Summer Reading II

Currently I am doing research on the United States, mostly pertaining to race and gender relations. I was always interested in historical gender relations and how they are relevant to gender relations today and how we can continue to move equality forward, but I recently also became interested in race relations. I think it may partially have something to do with the coming election as well as the disconnect I feel with the side of America that is still full of racism and sexism. I was also prompted to research because of my fascination with Faulkner, who chronicles both antebellum and postbellum south in his novels. Absalom, Absalom!, his book I am reading at the moment, is the story of Thomas Sutpen's attempt to create an antebellum southern legacy from low class standing as narrated by Rosa Coldfield (his much younger sister-in-law and later, fiancee) and Mr. Compson to Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury fame. During the war, Sutpen leaves his two daughters, Judith and Clytemnestra alone in this great southern mansion on a plantation he built years before to fend for themselves while he went and fought for the Confederacy. Judith was his daughter by his wife Ellen, a "true" daughter while Clytemnestra (Clytie) was his by a slave and therefore was a slave owned by her own father. Rosa, her own father having passed, comes to live with Judith, her niece (Ellen was her sister). One of the most fascinating portions of the book for me is how these three women, all related in some way, live together and survive together in this sparse room yet hardly speak, hardly know each other. They are kin but one (Clytie) is considered hardly so. Rosa is Judith's aunt, yet Judith is older than her.

"We are three strangers. I do not know what Clytie thought, what life she led which the food we raised and cooked in unison, the cloth we spun and wove together, nourished and sheltered. But I expected that because she and I were open, ay honorable, enemies. But I did not even know what Judith thought and felt. We slept in the same room, the three of us (this for more than to conserve firewood which we had to carry in ourselves. We did it for safety. It was winter soon and already soldiers were beginning to come back--the stragglers, not all of them tramps, ruffians, but men who had risked and lost everything, suffered beyond endurance and had returned now to a ruined land, not the same men who had marched away but transformed--and this was the worst, the ultimate degredation to which war brings the spirit, the soul--into the likeness of that man who abuses form the very despair and pity the beloved wife or mistress who in his absence has been raped. We were afraid. We fed them; we gave them what and all we had and we would have assumed their wounds and left them whole again if we could. But we were afraid of them.), we waked and fulfilled the endless tedious obligations which the sheer holding to life and breath entailed; we would sit before the fire after supper, the three of us in that state where the very bones and muscles are too tired to rest, when the attenuated and invincible spirit has changed and shaped even hopelessness into the easy obliviousness of a worn garment, and talk, talk of a hundred things--the weary recurrent triviata of our daily lives, of a thousand things but not one. We talked of him, Thomas Sutpen, of the end of the War (we could all see it now) and when he would return, of what he would do: how begin the Herculean task which we knew he would set himself, into which (oh yes, we knew this too) he would undoubtedly sweep us with the old ruthlessness whether we would or no . . ."

(Faulkner, 126-127)

Because of the way the society is structured, these women become little more than paper dolls for Sutpen to command. Without him, they are merely surviving, with him they are miserable and aware of his brutality, but have a purpose. The war has stripped these societal gender roles to their barest roots with the men cast as objects of fear (yes, objects, for violence in our society can objectify men just as much as sexuality can objectify women) and the women as ghostly figures for their use. It's creepy and haunting, but undoubtedly accurate.

Along the same lines I am also reading the following:





I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do with all of this information, what book will come of it, but hopefully after more research I will be able to focus my brain and create something interesting. I guess we'll see. Really, right now, I need to focus and finish creating all the imagery for My God, so it's possible all of this will become a side project real soon.

Holy crap that was the nerdiest post ever. Also, only three and a half weeks until classes start up again.