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Article Excerpt
A victim/victimizer pattern characterizes the troubled relationship between Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, and it is this unreconciled paradox that leads to their tragic deaths. This essay analyzes victim/victimizer transformations through an interdisciplinary lens that draws together psychology, theology, education, the relatively new field of victimology, and Homi Bhabha's negotiation theory.
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The central conflict in William Faulkner's Light in August transforms Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden from victims of both family and societal abuse into victimizers of each other, a tragic shift that is reconciled only in death. Joe murders Joanna and is castrated, in turn, by the avenging Percy Grimm. To gain insight into the complicated relationship between Joanna and Joe and its defining moment when Joanna mistakes the onset of her menopause for pregnancy, I will consider relevant theories from psychology, theology, education, and the relatively new field of victimology. I will also look at the alternating transformations of Joanna and Joe from victims to victimizers through the lens of Homi Bhabha's postcolonial theory as it defines a series of negotiations wherein the oppressed victim subconsciously identifies with the oppressor/victimizer as a first step to assuming the oppressor's power.
The transformation from victim to victimizer is not necessarily a single, unidirectional change. Rather, it can happen as a series of shifts between submission and aggression as the individual adapts to altered perceptions or circumstances. Moreover, a victim who becomes a victimizer in one situation may simultaneously remain a victim in another situation and, in addition, the individual may reposition herself or himself multiple times. So, for example, even as Joe flees the scene of Joanna's murder, he seems to be knowingly running toward his own fate; it is a death he subconsciously negotiates. Joe is consumed with guilt and shame both for who he is as well as who he could not become for her. Thus he subliminally desires his own death, not so much as punishment, but in order to reassume the more familiar role of victim. It is as if only death can finally reconcile the victim/aggressor, black/white parallax that has overwhelmed Joe throughout his life and now delivers him to the revenge of Percy Grimm. "Then his face, body, all seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever" (Faulkner, Light 465).
Joanna also negotiates her own murder, thus becoming both Joe's victim and victimizer at the same time. The two have been engaged in a power struggle of aggression and submission in an increasingly antagonistic relationship lacking compromise. In death, Joanna, too, reassumes the role of victim whose murder reconciles the paradox of her life. During her life, the townspeople denied Joanna respect as an individual because of her northern roots and her support for Negro education. However, in death they defend her as representative of white women. She "loses all individuality, becoming simply a white woman and hence an innocent victim who must be avenged" (Vickery 72). Nevertheless, that Joanna Burden deserved "an attained bourne beyond the hurt and harm of man" (Faulkner, Light 289) is acknowledged by the townspeople too late, even as they demand a vengeance that echoes Joanna's earlier prophecy to Joe, "Maybe it would be better if we both were dead" (278).
Both Joe and Joanna are victimized by the circumstances of their birth. John Lutz summarizes the similarities between these circumstances: "Both are psychologically split between an identity as a victim and a victimizer: as a white woman, Joanna is both a victim of the patriarchal values of her society and a recipient of the privileges derived from the racial inequality just as Joe, alternately identified (both by himself and others) as a black male and a white male, is both a victim of racism and a source of patriarchal violence" (470). Abused children can become abusers themselves. Therefore, we can expect that physical punishments meted out by Joe's religiously zealous adoptive father, Simon McEachern, modelled for young Joe how brutality rewards an aggressor with complete control. Paulo Freire writes of a possible "'adhesion' to the oppressor," by which the oppressed identify with their opposite and fail to see that there are other choices besides total domination of one group or individual by another group or individual. Freire's example is the peasant who is promoted to overseer and who becomes "more of a tyrant towards his former comrades than the owner himself" (28). In much the same way, Joe mislearns that violence is the only answer: he eventually attacks McEachern, almost beats a prostitute to death because she is not offended when he tells her he is a Negro, and bloodies and eventually kills Joanna
Joe's violence is less rage than shame for his confused racial identity. In one sense, his physical attacks on those who would shame him only mirror the psychological beating he imposes on himself. Such a reaction is all too common, according to Dr. Michael Lewis of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Research confirms that psychological attacks on the self, such as insults, humiliation, or threats, can cause aggressive reactions. However, the rage associated with such attacks often turns inward against the self, and instead of hate directed toward the attacker, the self is shamed into submission (165).
Joanna was not physically abused as a child and, also unlike Joe, she had not been transformed into a victimizer prior to their union. Joanna's early victimization was more subtle than Joe's, yet equally devastating as she experienced what theologian Linda Mercadante refers to as the fairly common trap of being "caught in traumatic life changing situations of injustice" which render the victim helpless (283). Joanna describes to Joe the Civil War and its aftermath as "the killing in uniform and with flags, and the killing without uniforms and flags. And none of it doing or did any good (Faulkner, Light 255). Of course, that was all before she was even born. Nevertheless, the seeds of Joanna's trauma had been sown fourteen years before her birth when her grandfather and half-brother were shot and killed "over a question of negro voting" (248). Then, when Joanna was four, her father made her go into a forbidding and frightening cedar grove to witness the unmarked graves: "Remember this. Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of. A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins" (252). Thus did her father's guilt become Joanna's burden in much the same way as Joe was encumbered...
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