Christmas and Women

The Feminine Influence: Christmas and His Intense Misogyny “It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice. He was used to that before he ever saw either of them. He expected no less, and so he was neither outraged nor surprised. It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men.” (Faulkner 158) In William Faulkner’s Light in August, Joe Christmas’s misogynistic view towards women has reason behind it, based on his negative past with significant female characters. The above quote emphasizes his feelings towards women, describing how Joe is able to handle the harshness of a man, but cannot stand the weak and nurturing nature of a woman. Moreover, he believes women are only out to make him cry, as we see with his attitude towards the dietitian and Mrs. McEachern. Over the course of his life, beginning with the absence of a mother, Joe has been impacted by several female influences, from a brief stint with an orphan girl, Alice, up to his lack of a relationship with his mother, Millie. These women have led to Joe’s distrust and pure hate of femininity. Alice, a twelve year-old girl from the orphanage, is his first encounter with a maternal figure. Joe relies on Alice as a supportive comfort, as he does not have a mother or any adult figure to turn to, for that matter. “He had liked her, enough to let her mother him a little; perhaps because of it. And so to him she was as mature, almost as large in size, as the adult women who ordered his eating and washing and sleeping, with the difference she was not and never would be his enemy. One night she waked him. She was telling him goodbye but he did not know it. He was sleepy and a little annoyed, never full awake, suffering her because she had always tried to be good to him. He didn’t know that she was crying because he did not know that grown people

Cited: Bleikasten, André. Ink of Melancholy. Indiana University Press. 1990. http://books.google.com/books?id=WbA8pxUtLFwC&pg=PA286&lpg=PA286&dq=a+diminishing+row+of+suavely+shaped+urns+in+the+moonlight&source=bl&ots=lh5TQu-7sq&sig=dpExkzL3AzJNkZu5ecfrqKiVJ5I&hl=en&ei=GD-iSfyyO5DoNdvtoOkN&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result Brooks, Cleanth. “Introduction.” Random House, Inc. New York, New York: 1986. Faulkner, William. Light in August. Random House. New York, New York: 1972. Hamblin, Robert W. and Charles A. Peel. A William Faulkner Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group.1999 http://books.google.com/books?id=fpuVmudsihYC&pg=PA303&lpg=PA303&dq=freud+joe+christmas&source=bl&ots=Yd_q6yRcG0&sig=s-3NWDJmPN4yP00pcBbmAMSeqw4&hl=en&ei=ExyiSZznNpDoNdvtoOkN&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA303,M1 Schisler, Allison D. “Sexism in William Faulkner’s Light in August.” Oct. 12 2008. http://classic-american-fiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/joe_christimas_treament_of_women_part_one