, one that is helpful in making
sense of Kaimon’s refusal to talk about his violation. Kaimon, he posits, associates his own crisis
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of subjectivity with language. His explanation that he left Oxford “because of Faulkner” (whom,
Spencer remarks, Kaimon calls a “‘perverted degenerate’ for his writing”) and his desire to join
Gaye Nell and the karate group “entails a desire to transcend language and instead undergo a
physical experience that will cause his identity to be recognized” (136). At the same time, the
scene in which Kaimon runs off to join the karateka and leaves his cherished Faulkner jersey
with George and Marvin exemplifies not only his “rejection of language” but also the
“association between language and homosexuality” (143):
The centrality of homosexual identity to the linguistic performativity of the body
in Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit is demonstrated by the association of gay men
and language throughout the novel. […] Language and gay men are the two things
[Kaimon] knows about and initially rejects—yet both keep returning. […]
[T]hrough the gay characters Kaimon realizes how linguistic categories of sexual
difference determine the gendered perception of the body. (141)
Spencer’s evaluation is provocative, for Kaimon certainly, upon first meeting George and
Marvin, is very careful to sufficiently declare himself as “not gay.” We find that Kaimon knows
“all about them”—“them,” of course, in this case being a pejorative euphemism for
homosexuals—wants nothing to do with them, and superciliously tells them to “go on down” to
the YMCA instead of talking to him (Crews 24). “I’m not a meat freak,” he snaps after one of
them calls him “pretty” (25).
The treatment of the rape scene, along with Kaimon’s insistence on not speaking about
the incident, marks the constraints of the novel’s subversive depictions of gender and
performativity. Kaimon’s (and the novel’s) reluctance to talk about it, symptomatic of Kaimon’s
subsequent feelings of emasculation, reinscribes traditional gender politics in which sexual
violation “reaffirms[s] a woman’s femininity yet emasculates the male victim” (Sielke, “Voicing
Sexual Violence” 171). It also marks the moment when the novel “refigures” the Southern rape
complex, which as I’ve discussed previously in this chapter, symbolized “the ‘rape’ of the South
during Reconstruction” in its figuration of the sexual violation of a white female by an
aggressive black man (Cash 2). The South’s proliferation of the rape complex narrative through
literature and various other forms of propaganda was born out of the cultural shift that occurred
during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, the rape complex emerged as a
response to a crisis of masculinity brought about by war, depression, and, most significantly, the
83
new freedoms afforded to women and blacks. Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit reconfigures “this
racialized conflict between men” (Sielke, “Voicing Sexual Violence” 171). George and Marvin
are not black men, but they do represent what was becoming an increasingly visible “threat” to
masculinity: homosexuality. I have mentioned how homosexuality particularly “rubbed against
the grain” of Southern masculinity (Friend xxi). That George and Marvin are cast as aggressive,
depraved villains and homosexuals reifies the place of homosexual behavior within “the realm of
the desperate and deviant” (San Filippo 408) and concretizes the South’s “extreme fear and
loathing of gay men imaged as a threat not only to vulnerable young men but also to the larger
community” (Woodland 290). Kaimon’s “mistrust of language” may indeed be related to his fear
of homosexuality, yet to assume such is to only circle around the other issue here. On
discovering Belt’s “dishonorable discharge,” we find that Kaimon is embarrassed because he
“was brought up to believe that a man did his duty and, if he found he was unable to do his duty,
he kept quiet about it and never under any circumstance, except maybe drunkenness, breathed a
word of it to a living soul” (Crews 146, emphasis mine). In other words, Kaimon’s fears of
language and his anxieties surrounding homosexual behavior are tied up with his own notions
about “proper manliness.”
Crews’s concern with class distinctions is perhaps not as easily recognizable as Dickey’s;
however, Crews writes about a very specific kind of man, one whose social status associates him
“with a rougher and less ‘civilized’ manliness, as found among immigrants, African Americans,
[and] the working classes” (Friend xv). As Erik Bledsoe notes, much scholarship has commented
on depictions of “machismo” in Crews’s fiction (xi). His male protagonists are marginalized,
working-class white men with an affinity for violence and binge-drinking and who represent
what James H. Watkins terms “redneck masculinity.” Such qualities—Watkins writes, along
with the inability to “measure up to” hegemonic conceptions of manhood “tied closely to an
individual’s ability to provide material prosperity for himself and his family”—hinder the
redneck man’s “emotional growth” and contribute to crises of masculine subjectivity (17).47
Patrick Huber identifies other (often stereotypical) characteristics of redneck men; they are
typically bigoted—against “blacks, Jews, hippies, union organizers, aristocratic southern whites,
In “‘The Use of I, Lovely and Terrifying Word’: Autobiographical Authority and the Representation of ‘Redneck’
Masculinity in A Childhood,” Watkins argues that Crews’s memoir (not, necessarily, his fiction) “makes a bid to
flesh out and humanize the southern ‘redneck’ and thus reverse a centuries-old trend in which this class of
southerners is maligned and demonized, on the one hand, or treated as comic on the other” (16-17).
47
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Yankees, and, for good measure, ‘foreigners’ in general” (148-49)—uneducated, drive pickup
trucks, embrace “traditional southern social and religious values” and reject “some of the
bourgeois notions of manhood…fashion[ing] their own code of working-class masculinity and
respectability which placed a high premium on honesty, independence, and hard work” (157,
161).
Any number of Crews’s male characters match this description48; Kaimon, however, is at
once the exception and the rule. He represents his own, alternate version of manhood, one that
eschews the conventional Southern paradigms of “mastery” and “honor.” He doesn’t work, drifts
casually from place to place, lived for a time in a hippy “free love” community in Mexico (and is
even confused for a hippy when first arriving at the Sun ‘N Fun), rarely drinks, and in these ways
resists categories of Southern manhood, in particular forms of “redneck” masculinity Crews most
frequently employs. What’s more, Kaimon is a man who has moved away from Mississippi—the
Deep South—and has relocated to a very different South: South Florida. Ft. Lauderdale,
especially as described in Crews’s novel, is a “tourist’s” South; it’s kitschy—as the name of the
motel, the Sun ‘N Fun, best indicates—and it’s a “Yankee” South, a “No South.” 49 No one
Kaimon encounters during his time in Ft. Lauderdale ever recognizes the image of Faulkner on
Kaimon’s jersey (George and Marvin actually confuse Faulkner’s head with Beethoven’s). This
seems to be a clear effort for Kaimon (and perhaps Crews himself) to gain distance from the
Southern tradition. Despite this, Kaimon is almost haunted by the image of Faulkner. Throughout
the novel, Kaimon remains unable to escape his heritage.
Though Kaimon may reject concrete categories of Southern manhood, he nonetheless
continues to demonstrate his own masculinity through acts of violence. And violence, it should
be reiterated, played a central role in both “creating” and “exhibiting” Southern masculinity.
Kaimon’s violent urges, some of which I have previously discussed, are a crucial part of his
response to the emasculation he feels after being raped by George and Marvin; he is overcome
by violent emotions, “filled with a rage to strike, scream, and kick” (96). Kaimon is given the
48
Former high school football star Joe Lon Mackey, in A Feast of Snakes (1976), is one such character who has
difficulty making sense of his adult world and goes on a shooting rampage while at Mystic, Georgia’s annual
Rattlesnake Roundup. Another is Eugene Biggs who, in The Knockout Artist (1988), masters and exploits the trick
of knocking himself out with a single punch to the jaw.
49
For a history of the “No South,” see James C. Cobb’s Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.
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opportunity to physically assault George and Marvin when they—along with a number of their
friends—arrive at the Sun ‘N Fun for a karate lesson (which take place in an empty swimming
pool), and Kaimon takes every advantage of achieving catharsis through beating them in a
match. Kaimon performs a perfect shuto uki to George’s throat, then, “in a single movement,
delivered a hammer-fist blow to George’s forehead” (114). Kaimon continues the lesson by
defeating every “homosexual” in the pool. “He went into the pool and killed seventeen men,”
Kaimon silently repeats to himself, using what he refers to as “Belt’s favorite metaphor” (117,
118). Kaimon does not actually kill anyone, but the language of death and destruction only
further attests to the essential link between violence and masculinity. For Kaimon, violence too
becomes a means of organizing experience. For many of Crews’s subversive characters (who
like Kaimon often suffer crises of identity or struggle to adapt to their changing surroundings),
inflicting pain on themselves and others is a way of creating meaning out of the chaos of their
lives.50 As Crews himself once commented in an interview, violence can sometimes be “a
wonderful and good thing” that may someday “save you in the world” (Crowder 93). Kaimon
certainly seems to think along these same lines. Violence gives him a sense of masculine
purpose; it is a force as creative as it is destructive.
Kaimon most especially uses violence to define his manhood “against models regarded as
feminine” (Watts, emphasis mine). Kaimon seemingly understands that, as Lynne Segal suggests,
“a ‘pure’ masculinity” can only be defined in contrast to its “opposite”: “[i]t depends on the
perpetual renunciation of ‘femininity.’ No one can be ‘that male’ without constantly doing
violence to many of the most basic human attributes: the capacity for sensitivity to oneself and
others, for tenderness and empathy, the reality of fear and weakness, the pleasure of passivity”
(qtd. in Tuana 121). George and Marvin’s flamboyant effeminacy—the two occasionally accuse
each other of being “bitchy” (28) and dress as women before luring Kaimon to the dressing room
where they reveal their identities and rape him—is what Kaimon finds most frightening about
their sexuality.51 Equally threatening to Kaimon’s manhood is Gaye Nell. At once “masculine
According to Maxime LaChaud, the violent actions of Crews’s male characters such as Kaimon are an attempt to
create order and meaning, that “[t]hrough these rituals, [Crews] show[s] the reader that the quest for meaning in the
chaotic and brutalized New South is inevitably a quest for order” (68).
50
Spencer claims that Crews “avoids the overdetermination of the gender-sexuality nexus,” that the novel does not
conflate gender and sexuality “where, for example, women who take on masculine gender attributes are
automatically assumed to be lesbian” (142). The effeminate and obviously homosexual George and Marvin,
however, work against this assumption.
51
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and feminine, sex and violence” (Lake 89), Gaye Nell upsets categories of gender normativity as
Kaimon understands them. Upon first meeting her Kaimon realizes that she is “no ordinary girl,”
an observation to which he continues to return and a quality he struggles to accept. Gaye Nell’s
“masculine” energies cause Kaimon to feel emasculated, feminized, and to this he reacts with
violent impulses. When she sexually taunts him—emasculates him—at the mackawari board,
Kaimon expresses the impulse to “hit her, smash her mouth, kill her” (Crews 61). It is after this
that Kaimon also contemplates “raping her” (57). Rape, Kaimon believes, is one of the ultimate
expression of masculinity, what Doreen Fowler calls “an attempt to sexually annihilate the
female other” (3). Notably, it is after Kaimon is raped by George and Marvin (and Gaye Nell, if
we are indeed to understand their encounter as a “rape”) that he becomes most intent on
realigning traditional gender roles. In his verbal letter to Faulkner—Kaimon contemplates what
he sees as one of the more serious consequences of having his hands in casts; in the men’s
restroom at The Iron Horse, he remembers in horror:
I couldn’t get my pointer out. I mean, I already knew it—Lazarus unzipped me
and held my peter for me back in the motel room—but it’s not the kind of thing
you remember. It’s too awful to remember. You hold your own peter for nineteen
years and then in an instant you get so fucked up that somebody has to unzip you,
well, it’s just something you forget, that you make yourself forget. (Crews 6970)52
The person he blames for his broken hands, for creating the situation that’s left him unable to
hold his own penis, his manhood? Gaye Nell. Shortly after leaving the restroom, where his anger
renders him ultimately unable to urinate, Kaimon is struck by the overwhelming urge to “fuck.”53
He declares in his letter to Faulkner what he “needs”: to “get some girl down on her back…[and]
root around in her until I felt like I had my balls back” (73). In an echo of Jason Compson and
his attitude toward Caddy, Kaimon further attempts to regain his sense of masculinity by
returning Gaye Nell to the realm of the feminine through language.54 Upon seeing her for the
very first time—engaged in a spar with a yellow belt—Kaimon calls her “one rough pussy” (22).
52
Part of why Kaimon wants so badly to “forget” comes back to his fear of homosexuality.
53
There is, it should be noted, a particular level of violence inherent in this word.
54
As this chapter has discussed, Kaimon recognizes the power of language. Spencer suggests that Kaimon
associates language with homosexuality, yet he also seems to associate homosexuality with emasculation,
feminization. Ergo, he looks to language as a way of “re-feminizing” Gaye Nell.
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With his hands bound up in plaster casts, he again reduces her to what Celia Daileader terms
“one featureless mass of tamed and branded sexuality” (13) by calling her a “cunt” (65).
Looking at Crews as “a social reporter and critic, who embeds his fictional women in
uniquely Southern sociocultural contexts,” Lake discusses representations of women throughout
Crews’s repertoire (79). She rightly claims that though his women are diverse, those like Gaye
Nell Odell—with “high (perhaps unrealistic) aspirations…complex (and sometimes perverse)
motivations…caught in the conflicting demands of traditional and modern society” (79)—are
ultimately “thwarted, sometimes by the restraints of a male-oriented world, sometimes by their
own inadequacies or conflicting desires” (87). In the case of Gaye Nell Odell, she suggests,
Crews evinces the complexities of being an “ambitious” woman. Lake cautions “antifeminist”
readings of Gaye Nell and instead advocates interpreting “the similarities of [her] strivings” to
those that Kaimon also faces; doing so suggests “that it is not hostility to independent women
that Crews intends to convey. Instead, he may mean to demonstrate that success itself is a
delusion—for all people” (87). The positivity with which Lake addresses Gaye Nell’s complex
character is admirable. However, while certainly Crews’s novel explores the limits of success as
universal, I find that Kaimon’s treatment of Gaye Nell throughout the narrative conflicts with
any sort of feminist message. Kaimon’s linguistic attempts to mark Gaye Nell as inferior—
thinking about hitting her, raping her, killing her, calling her offensive names that represent a
marginal, negative femininity, even simply calling her Gaye Nell55—does inarguably reveal a
certain hostility toward liberated women in general and Gaye Nell in particular.
The novel’s peculiarly traditional ending—wherein Gaye Nell discovers she is pregnant
with Kaimon’s baby, competes one last time in the Dania Beach Fourth of July Celebration’s
beauty pageant56 and, after losing when an airplane crash unexpectedly ends the celebration,
55
No one calls Gaye Nell by her name. After joining the karateka, she gives up her name, her gendered identity.
Most people, she tells Kaimon, call her nothing; Belt calls her “the brown belt” (137). Kaimon, however, insists on
making her a woman by naming her.
Jerrilyn McGregory points out, when describing A Feast of Snakes’ depiction of the annual Rattlesnake Roundup
and Beauty pageant, that pageants hold “a special place” in the South, especially in the Wiregrass region from which
Crews hails: “Claxton’s Rattlesnake Roundup Parade, for example, features over a dozen pageant queens, who had
variously won titles such as Miss Gum Spirit and Turpentine, Miss Georgia Sweet Onion, Miss Liberty County,
Miss Coastal Georgia, Miss Pinewood Christian Academy, or Miss Forestry Queen. These pageants signify the
intensity of interest in regional, state, and national beauty competitions in this region. Given the status and roles of
women in the region, for some, such titles represent the pinnacle of success” (101).
56
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leaves town with Kaimon to presumably get married and raise a child—only further compounds
the novel’s gender politics. As Lake proposes of the conclusion:
[C]onfronted with pregnancy and love, Gaye Nell must yield, must surrender to a
“true” feminine nature, as though her ambition has been an aberration. Perhaps
Crews is arguing that the combination of masculinity and femininity is
unsustainable. However, this interpretation is risky: John Kaimon too abandons
his quest—karate mastery—for love. […] Reading Gaye Nell’s inexplicable
capitulation as a commentary on modern gender roles may be risky for another
reason. Perhaps the ending of Karate is merely weak, a collapse into
unconvincing romance. The sudden renunciation of ambition seems to betray the
characters of both Gaye Nell and John. The happy ending seems untrue to the
logic of the novel. (89)
The ending, to be sure, is strange, but not as “untrue” to the novel’s logic as Lake believes.
Considering the novel’s (conservative) sexual and gender politics that I have discussed, the
ending then seems more than in line with Kaimon’s insistence on heteronormativity. In Karate Is
a Thing of the Spirit, men should be heterosexual, violent, and in control of women who, in turn
should fulfill their roles as wives and mothers.57
Crews’s Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit invariably fosters many of the South’s deepseated anxieties about gender and sexuality. Much like Dickey’s Deliverance, however, Karate
Is a Thing of the Spirit is a complex novel, and it should be regarded as such. It subverts our
expectations, lampoons tradition, and in many ways collapses the binaries that inform Southern
cultural perceptions of gender. Deliverance and Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit demonstrate the
ways in which Dickey and Crews—so often dismissed as “redneck” male writers—not only
engage, but are themselves engaged by the South’s mythologies and gender politics.
At several point during the course of the narrative, before finding out she’s pregnant with his child, Kaimon
attempts to see in Gaye Nell something maternal. He hears her voice fall “from her mouth like a mother’s lullaby”
and notices “a noise in her throat. A mother’s maybe” (95, 97).
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CHAPTER THREE
LOVING THE PAST THAT IS DEAD:
NECROPHILIA AND MASCULINITY IN CHILD OF GOD AND TWILIGHT
Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951) contains what are now ubiquitously considered
some of the most famous words in all of Southern literature: in Act I, Scene III, Gavin Stevens
tells Temple Drake, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (73). These lines, cogitation on a
familiar theme that runs throughout most of Faulkner’s fiction, are more extensively used to
explain the South’s tortured relationship with its own history. As Allen Tate insists, the
“backward glance” is a characteristic endemic to the Southern literary tradition (qtd. in Jones
619). Lewis P. Simpson similarly observes the tendency of Southern fiction “to see the life of the
individual southerner as always in a dramatic tension with history”; citing Robert Penn Warren,
Simpson suggests that the South is forever “trapped” in the past (77). One of the goals of this
dissertation has likewise been to explore “the presence of the past” as what David Holman refers
to as “both heritage and trap” (qtd. in Jones 619). As I have argued throughout this study,
Faulkner, Lee, Dickey, and Crews seem unable to disentangle their fiction from history—from
“the matter of the region” (Roberts xi)—continually and (un)consciously engaging the South’s
vested system of socio-cultural mythologies and politics, most notably—as I have shown—those
surrounding notions of gender, sexuality, class, and race.
This chapter continues to investigate the ways that Southern fiction is entrenched in the
past by looking at Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God (1973) and William Gay’s Twilight (2006).1
These texts, however, appropriate the past’s formidable presence in a way that differs
significantly from those novels previously explored. Taking Southern fiction’s compulsory
“backward glance” to a perverse extreme, both McCarthy’s and Gay’s novels concern
necrophiliacs, characters who—quite literally—love the dead, the past personified. But most of
what little scholarship exists on either Child of God or Twilight disregards the function of this
dynamic as a potential metaphor for the “Southern condition.”2 In fact, criticism that discusses
1
Not to be confused with the Stephanie Meyer vampire saga.
According to Timothy Parrish, in “History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels,” “Prior to
Blood Meridian, McCarthy had established himself among a handful of devoted readers as a southern writer with a
remarkable gift for language, a writer of dark and violent novels whose work had often been compared with that of
William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor” (67). McCarthy’s most recent novel and Pulitzer Prize winner, The Road
2
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the treatment of necrophilia in these texts at all—and critical discussions of necrophilia in
Twilight are practically non-existent—offers only a very narrow reading of it, trending instead
toward their larger spiritual and moral implications. Of Child of God, for instance, Gary M.
Ciuba suggests that Lester “feels free to violate primal taboos against murder and eroticism
because he wants to leave behind the numbingly ordinary world of Sevier County and live in the
forbidden zone of the violence that is called sacred” (173). Edwin T. Arnold, discusses the ways
in which McCarthy’s is an effectively religious text—a moralizing parable—proposing that there
are in Child of God “distinct thematic concerns […] a moral gauge by which we, the readers, are
able to judge the failure or limited success of McCarthy’s characters” (46). Arnold examines
Child of God from an especially theological perspective in response to Vereen M. Bell’s reading
of the novel as nihilistic. In The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, Bell argues that McCarthy’s
narrative is aimless and essentially plotless, and that “McCarthy causes the status of humanness
itself to seem intolerably ambiguous and frail—nugatory, even, in the unimplicated, insentient
otherness of the world” (68).
Critics have been reluctant, though, to see how Child of God’s and Twilight’s depictions
of necrophilia accurately portray the history of the South. On a basic, if disturbing, level,
necrophilia is an obsession with the past. These two novels therefore represent a knowing
(per)version of the South’s obsession with the past, deployed through a trope that is firstly
rendered as violent and that is then furthermore sexualized and gendered. And the representation
of gender in McCarthy’s fiction—particularly Child of God—is largely uncharted critical
territory.3 The same is true for Gay’s Twilight. Because both novels mainly concern male
characters, this chapter extends the discussion of masculinity and performance that began in
(2006), was most famously lauded by Oprah and was chosen as her official book club read in the spring of 2007. In
2009, The Road was released as a feature film, starring Viggo Mortensen, and was the third feature film (following
All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men) to be based off of one of McCarthy’s novels. The Road’s
popularity, along with the success of Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 Academy Award winning adaptation of No
Country for Old Men, has helped to secure McCarthy’s place as a great American writer in general and as a great
“Western” writer in particular. In large part because of this commercial success, scholarly interest in McCarthy has
increased dramatically within the last several years. Yet criticism on his work is still limited and is predominantly
focused on his “Westerns.” William Gay, on the other hand (who died in February of 2012), remains a relatively
obscure—though commanding—voice in Southern fiction, and scholarship on his novels is therefore minimal.
3
This may be because McCarthy himself has sort of quashed any questions of gender representation in his novels,
particularly in regards to his treatment of female characters. When asked in his exclusive (and visibly
uncomfortable) interview with Oprah why in his novels “there’s not a lot of engagement with women,” the “fiercely
private” writer tells the television host: “Women are tough. They’re tough. I don’t pretend to understand women. I
think men don’t know much about women. They find them very mysterious” (“Women, Food and Shoes”).
91
Chapter Two. Here, I examine the ways that Child of God’s Lester Ballard and Twilight’s Fenton
Breece “perform” masculinity, most often in an effort to be accepted by other (male) members of
their community. In so doing, Lester and Fenton victimize women, eventually resorting to killing
them and sexually abusing their corpses. This chapter therefore further argues that it’s through
these acts of sexualized violence that McCarthy’s and Gay’s novels also (re)activate a variety of
stock images of white Southern manhood and womanhood—images ranging from
representations of “white trash” masculinity and femininity to aristocratic notions of
“gentlemanliness” and “ladyhood”—and engage the South’s system of deeply entrenched
gender, class, and race politics, issues they are otherwise thought to avoid or ignore.
Like Faulkner, McCarthy and Gay are writers who have inevitably inherited “the images,
icons, and demons of [their] culture” (xi). One of the goals of this dissertation is to interrogate
the “presence of the past,” or the ways that Southern writers are often unable to escape the
troubled history and mythologies of their region. In order to therefore make sense of Child of
God’s and Twilight’s treatments of necrophilia as a comment on the “dramatic tension” between
the South and its history—as a means by which to reconceive or travesty the past—it’s necessary
to first explore the extent and implications of the South’s longstanding obsession with the past.
THE UNRELENTING PRESENCE OF THE PAST
In The New Mind of the South,4 Tracy Thompson jokes that Southerners “can’t shut up”
about “their reverence for the past” (11):
Southerners rightly have a reputation for being obsessed with the past, and there
was no shortage of people in my childhood who were happy to regale me with
stories about the Yankee soldier buried under the muscadine vines, the privations
their families endured during Reconstruction, or the damage sharp ends of cotton
bolls could do to a person’s hands. Every once in a while, somebody would
mention the Klan (who were not, of course, anybody we knew). But lynchings?
What lynchings? (71).
Borrowing the title from W.J. Cash’s seminal “species of fiction” (Roberts 70), Thompson’s 2013 study of the
changing landscape of the twenty-first century South investigates why the region “continues to be so misunderstood
by Southerners and non-Southerners alike.”
4
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Writing of her own history as a Southerner—and writing specifically of the white South’s
peculiar ability to be obsessed with the past and at the same time unwilling to acknowledge some
of its history’s more unsavory moments—she describes what is commonly considered one of the
essential characteristics of Southern culture in general and Southern literature in particular.5
Allen Tate has also considered the South’s obsession with the past, calling it “the
defining trait of modern southern writing” (qtd. in Jones 619). Importantly, one of the goals of
this dissertation is similarly to explore this “presence of the past,” particularly the ways that
Southern writers (across decades) respond to—challenge, problematize, or endorse—or are
otherwise unable to detach themselves from the troubled history and deeply entrenched
mythologies of their region. This chapter not only suggests that Child of God’s and Twilight’s
treatments of necrophilia pervert this very dynamic—for Lester Ballard and Fenton Breece are
characters who are quite literally unable to let go of their tragic pasts, personified by the
collection of dead bodies with which they keep company—but further argues that it’s through
these acts of sexualized violence that McCarthy’s and Gay’s novels also (re)activate certain
stock images of Southern manhood and womanhood. In order to make sense of Child of God’s
and Twilight’s treatments of necrophilia as a comment on the “dramatic tension” between the
South and its history—treatments that ultimately engage the deeply entrenched gender, class, and
racial mythologies that have been explored in the previous chapters—and also in order to more
fully explore the question of why it’s so hard for these writers to shake the “matter of the region”
(Roberts xi), it’s important to first establish the significance of the past, as Tate describes it, as
one of the most prevalent and enduring tropes in southern literature.
As Diane Brown Jones explains, “Southern literature is contextualized by the constructed
memory of the region’s past. That memory is neither unfailingly supportive nor unquestioningly
complimentary” (619). Twentieth-century Southern writers, above all, are inclined to see history
as a “process,” and understanding the past, therefore, is a crucial means of negotiating the
There is some debate among scholars over what qualifies Southern literature as “Southern.” Some characterize
Southern literature based on a coding of certain themes as “Southern”—such as the importance of community, an
obsession with history and the past, and a distinct religious sensibility—and concerns of regional identity. Others,
such as Louis D. Rubin, observe that “[t]he bane of so much Southern literary scholarship has been cultural
oversimplification. The South has been this, or that, and no other” (qtd. in Gwin 585). In The Literature of the
American South: A Norton Anthology, Minrose C. Gwin and Trudier Harris similarly write that “during and since
World War II—a period of extraordinary change in the South and the world—writing by southerners has become so
multifarious as to spill over and dissolve the defining features of that mythic monolithic creature called ‘Southern
Literature’” (585).
5
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present. Louis D. Rubin cites Robert Penn Warren’s assessment of what Rubin calls “the past as
anchor for human definition in time” (“After the Renascence” 620); as Warren once claimed,
“The past is always a rebuke to the present. […] The drama of the past that corrects us is the
drama of our struggles to be human, or our struggles to define the values of our forebears in the
face of their difficulties” (qtd. in Rubin, “After the Renascence” 621). The fiction of Warren and
other twentieth (and twenty-first) century writers seeks not to romanticize the past by
“extend[ing] a legendary image” of the South throughout the centuries; instead, these writers
interrogate the past’s “interplay with the present,” often situating protagonists “against their
history, including their failings, prejudices, and defeat” (Jones 619).6 The past is therefore what
David Holman calls “both heritage and trap,” comprising, Jones further affirms, an intricate
“matrix”: “ever enlarging, relative to the perspective of remembrance, variously regional,
communal, familial, or individual” (619). Because of this, the past in Southern fiction is
“dialogic”: “the experience of southern literature is such that its richness, its paradoxes, its
human complexity—in short its past—cannot be told in one voice or text” (620).
Faulkner’s fiction—its own unique sort of “heritage” and “trap” for twentieth and twentyfirst-century Southern writers7—is perhaps marked most notably by its broad social awareness
and sense of history, of the burden of the past. Gavin Stevens’s sage reminder that the past is
“never dead” is an adage all too familiar to many of Faulkner’s characters, chief among them,
Quentin Compson. Quentin’s section in The Sound and the Fury (1929) famously opens: “When
the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then
I was in time again” (76). Quentin is quite literally trapped in time, and his effort to break his
As Diane Brown Jones explains, C. Vann Woodward, in The Burden of Southern History, “articulates the
uniqueness of the South’s people when he distinguishes southerners from other citizens of the nation by their past
and their historical consciousness of the past. For southerners, a sustained engagement with a shared national past
has held less interest than their divergent regional past” (619).
6
Michael Kreyling writes in Inventing Southern Literature: “If the ‘South’ is a cultural entity, then ‘Faulkner’ is its
official language” (127). Faulkner’s writing has had an especially profound impact on the fiction of both McCarthy
and Gay. Edwin Arnold cites Jonathan Yardley’s assessment of the “stark, mythic quality” of McCarthy’s writing,
referring to him as “perhaps the closest we have to a genuine heir to the Faulkner tradition” (5). Gay too couldn’t
escape “Faulkner’s commanding influence”; as William Giraldi rightly observes in one of the few interviews and
“in-depth” analyses of Gay’s fiction: “For an aspiring writer in working-class Lewis County, Faulkner existed in the
very air. He was a kind of Delphic oracle for new scribes: without him nothing even remotely literary came to pass.
Gay read Faulkner in the thirty-five-cent Signet editions he bought at the local drugstore in Hohenwald, Tennessee.
He had been buying notebooks and pens since childhood, but now, late in high school, charged by O’Connor’s and
Faulkner’s doomed visions of the South, he began to formulate his own fiction, began to heed the insistent voices
calling from within” (“A World Almost Rotten”).
7
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grandfather’s watch expresses a desire to arrest time. Quentin furthermore expresses a longing to
return to the past innocence of his childhood. As discussed in Chapter One, his stream-ofconsciousness narration is frequently interrupted by his memories of the past; specifically, his
mind frequently returns to a time before his sister, Caddy, was “unvirgin.” Quentin is a virgin—a
timid, obedient servant of the symbolic order—and Caddy’s promiscuity, as Chapter One also
explains, defies the traditional codes of Southern womanhood that Quentin reveres and, thusly,
disrupts his sense of order.
Quentin’s obsession with the past is also evident in the short story “That Evening Sun”
(1931).8 Narrated by a twenty-four year old Quentin, who reflects on events that transpired when
he was nine, the story immediately establishes Quentin’s discontent with the “new” South (read:
the present). He remarks with seeming disdain that the streets “are paved now” and that the iron
telephone and light poles—“bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and bloodless grapes”—are
replacing the old shade trees (289). The city laundry trucks that have replaced the old tradition of
black women collecting and doing white people’s laundry drive on these newly paved roads and
blow their “irritable” electric horns. Quentin seemingly equates this change—this progressive
industrialization—with degradation. As Quentin sees it, these new, modern values are negatively
affecting the human ties in Jefferson. The Compson kitchen, which should be the warm, center of
nurturing, the heart of the home, is described as cold. Nobody wants to spend time in a cold
kitchen, Quentin says, seemingly anticipating the breakdown of his family unit.
Quentin is far from the only character of Faulkner’s to shoulder the burden of the past. In
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Quentin shares his obsession with history with Rosa Coldfield.
Spurned when she was a young woman, the resentful Miss Rosa is unable to let go of her hatred
for Thomas Sutpen and is compelled to recount the awful history of this “demon” time and time
again. Light in August’s (1932) Reverend Hightower is another character very much stuck in the
past. The Reverend Hightower, the town’s pariah, thinks of little besides the Confederate cavalry
Caddy, Jason, and Mr. and Mrs. Compson are also characters in “That Evening Sun.” This, along with several
mentions of Disley, Frony, T.P. and Versh, “connect the story with The Sound and the Fury.” As Theresa M.
Towner and James B. Carothers explain: “The chronology of ‘That Evening Sun’ is part of one of the greatest
intertextual problems in reading Faulkner. The narrator Quentin in The Sound and the Fury commits suicide at age
nineteen, and later, in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the narrator says he is ‘older at twenty than a lot of people who
have died’” (151). The character of Nancy also reappears—and is given a different storyline—in Requiem for a Nun.
In response to questions about the relationship between these characters and these texts, Faulkner said, “These
people I figure belong to me and I have the right to move them about in time when I need them” (qtd. in Towner and
Carothers 151).
8
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of his grandfather’s time. He also compulsively reminisces about the past events that have led to
his position as outcast: his wife’s affair and later suicide. In Flags in the Dust (1929), Young
Bayard’s life is “blighted by his constant recurrence to the moment when his brother John
jumped out of his plane and thumbed his nose at him” (Rollyson 2). Even one of Faulkner’s
lesser known short stories, “Hair” (1931), confronts the past’s impact on the present. In “Hair,”
the unnamed narrator reveals that the mysterious Hawkshaw—the middle-aged barber “that
hadn’t never said more than Yes or No to any man or woman in the town that anybody ever saw”
(Faulkner, Collected Stories 131)—marries Susan Reed because she reminds him so much of his
deceased love, Sophie.9
The presence of the past—the burden of history—is a theme to which many
contemporary Southern writers continue to return.10 Toni Morrison, for example, ponders this
theme in Beloved (1987). Morrison may have been born and raised in Ohio, and most of her
fiction may be set in the North, but she owes a lot to Southern traditions, both historical and
literary. In addition, Morrison has publicly acknowledged her artistic indebtedness to Faulkner
on a number of occasions. Her 1955 Master’s thesis, which explores suicide in the works of
Virginia Woolf and Faulkner, further evidences her preoccupation with him at a crucial stage in
her career. Morrison has said that she “spent a great deal of time” with Faulkner, and that he had
a profound effect on her writing (qtd. in Denard 24). Though she confesses her desire to emulate
“Hair” incidentally also features one the first appearances of Gavin Stevens, the very character who later verbalizes
the role of the past as it plays out in so much of Faulkner’s fiction. Also, it’s worth pointing out that Hawkshaw’s
relationship with Susan Reed—the young girl who reminds him so much of his dead wife—is in and of itself a sort
of necrophilia.
9
For example, Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend (2002)—set sometime during the late 1960s, early-mid 1970s—tells
the story of the Cleve family as they struggle to come to terms with the death of nine-year-old Robin. Like the
Compson family, the Cleves were once an aristocratic, well respected family in Alexandria, Mississippi. And, like
the Compsons, sisters Edie, Tat, Libby, and Adelaide live in and make sense of their present by constantly
recounting the events of the past (most notably the time when they were living in Tribulation, the grand, plantationstyle home of their childhood). The one topic the sisters refuse to broach: their great-nephew (Edie’s grandson)
Robin’s death. Despite their unwillingness to discuss this part of their past, they are clearly haunted by it and can’t
help but realize that their family hasn’t been the same since Robin’s passing. Robin’s mother, Charlotte, wanders the
house in a drug-induced haze. Robin’s older sister, Allison (who was four years old at the time of Robin’s death and
claims to not remember anything about that day or about Robin) has clearly seen something traumatic about which
she refuses to talk and similarly wanders around in a kind of daze, barely able to distinguish between dreams and
reality. The only one who is willing to confront this past is Robin’s younger sister, Harriet, who was only a baby
when Robin was killed. As Quentin Compson becomes obsessed with knowing the “truth” of Thomas Sutpen,
Harriet sets out to discover Robin’s killer. In the process, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and class,
only to ultimately discover that sometimes there is no truth, “that victory and collapse were sometimes the same
thing” (Tartt 614).
10
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Faulkner, she (as a black woman writer) resists the Faulknerian heritage. Beloved is in some
ways Morrison’s response to Absalom, Absalom!, an example of how “the African American
telling of the southern past creates a dialogue with other, older manifestations that must then be
reviewed and in some measure, great or small, reconfigured” (Jones 619). Sethe is a character
literally haunted by her past, a past that physically manifests as the ghost of her murdered baby.
The arrival of Paul D, Sethe’s fellow slave at Sweet Home, also causes traumatic memories of
Sethe’s time on the plantation to come flooding back. As the two spend more time together, they
begin to realize that they have something in common: they avoid dealing with their past and as
such are left struggling with their present. While Sethe represses her past, Paul D tries to run
away from his. In one particular scene, Sethe combs and unbraids Denver’s hair while telling
Beloved the stories of her past. When Denver complains that it hurts, Sethe responds, “Comb it
every day, it won’t” (Morrison 72). Critic Blake Hobby, in a compelling argument, reads this
scene as an extended metaphor of the way memory functions in the novel.11 Although Sethe is
initially unable to heed her own advice, this method of dealing with the past has the potential to
lead to her renewal. Throughout Beloved, Sethe and Paul D try to reconstruct themselves in the
present in light of their traumatic pasts.
Like Morrison, Cormac McCarthy—who has of late garnered an increasing amount of
attention for his work, from both scholarly and popular audiences worldwide—is often
overlooked as a “Southern” writer. And also like Morrison, much of McCarthy’s work has been
informed by (and is perhaps in many ways also a response to) Faulkner’s.12 McCarthy’s first four
novels—The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree
(1979)—all set in the South, in various and sometimes undisclosed parts of Appalachia, similarly
engage the “backward glance” that Tate describes as “the defining trait” of modern Southern
fiction (qtd. in Jones 619).13 The Orchard Keeper, for example, offers a frightening testament to
11
See “Renewal and Rebirth in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”
John M. Grammer writes that McCarthy “is a writer who studiously avoids clichés, for one thing, and a writer
who—except perhaps for his allegedly Faulknerian prose style—seems to have very little to do with southern
literary tradition” (30).
12
It could also be argued that The Stonemason (1995), “A Play in Five Acts,” is another of McCarthy’s “Southern”
works. Set in Kentucky in the 1970s, The Stonemason follows three years in the life of the Telfairs, a middle-class
black family working for three generations as stonemasons in Louisville. Like so much of McCarthy’s other
Southern fiction, the play similarly dramatizes the interplay of the past on the present; as the staging in Act I Scene I
reads: “One could say that the play is an artifact of history to which the audience is made privy” (McCarthy 6).
13
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the influence that history has on the present. The novel charts the coming-of-age of John Wesley
Rattner, whose father is murdered when John Wesley14 is a young boy. And it is this violent
event of the past that sets the present narrative in motion: spurred on by his mother, John Wesley
grows up and sets out to avenge his father’s death. Unbeknownst to John Wesley, it is Marion
Sylder—who becomes his mentor—that has killed his father. Sylder is a criminal, an outlaw, and
a bootlegger, corrupted by the “modern” world and prone to violence. Though Sylder takes John
Wesley under his wing as a seeming act of kindness, his mentorship threatens to lead John
Wesley down a similar path of corruption.
Suttree, McCarthy’s last novel published before his works dramatically shifted in setting
from the South to the West, is perhaps the most “Southern” of his Southern novels.15 Containing
“one of the most flagrantly ‘southern’ moments in McCarthy’s work”—a scene in which
Cornelius Suttree visits the relics of his family’s old plantation, that illustrious symbol of the
South’s “failure...to preserve itself against time” (Grammer 30)—Suttree follows the life of its
eponymous character as he rejects his past life of privilege, leaving behind his wealthy family in
order to live as an indigent fisherman. Even as he rejects his past, Suttree is never quite able to
escape it. As John M. Grammer explains, Suttree is a reflection on “the tension between the
permanence of memory and the power of time”; Suttree’s “efforts to resolve” this tension by
“revisiting” the plantation and other scenes from his past “in his own ritual of memory,”
Grammer writes, principally comprise “the subject matter of [this] novel” (29).
McCarthy’s concern with the presence of the past is also evident in Child of God, which
too deals with the past thematically (for ultimately, it is Lester’s tragic past that initiates his
descent into madness and depravity).16 Child of God, though, most keenly reveals McCarthy, as
Fred Hobson has branded Faulkner, as “a dispenser of Southern Gothic, a chronicler of a
primitive and frightening South” (437). And just as Faulkner has influenced McCarthy, both
Faulkner and McCarthy have markedly inspired the writing of William Gay, whose 2006 novel,
The use of the name John Wesley further evidences McCarthy’s engagement with the Southern literary tradition:
it’s a fairly obvious nod to another famous Southern Gothic writer, Flannery O’Connor, several of whose short
stories also feature characters of the same name.
14
15
Semi-autobiographical and overtly comical, Suttree is generally considered a bit of a departure for McCarthy.
I spend a lot of time establishing McCarthy as a Southern writer because he’s so often overlooked as such; Gay,
on the other hand, is simply overlooked.
16
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Twilight, is the most recent piece of fiction that this dissertation explores. Twilight is “the crown
of Gay’s oeuvre, a taut sweat-inducing thriller…[that] sets a new standard for darkness and
depravity”; it’s a novel, William Giraldi asserts, that is “so unrelenting in its sinister vision that
any hope of light or comedy gets sucked back into the story as if by a black hole” (“A World
Almost Rotten”). Like so much of Faulkner’s fiction, the South as constructed in Child of God
and Twilight is “primitive and frightening”; McCarthy’s and Gay’s characters, as Joel
Williamson has written of Faulkner’s, similarly live and move “upon a marital and sexual
landscape that [is] in shambles […] littered with fragments left by a destructive social order”
(William Faulkner and Southern History 369). These two novels in particular not only make
conspicuous the tension between past and present, but do so through an examination of
necrophilia, featuring characters who engage in sexual intercourse with human corpses.
Concerned less with the nature of “the past” as recurring history, theirs is instead an attempt to
travesty the past. Through Child of God and Twilight, McCarthy and Crews consider the South’s
fetishization of the past as a context for enacting the region’s historical and deeply entrenched
gender politics and mythologies.
Chapter One observes that critics have often asked what incest means in Faulkner’s
fiction, and because Faulkner is by and large considered “the god from whom no…writer in the
South can ever hope to flee” (Giraldi), thusly asks this same question of Southern fiction in
general, describing the various narratives of incest that have circulated in and about Southern
culture for centuries. Similarly, Chapter Two describes the South’s long history of rape
narratives, placing emphasis on the myriad manifestations of what W.J. Cash calls the “Southern
rape complex.” Narratives of necrophilia, however, are something of a strange skeleton in the
South’s already weird closet. Most criticism is reluctant to talk about necrophilia to much extent,
yet it’s a form of sexual violence that crops up in Southern fiction time and time again. To
understand Child of God’s and Twilight’s representations of necrophilia as they intersect with
(and deviate from) other narratives of sexual violence in the South—and perhaps to establish
how representations of “necrophilia” in Southern fiction move beyond the more conventional
understanding that characters in Southern fiction are racist and/or sexist—it’s therefore crucial to
ask here, just as other critics have asked of incest and rape: what does necrophilia mean in the
fiction of Southern writers?
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WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE (DON’T) TALK ABOUT NECROPHILIA 17
In the collection of perversities that most people associate with the South, necrophilia is
itself a sort of oddity. Researching “incest” and “rape” in Southern fiction produced a profusion
of results. The same, I found, cannot be said of searching for sources on necrophilia.18 But
necrophilia too has its own historical place in the South’s narrative fiction and mythology, part of
the reason for which having to do with the regional literature’s trademark obsession with the
past. Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930) is easily the best recognized Southern story of
necrophilia that also illustrates the South’s strained effort to embrace modernization while still
upholding tradition. Emily Grierson—regarded as “a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of
hereditary obligation upon the town” (Faulkner, Collected Stories 119)—is a relic of Jefferson’s
dying aristocracy, the last living vestige of a social order that is disappearing as the South slowly
moves into the twentieth century. And Emily has difficulty accepting this change; she stays
cooped up in her decaying home—“an eyesore among eyesores” (119)—denies the death of her
father, refuses to pay her taxes because she insists that Colonel Sartoris remitted them years ago,
and rebuffs the town’s attempt to attach a mailbox or the metal numbers above it to her house. In
other words, Emily simply refuses to move out of the past and into the present. This is made
even more apparent when the town discovers the body of Homer Baron locked away in a room
of her home, a room that, the townspeople note, has been “decked and furnished as for a bridal”
(129). Emily’s gruesome “marriage” to Homer Baron, as it were, is her most radical effort to
thwart change. Indeed, as Gavin Stevens cautions us, the past in “A Rose for Emily” is not past.
“A Rose for Emily” is also one of Faulkner’s most thorough meditations on the South’s
gender politics. Shocking not only for its “hint of necrophilia” but because “it is a woman who
17
This subtitle is an homage to Sabine Sielke’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape.”
Anil Aggrawal, in Necrophilia: Forensic and Medico-legal Aspects, calls necrophilia “one of the weirdest, most
bizarre and revolting practices of abnormal and perverse sensuality” (1). In “Abuse of a corpse: A brief history and
re-theorization of necrophilia laws in the USA,” John Troyer concurs. Citing Tyler T. Ochoa and Christine Jones,
Troyer explains that our “modern disgust” with necrophilia is “based primarily on widespread horror at corpse
desecration” (144). In other words, our reluctance to talk about necrophilia has simply to do with the fact that the act
is so taboo and, as most people understand it, creepy. And admittedly, when people ask me to tell them about my
dissertation, I sometimes find myself hesitant to talk about this particular chapter out of fear that those people may
view my work—and therefore, me—as “creepy” or “perverted.”
18
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provides the hint,” this story is considered “a supreme analysis of what men do to women by
making them ladies” (Fetterely 34, 42). Judith Fetterley argues:
[I]t is a story of the patriarchy North and South, new and old, and of the sexual
conflict within it. As Faulkner himself has implied, it is a story of a woman
victimized and betrayed by the system of sexual politics, who nevertheless has
discovered, within the structures that victimize her, sources of power for herself.
If [Nathaniel Hawthorne’s] “The Birthmark” is the story of how to murder your
wife and get away with it, “A Rose for Emily” is the story of how to murder your
gentleman caller and get away with it. Faulkner’s story is an analysis of how
men’s attitudes toward women turn back upon themselves; it is a demonstration of
the thesis that it is impossible to oppress without in turn being oppressed, it is
impossible to kill without creating the conditions for your own murder. “A Rose
for Emily” is the story of a lady and of her revenge for that grotesque identity.
(35)
Looking closely at how the town of Jefferson constructs Miss Emily as a “lady”—as a symbol,
an object of speculation, and “a public document that the town folk feel free to interpret at will”
(36)—Fetterley highlights the ways in which Emily’s “status as a lady is a cage from which she
cannot escape” (37). Fetterley also considers Emily’s relationship with her oppressive father
who, even after his death, continues to assert over her his patriarchal authority. The
townspeople’s image of Emily and her father as a tableau—“Miss Emily a slender figure in
white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and
clutching a horsewhip” (Faulkner, Collected Stories 123)—symbolizes the extent to which “that
quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent
and too furious to die” (Faulkner, Collected Stories 127).
“A Rose for Emily” evidences how the theme of “the past in the present” can often get
tangled up with representations of sexual violence and issues of gender. In Faulkner’s story, the
past invariably inheres in the gender politics; Faulkner’s use of necrophilia, in this case, pushes
against the South’s reputed reverence for the past—something that Child of God and Twilight do
as well—and is critical of the region’s system of gender and sexual politics. Some of Faulkner’s
other fiction also conflates these three seemingly unrelated issues, in ways much more subtle
than “A Rose for Emily.” As I Lay Dying (1930) is one such example. Whereas Emily Grierson’s
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erotic desire for Homer Baron’s corpse is exposed by the strand of iron-gray hair found on the
pillow beside him, the intimation of necrophilia in As I Lay Dying only “circulates…but remains
safely within the realm of male fantasy and is never acted upon” (Scheel). The novel chronicles
the comically “white trash” (and very much stuck-in-the-past) Bundren family’s calamitous
journey to honor the last wish of its matriarch, Addie, by burying her in the town of Jefferson.
But the Bundrens’ excessive devotion to Addie also reveals their obsession with her; writing of
the literary corpse in As I Lay Dying, Tamara Slankard identifies the ways that Addie’s dead
body is “fetishized, particularly by her sons, throughout [the novel’s] overlapping narratives”
(18). Slankard describes Cash’s and Vardaman’s different “masturbation rituals” and explains
how their “fixations” on Addie’s corpse—fixations ultimately grounded in their “inability to
separate themselves from a dead past” (18)—vacillate “between such melancholic obsession and
sexual fetishism…eventually resulting in a symbolic incestuous act that continues for much of
the narrative” (21).19 At the same time, Addie’s corpse, the fetishized maternal object, also
challenges “domestic narratives of ideal Southern womanhood, as when Cora Tull surmises that
Addie is ‘not a true mother’ or when Addie herself laments, ‘motherhood was invented by
someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care
whether there was a word for it or not’” (Slankard 25).20
The inextricable linkage between “the past” and representations of necrophilia and
gender is a correlation that Faulkner may have helped to proliferate, but it’s one that certainly did
not originate with him, for necrophilia’s place in Southern fiction was established long before
Faulkner’s time. Famed gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems are riddled with hints
of necrophilic desire. His tales of bereavement—“Morella” (1835), “Berenice” (1835), and
“Ligeia” (1838), most notably—all feature male narrators whose sexual attraction to their female
As Slankard further elucidates: “Early in the narrative Darl performs an adolescent ritual of passive masturbation
by lying in his ‘shirt-tail’ and ‘feeling myself without touching myself, feeling the cool silence blowing upon my
parts,’ and he wonders ‘if Cash was yonder in the darkness doing it too, had been doing it perhaps for the last two
years before I could have wanted to or could have.’ Soon after, the family finds Vardaman ‘in his shirt tail, laying
asleep on the floor like a felled steer, and the top of the [coffin] bored clean full of holes and Cash’s new auger
broke off in the last one.’ Though Vardaman is only a prepubescent child, his ‘shirt tail’ dress is clearly associated
with his older brothers’ masturbation rituals; in this way, the holes ‘bored into’ his mother’s face then take on the
image of simulated sexual violation (using ‘Cash’s new auger’ as the substitute) and Vardaman’s powerful sleep a
symbolic postcoital collapse” (21).
19
Slankard’s analysis isn’t limited to representations of womanhood. She looks also at Anse, “the patriarchal
Bundren figure [who] represents a compromised Southern masculinity willing to sacrifice both his children and the
dignity of the maternal body for its remnants of stubborn pride” (14).
20
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companions manifests only when these titular women succumb to illness, their physical
comportment becoming ever increasingly corpse-like. In “Berenice,” for instance, Egaeus
reflects on Berenice in “the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty” and asserts, “[M]ost surely
I had never loved her” (Poe, “Berenice” 101). As sickness slowly begins to consume her,
however, Egaeus begins to see her “not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice
of a dream; not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being; not as a
thing to admire, but to analyze; not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse
although desultory speculation” (101). And it’s because of her “fallen and desolate condition”
that Egaeus now not only “shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach,” but
decides to “[speak] to her of marriage” (101). Poe’s credo that “the death…of a beautiful woman
is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” is similarly glorified in poems such as
“Annabel Lee” (“The Philosophy of Composition” 548). According to Marie Bonaparte,
“Annabel Lee” concludes with a “true necrophilist phantasy” in which the speaker imagines:
“And so, all the nighttide, I lie down by the side/Of my darling—my darling—my life and my
bride,/In her sepulchre there by the sea—/In her tomb by the sounding sea” (qtd. in Bloom 79,
italics in original).
Bonaparte attributes the insinuations of necrophilia in Poe’s fiction and poetry to acts of
repetition compulsion stemming from an “unswerving devotion to an infantile love object” (qtd.
in Bloom 79): that is, his dead mother. Poe’s works perhaps lack the irony, the element of parody
evident in Faulkner’s tales of necrophilic desire. Yet, because of the degree to which Faulkner
(and, indeed, Poe) is “a product, as well as a producer” of his time and region (Roberts xi), it’s
worth noting the way that this dynamic is usually gendered: with the exception of “A Rose for
Emily,” the South’s narratives of necrophilia typically center on men loving dead women who
represent the past. W.J. Cash’s estimation of the South’s “downright gyneolatry” is perhaps most
useful when considering this. As Cash writes—and as Chapter One explains in some detail—
beginning before the outbreak of the Civil War, Southern women were invested with expressions
of the South’s ideal: “She was the South’s Palladium, this Southern woman—the shield-bearing
Athena gleaming whitely in the clouds, the standard for its rallying, the mystic symbol of its
nationality in the face of the foe” (86). The Southern woman was “[t]he center and
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circumference, diameter and periphery, sine, tangent and secant of all…affections” (86-87).21
The cult of Southern Womanhood encouraged the association of white women with the “very
notion” of the South itself (Gray 189).
Changing ideas about chivalry and manhood were at the core of the South’s ante-and
post-bellum insistence on investing white women with such symbolic value, and one of the
major factors that contributed to definitions of Southern masculinity was white men’s ability to
assert authority over African-Americans. Chapter One explains the origin of the myth of the
“black beast rapist” and the “jezebel,” figures invented by white patriarchy as a means of
inhibiting interracial sex between black men and white women and of justifying the sexual
exploitation of black women, respectively. To combat “Yankee” rumors that Southerners were
vile and lascivious, white patriarchy turned to fiction; the white woman was thereby
“compensated, the revolting suspicion in the male that he might be slipping into bestiality got rid
of, by glorifying her” (Cash 86). Diane Roberts expounds upon Cash’s account by citing Joel
Williamson, who writes, in The Crucible of Race, that “it was a ‘kind of psychic compensation’
for white men to project their fears (and their fantasies) onto ‘the black beast rapist’ and invest
all white women with goodness” (104).
It makes sense, then, for narratives of necrophilia in the South also to also be very deeply
embedded in “the discourse of white supremacy” (Thompson, “Speaking Desire” 24). Within
that discourse, as Carlyle Van Thompson suggests,
the ritual of lynching allows the white Americans involved as spectators and
participants the freedom to express their often-sadistic sexual desires. […]
Castrating, dismembering, disemboweling, stabbing, and mutilating of Black
individuals require close and intimate contact with the victim’s body. This signals
desire, a desire that was present when Black men, women, and children were
forced to stand naked on the auction blocks for white males’ inspection
(fingering). […] Indeed, there is a strong element of public necrophilia present at
these lynchings. The groping, fondling, sodomizing, and raping of Black women
before they were lynched blatantly illustrate some white Americans’ sadistic
sexual desire. (24-25)
“Such was the toast which brought twenty great cheers from the audience at the celebration of Georgia’s onehundredth anniversary in the 1830’s,” Cash writes (87).
21
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Thompson further describes white Southerners’ “hysterical lust” for the body parts—“fingers,
toes, ears, and penis”—of those victims of lynchings (25). Noting that whites would regularly
collect these parts and sometimes keep them on their person, he explains how this “lust”
exemplifies “the private act of necrophilia in which the white home becomes a necropolis for
Black bodies” (25).22
My goal up until this point has been to outline a useful and too often disregarded way of
reading McCarthy’s and Gay’s novels, to situate them within a Southern cultural and narrative
history with which McCarthy, especially, is so frequently not associated. In point of fact, when it
comes to interrogating Child of God’s treatment of necrophilia at all, most criticism seems loath
to consider its distinct “Southernness”; instead, McCarthy in general and this novel in particular
are understood to “have very little to do with southern literary tradition” (Grammer 30). But
Child of God, as very much a part of the Southern Gothic tradition—a genre that probes “the
presence of something perverse, rotten, and nightmarish in a world allegedly governed by strict
piety, family values, and a proud past” (Thomson 315)—is indeed another novel in Southern
literature’s long and complex line of necrophilia narratives. What’s more, McCarthy’s and Gay’s
novels are both an extension and a critique of these earlier writers and the South they
represented. In Child of God and Twilight, the past is similarly inhered in representations of
gender—most notably in the politics of men acting out Southern manhood—and in their
treatments of necrophilia, McCarthy and Gay address and challenge Southern fiction’s
longstanding reverence for the past.
“THEY SAY HE NEVER WAS RIGHT AFTER HIS DADDY KILLED HISSELF”:
UNBURYING THE PAST IN LESTER BALLARD’S NECROPHILIC, GENDER-BENDING
PRESENT
Child of God, McCarthy’s third novel, according to Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C.
Luce, has “elicited the most thoughtful considerations of McCarthy thus far in his career” (5).
See also Russ Castronovo’s Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the NineteenthCentury United States, which explores how white men establish freedom “through the civil, social, and biological
deaths of nonwhites,” i.e. women and racial minorities (30). The chapter “Political Necrophilia: Freedom and the
Longing for Dead Citizenship” most thoroughly illuminates the link between race, gender, and necrophilia by
describing how “necrophilic fantasies”—fantasizing about suicide, death, and/or dying—became a way for women,
slaves, and other non-whites to achieve agency and freedom.
22
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The narrative charts the gradual decline of Lester Ballard—a man dispossessed and forced to
take residence in the mountains of Sevier County, Tennessee—into violence and depravity.
Shunned by his community, Lester becomes a hermit and soon resorts to murdering women for
his own necrophilic pleasures. But what little scholarship exists on Child of God offers a very
narrow read of McCarthy’s treatment of necrophilia, shying away from exploring it in any great
depth. Veeren M. Bell insists that in Child of God, “McCarthy causes the status of humanness
itself to seem intolerably ambiguous and frail—nugatory, even, in the unimplicated, insentient
otherness of the world” (68). Edwin Arnold, in response to Bell, argues for a reading of Child of
God as a moralizing parable, claiming that there is “always the possibility of grace and
redemption even in the darkest of his tales, although that redemption may require more of his
characters than they are ultimately willing to give” (46). Maxime LaChaud, on the other hand,
interprets Child of God through Mikhail Bahktin’s theories of the carnivalesque. Child of God,
he writes, is “the story of the quest for meaning of a man rejected by his community, the
community of Sevier County, and who tries to impose a certain order on his life in creating an
artificial family made of toys and corpses” (64, 65). Michael Madsen takes another sympathetic
approach to understanding Lester’s necrophilia and suggests that our reaction to the novel—that
we as readers are simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by Lester and his behavior—can “be
categorized as experiencing the uncanny” (18). Taking into account both the etymology of the
word unheimlich (“unhomely”) and Child of God’s upending of traditional home spaces, Madsen
calls the novel “effective and haunting because we do not feel quite at home with ourselves or
safe when confronted with something we would rather not have acknowledged and would have
repressed” (26).
Also taking into consideration the “home” or domestic sphere are Nell Sullivan and
Hillary Gamblin, who offer “much-needed” feminist critiques of McCarthy’s work (Gamblin
28). Sullivan’s essay, “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of
God,” sees Lester’s necrophilia as outright misogynistic. As she submits, for Lester, dead women
are preferable to living women because they are less frightening, and—as the novel
demonstrates—even in death, “women are objects of dread” (76, emphasis mine). Gamblin’s
“Discovering the Romantic in a Necrophiliac: The Question of Misogyny in Child of God” is in
large part a rejoinder to Sullivan. Gamblin approaches her own argument by “tempering
Sullivan’s feminist-driven theory with [Jay] Ellis’ emphasis on space and exploring Ballard’s
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Romantic interactions with his victims”; doing so, she writes, “provides a more profitable
feminist apparatus to understand this seemingly irredeemably misogynistic character” (28).
Scholarship on “gender” in McCarthy’s fiction—specifically Child of God—is
impressively minimal, and Sullivan’s and Gamblin’s feminist assessments are unmistakably
significant arguments and welcome voices, each in their own way offering an interpretation that
illuminates Lester Ballard’s necrophilia in a crucial way. However indispensable, they too
overlook or undervalue Child of God’s place in the Southern Gothic literary tradition.
McCarthy’s text is indeed a part of this tradition, and the very fact that Child of God deals with
necrophilia places it alongside other works like “A Rose for Emily” and As I Lay Dying; as such,
it should be similarly understood. Like other Southern narratives of necrophilia, Child of God
engages the South’s strange obsession with the past, takes this theme, perverts it, sexualizes it,
and in so doing, directly confronts notions of Southern womanhood and manhood.
History is important in McCarthy’s South, and particularly to Lester Ballard, who is
staunchly resistant to change. The first part of Child of God therefore not only establishes
Lester’s place in the community as an outcast—shunned by his town because of his resistance to
its modernization—but further helps contextualize the motivation for much of Lester’s bizarre
behavior. The first part of the novel reveals details of Lester’s tragic past and makes conspicuous
the extent to which this past continues to haunt him. First introduced as “small, unclean,
unshaven,” as moving “among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. […]
A child of God much like yourself perhaps,” Lester stands in the door of his family’s barn.
Behind him in that same barn is “a rope hanging from the loft” (4). That rope is a dark reminder
of his father’s suicide; as an anonymous townsperson soon reveals, Lester’s father hanged
himself after his mother ran off. Lester—“nine or ten years old at the time” (McCarthy 21)—was
the one to find his father’s body hanging in the barn and, according to this same townsperson’s
account, it was a gruesome scene: “The old man’s eyes was run out on stems like a crawfish and
his tongue blacker’n a chow dog’s. I wisht if a man wanted to hang hisself he’d do it with poison
or something so folks wouldn’t have to see such a thing as that” (21). This is clearly a traumatic
thing for anyone to witness, and it is especially devastating for young Lester, who at this point
has already suffered being abandoned by his own mother. “They say he never was right after his
daddy killed hisself,” the anonymous townsperson recalls, linking Lester’s early experience with
trauma to his eventual mental decline (21). Lester’s harsh upbringing—being abandoned by his
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mother and bearing witness to his father’s suicide—have, as the omniscient narrator describes,
caused Lester to grow “lean and bitter. Some said mad” (41).
Lester’s homestead may have been the site of his early trauma, but it’s nonetheless the
last attachment he has to his past (even if that past is tainted by death and abandonment). The
beginning of the novel therefore also sets the stage for Lester’s inability to adjust to the modern
world outside of his comfort zone, as Lester watches as his childhood home is auctioned off. And
the auction of Lester’s private homestead notably assumes a very “public and communal nature”
(Fetterley 35). Those attending
came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and
across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and
the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the
fat man with the guitar grinning and gesturing to the others in a car behind and
bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a
wrinkled face. (McCarthy 3)
The auction becomes a sort of carnivalesque “festival that brings the town together, clarifying its
social relationships and revitalizing its sense of the past” (Fetterley 35). At the same time that the
rest of the town is “revitalized” in its sense of the past, Lester is, in effect, being forcefully
detached from his. Angry, Lester tells the auctioneer: “I done told ye. I want you to get your
goddamn ass off my property. And take these fools with ye.” The auctioneer replies: “You done
been locked up once over this. […] Lester, you don’t get a grip on yourself they goin to put you
in a rubber room” (McCarthy 7). The auctioneer’s retort reveals that this is not Lester’s first
attempt to thwart change. Presumably like his past attempts, this effort to resist change comes to
a violent end. Another anonymous townsperson tells how Lester is coldcocked—with an axe—
by someone named Buster and is then carted off to jail.
The omniscient narration in the first part of the novel is punctuated by such similar firstperson accounts of various townsfolk’s past encounters with Lester. The overwhelming majority
of the town’s communal memories involves Lester and somehow serves to establish him as
weird and prone to violence. But, like “A Rose for Emily,” in so doing, Child of God also
provides a glimpse of the community, its traditions, and its own odd reverence for the past. One
nameless townsperson recounts the peculiar story of a high school aged Lester beating up a
younger boy for not complying with Lester’s demands to retrieve a lost softball: “Lester told him
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one more time, said: You don’t get off down there and get me that ball I’m goin to bust you in
the mouth. He just stood there a minute and then he punched him in the face. […] I never liked
Lester Ballard from that day. I never liked him much before that. He never done nothin to me”
(17, 18). Another describes a time Lester “had this old cow to balk on him, couldn’t get her to do
nothin” and so attempted to get the cow to move by tying her to a tractor, consequently breaking
her neck and “kill[ing] her where she stood” (35). In the minds of his fellow townspeople, Lester
is simply weird; he is dispossessed and unpredictably violent, and even those who Lester has
never personally offended find reason to dislike him. Yet as Vereen Bell notes, these anecdotes
about Lester—these shared, collective memories—are being recounted after the later events in
the novel have occurred. Though the citizens of Sevier County ostracize him, Lester “has
become a part of the mythology of his region and has thereby achieved, ironically, a place in the
community that has eluded him otherwise” (Bell 54). That Lester is a necessary fixture in his
society is made further apparent towards the end of the novel, when Lester flees from a group of
townspeople who are trying to capture him and nearly drowns in the river. The omniscient
narrator interrupts the narrative to make the following observations: “You could say that he’s
sustained by his fellow men, like you. [...] A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed,
that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it” (McCarthy 156). Lester may be
strange and sometimes violent, but he is still very much a part of the town’s mythology, a part of
their history that they need. Like Emily Grierson, Lester is a kind of “hereditary obligation on the
town” (Faulkner, Collected Stories 119). He’s also “the subject of shared speculation,” a figure
of “central significance to the identity” of the community and “to the meaning of its history”
(Fetterley 35).
The history the first-person narratives recount reveals Lester as “a cultural artifact” that
“reflects and defines the culture that has produced” him (Fetterley 35). That is to say, these
narratives furthermore evidence the ways that the community instills in Lester behaviors they at
the same time condemn. The first-person narratives interspersed throughout the first part of the
novel—such as the story about the fair that “had a old boy come through would shoot live
pigeons with ye […] loadin the old pigeons up the ass with them little firecrackers” or about the
man who was nearly killed while attempting to box an ape at the local carnival (McCarthy 58,
59)—express a “conventional disposition toward violence, ritualized in hunting and fighting, and
a preoccupation with death and with the dead” (Bell 55). The community thrives on hunting,
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shooting birds, and boxing apes, but when Lester, as one townsperson recounts, ties a cow to a
tractor and “like to of jerked her head plumb off,” he is viewed as violent (McCarthy 35).
Though the community isn’t necessarily responsible for Lester’s actions, it engenders this
etiquette in its citizens and thusly punishes Lester for his adherence.
It’s worth mentioning that those nameless voices that speak for the community are
predominantly—if not exclusively—male voices. Therefore, these first-person narratives also
serve to define the community’s gender politics. The patriarchal community described in the
novel is one that upholds a certain respect for “ladies”—when Lester causes a scene at the
auction, the auctioneer warns him, “Watch your mouth, Lester. They’s ladies present” (7)23—and
it’s also one that at the same time is immersed in masculine expressions of ritualized violence,
such as hunting, shooting, and fighting. These rituals are ultimately arenas that allow white men
the space to “publicly demonstrate manliness” (Friend x). As Craig Thompson Friend explains
and as Chapter Two describes, since before Reconstruction, Southern manhood has “required
regular public performance” as a way of maintaining social, gender, and racial hierarchies (x).
Public rituals—in the novel, for instance, the very public spectacle of boxing an ape at the county
fair, which the storyteller admits he participated in to impress “this little old gal on my arm kept
lookin up at me about like a poleaxed calf” and to furthermore assuage the “old boys eggin me
on” (McCarthy 58)—are “culturally constructed spaces that communicate social realities by
defining and setting a common cultural agenda,” providing participants a means of asserting “a
conception of identity to themselves and to those around them in the larger social context”
(DuRocher 47). Kris DuRocher looks specifically at lynching, a ritual that bolstered the
foundations of white supremacy by “allow[ing] the white community to model, produce, and
reinforce a distinct class, racial, and gendered identity while also sending a message to the black
community as well as white women and children to obey boundaries set up by while males” (47).
Lynching in particular and other rituals in general make apparent the extent to which violence
played a role in both “creating” and “exhibiting” Southern masculinity (47).24
The auctioneer’s admonition here echoes an instance in To Kill a Mockingbird, when Scout recounts the time
when Boo Radley and some of his friends were arrested as young teens for “using abusive and profane language in
the presence and hearing of a female” (Lee 11). In Child of God, similarly, “ladies” should never be subjected to
profanity.
23
John Dudley is one of the few critics to also consider the role of gender in McCarthy’s fiction. Through Julia
Kristeva’s theory of abjection, Dudley’s essay, “McCarthy’s Heroes: Revisiting Masculinity,” explores “masculine
myth” and male subjectivity in most of McCarthy’s novels.
24
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Maxime LaChaud calls Child of God “the story of the quest for meaning of a man
rejected by his community…who tries to impose a certain order on his life in creating an
artificial family made of toys and corpses” (64, 65). Indeed, Lester’s necrophilia most certainly
reveals his attempt to bring order to his otherwise chaotic life, and his affinity for collecting the
bodies of women and residing with them in a mountain cave furthermore exposes his desperate
search for community, a frantic need to belong. What Lester seems to understand about how to
fit in with the rest of his community, however, mostly parallels the concept of “manhood”
defined by the first-person narratives; in order to belong, Lester often “acts” out what he thinks it
means to be a man. And given the community’s “conventional disposition toward violence” (Bell
55), it makes sense that Lester similarly associates violence with masculinity. This perhaps
illuminates Lester’s almost obsessive need to carry his rifle—an obvious phallic symbol—with
him at all times.25 Lester’s rifle isn’t just some kind of vestigial accessory: he is a crack shot, a
skilled rifleman, so skilled, in fact, that “they run him off at the fair one time” (McCarthy 57).
One such instance in which Lester uses his rifle to demonstrate his manliness (and also one of
the most unexpectedly endearing descriptions of Lester) occurs when he visits the shooting
gallery at the fair. Entranced by the stuffed animals, Lester plays three rounds, winning two
stuffed bears and a tiger and causing the pitchman to take the rifle away from him and reactively
declare: “Three big grand prizes per person is the house limit” (64). Lester proudly carries his
prizes—a testament to his masculine prowess—through the fair crowd and basks in the attention
he receives for adequately, successfully exhibiting his manliness. He passes a woman who
notices his prizes, exclaiming: “They lord look what all he’s won” (65). As the omniscient
narrator also describes: “Young girls’ faces floated past, bland and smooth as cream. Some eyed
his toys. The crowd was moving toward the edge of the field and assembling there, a sea of
country people watching into the dark for some midnight contest to begin” (65). For a fleeting
moment Lester experiences what it is like to be a part of the community—to be admired by
women26—until he spots “a young girl with candyapple on her lips and her wide eyes. Her pale
25
The rifle is a sort of security blanket for Lester on a couple of levels. Apart from using it to demonstrate his
manliness, the rifle is also possibly the only remaining item from his past that Lester currently has in his possession.
As one of the nameless townspeople explains, Lester “had that rifle from when he was just almost a boy. He worked
for old man Whaley settin fenceposts at eight cents a post to buy it. Told me he quit midmorning right in the middle
of the field the day he got enough money” (57).
26
Much like the first-person narrative in which the narrator describes his attempt to box an ape, part of the reason
behind the masculine performance of shooting rifles is to impress women.
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hair smelled of soap, womanchild from beyond her years, rapt below the sulphur glow and
pitchlight of some medieval fun fair. A lean skylong candle skewered the black pools in her
eyes” (65). Through the fireworks, she notices “the man with the bears watching her and she
edged closer to the girl by her side and brushed her hair with two fingers quickly” (65). Lester’s
staring clearly makes this young girl uncomfortable, and at the sight of her moving closer to her
friend, Lester is reminded of his position as outcast and is thereby emasculated.
Lester also seemingly understands that one of the ways men bond with one another
occurs across the bodies of women, that—as Eve Sedgwick suggests—“in the presence of a
woman who can be seen as pitiable or contemptible, men are able to exchange power and to
confirm each other’s value even in the context of the remaining inequalities in their power”
(160). When in prison after being falsely accused of rape, Lester initiates a conversation with his
cellmate. Upon finding out that “Nigger John” is in jail for “cutting a motherfucker’s head off
with a pocketknife,” Lester voluntarily reveals that he “was supposed to of raped this old girl”
who “wasn’t nothing but a whore to start with” (McCarthy 53). His cellmate tells him: “White
pussy is nothin but trouble.” Lester “agreed that it was. He guessed he’d thought so.” He then
tells his cellmate: “All the trouble I ever was in…was caused by whiskey or women or both”
(53). But this observation is for Lester no truism; rather, it is something he says because “[h]e’d
often heard men say as much” (53). As Arnold writes, Lester “would like to pretend a kinship
with them” (Arnold 55). Lester’s conversation with this man makes visible his awareness
(however tacit) that to reinscribe this nameless woman as a “whore,” as “white pussy” (that is, to
reduce her to her physiological body part)—names that represent a marginal femininity—is to
place her as inferior to what he understands as the community’s hegemonic version of
masculinity. That is to say that through this conversation, Lester hopes only to further cohere his
bond with another man.
Something similar happens when Lester goes to visit the dumpkeeper, whose nine
“gangling progeny […] moved like cats and like cats in heat attracted surrounding swains to their
midden until the old man used to go out at night and fire a shotgun at random just to clear the
air” (McCarthy 23).27 One of the daughters, along with a nameless man who is presumably one
In “The Dispossessed White as Naked Ape and Stereotyped Hillbilly in the Southern Novels of Cormac
McCarthy,” Duane R. Carr says that McCarthy “assumes, like [Erskine] Caldwell, that young ‘poor white’ females
love to copulate with any man who comes” (15). Indeed, the dumpkeeper’s daughters are a prime example “white
27
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of said “surrounding swains,” teases Lester by offering to show him her breast in exchange for
money: “Shit…If you’ns ever got any of this you never would be satisfied again,” she says to
him. As she walks away, leaving Lester and the man behind, the man turns to Lester and admits:
“I’d like to chance it...Wouldn’t you, Lester?” Lester agrees (30). Notably, Sedgwick’s
triangulation relies also on Gayle Rubin, who contends that heterosexuality is based, in one form
or another, on what she terms “the traffic in women,” or the use of women “as exchangeable,
perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men”
(25, 26). In this moment, the dumpkeeper’s daughter (all nine of whom are named out of an old
medical dictionary and are more or less treated interchangeably, are next to impossible to
distinguish from one another—by readers and the dumpkeeper alike), becomes a vehicle for
Lester to assert his masculinity and cement his relationship with another man.
Lester imitates and takes to an extreme the behaviors of masculine expression instilled in
him by his community, and in so doing he exposes the performative nature of gender. This also
occurs when Lester has his first sexual encounter with the female counterpart of a dead,
copulating couple he finds in an abandoned car. After having his way with her, Lester brings the
woman’s corpse back to his home—the abandoned house in which he’s of late been squatting—
and keeps company with her as if she’s alive. With this dead woman Lester creates his own
(per)version of domesticity and casts himself in the traditional, idealized role of “Man-theImpregnator-Protector-Provider” (Gilmore qtd. in DuRocher 46). Having already sufficiently
proven his sexual proficiency with the woman’s cadaver, the first thing Lester does when he gets
her back to his home is lay her on the mattress and cover her up with a blanket, as if to make sure
she stays warm and protected from the bitter cold. The next day “two boys came across the lot
and entered the house where Ballard lay huddled in his blanket on the floor” (McCarthy 93-94).
In part afraid of being discovered and also fearful of losing his new domestic partner, Lester opts
to further protect his woman’s corpse by moving her up into the attic. Hilary Gamblin also
understands this scene as indication of Lester’s desire to protect his companion. Noting that
when Ballard moves the cadaver into the attic he first “cleared a place on the loose floorboards
and dusted them off with some rags” (McCarthy 95)—a “type of veneration” that “suggests a
trash sexuality” gone haywire, but I would argue that McCarthy’s stereotyped characterization of the nine daughters
is perhaps more tongue-in-cheek than Carr suggests.
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reverence and care for the deceased” (Gamblin 33)—Gamblin demonstrates how Lester does not
simply “view women as an object that may be stored and taken out for sexual pleasure” (33).
Lester continues to provide for his new partner by buying her clothes. After walking three
hours in the freezing cold, Lester arrives in Sevierville and goes shopping. The items he
purchases for his companion include a red dress, several pairs of underwear, a hairbrush, lipstick,
and other cosmetics. As Gamblin notes:
When Ballard speaks to the clerk in front of the store, he refers to the articles of
clothing as “needs;” Ballard wishes to provide for his victims’ needs as he views
himself as a provider. […] Because Ballard keeps his victims within his living
space and considers them as part of his community, the act of dressing them
implies an attempt at responsibly interacting with others as opposed to frivolous
playing. (35)
Men’s role as “protector/provider” has a long and storied place in the South’s conception of
masculinity, a place that can be traced back to the white patriarchal South’s insistence on
preserving its racial hierarchies. In A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American
South Since Emancipation, Joel Williamson explains how men’s traditional role as protector and
provider in the South evolved from the Victorian model of the family, wherein it was the
function of every man “to protect physically and provide materially for his wife and children”
(18). In the South, however, the importance of maintaining these roles was amplified, “woven
firmly into fabrics of male and female identity already reshaping themselves to meet the black
threat” (19). Following emancipation and the depression of the 1890s, Southern men found it
increasingly difficult to materially provide for their women. Men responded to these “feelings of
inadequacy” by deflecting their anger and insecurity onto “the black beast rapist.” Men’s need to
“provide” for their women, in other words, became tangled up with an effort to “protect” her
purity.
On the one hand, by “pretending” the girl isn’t dead, as it were (Ellis qtd. in Gamblin,
30)—protecting her from the elements and caring for her as if she’s alive—Lester evinces an
effort to stop time, to hold on to the past. If his mother ran off when he was a young boy, and if
his father committed suicide shortly thereafter, it makes sense that Lester—lonely, abandoned,
and probably never having experienced true domestic happiness—would use this corpse to try to
recreate a version of his idealized, lost past. And it’s clear from the moment he “moves in” to
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Waldrop’s old home that “the past” is, for Lester, a looming presence: on his first night there,
Lester reads a stack of old newspapers he has collected and “muttered over them, his lips
forming the words. Old news of folks long dead, events forgotten, ads for patent medicine and
livestock for sale” (15). In cohabitating with this corpse, “he creates a space and time outside of
the civilization that rejects him,” a space impervious to change (Gamblin 32).
There is still more to Lester’s effort to protect and provide for this woman’s corpse; it’s a
way of imposing on this dead woman’s body what he thinks she needs to do in order to be a
“lady.” Gamblin sees the scene in which Lester buys his victim clothes, brushes her hair, and
applies her makeup as indication that he ascribes to “a static and idealized view of femininity”
(35). The way that Lester treats this particular female corpse, she suggests, “illustrates he too
buys into this traditional idea of women being overly concerned with their appearance. He treats
them as he expects that they would want to be treated” (35). To add to this, I take into account
Nell Sullivan’s observation that Lester’s victims are generally considered “whores”—by Lester
and the omniscient narrator—or are in some way or another marked as sexually promiscuous
(Sullivan 75). They are “damaged goods,” to use a vulgar phrase, and this particular girl that
Lester finds dead in a car, mid-coitus with someone apparently other than her steady boyfriend,28
is certainly no exception. That Lester brings her home—keeps her warm, protected, and clothed,
cares for her and whispers in her ear “everything he’d ever thought of saying to a woman”
(McCarthy 88, emphasis mine)—is not only a rare instance in which Lester treats a woman with
a sheer modicum of respect, but is additionally indicative of some sort of backwards effort to
restore to this “damaged” corpse some kind of ladylike purity.29
For Lester, it seems that the primary way for his victims to become “ladies”—or to be
worthy of being considered a “woman” instead of a “bitch” or a “whore”—is for them to be
dead. Lester articulates what Russ Castronovo calls “the conviction that death redeems a sexually
dishonored woman” (30). Sullivan recalls another moment in the novel where this conviction
becomes apparent: when Lester first encounters the “old whore” he is later accused of raping, she
is described by the narrator as “a lady sleeping under the trees in a white gown,” and Lester
watches her for some time “to see if she were dead” (McCarthy 41). Asleep and thereby “deSullivan points out: “The deputy sheriff later implies that she was promiscuous, saying ‘she was supposed to of
been goin with that Blalock boy we talked to’” (75).
28
29
I say “modicum” of respect here because Lester does at one point refer to her as a “[g]oddamn frozen bitch” (102).
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animated,” Sullivan writes, “she receives the approbative term lady, but waking, she becomes ‘a
goddamned whore,’ in Lester’s words, or ‘the old whore,’ in the narrator’s” (74). Ultimately, the
fact that for Lester and the rest of his community “death becomes her” 30—that women are
“ladies” only in death—serves to reinfornce the link between violence and masculinity.
DuRocher posits that white Southern men’s “ability to control those within their
households and below them in the social hierarchy, primarily slaves and women, reflected their
race and masculinity” (46). Lester is able to exert total control over the corpse that he finds and
brings back to his house, moving her from room to room, dressing her, and fixing her hair and
makeup. But this control, Lester soon finds, is only fleeting; an unattended fire soon causes
Lester’s house to burn to the ground, and the scavenged woman’s corpse burns with it. It is at
this point in the novel that a distinct shift in Lester’s personality becomes discernible. Now,
detached from his past, shunned by his community, homeless, and alone, Lester secludes himself
in a mountain cave. It’s at this point also that Lester’s violent performances escalate, as he now
resorts to killing women himself, collecting their bodies and dragging their “rancid mold-crept
corpse[s] through the wall of the sinkhole and down the dark and dripping corridor” in which he
resides (McCarthy 158). Arnold suggests that Lester is “not about violence but about
companionship” (55). Certainly, as LaChaud similarly explains, violence is a means for Lester to
reduce his solitude; Lester develops a relationship with others by inflicting pain on them: “The
ephemeral act of murder gives [him] access to human contact” (66). Lester’s necrophilia is
clearly an attempt to ease his loneliness, to hold on to his past by creating a community that will
accept him, but above all, it suggests that Lester understands that women, sex, and violence are a
sort of passport to manhood. And Lester takes this to an extreme and asserts control—his
masculinity—not just by having sex with women, but by killing them as well. This is apparent
when Lester shoots and kills his first victim, one of the dumpkeeper’s daughters, after she rejects
his advances and further emasculates him by telling him, “You ain’t even a man. You’re just a
crazy thing” (McCarthy 117). In her final moments alive, the dumpkeeper’s daughter refuses to
show Lester her breast. Alive, Lester is unable to control her; dead, Lester can do with her as he
pleases.
Sullivan describes one other instance wherein “[o]ne of the vigilantes who roust Lester from the hospital recalls
the esteem that accrues to women with death when he refers to Lester’s victims as ‘them dead ladies’” (74). This
further proves how Lester’s community instills in him certain behaviors. In other words, Lester understands this
about “ladies” because it’s something he learned from his community.
30
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Notably, the dumpkeeper’s daughter is another example of how Lester tries to turn his
dead “whores” into “ladies.” Like the girl Lester finds dead in a car (who at the time of her
unfortunate carbon monoxide poisoning had been engaged in intercourse with a young man other
than her steady boyfriend) the dumpkeeper’s daughter is promiscuous. The first part of the novel
establishes all nine of the dumpkeeper’s daughters as unabashedly sexually active:
They moved like cats and like cats in heat attracted surrounding swains to their
midden until the old man used to go out at night and fire a shotgun at random just
to clear the air. […] They were coming and going all hours in all manner of
degenerate cars, a dissolute carousel of rotting sedans and niggerized convertibles
with bluedot taillamps and chrome horns and foxtails and giant dice or dashboard
demons of spurious fur. All patched up out of parts and lowslung and bumping
over the ruts. Filled with old lanky country boys with long cocks and big feet.
They fell pregnant one by one. (27)
When Lester comes to the dumpkeeper’s house on this fateful day, the daughter is home alone
with “the idiot child.” Lester asks her if the child is hers and, despite her denial, he insists that he
knows better: “You cain’t fool me,” Lester tells her (116). Furthering his thinly-veiled attempt to
learn more about the girl’s sexual activity, he asks her if she’s of late “slipped off in the bushes”
with “that old crazy Thomas boy” (117). Lester may not come right out and say it, but the
implication here is that Lester thinks this girl is just another “whore.” Yet later, dead and housed
“in the bowels of the mountain,” the dumpkeeper’s daughter and, presumably, other female
victims just like her, lay on “ledges or pallets of stone…like saints” (135, emphasis mine).
Formerly a “whore,” a sinner, the dumpkeeper’s daughter is now saintly, her purity seemingly
restored.
W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South explains how the ideal Southern Lady was pure and
chaste; she furthermore represented the clean, closed, classical body, a body, Mikhail Bakhtin
describes, that “was first of all a strictly completed, finished product”: “All signs of its
unfinished character, of its growth and proliferation were eliminated; […] The ever unfinished
nature of the body was hidden, kept secret; conception, pregnancy, childbirth, death throes were
almost never shown” (Bakhtin 29). Ironically, the dead women in Lester’s collection of
corpses—all noticeably very white—are “leaky vessels,” grotesque bodies that exhibit acts of
bodily elimination: that, even in death, bleed, urinate, eventually grow moldy and drip with “a
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gray rheum” (McCarthy 196). The grotesque and other Bahktinian elements of the carnivalesque,
as many critics have noticed, 31 permeate the atmosphere of the entire novel. It’s important to
recognize the carnivalesque elements of Child of God in order to understand the ways the novel
lampoons tradition, explores “the momentary suspension of conventional hierarchies, even a
burlesque parody of the sacred, and center[s] on the celebratory transgression of social and
ethical norms” (Frye 115).
The novel reaches its transgressive apex in part three. Now associating sexual pleasure
with violence and death, Lester—a “gothic doll” in “frightwig and skirts” (McCarthy 140,
172)—takes to wearing the clothes and scalps of his female victims. Arnold believes this to be a
symptom of Lester’s “growing madness”; Lester, he explains, “has no hold on his own identity”
(55). While Lester may very well be (and almost inarguably is) going crazy towards the end of
the novel, his fondness for wearing the clothes and scalps of his female victims—a sort of
grotesque and subversive “drag performance,” to borrow a phrase from Judith Butler—
demonstrates the ways in which gender is a “regulatory fiction.” According to Butler,
subjectivity is something that is performed, produced by certain “stylized bodily acts” that are
socially constructed and that in their repetition over time establish the appearance of what she
terms an “essential” or “core” gender (Butler 14). Lester’s “drag performance” exposes the
performative nature of gender, thereby destabilizing the “structures of power” that govern his
Sevierville community.32 Lester—and in many ways, the novel itself—overturns convention,
breaks down the community’s boundaries and problematizes its gender politics.
This explains in part why Lester is the town’s outcast. Towards the end of the novel, as
Lester flees from a group of townspeople who are trying to capture him, he nearly drowns in the
river. The omniscient narrator interrupts the narrative to make the following observations: “You
could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. [...] A race that gives suck to the
maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it” (156).
According to René Girard’s theory of sacred violence, “the community is both attracted and
repelled by its own origins. It feels the constant need to reexperience them, albeit in veiled and
Nell Sullivan notices the ways in which Lester’s women “leak,” although she does not consider the Bakhtinian
implications of their “incontinence” (75). Critics who do look at elements of the grotesque and/or carnivalesque in
Child of God include, for instance, Maxime LaChaud, Lydia R. Cooper, and Steven Frye.
31
Butler discusses drag performances as “simultaneously reinscribing and challenging the gender norms they
imitate, such as those of ideal feminine types” (Spencer 141).
32
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transfigured form. By means of rites the community manages to cajole and somewhat subdue the
forces of destruction. But the true nature and real function of these forces will always elude its
grasp, precisely because the source of evil is the community itself” (Girard 99). In Girard’s
theory, human beings are instinctually mimetic creatures and are thus in constant conflict with
one another over our shared objects of desire. Because this conflict, Girard claims, creates a
threat of violence, communities unite against a scapegoat figure. Arnold observes Lester’s
position within the community as scapegoat, a figure within the community that, as Susan L.
Mizruchi confirms, must “resemble others, but differ fundamentally” (62, italics in original).
Lester is both a norm and an aberration, displaying what is by his society conventional behavior
and simultaneously taking that behavior to an extreme. While Lester is not necessarily one of
what “the gentlest, most innocent creatures, whose habits and instincts [brings] them most
closely into harmony with man” he is undoubtedly incorporated within the community as part of
its mythology (de Maistre qtd. in Mizruchi 62). According to Girard, scapegoat figures must be
“loosely integrated into the community so that their death would not incite demands for
vengeance” (Mizruchi 62). One of the ways community is maintained is by institutionalizing the
“limits on human desire” (63), and yet Lester is the sole figure in the community unbound by
these limitations; as a scapegoat figure, Lester’s violent, necrophilic actions and recognition of
subjectivity as a social construction remind his fellow townspeople of their own repressed
desires and thereby upset the balance of the community. Ritual violence—Lester’s expulsion
from the community and eventual arrest—is thereby necessary for the restoration of the
community, for “the tensions aroused by desire have been dissolved” (Lyden 83).
Lester’s bizarre behavior—his necrophilic tendencies—exposes the ways that gender and
subjectivity are socially constructed. In imitating and taking to an extreme the behaviors instilled
in him by his community, he subverts the naturalized, patriarchal modes of gender and structures
of power that govern his community and that, most importantly, are deeply entrenched in the
Southern literary tradition. McCarthy is not typically considered to be the kind of writer that
participates in this tradition, but Child of God very clearly demonstrates McCarthy’s engagement
with the South’s strange and complex gender mythologies. Ultimately, the novel’s treatment of
necrophilia in general and the depiction of Lester’s expulsion from the town in particular
challenge normative, patriarchal modes of identity in the South. McCarthy is already one of the
most challenging and original writers to emerge from the South in recent years; that in Child of
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God he confronts conceptions of Southern manhood and womanhood—issues he is otherwise
often thought to avoid or ignore—makes him all the more ingenious.
“A MODEL OF SARTORIAL ELEGANCE”: THE NECROPHILIAC AS EFFETE
ARISTOCRAT IN TWILIGHT
If McCarthy’s Child of God—as Duane R. Carr suggests—through Lester Ballard is
“dipping into comic stereotypes of disadvantaged and dispossessed white Southerners” (14)—not
unlike Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—then Twilight’s portrait of the “dandy” and supremely
wealthy necrophiliac, Fenton Breece, could in some ways be considered a modern retelling of “A
Rose for Emily.”33 Through Fenton Breece, the town’s lascivious undertaker with a penchant for
photographing his sexual exploits with the bodies of the dead men and women he prepares for
burial, William Gay’s Twilight quite literally perverts the image of the aristocratic Southern
Gentleman. In its treatment of necrophilia, the novel (re)activates, often pushing against, the
South’s structuring codes of manhood and womanhood, as well as it too enacts and renders
violent and sexual the theme of the past in present.
Set in the fictional town of Centre, Tennessee, the novel follows Kenneth Tyler, a young
teenager who, suspecting that Fenton Breece has buried his father without the waterproof vault
that his family paid for, discovers a number of desecrated gravesites in which the bodies have
been horribly mutilated. Looking for further proof of Fenton’s indiscretions, Tyler steals a
briefcase from the trunk of Fenton’s car—a briefcase containing a large sum of money and a
stack of photographs of “unmistakably dead,” nude women “arranged in grotesque
configurations” and “grouped in mimicry of various acts of sexual congress” (Gay 23). After
Tyler’s older sister, Corrie, attempts to blackmail Fenton, the perverse undertaker hires convicted
murderer Granville Sutter to retrieve the photographs at whatever cost. While the scholarship on
Child of God is a noticeable influence on Gay’s gothic novel Twilight, both stylistically and thematically. In a
2007 interview, Gay remarked: “I can’t really argue when people say my writing is influenced by [McCarthy],
because it obviously was. There was a period when I read so much of his stuff, there was a time when I was actually
thinking like the characters in Suttree” (Kenyon). The epithet at the beginning of the second part of Gay’s novel is
one such instance of McCarthy’s influence; the line from Suttree—“The rest indeed is silence”—alludes to Hamlet’s
dying words in Shakespeare’s tragedy, conjuring images of death and aligning these images with Southern
experience. Also, like McCarthy, Gay is a Tennessee writer.
33
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McCarthy is minimal, it is practically non-existent on Gay; any criticism on the writer in general
and Twilight in particular is limited mostly to book reviews. In one such Washington Post
review, Art Taylor claims that by mixing “menace and levity, Gay suggests some crucial
revelation—or perhaps dark divination—about the pervasive nature of evil” (“Shallow Grave”).
Moreover, Twilight also seems to offer some kind of “dark divination” about the myth of the
South, about “the failure of the southern order to preserve itself against time” (Grammer 30). The
image of the South offered in Gay’s Twilight is not a place of “moonlight and magnolias”; rather,
it’s a place where the past—now dead, decayed, and “buried” out in the Harrikin—is still
hauntingly present. The Harrikin serves as a grim reminder of the futility of change.
The Harrikin—a dangerous wilderness named so after a tornado nearly destroyed the
town in the early 1930s34—is a space that embodies the town of Centre’s inability to escape “the
past.” It’s a land that time forgot, “a whole frozen labyrinth of decaying Southern memory,” full
of “derelict mansions, abandoned mines and lone survivors” (Upchurch).35 Once a prosperous
mining town, the Harrikin is now wild and grown over: “[t]rees sprouted up through the works of
man. Kudzu and wild grapevines climbed the machinery until ultimately these machines seemed
some curious hybrid of earth and steel. […] Brush and honeysuckle obscured the sunken shafts”
(87). The Harrikin is “the closest thing to a wilderness there was” (Gay 87). More importantly,
it’s also a respite “from a world that still adhered to form and order” (88); to enter the Harrikin,
one moves “not only geographically but chronologically…into the past” (88). The Harrikin is an
ungoverned, lawless wilderness, what Michael Upchurch calls “some mythic realm”
(“Twilight”). The realm of the Harrikin is indeed somewhat mythical, rendered also through
subtle yet distinguishable fairytale imagery. When Tyler first enters the Harrikin he sees “a brick
outbuilding and a tiny wooden shanty like a witch’s house in a fable” (Gay 126). Later, when
Sutter comes to the Calvert’s house, Claude mistakes his knock at the door for Tyler’s, asking:
“You the Lost Sheep back?” Sutter replies, “Yes…as lost a sheep as ever was” (185). Sutter, the
proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, is thereby granted entry into the Calvert’s home, where he
thus brutally and ruthlessly murders the entire family. When Sutter eventually manages to
capture Tyler, he does so in an allusion to the story of Little Red Riding Hood, dressing as an
34
“Folks called the tornado a harrikin, a hurricane, one fierce storm the same to them as another” (Gay 87).
Since the antebellum period, Southern fiction has been brimming with such “derelict mansions” and “ruined old
houses, symbolizing the failure of the southern order to preserve itself against time” (Grammer 30).
35
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“old grandmotherlike woman”—in “an anklelength dress and men’s brogans broken out at the
side and a ratty plaid shawl wound about her ample shoulders”—who asks for Tyler’s help
unloading a sack of cowfeed from the trunk of her car (190). The frequent allusions to fables and
fairytales do, as Taylor suggests, combine “menace and levity,” establishing the Harrikin as a
land of fable, a mythical backwoods. As such a place, The Harrikin is a significant part of the
folklore of this particular community. The townspeople talk about the Harrikin like it’s some sort
of urban legend. In one instance, the storekeep notices Tyler’s rifle and, assuming he’s going into
the Harrikin to hunt, cautions him, “Best be careful in there less you’re used to it. I got lost once
in their digging sang and like to never come out” (102). According to the locals, the Harrikin is
like a black hole or the Bermuda Triangle: people go in, but don’t often come back out. It’s a
“haunted” space steeped in the past, in history, but also in myth and violence. Essentially, the
Harrikin literalizes the community’s—and perhaps the South’s—relationship with past: that it
occupies its own separate and distinct space allows them to keep a safe distance from it, yet it’s
forever there, a constant and haunting reminder of the town’s history.
As in Child of God, first-person anecdotes punctuate the first part of the novel and reveal
additional details about the community: its rules, folklore, and its conflicted relationship with the
past. The first-person narratives help to both establish Fenton’s character and his place within the
Centre, Tennessee community as a (per)version of the Southern Gentleman, as well as they help
to establish the community’s gender politics As Squire Robnett recalls:
I never cared for undertakers in general and Fenton Breece in particular. There
was just always something about him. I done some work for him out there when
he was buildin that mansion he built, but times was hard and I’d of worked for
Hitler if he’d of been hirin. Whatever it was, he was born with it because I
knowed him when he was a boy and he was just as peculiar then as he is now.
Fenton was a rich kid, and that’s when I first begun to suspect rich ain’t all it’s
made out to be. […] I always believed Fenton just liked foolin around with dead
folks. He just didn’t fit in. Didn’t or couldn’t. He used to get dead animals off the
side of the road and play like he was embalmin em. […] If he couldn’t find none
and the mood was on him he took to killen em hisself. Strangle em. There for a
while he was hell on the neighborhood cat population. (Gay 18)
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The people of Centre dislike Fenton for the simple fact that he just doesn’t fit in. Although he
comes from a wealthy, well-liked family, he is still shunned by his community. At the same time,
however, Fenton and his extravagant mansion have become “part of the folklore of the region”
(19).36 The townspeople are fascinated by Fenton’s wealth and are obviously interested enough
in him to “conjecture” and gossip about his house: the “many miles” of copper tubing and
electrical wire, the “glittering bricks,” the exotic tile and light fixtures imported from Europe,
and the workmen whom the local workers said spoke some sort of “Chinese gobbledygook” (19).
Although they find him odd, the town quite literally needs him; Fenton is not only an institution,
the town’s own local legend, he is also the only undertaker they have.37 One of the reasons
Fenton Breece aspires to the level of legend is because he descends from a long line of wealth
and status. He is a living monument of the town’s past and of a social order that has slipped away
with that past. An “aristocrat” trying to function in a time when the old order “aristocracy” no
longer exists, Fenton represents the time-honored traditions of the town’s history. But he’s also
the town’s pariah, an eccentric who stays more or less removed from the rest of the community.
Moreover, Fenton is a necrophiliac, one who—presumably among other things—
photographs himself “nude and gross and grinning, capering gleefully among the painted dead”
(Gay 23). Through Fenton, Gay literally perverts the romantic image of the noble, aristocratic
Southern Gentleman. This figure emerged out of the seventeenth-century planter class and is
therefore associated with the plantation system. Defined by “a code of gentility that expresses the
ethos of the planter class throughout the South,” the gentleman was typically a man of means and
was above all things “assured of his own superiority” (Watson 292). The “first commandment”
of the gentleman’s code38 decreed that all men were essentially unequal: the vast majority of
men, this commandment held, were “born to follow and serve” while only an elite few were
destined to be leaders. In spite of this, a gentleman still demonstrated courtesy to all men, no
matter how inferior their social standing (292). The Southern gentleman was honorable, virtuous,
Fenton’s magnificent home is also described as fairytale-like: “Set on the gently rolling slopes of grass, the house
might have been the counting house of some wicked ruler living in exile. Or yet an evil magician with spells cast on
the rightful heirs” (19).
36
37
He is furthermore the son of undertaker, an indication, perhaps, of Fenton’s inability to escape the past.
38
There were actually a number of treatises and manuals published on gentlemanly manners and conduct, such as
Henry Peacham’s Complete Gentleman (1622).
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and respectable; “his primary purpose in following his code was to possess and maintain a
personal honor that commanded the respect of all of his peers as well as those of lower social
orders” (Watson 292). Though his economic background has provided him with a certain
reputation about town, the degree to which the other townspeople find him respectable is
questionable: generally people he meets “nodded formally to him,” but occasionally, “if they
were women who appealed to him in some way and whose death he anticipated with relish he’d
tip his Stetson and watch their eyes skitter away to somewhere else and they’d hurriedly walk
on” (Gay 10). People avoid him on the sidewalk, openly make fun of him, and his perverse
proclivities—relishing the death of certain women, for instance—negate any last scrap of
“honorability” he could ever hope to possess. Fenton’s social status, exorbitant wealth, and
“sartorial elegance” (9)—passed down to him through the generations—by all accounts mark
him as a “gentleman,” but he defies the codes of Southern gentlemanly behavior.
Not only is Fenton “perverse,” he’s also described as effeminate. Sutter at one point calls
him “[f]at and soft and very likely some specie of queer” (Gay 57). Similarly, when Fenton visits
the Bellystretcher Café one morning, he is confronted by a pair of old men who ridicule him for
smelling “sweet”: “Put me in mind of an old gal off Tom’s Creek I used to go with,” says one
man to the other (10). Fenton’s encounter with these two “oldtimers” establishes Fenton as
unusual and effete; it furthermore provides insight into the community’s ideas about appropriate,
gendered expression. This is the “land of Duck Head overalls and felt hats” (9), a land in which
most of the men are hardworking, blue-collar, and self-made. Fenton, in defiance of the
hegemonic ideal, wears “a fawncolored topcoat over a tan gabardine suit with a matching vest
buttoned over his wellfed belly and an offwhite shirt with a green tie of iridescent watermarked
silk. He wore a brown Stetson with a rolled brim and flat crown, and he carried an umbrella
though there was no cloud in sight” (9). His extracurricular pursuits (apart from his perverse
sexual inclinations) are even considered somewhat feminine by the community’s standards:
Squire Robnett describes Fenton’s hobby of “prissin around settin out peonies and box elders”
(18). While other male members of the community partake in “masculine” activities such as
hunting, Fenton prefers hobbies like gardening.
As Squire Robnett also explains, Fenton’s “got that smarmy act down pat, but a act is all
it is” (Gay 18). Those in the community are aware that Fenton “acts” a certain way to fit in.
Fenton himself seems aware of this as well, particularly when it comes to courting those of the
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opposite sex. In order to “court” Corrie, Fenton basically puts on a show, acting out what he
thinks men do to attract women: he finds out where she works and what time she gets off, then
drives there in his fancy white Lincoln, reeking of aftershave “made from the glands of male
hogs and possess[ing] aphrodisiac properties” and wearing “one of the seethrough nylon shirts
that were just beginning to catch on” (16). Here, Fenton hopes that achieving a certain “look”—
one ornamented by an expensive car and pheronomic aftershave—will define his masculinity.39
That Corrie is so much the object of Fenton’s affections—and his corpse of choice—is
significant for the fact that she falls on the opposite end of the community’s perceived social
spectrum. The first time Fenton ever sees Corrie he ogles her body underneath her “tight black
shirt” and thinks to himself:
A bootlegger’s daughter…White trash who had probably done it with every man
in town save him. He remembered a phrase his mother had used long ago in some
old cautionary fable. He had forgotten the fable and disregarded the caution but
the phrase was with him still: anybody’s dog who wants to go hunting. It seemed
applicable here. (Gay 15, emphasis mine).
Fenton’s observation here makes conspicuous the town’s attitude (and anxiety) about female
sexuality. Corrie embodies that place where ideas about gender, race, and class intersect, and as
such, she is ostracized and denigrated—a victim of “whistles and catcalls” since childhood—for
being both “white trash” and for allegedly being overtly sexual.40 The term “white trash”—the
concept of which this dissertation has explored previously in To Kill a Mockingbird (although
Lee’s novel never actually uses the phrase “white trash”)—which combines a classist and racist
slur, “is both an economic identity and something imaginary or iconic”; as Matt Wray and
According to Susan Faludi, “ornamental manhood” is one variously defined by appearance, by a man’s ability to
achieve a certain “look.” In Stiffed—which mostly discusses modern or late twentieth-century masculinity--Faludi
describes the impact of “ornamental culture” on men’s perception of themselves: “Ornamental culture has proved
the ultimate expression of the American Century, sweeping away institutions in which men felt some sense of
belonging and replacing them with visual spectacles that they can only watch and that benefit global commercial
forces they cannot fathom. Celebrity culture’s effects on men go far beyond the obvious showcasing of action heroes
and rock musicians. […] Nonetheless, the culture reshapes his most basic sense of manhood by telling him as much
as it tells the celebrity that masculinity is something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources; that it is
personal, not societal; that manhood is displayed, not demonstrated. The internal qualities once said to embody
manhood—surefootedness, inner strength, confidence of purpose—are merchandised to men to enhance their
manliness. What passes for the essence of masculinity is being extracted and bottled—and sold back to men” (35).
39
Corrie is often teased by her classmates on the schoolyard, evidence of the extent to which ideas about “white
trash” sexuality are ingrained in this community: the assumption that “white trash” girls have “done it with
everybody else” is so prevalent that even school kids are aware of it.
40
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Annalee Newitz describe, the expression represents “a discourse which often confuses cultural
icons and material realities, and in effect helps to establish and maintain a complex set of moral,
cultural, social, economic, and political boundaries” (171). Some of the most recognizable and
offensive stereotypes of “white trash” are those that associate the term with “dangerous and
excessive sexuality” (171). In the South, where white women were so invested with so much
purity, were expected to be “stainless expressions of the South’s ideal” (Gray 189), the link
between “white trash” and “excessive” female sexuality became even more necessary for
upholding the boundaries of white society. Corrie, then, represents a type of sexuality that is
demonized: she suffers catcalls and whistles, tries desperately to fit in with the “freshfaced town
girls” but simply because of her economic position just lacks “the right flair” (Gay 24). And yet,
because of the way that the men in this community are attracted to her—one man, for instance,
sees Corrie walk past the café and boasts that he “wouldn’t kick that of bed” (15)—it’s evident
that Corrie’s “white trash” sexuality is simultaneously fetishized. Though they criticize her for
allegedly “doing it” with “everybody else” (24)—and there is no evidence in the story to suggest
that Corrie is at all sexually active—the male community seems eager for the opportunity to be
with her. As “white trash,” Corrie is removed from the other, more respectable women of her
society who have been made “too much the objectification of the combined mother-virgin land”
to be “defile[d]…with impunity” (Roberts 104).
Fenton, the effeminate necrophiliac who openly refuses to adhere to the rules of society,
is ultimately the one who acts on the community’s secret impulses. When Corrie is killed, Fenton
takes her body not to the funeral home, but to his home, where he dresses her in a pink evening
gown, sits with her on the couch listening to music and radio soap operas, and presumably
sexually abuses her corpse. At the same time that Fenton is “free” to “defile” her because she’s
“white trash,” Fenton tries to restore to her some kind of purity, to make her a “lady.” In one
scene, Fenton places Corrie sitting upright on the couch and sits next to her. The omniscient
narrator describes:
For a time they just sat there listening to music. He chatted away at her and her
face wore a slightly quizzical look, as if she couldn’t quite fathom what he was
talking about. Brandy? he asked her. He got up and from a sideboard brought a
bottle of brandy and two snifters. He moved a small table near her knees and set
her snifter atop it and sat with his own cupped in his small white hands. After a
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time he drank it, and drank hers as well. The sourceless music wafted about the
room. That’s Mahler, he told her. I don’t suppose you’re familiar with Mahler.
His voice gently chided her lack of erudition. (Gay 146)41
On the one hand, as someone “intimately associated with death” (51)—and as someone who
delights in his power to “alter these [dead] helpless folk to his liking” (12)—it makes sense that
Fenton has difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality.42 Towards the end of the novel, when
Fenton’s perversions have been discovered by the townsfolk, he tries to skip town, taking
Corrie’s body with him. As he tries to get her in the car, he screams at her: “Goddamn it. […]
What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t you see I’m in a hurry here? Can’t you do anything
for yourself? Can you not do so simple a thing as pick up your foot?” (207). Fenton seems not to
recognize the fact that Corrie is dead, speaking to her as he would a live person; in the scene
described in the quote above, by dressing her in expensive clothing and keeping company with
her in a disturbingly grotesque perversion of domesticity, Fenton seems clearly “trapped in the
past,” unable or unwilling to live among the living or in the present.
Also in this scene of perverse domesticity, Fenton attempts to “educate” Corrie by
instilling in her a knowledge of classical composers. Fenton associates Corrie’s “lack of
erudition” with her standing as “white trash”; according to The Southern Lady’s Companion,
published in 1849, “ladies” should be “instructed in the useful and ornamental branches,”
including “the languages and higher branches of mathematics, as well as other arts and sciences,
regarded as essential to a finished education” (241).43 Fenton imposes on Corrie’s body another
central aspect of Southern ladyhood when he dresses her in a pink gown and relaxes with her in
the drawing room. Fenton never performs anything resembling a wedding ceremony with
41
Another quality of the Southern gentleman, made prominent in the fiction produced between 1830 and 1860, is
“his reverential love for his chaste and refined lady,” which associated him with “qualities of sensitivity, morality,
and benevolence without depriving the gentleman of his manliness” (Watson 293). This particular scene, in which
Fenton sits with Corrie, pours her brandy, dresses her in an evening gown, and enjoys a quiet evening listening to
the radio, offers additional insight into Fenton’s idea of himself as a “gentleman.”
This is made further apparent when Fenton jokes: “It’s only natural that a person as intimately associated with
death as I am would think quite a lot about it. There’s a poem I’ve remembered that seems to sum it up best” (51).
The poem Fenton recites is by W.H. Auden: “As poets have mournfully sung/ Death takes the innocent young/ The
rolling-in-money/ The screamingly funny/ And those who are very well hung” (51).
42
There was also thought to be a certain danger associated with permitting women to receive “too much” education.
Stefanie Lee Decker explains: “A well-educated Southern woman ran the risk of losing her femininity. As Margaret
Ripley Wolfe has argued, independent, educated women were often accused of ‘desexing’ or ‘unsexing’
themselves” (33).
43
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Corrie—as Emily Grierson does with Homer Barron—but the two are described as a “strange
pair of lovers” (209). As his new lover, or “domestic partner,” Fenton expects Corrie “to
conform to the shape decreed by her ‘ladylike’ clothing and confine herself in the drawing room:
the space decreed by her race and her class” (Roberts 3).
Moreover, Fenton’s attempt to “educate” and, essentially, control Corrie comes back to
the South’s ideas about appropriate masculine expression. As Kris DuRocher explains, white
Southern men’s “ability to control those within their households and below them in the social
hierarchy, primarily slaves and women, reflected their race and masculinity” (46). His sexual
proclivities additionally reveal the extent of his disposition toward violence, also associated with
the desire to control others and another reflection of white Southern manhood. On a number of
occasions throughout the novel Fenton commits acts of violence, such as arranging dead bodies
into “grotesque configurations they’d probably not aspired to in life” (Gay 23) or admitting to
having killed a “whore” one time in Memphis with “a Pop-Cola Bottle”; “You never saw so
much blood,” he tells Sutter. “The bedclothes were soaked, white sheets with great crimson
centers, like flowers…the bottle broke something loose inside her, punctured her in there
somewhere, and all the blood ran out of her” (50).44 That Fenton enjoys inflicting pain on others
indicates that he uses violence seemingly as a means of proving his ability to control others, of
asserting a sort of godlike dominance.
Even the townspeople, after discovering Fenton’s perversions, apparently regard him as
some sort of powerful, perverse deity. While Sutter and Tyler fight in the snowy Harrikin, an
angry mob appears at Fenton’s front door; sneaking out the back (with Corrie’s body in tow),
Fenton manages to escape by hearse. Because of the snow, however (and in an echo of Tyler’s
earlier wreck that killed Corrie), the hearse skids and is sent careening over an embankment and
into the brush. Surrounded by a mob of vengeful townies, Fenton threatens to shoot himself, but
a member of the mob kicks the gun out of Fenton’s mouth. It’s at this point that the crowd
remembers that Fenton is not alone: “They’d been trying not to look at the girl but now they had
to. Lord God, one of them said. They stood before this strange pair of lovers in a sort of perverse
awe, aspirants before some strange god they couldn’t even begin to fathom how to worship”
(Gay 209). In this moment, the townfolk’s prurient interest in Fenton (and Corrie) is satisfied,
Fenton’s description of the incident with the cola bottle evokes Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), in which Popeye
rapes Temple Dranke with a corncob.
44
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and their simultaneous disgust and fascination with Fenton becomes most apparent, though it’s a
feeling that has been present throughout the narrative. When it comes to Fenton, the community
is “alternately curious, jealous, spiteful, pitying, partisan, proud, disapproving, admiring, and
vindicated” (Fetterley 36), in part because Fenton is free to act out the community’s own
repressed fantasies and desires. As in “A Rose for Emily,” Fenton’s community is especially
vindicated in seeing their “monument” of the past, esteemed mostly because he is a relic of that
honored past, “fall and reveal itself for clay” (38).
Fenton and Lester Ballard both reflect certain “fundamental aspect[s] of ourselves—of
our fear, of time, our programmed infatuation with death, our loneliness, our threatening
appetites, our narcissistic isolation from the world and the reality of other people” (Bell 55). And
in many ways, Twilight’s and Child of God’s treatments of necrophilia—through Fenton and
Lester—subvert the naturalized, Southern patriarchal modes of gender and structures of power
that govern their respective communities. Both novels’ representations of necrophilia serve as a
comment on the “dramatic tension” between the South and its history, what is ultimately one of
the goals of this study: to explore “the matter of the region” and the reasons why so many
Southern writers find it difficult to shake. Child of God and Twilight are direct recognitions of
and response to that issue. Even in moments when these novels complicate or reaffirm the value
of certain stereotypes, Child of God and Twilight nonetheless demonstrate the ways in which
McCarthy and Gay wrestle with the South’s historic and complex network of gender, class, and
racial mythologies.
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EPILOGUE
SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND GENDER REPRESENTATION
IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN CULTURE
Over the last century and half, the South has proven itself to be a region that has a hard
time breaking with tradition. As Tracy Thompson affirms in The New Mind of the South, the
reason for this has almost everything to do with the region’s history, its past:
[T]he South is a region that has known more massive, wrenching social change
than any other part of the nation. If Southerners place a high value on tradition,
it’s because tradition in the South is like beachfront property in an era of global
warming: as much as you love the view, you live with the knowledge that some
morning you will wake up and find it gone. (10)
W.J. Cash’s astute description of “the Savage Ideal”— the determination of (white) male society
to maintain tradition, those customs and “routines of mind” that had been honored and passed
down over the course of the South’s development—in many ways still rings true. Indeed, as I’ve
discussed, the South is often characterized by its long-standing “obsession” with the past, and
this has ultimately influenced the ways in which the South and its writers continue to enact a
discourse that engages the mythologies related to gender, class, and race that have been born out
of the South’s turbulent history. The representations of Southern womanhood and masculinity
I’ve explored within this dissertation often reflect or challenge—but nonetheless activate—
concepts that are very much rooted in history. The South’s ideas about appropriate gendered
expression, most of which developed out of ante- and post-bellum efforts to maintain racial
superiority, have become a core part of its tradition, an institution to which many Southerners
continue to cling.
In “Southern Women: A New Generation of Women Who Are Redefining the Southern
Belle,” a 2011 article in Garden & Gun, Allison Glock suggests that “Southern women like men
and allow them to stay men” (56).1 What she means by this is arguably vague, but her elusive
and overreaching claim that women like men—and they like them to be men—at the very least
indicates that the South’s traditional ideas about appropriate gendered and sexual expression are
1
I’ve addressed some of Glock’s other (somewhat regressive) remarks about Southern women in Chapter One.
130
still operative. Glock’s assessment is in many ways confirmation that, as Angelia Wilson asserts,
the vestige of “genteel society” still demands of its men and women gender and sexual “clarity”
(3). It not only makes evident a sort of lingering association of manhood with violence—for as
this dissertation has argued, concepts of “manhood” in the South rely heavily on performance
and demonstrations of violence—but furthermore illuminates the extent to which the South’s
ideas about gender—especially womanhood—are entrenched in history. The Southern woman,
Glock writes, is “leashed to history…forever entangled in and infused by a miasma of mercy and
cruelty, order and chaos, cornpone and cornball” (55). Glock’s article is just one in a barrage of
recent publications instructing young women in the ways of Southern womanhood. Maryln
Schwartz’s A Southern Belle Primer: Or Why Paris Hilton Will Never Be a Kappa Kappa
Gamma (2006), Shellie Rushing Tomlinson’s Suck Your Stomach In and Put Some Color On!:
What Southern Mamas Tell Their Daughters that the Rest of Y’all Should Know Too (2008), or
Real Housewife of Atlanta Phaedra Parks’s Secrets of the Southern Belle: How to Be Nice, Work
Hard, Look Pretty, Have Fun, and Never Have an Off Moment (2013)2 are but a few examples of
how ideas about (white) Southern womanhood persist. But these concepts of womanhood aren’t
simply and solely rooted in history; they are also in and of themselves an implicit form of
violence, indicative of an oppressive structure of gender and sexual politics that legitimates both
white and black women’s place in white patriarchy.3
Violence, as Cash also suggests, is an intrinsic part of Southern culture. In The Mind of
the South, Cash describes the typical (male) Southerner as violent, a “complete hedonist” and
also a “complete romantic” (45). Myriad works of fiction have emerged in recent years that
continue to offer variations on Cash’s Southern “hell of a fellow.” In addition to those I’ve
examined in this dissertation—such as Deliverance, Karate Is A Thing of The Spirit, Child of
God, and Twilight—contemporary “Grit Lit” writers Barry Hannah and Larry Brown are perhaps
two of the most recognizable examples of authors whose works confront and at times challenge
the connection between masculinity and violence in the South. Brown’s collection of short
stories, Big Bad Love (1990), focuses mostly on white, lower-middle class males who are equally
2
Phaedra Parks, it should be noted, is a black woman whose guide, Secrets of a Southern Belle, suggests an attempt
to recover positive meaning from the term for black women, who have for so long been refused access to the role of
“Southern Belle,” a title historically and exclusively reserved for white, aristocratic women.
3
There is another implicit violence at stake here. These female-authored guides attest to the ways in which Southern
women have internalized these historically oppressive roles and use it in turn to oppress other women.
131
as likely to “toss down a pint of whiskey” (Cash 52) as they are to profess their love for their
women. His male characters “fight harder and love harder” than anyone; The unnamed narrator
of “Waiting for the Ladies,” for instance, is one of the characters in Big Bad Love who is as hard
as he is soft, as likely to shoot someone as to weep quietly to himself. When his wife comes
home from the dumpster and reveals that she was flashed by a man who drove a blue pickup, the
narrator becomes suddenly and irrationally angry.4 He feels that his wife’s innocence has
somehow been violated; by proxy, his own sense of honor has been violated as well: “This
unknown guy getting his own personal tiny rocks off had messed up my own sexual
gratification,” he thinks to himself, “and besides that, by God, it just wasn’t right. Here I was a
working man, or had been, and come to find out it ain’t even safe to lay over here in your own
bed and let your wife take the garbage off” (Brown 80). To restore his manhood, he—much like
Cash’s vigilante Southerner—sets out to find and potentially shoot the man who “flangs his
thang” (81) at pure, innocent women. Here, the need to demonstrate “honor” by defending one’s
family is made apparent through the narrator, a parody of the chivalric (i.e. romantic) but still
masculine and threatening (i.e. hedonist) Southern gentleman.
“Waiting for the Ladies” is also a subtle yet especially pointed example of how
representations of violence in Southern fiction are often sexualized. The act of
“flashing”—of forcefully exposing oneself to an unsuspecting and unwilling victim—is a form
of nonconsensual sexual advance. The narrator imagines the motivation behind the flasher’s
lewd behavior as “an overpowering urge to gratificate himself…like the mirror is to the image,
himself twinned in their eyes, what he imagined to be his big penis, his brutal, killing penis,
swinging like a nine-pound hammer, suspended out there for all womanhood to draw back and
gasp from” (Brown 82). It’s a kind of violence, as the narrator again declares when he reports the
flasher to the police, who insist that his acts of flashing—for which he’s been arrested six
times—are “harmless” (85). Brown similarly conflates violence and sex in Father and Son
(1996), a haunting meditation on the extent to which the past can shape the present. The novel
follows Glen Davis who, just released from prison, murders two men, rapes a young girl, and
sets out to exact a twisted revenge—and assuage his threatened masculinity—by raping his
father’s mistress and half-brother’s mother, Mary.
Actually, his first reaction is to ask about its size. When he recounts this story to his father, his father’s first instinct
is also to ask how big it was, a tongue-in-cheek observation about how manhood is measured based on one’s
“manhood,” virility, and power.
4
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Like Brown’s Big Bad Love and Father and Son, Barry Hannah’s Geronimo Rex (1972)
also examines the conflation of gender representation, sexuality, and violence.5 The protagonist,
Harry Monroe, cavorts, drinks, and is prone to violent outbreaks, especially when his masculinity
is in question. When Tonnie Ray’s younger brother starts a rumor that Harry’s “queer,” Harry
brutally beats him. Much like Deliverance’s Ed or Child of God’s Lester Ballard, Harry
seemingly understands that masculinity is performed through violence. Harry asks his father for
a pistol because it’s the most “manly” thing he can think of, and he continues to carry around and
use the gun throughout the novel. This is similarly true for Fleece, a “mama’s boy” who says his
manhood is bound up inside him “courtesy of the Baptist Church” (Hannah 137). Fleece enjoys
reading novels like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer (a “feminine” hobby,
according to his hyper-masculine stepfather, Creech) and wants to “steal pleasure” from a
woman (140). At one point Fleece realizes, “Either you have to live in the uterus or you have to
slam it shut with an uppercut” (174). Fleece here seems to recognize—as Harry does as well—
that to break free from the feminine requires an assertion of physical, masculine strength and
violence.
Other, more easily perceptible representations of violence in the South—representations
that make conspicuous the lingering and inextricable linkage between violence, sexuality, and
gender—continue to emerge. A remarkable recent exploration of the South’s violent history is
Quentin Tarantino’s “spaghetti Southern” revenge narrative, Django Unchained (2012). The film
is in many ways a contemporary reaction to the horrors of the South’s “peculiar institution,” a
gratuitous and gritty criticism of what Joe Morgenstern calls “the pernicious lunacy of racism
(“Tarantino, Blessedly ‘Unchained’”).6 “It’s a very strange movie,” David Denby writes in a
review for The New Yorker, “luridly sadistic and morally ambitious at the same time, and the
audience is definitely alive to it, revelling in its incongruities, enjoying what’s lusciously and
profanely over the top” (“Django Unchained”). Like Tarantino’s other films, Django is
deliberately subversive; it delights in lampooning our cultural norms and tackles what remains
especially sensitive subject matter. In 2013, slavery is still an issue that Hollywood is
“traditionally nervous” about addressing, a reluctance that toes the line of “a conspiracy of
5
Larry Brown was a student and friend of Barry Hannah’s.
6
Django Unchained also offers an interesting examination of black masculinity in the South, which this dissertation
does not address.
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silence” (Bradshaw).7 In this way, Django has made significant strides in shaping how we as a
country think about slavery and race.8 The film is, after all, about a newly freed slave (played by
Jamie Foxx) who exacts a gruesome revenge on numerous sadistic (and thereby deserving) white
racists. Apart from Tarantino, few (if any other) filmmakers are brave enough to broach the topic
of slavery in such a radical way.
Yet, as it should be noted, the impetus behind Django’s violent excursion is to rescue his
wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), from the Candyland plantation. The implication is that
Broomhilda—and Candyland’s other black female slaves—are suffering repeated (and
institutionalized) sexual abuse. Candyland is owned by Calvin Candie (played with oleaginous
relish by Leonardo DiCaprio), a sadistic Southern aristocrat whose capacity for cruelty is
unfathomable. Candie savors the brutalities of Mandingo slave fights and watches with delight as
one of his slaves is killed—ripped limb-from-limb by a pack of dogs—as punishment for running
away. We as viewers are privy to these atrocities as well, and Tarantino is not afraid to take the
level of violence in these scenes to a disturbing extreme, nor is he at all reticent to show us
Django suspended upside down, fully nude, in preparation for castration, or Broomhilda locked
naked in a “hot box” for trying to run away. But when it comes to confronting the very real and
equally cruel practice of slave rape, Django is strangely coy.9 As Janell Hobson asserts in
“Django Unchained: Unspeakable Things Unseen”:
Peter Bradshaw writes in a review in The Guardian: “As far as Hollywood is concerned, the day-to-day existence
of unabolished slavery has been what welfare reformists called the live rail: don't touch it. It takes a film
unencumbered with liberal good taste to try” (“Django Unchained—Review”). Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave
(2013) is another recent film to confront the horrors of American slavery, and since its release it has been lauded as
one of the most honest depictions of slavery in film. In an interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays the film’s
protagonist, Solomon Northrup, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart pondered why a British director might be better
able to tell an authentic story of slavery, pointing out that because of a certain “non-ownership” that “maybe it took
a couple of people from England to be able to do it” (“Chiwetel Ejiofor”).
7
8
Tarantino is of course a white man and was publically lambasted by Spike Lee for his liberal use of the word
“nigger,” which occurs in the film over a hundred times. As David Denby writes in “‘Django Unchained’: Put-On,
Revenge, and the Aesthetics of Trash,” “When Tarantino was criticized for this n-wording by Spike Lee, he
responded that that’s the way people spoke in 1858. Well, sure it is, but how much of that talk does Tarantino need
to make his point? There’s something gleeful and opportunistic about his slinging around a word that now offends
all but the congenital racists. How much of this n-wording is faithful reporting of the way people talked in 1858, or
necessary dramatic emphasis, and how much of it is there to titillate and razz the audience?”
9
And Tarantino is no stranger to depictions of sexual violence—many will perhaps recall the infamous,
Deliverance-esque scene from Pulp Fiction (1994).
134
The over-the-top violence and glamourous fetishization of black bodies
conveniently stand in for all the things we as a nation still can’t watch nor
acknowledge. […] That such enslaved women as Coco (Daniele Watts, dressed
up like a French maid) and Sheba (Nichole Galicia, stunningly rendered in the
finest garments and shown sipping champagne) are glamourized to the point that
movie fans have taken to social media to debate who’s “hotter” really drives
home how “slave rape” can’t be treated with any real cinematic honesty–and
therefore, we can’t begin to discuss a slave woman’s resistance or complicity.
We can, though, at least recognize how in merely hinting at Broomhilda’s sexual abuse the film
encourages its audience to also gloss over this detail, to dismiss it as “irrelevant or unimportant”
(Baecker 131). For all its “moral ambition,” Django Unchained reveals that there may still be a
sort of lingering, tenacious assumption that the sexual violation of black women is somehow
acceptable.10
It may surprise many to learn that Tarantino—famous for his unique genre-bending brand
of “neo-noir” filmmaking—was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and is therefore technically, by
birth, a Southerner. Whether or not he identifies himself as “Southern” I’m unsure; regardless,
through Django Tarantino illustrates the “ongoing effort, now into its third century, to come to
terms with the South’s role as both a real and imagined cultural entity separate and distinct from
the rest of the country” (Cobb 8). Django is perhaps best representative of our twenty-firstcentury attitude about the South; as a film, it projects an image of the South in art, one that in
many ways reflects how the South continues to be perceived by outsiders. It at the same time
attempts to exorcise some of the South’s cultural demons, subverting the glorified, idealized,
“moonlight and magnolias” image of the South made popular in earlier plantation narratives like
Gone with the Wind (1939). Moreover, Django demonstrates the ways in which the nation in
general and contemporary Southern writers in particular continue to negotiate the problematic
notion of “the South” and the specific features that constitute “Southern” identity. Like so much
Katherine Stockett’s The Help (2011) was also criticized for minimizing “both the institutionalized violence
(including sexual violence) of southern culture and the Civil Rights movement’s collective resistance to that
violence.” As Trysh Travis writes, the novel (and its film adaptation) focus “instead on a white heroine and
[celebrates] her limited rebellion against entrenched racism as if it was another Harper’s Ferry. By focusing on the
heroic white individual and her personal response to racism, the novel fails to realistically represent the world it
narrates. Worse, it leaves intact the political, economic, and social structures that it pretends to critique” (“Is The
Help Realistic?”).
10
135
of Faulkner’s fiction, Tarantino’s film both engages and explodes stereotypes as a means of
rejecting the “matter of the region,” but in so doing also demonstrates the extent to which we as a
culture can’t quite shake some of those very mythologies.
As Richard Gray suggests, works of Southern fiction that have “fixed the image of the
South in art” and in the minds of people the world over have come “along with and directly out
of the turmoil and even the violence of the changing South”; as the South has undergone—and
very much continues to undergo—a continual “process of transition,” so too do definitions of
Southern identity continue to evolve (qtd. in Kreyling 111).11 Michael Kreyling also calls
Southern literature “an amalgam of literary history, interpretive traditions, and a canon…a
cultural product or ‘artefact,’ to be understood just as Benedict Anderson understands the
‘nations’ that fill up the history of the modern era” (ix). It is not Southern literature, he writes,
“that changes in collision with history but history that is subtly changed in collision with
southern literature” (ix). Although many Southern writers—particularly those that I’ve examined
in this dissertation— often demonstrate a kind of reluctance to embrace change, they nonetheless
challenge the South’s conservative traditions, overturning and lampooning many of the South’s
longstanding, traditional assumptions about gender, class, race, and sexuality. The times they are
a changin’, and though the South may still have some growing to do (especially when it comes to
rethinking ideas about gender and sexuality), it is progressing and perhaps ultimately, over time,
as the South continues to evolve, so will its treatment of these mythologies and politics.
11
James C. Cobb affirms the nature of Southern identity as ever-evolving process in Away Down South (2005). In
his introduction, he writes: “The history of southern identity is not a story of continuity versus change, but
continuity within it. For example, as Edqin Yoder points out, there have been roughly as many New Souths as
‘French constitutions and theories of the decline of Rome.’ Henry Grady and the architects of the first postbellum
‘New South’ swore undying fealty to the social and political values of the antebellum ‘Old South’ in order to show
that their plan to restructure the region’s economy would not lead to the northernized ‘No South,’ first invoked by
George W. Cable in 1882. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century, the heralds of a newer and improved New
South clearly envisioned a region that looked less like the Old South and more like America. More than fifty years
and several more New Souths later, however, it requires no great exertion to find vestiges of the Old South still
flourishing in what many insist is now the irrevocably assimilated and indistinguishable No South so long sought by
some and resisted by others” (7).
136
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Cameron Williams was born in Burlington, North Carolina, where she lived for three years
before her family relocated to Florida. Although her upbringing on the east coast of Florida
amongst the snowbirds and tourists left her without a Southern accent, she was nonetheless
raised to appreciate her Southern heritage and considers herself a Tar Heel at heart. In 2006, she
earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Florida State University in Tallahassee,
Florida. Two years later, she completed her Master of Arts degree, also at Florida State
University. Her research interests include twentieth-century and contemporary Southern fiction
and feminism, sexuality, and gender studies.
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