Light in August Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Light in August - Essay Example Nicholas and Golay when critically analyzing William Fauklner’s novel â€Å"the light in august† gives a different point as a reason to why Joe hate women. Joe had an affair with Allen Bobbie, who’s a prostitute but after a short quarrel she ditched him and went away from town. This act leaved deep and life long affects on the way Joe stereotyped women for the rest of his life. Joe Christmas, main protagonist of the novel â€Å"the light in august† written by William Faulkner, serves as one of the novel’s most mysterious character. Portrayed as an angry man, he is the one stepping comfortably in neither black nor the white world. As Joe makes his first appearance in the novel, he arouses a strong amount of inquisitiveness on the mill workers, along with contempt for his greater lack of involvement and other appealing qualities. Though Faulkner has provided a number of statements to elucidate Christmas’s attitude, he still remains an isolated, enigmatic figure, indefinable. When working at the mill he is a non entity, an empty slate that is used by biased men who examines Joe according to their own minute level of understanding. Many of them believe that he is a native from an unknown foreign country. Joe Christmas is the central character for the theme projected by Faulkner. By his appearance and complexion he is a white man, but he suspects that he have some black ancestry. He is at times sickened by his blackness, like the time when he beats a prostitute for willing to sleep with a black man, and even loves to live in â€Å"black† neighborhood to absorb their norms and way of life. He perceives a mixed opinion, both ashamed and sometime proud of his blackness. He was always eager to inform everyone that he had a black heritage. He himself admits that his seek to come to terms with his racial uniqueness has entirely structured his life. Question 1: Why is Joe Christmas so violent towards women? The perception of feminine sexuality that Joe Christmas has is somehow similar to the characters of â€Å"Quentin Compson† and â€Å"Horace Benbow†, famous personalities of typical English literature. He is actually against the idea of menstruation, and equals hate the idea of naming a prostitute as an immoral woman. He adores the beauty and attractiveness of a virgin, declaring her a beautiful pot. Yet Christmas never loves the idea of women as a companion, which is why he favors prostitutes. Christmas links bodily blood with his outlook of women. He defines races and masculinity by the odor of their blood, and is responsible and ruined because of the color of his black blood. Faulkner intimately relates to Joe, in particular sexuality, race, and faith, is dyed by the metaphors of blood he belongs. His black blood is the most important element in Christmas's harsh view of women. He has a sick insight of women and her sexual position due to Christmas’s disturbing very first disc losure to sexuality, at the age little age of just five, where he supposed the mating act as aggressive and repulsive. Apart from the fact that he characterized sex as being a disgusted act, he developed the feeling that the male is predestined to provoke fear in his female co-worker. This idea remained in his mind for years and he acted brutally towards women in his own sexual encounters. Question 2: To what extent does his upbringing affect how he