524
PARTISAN REVIEW
died in childbirth on Christmas Eve, left the baby on the steps of
an orphanage, but later took a job as a janitor in the orphanage in
order to make sure that
his
"nigger" grandson would never be
allowed to contaminate anyone. This obsessiveness about race goes
hand in hand with a Calvinist obsession of the elect and of the hope–
less sinfulness of others, an obsession which is found both in Joe
Christmas's rigidly doctrinaire foster-father, Calvin MacEachern, and
in his future mistress, Joanna Burden, a descendant of New Hamp–
shire Puritans who remains in the South though she is the sworn
enemy of its ways. All these obsessions about purity and guilt are,
Faulkner indicates, the remnants of an inhuman religion that has
added bigotry and arrogance to the curse of slavery. They are the
symbols of a church that has lost its spiritual function, and that has
been deserted by the Reverend Gail Hightower, who spends his
days -in endless reveries of the South's irretrievable glory. The obses–
sions are all summed up in the fate of Joe Christmas, who is trying
to become
someone,
a human being, to find the integrity that is so
ripely present in Lena Grove. Lena does not have to try; her symbol
is the wheel on the road. Joe Christmas's is flight: flight on the
same road, but flight toward himself, which he cannot reach, and
away from hatred of himself, which he cannot escape. Only his
pursuers catch up with him, to murder and to castrate him.
Joe Christmas is an abstraction seeking to become a human
being. In the race-mad South, many a Negro--and Mexican, and
Jew-is turned into an abstraction. But this man is
born
an abstrac–
tion and is seeking to become a person. He is an orphan, brought
up in a foundling home, who in earliest childhood is watched by his
own gr.andfather as if he were a caged beast. He is then bribed by
the dietitian, whom he has heard making love with the interne, as
if he knew enough to betray her. He is adopted by a farmer who
re-names him, lectures
him,
starves him, beats him for not memoriz–
ing the Catechism. He is robbed and beaten by the pimp of the
prostitute with whom he has fallen in love. He is constantly treated
by his Negrophile mistress, Joanna Burden, as if his own personality
were of no account and is beseeched in her sexual transports as
"Negro." And finally, after being starved, betrayed, flogged, beaten,
pursued by bloodhounds, he is castrated. The essential picture be–
hind Joe Christmas is that of his grandfather carrying him to the or-
