The Fiction of Sexual Violence, pt. 2: Faulkner

In the first part of this series on the fiction of sexual violence, I briefly explained the twin aspects of "fiction" according to which I will explore this theme.  I began with Toni Morrison's Beloved and a reading of the effects of Ella's experience as a sex slave (quite literally as a slave in the Antebellum South).  And I suggested that we see in her trauma how sexual violence both disables a person's capacity for love (both loving and being loved) and dehumanizes the person in the process.  In Faulkner’s Light in August, the sexual violence between Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden is different.

The Ambiguity of Sexual Identity and Aggression

It is neither explicitly racial (for the racial identity of Christmas remains ambiguous), nor wholly objective (for what violence transpires is not always altogether clear).  A window into Christmas’s psychological interior accompanies his physical acts of forced sex with Joanna.  The “quiet rage” that pulses within Christmas throughout the novel drives his sexual aggression.  He acts with, or against, Joanna because he perceives her as a threat to his sexual dominance and identity as a man generally:  “‘My God,’ he thought, ‘it was like I was the woman and she was the man’” (Faulkner, 235).  Christmas stereotypes sex roles based on his view of what constitutes manly and womanly assertion.  He operates within these assumed categories.

The narrator, however, continues, “But that was not right, either. Because she had resisted to the very last.”  Christmas’s original stereotype of male/female sexual relations envisions the woman as a passive party who submits willingly.  Joanna’s resistance pressures his initial typecasting.  Yet the narrator complicates matters further:  “But it was not woman resistance.”  This language suggests that there is something intrinsic to male/female coupling, and, moreover, this characterization, or presupposition, assumes that female resistance in sexual coupling is commonplace enough for it to be of a certain “woman” type.  The implication is that male sexual aggression is frequent enough also to be typical -- and troubling.

As we walk though Faulkner's text, it is important to acknowledge that these stereotypes are present within the narrative itself, within its characters. This is how we are told that they think about the sexual encounter.  This is important to recognize, I think, because when someone identifies sex or gender stereotypes at work, the person who identifies them is often accused of bias.  Possibly it is benign or benevolent bias, but bias nevertheless.  If in Light in August Faulkner takes up racial stereotypes, we should not be surprised to find sexual stereotypes also.  Just because Faulkner writes a story in which the narrator describes characters who seem to operate within racial, sex, and gender stereotypes (but are also confused about them), this does by itself mean that he endorses the stereotypes any more than does a reader who identifies them (and also raises questions about them).

If we are exploring the fiction of relationship, in which relationship is, as Arnold Weinstein notes, "something made rather than given, built out of belief, not fact" (Fiction of Relationship, 3), then we must locate the beliefs upon which characters act in their relational engagements.  What, in other words, is the presuppositional foundation upon which characters construct their relationships?  And if these characters engage in relationships marked by sexual violence, whatever the degree or type, then it is absolutely necessary to follow the narrative fiction (the novel) wherever it leads in revealing the character's own relational fictions (constructed connections).

"Quiet Rage" and Teaching Hate

Joe Christmas is frustrated by the disorder to his world that the murkiness of the first sexual encounter with Joanna Burden reflects.  His categories have been jumbled.  As a result, he is offended at the perceived threat to his sexual agency.  Confused and infuriated by this sexual engagement in which "man" and "woman" were not perspicuous, Christmas returns the next night, as we have seen, not “in eagerness, but in a quiet rage”:

And so he sprang forward, toward the door to intercept her.  But she did not flee.  ...  He began to tear at her clothes.  He was talking to her, in a tense, hard, low voice: “I’ll show you!  I’ll show the bitch!”  She did not resist at all.  It was almost as though she were helping him, with small changes of position of limbs when the ultimate need for help arose.  But beneath his hands the body might have been the body of a dead woman not yet stiffened.  But he did not desist; though his hands were hard and urgent it was with rage alone. ‘At least I have made a woman of her at last,’ he thought. ‘Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.’  (236)

William Faulkner (1897-1962, photo 1954)

Formerly, Joanna “resisted to the very last,” but (we are then told) it was not resistance, yet (we are also reminded) it sort of was.  The concept and expression of resistance is unclear or, better, expanded.  In this passage, Joanna does “not flee … She did not resist at all,” which seems unambiguous.  And it seems like she even assists Christmas.  No resistance, maybe some aid, but also no participation -- this is how the narrator describes the attack.  She was like “a dead woman.”  (I shall return to this description in the next posting on Coetzee.)

The full psychological workings in Joe Christmas are complex.  The most explicit rationale offered in the text for his assault, and articulated by Christmas himself, is a didactic one: “‘I’ll show you!’” he insists.  Indeed, he says to himself, “I have taught her” to hate me.  His forcible action amounts, in his view, to a sexual lesson:  he attempts to make Joanna a "woman" and to sire hate in this woman for him, the man.

In doing so, he is fashioning the relationship according to his preconceptions.  Christmas is reassembling the categories of "man" and "woman" in a sexual relationship as he understands them. But he  is doing more than this.  Christmas also recognizes the event for what it is:  forced sex, animated by selfish emotion, that produces a fissure between two humans characterized by hate.

The Creation of  Dysfunctional and Disfigured Relationships

This fictional episode about the sexual intercourse between Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden (her name is significant, for Joe feels that she places more than one burden on him) displays at the same time the other facet of the fiction of relationship:  his building, redirecting, that relationship according to his beliefs.  The story of their relationship is the story of a relational construct.

I say above that Christmas's action is selfish, because the rage from which the forced sex (“rape” may not be exactly the right term) originates in large measure from Christmas’s discomfort with his own unsettled identity.  He is unsure of who he is as a man.  He is also unsure of whether he is "white" or "black."  Recall how in the novel, after coitus, Christmas shares with his various sexual partners the ambiguity surrounding his racial composition.  His sexuality as a man and his racial identity are intertwined.  Does he have “nigger” blood in him, as he thinks -- but, then again, is unsure?  If he does, then he would, in the prejudicial parlance of Mississippi, be a “boy,” not a “man.”  Later Christmas will ask Joanna, “Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?” (249).

Perhaps Christmas feels the hate that may target him if he does have some black blood.  Or perhaps he is responding to that intuited hate, which would question both his humanity and manhood, when he acts to prove to himself and to Joanna that she is “the woman” and he “the man” -- that his blood biology makes him of a superior type to her.  More clear than the racial question, which always attends Christmas’s sexual activity, is that his own gender prejudice combines hate and rage.  Indeed, as we have seen, he believes he has taught Joanna to hate him.

In Beloved, Morrison writes of Ella, “She understood Sethe’s rage in the shed twenty years ago, but not her reaction to it” (Morrison, 256).  This is an expression of empathy, probably both cognitive and affective, by one former slave woman with another, furious at the prospect of a return to subjugation and sexual objectification.  Racial hate leads to sexual assault, which leads to Ella’s lack of loving, her own quiet rage.

In Faulkner’s novel, the sequence observed involving Ella in Beloved is reversed:  here rage leads to sexual assault, then hate. “‘Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.’”  Of course, Ella is the victim and Christmas the agent in different types of sexual assault.  But in both novels, hate and rage accompany each other.  And in both novels, prejudice and, to some degree, racism color sexual aggression.

The Casualties of Aggressive Sexual Identity Assertion

In the final analysis, Christmas constructs a hostile relationship that he hopes will secure or add definition to his ambiguous identity, and yet it is also a fabricated relationship, founded on rage, intended to yield hate, which demonstrates the depths of the relationship’s dysfunction.  And ultimately dysfunctional it is.  Joanna eventually plans to murder Christmas before killing herself.  Christmas heads her off, quite literally, before she can.  Faulkner narrates a fiction of relationship, which Christmas creates by sexual aggression and which is characterized by the opposites of the things that we associate with harmonious relationships:   hate (vs. love) and rage (vs. peace).

Among other things, then, we see vividly in Light in August how sexual aggression, fueled by its perpetrator's prejudices, dysfunctionally disfigures the relationships that it fashions.