On Either Side of the Color Line:

Incest, the Question of Exploitation, and Go Down, Moses
OHRI Naoko
Introduction
Incest is one of the important motifs in William Faulkner’s novels. Not until
recently, however, did the incest between L. Q. Carothers MacCaslin and Tomasina in

Go Down, Moses (1942) attract any significant attention. For example, Constance Hill
Hall’s Incest in Faulkner (1986) does not include their coupling (Davis, T. 93). Until the
1980s, most of the criticism of Go Down, Moses did no more than classify it as a novel ora story series because of its unusual form (Wagner-Martin 5); under thesecircumstances it is not unexpected that their sexual relationship did not receive more
substantial attention. Nevertheless, it is surprising that it has been overlooked for sucha long time, for it is “the only example in Faulkner’s work of consummated incest”(Chabrier 129).
The reasons why the case of incest in Go Down, Moses has gone unnoticed lie inthe couple’s unique characteristics. One is that they are a parent and a child――astriking difference from Faulkner’s other incestuous couples. The more famous andtypical couples, or occasionally trios, are all siblings such as Quentin and Caddy
Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929), Charles Bon and Judith and Henry Sutpen
in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Horace and Narcissa Benbow in Sanctuary (1931).
Among the numerous cases of sibling incest that are characteristic of Faulkner’s work,
an isolated case of parent-child incest in Go Down, Moses might have been
inconspicuous. Although Karl F. Zender also addressed its distinctiveness in the 1990s(Zender 755), most of the criticism of incest in Faulkner, including John T. Irwin’s

Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge (1975), still shows a preoccupation with
incest between siblings, especially with that between brother and sister １.
The other reason why the incest in Go Down, Moses has been neglected is that
Carothers and Tomasina belong to different races. Therefore, their sexual relationshiphas been well recognized as an example of consummated miscegenation ２. Furthermore,some critics did not believe Carothers’ paternity of Tomasina until Faulkner’s letter
revealing their blood relationship was discovered in 1999 (Polk 107). The tendency totake their coupling seriously as a case of miscegenation may come from the way Isaac(Ike) MacCaslin, the protagonist of the novel, looked at it. In “Delta Autumn,” heencounters an abandoned lover of Carothers (Ross) Edmonds, the sixth head of his
family. The words Ike hurls at the nameless woman, who seems almost white, clearlyshow what kind of carnal sins he assumes Carothers, his grandfather, committed:“You’re a nigger!” (GDM 344). Even after her origin as a descendant of Tomey’s Terrel,
Tomasina’s son, is revealed, he still dwells on her nonwhiteness. “Marry: a man in yourown race. That’s the only salvation for You――For a while yet, maybe a long while yet.
We will have to wait. Marry a Black man” (346). His antipathy toward her hybridity
demonstrates that of all Carothers’ sins, nothing horrified him more than miscegenation.
To be exact, incest was, for him, not the most hideous sin his grandfather committed(Hoffman 169-71).
When looking at some features shared between two of Faulkner’s novels, Eric J.
Sundquist argues that Go Down, Moses evolved from Absalom, Absalom! by
disintegrating the barrier that was preventing the consummation of miscegenation as
incest (Sundquist 132). Nevertheless, why did incest in Faulkner only become a reality
between a parent and child, who also had the relationship of master and slave? To seek
an answer to this question, I will look at the father-daughter relationship between
Carothers and Tomasina and examine their coupling from the perspective of feminist
psychiatry and anthropology, which made clinical contributions to the clarification ofincest in the 1970s-1980s. By introducing historico-jurisprudential studies of slavery
into Faulkner criticism, Thadious M. Davis reads into the sexual dynamics in the novel,
which were peculiar to the American South before the Civil War, and used to actualize
incest as miscegenation. My project is to reconsider these dynamics as the culminationof gender asymmetry in the incest taboo called “the traffic in women” (Rubin 175). I aim
to describe how incest between father and daughter, who are also unusually owner andproperty, is an exaggeration of the tolerance for incest under certain circumstancesinherent in “the law of exogamy” (Herman 59), which requires people to form networksof kinship.

Blood Relations ≠ Kinship Relations“His own daughter His own daughter. No No Not even him” (GDM 259).
Speculating that Carothers had a son by Tomasina from fragmentary entries in the oldplantation ledgers of the family, Ike could not help being shocked by his grandfather’s“ruthlessness” (260). A question arises here: is it not inconvenient for a father to havesexual relations with his daughter? In exogamous societies, where family groups aredemanded to exchange members through marriage, a man cannot possibly derive
benefit from incest because of its inability to create kinship relations. In fact, in theAmerican South, incest was so feared that it was placed beside miscegenation as one of“the twin prohibitions” (King 126). According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the influential
anthropologist, marriage outside the family group governed by the incest taboo is thefundamental form of gift-giving that develops friendly relations among people. Byrequiring the exchange of people as well as objects and thereby creating not only
reliance but also kinship relations, marriage serves to bind people more strongly thanthe exchange of objects does. “The prohibition of incest is less a rule prohibiting
marriage with the mother, sister or daughter, than a rule obliging the mother, sister, or
daughter to be given to others. It is the supreme rule of the gift, and it is clearly this
aspect, too often unrecognized, which allows its nature to be understood” (Lévi-Strauss
481). If that is so, those who break it would lose their share of the social alliance thatthe rule guarantees. Taking women within the family for sexual need ought to beagainst men’s own interests.
Why then did Carothers not hesitate to make a sexual conquest of his own
daughter? The answer rests in the master-slave relationship between them. Tomasina
was less his daughter than one of his slaves because her mother, Eunice, was his slave
concubine. Female slaves were exposed to unrestrained sexual exploitation since thesystem and culture supporting slavery encouraged slave owners to use them sexually.
By making sexual use of and fathering children by those women, slave owners couldsatisfy their sexual desire, and, at the same time, gain the same profit as they could
from “breeding” slave couples; that is to say, the labor force reproduced itself (Davis, T.
90, Davis, A. 6-7, Clinton 203-06). Moreover, slaves were legally defined as without will,
and, therefore, sexual aggression against female slaves could not be recognized as rape
(Davis, T. 112-13). Although not all intercourse may have been violent, it is asentimental judgment to expect, as Ike does, that “some sort of love” (GDM 258)
determined sexual relations between master and slave (Davis, T. 96-98, Davis, A. 25-26,
Clinton 212-13). In relationships with an overwhelming power imbalance, sexual
exploitation or abuse hardly needs overt violence or coercion. It can be said that whitemen’s sexual desire itself, “the backyard temptation” in Lillian Smith’s words (Smith116), was the product of a sexual culture that eroticized domination, and was shaped by
the need to justify the exploitation of enslaved labor. Catherine Clinton explains thepsychological effects that the hierarchal social structure of the Old South, built by
getting the best value out of race and gender, had on its white founders’ sexuality:“Within the complex sexual scenario of plantation society, power eclipsed other themes.
It is not excessive to speculate that domination shaped erotic imagination, arousal,
objects of desire, and modes of gratification. Slaveowners incorporated violence, actualor implied, into their pattern of sexual satisfaction” (Clinton 222).
Under those circumstances, even slave women related to their owners by blood
could not always escape sexual victimization. Given that Southern criminal law is said
to have traditionally been relatively tolerant of incest (Chabrier 130-31), it was neverapplied to interracial breaches. The reason was that slaves were not defined as humans,
but as chattels like livestock; therefore, they had no legal right to be members of thefamily. Besides, family law at that time left them out of consideration (Davis, T. 99-100).
Even if they took an active part as “studs” in breeding slaves, it was easy for slave
owners to deny the offspring were their own. This must have given them a good excuse
to make sexual use of even their daughters or sisters born in slavery. In fact, it was not
unusual for slaves, who were not family members but family possessions, to be
inherited not only as a labor force, but also as a sexual luxury (Clinton 218-19). Thus
some masters often took the liberty of using their fathers’ concubines, and others werenot afraid to take both slave mothers and daughters for sexual use (Fox-Genovese 9,
Davis, T. 99-100). In view of these instances, it can easily be understood how
mixed-blood girls like Tomasina, born in slave concubinage, were vulnerable to thesexual advances of their father-owners or half brothers.
To sum up, Carothers’ incestuous violation of Tomasina was enabled by her lackof membership in his family. The incest taboo or law of exogamy rewards people for theexchange of their family members, not for that of their family property. Therefore, even
if he had married his slave daughter off, Carothers would not have gotten any kinshiprelations from her marriage. In other words, Tomasina, as a piece of his property, had no
exchange value in the market for marriage. Although they were related by blood, she
was ineligible for membership in his family; therefore she would never have a market
value in marriage. Thus, the exogamy law did not protect her from incestuous
molestation. For girls or women who have no value in marital exchange, the law does
not give its followers any reward; on the other hand, it does not give its offenders any
penalty. In that case, nothing prevents those females from being taken by their own
fathers or (half) brothers. Consequently, other than the legacy of 1,000 dollars left to his
son who was also his grandson (GDM 258), Carothers showed no compunction
exploiting his daughter for his own sexual pleasure.

The Rule of the Father
Curiously enough, in Go down, Moses, daughters who did have exchange value
in the marriage market unlike Tomasina, namely, white women with membership in
their fathers’ families, were also treated like objects to be owned. “Was” discloses the
structure of a special kind of marital exchange by comically revealing how Ike’s parents’relationship began. Its third section focuses on a game of cards between Amodeus(Buddy) MacCaslin and his neighbor Hubert Beauchamp that was supposed to berepeatedly played until Buddy’s twin brother Theophilus (Buck) gave up his “bastion ofbachelorhood” (Muhlenfeld 201) to “win” Hubert’s helplessly unmarried younger sister
Sophonsiba (GDM 23). The game is doubly noteworthy because her limited chances ofmarriage are at stake and it deals with them on almost the same level as the ownership

of Tennie, a slave girl of the Beauchamps who is Tomey’s Terrel’s sweetheart. In someways, Tennie finds herself in a more advantageous position than that of her mistress
who is placed under the definitive condition of the wager. Hubert partly shares Buddy’sview, and they lay the wager on the premise that they can no longer keep the pair ofslave lovers separate from each other. While Sophonsiba cannot get married to Buck
unless her brother wins the bet, Tennie can live with her lover no matter which player
wins. In addition, Hubert has no plan to provide a dowry for his sister, even if he wins,
and ends up disposing of Tennie without charge by losing the bet. At this point,
Sophonsiba’s value as an exchange good for marriage is too low to be readily
distinguished from that of her maid in trade transactions. The mistress and maid are
exchanged no differently between the men of the Beauchamp and MacCaslin families.
Why does Sophonsiba have to be called an exchange good? The reason lies in
the fact that the exchange of people in marriage is not conducted sex-neutrally. In
marital exchange, men can act as givers and receivers, but women only have the role ofgifts-given (Lévi-Strauss 115). Women’s role is, according to Gayle Rubin, a feminist
anthropologist, a “conduit” of a relationship between men or, in the more sophisticatedlanguage of Eve K. Sedgwick, the medium of “male homosocial desire.” By requiring theexchange of women not for men, but between men in making kinship relations, the lawof exogamy confers the benefits of social alliance only on men (Rubin 174).
Although her role as a woman is to be given, Ike’s nameless wife recklessly
attempts to participate in marriage as a partner. One evening, when she finds out that
Ike is building their new house in her ignorance, she decides to show him her naked
body for the first time and thereby tries to get him to promise that he will take over his
family’s plantation (GDM 297-301). She strives to buy the land in exchange for her
nakedness but fails to understand that as a gift for him she may not concurrently be theperson he is dealing with. Regardless of whether he had seen her body in the nude ornot, he should have already made her his by then. The person he was dealing with intheir marriage is her father who was also his “partner” in carpentry (296). Where and inwhat house she will live is determined by an agreement between her father andhusband, her giver and receiver, and no matter how much she loves her husband, itmakes no difference to her position as a gift-given. Since she is not allowed to be a giveror a receiver, he cannot possibly accept her proposition and, the consequence is that she
sacrifices her feminine pride for nothing. The love scene of the newlywed couple, praised
as “the most passionate in all of Faulkner’s fiction” (Muhlenfeld 203), is closed by her
hysterical laughter when she suffers a destined crushing defeat in the structure of
marriage. “And that’s all. That’s all from me. If this dont [sic] get you that son you talkabout, it wont [sic] be mine” (GDM 300-01).
It is obvious that both Sophonsiba and Ike’s wife are treated as the property of
their kinsmen whose wills are negligible (Dickerson 418-21). Although it is a privilege ofwhite women, their exchange value in marriage does not make their position very
different from that of female slaves. This understanding leaves us with a new question
about how women who were legitimated but still owned by their fathers were able to
avoid involvement in incest. The rights of the ownership of women provide the vital clue
as to why and how incest occurs.
First, we will look at the actual conditions of incest. Today, it is recognized as aform of sexual abuse of children most often reported between fathers and daughters.
Social surveys of the sexual experiences of both sexes, including the well-known Kinsey
reports, have been carried out since 1940, but it was not until the 1970s that surveys
which targeted incest cases were worked on seriously. Summarizing the findings of thefive major surveys of either kind, Judith Lewis Herman, a feminist psychiatrist,
illustrates how frequently incest occurs. The former surveys contained the revelations
that 1) some adults make children their sexual objects, 2) most of the adults committing
such acts are male, whereas most of the children victimized are female, and 3) such actsare sometimes committed within the family ３. It is the latter surveys, however, thatrevealed that the occurrence of incest follows the same pattern as the sexual abuse ofchildren, in which most cases have female children as victims and male adults asperpetrators ４. Without forgetting that brothers, uncles, and grandfathers can also be
perpetrators, the findings of the surveys agreed that the great majority of incest occurs
between parents and children and most of the cases occur between fathers anddaughters (Herman 11-19) ５.

The reason why incest almost always occurs between fathers and daughters
but almost never occurs between mothers and sons can be found in the male supremacyof the incest taboo. “In patriarchal societies,” Herman concludes, “including Western
society, the rights of ownership and exchange of women within the family are vested
primarily in the father. These rights find their most complete expression in the father’s
relationship with his daughter” (60). According to her, the effectiveness of the incest
taboo is due not to the rule of the gift but to “territorial behavior” among men in thefamily. In this case, what is forbidden is the sexual appropriation of women subject toother kinsmen. Whereas every other female relative belongs to other men, the daughter
belongs exclusively to the father, which is why incest is most strenuously prohibitedwith the mother but, on the other hand, is almost overlooked with the daughter.
Between father and daughter is the place where men’s rights of ownership of women are
maximized because the rule is not reinforced by sexual rivalry among men (60-62).
Taking into account the absoluteness of a father’s power over his daughters, it
is difficult to think that only white women could always escape the danger of incest. It
may sound anachronistic to class the realities and structure of incest in the latter half ofthe 20th century with those in the American South one and a half centuries before;
nevertheless, “[p]atriarchy was,” as Catherine Clinton concludes, “the bedrock uponwhich the slave society was founded, and slavery exaggerated the pattern ofsubjugation that patriarchy had established” (Clinton 6). If that were so, incest in theslave South would be the furthest extreme of, but cannot be very different from, that in
our own time. In Faulkner’s novels, there is at least one example of white women who
fall victim to incestuous fathers. Milly Jones in Absalom, Absalom!, who was born to an
unmarried mother who supposedly died in a Memphis brothel, bears old Thomas
Sutpen a daughter out of wedlock. In his provocative, postcolonial reading of Faulkner,
Eduard Glissant, a writer from Martinique in the West Indies, assumes that Sutpen
himself may be Milly’s father (Glissant 134-36)６. The sexual coupling of the alleged
father and daughter, who remind us of Carothers and Tomasina, suggests that excuses
to make sexual use of young female relatives, without difference in the color of skin,were not so hard to find in the antebellum South.

Conclusion
Now it can be fully understood what an appropriate setting Faulkner’s incest
finds for its realization. Carothers’ sexual domination of Tomasina is on one hand an
exceptional breach of the incest taboo possible only under the sexual dynamics of slavery,
but, on the other hand, is a typical instance of the anticipated breakdown of the rule,seen in light of the mechanism of incest occurring, in which the father’s unrivaled powerplays a pivotal role. Unlike Absalom, Absalom!, Go down, Moses keeps white womenaway from incest. However, by depicting all women as the property of men, it suggeststhat incest between father and daughter, who are also master and slave, is not adeviation from patriarchal family norms but their magnification through the racial
order. It does not matter that incest in Faulkner is mostly between brothers and sisters.
However, it is important that after a great deal of trial and error between brothers andsisters, the novelist needed to look for another place for its first and last realization. If
that is so, among the many cases of incest represented by him, that in Go down, Moses
undeniably holds an especially important position. Carothers’ sexual taking ofTomasina should be ranked as an archetypal, not a borderline, case of incest in
Faulkner’s work.

*The first version of this article was written in Japanese and read at the 82nd General
Meetings of the English Literary Society of Japan held at Kobe University on May 29
and 30, 2010.

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About the Author
OHRI Naoko is a doctoral candidate in the Division of Comparative Literature
and Cultures at Ochanomizu University (e-mail: oori@rhythm.ocn.ne.jp). One of her
publications is, in Japanese, “’Not in a Bedroom but in a Courtroom’: On Precarious
Kinship in Melville’s Billy Budd” in American Literature 67 published by the Tokyo
Branch of the American Literature Society of Japan in 2006.

Notes
A few exceptions are Olga W. Vickery’s The Novels of William Faulkner and Takeuchi
Masaya’s “Darl’s Arson in As I Lay Dying.” They find a son’s incestuous desire for his

１mother in As I Lay Dying (1930). Lately, there is a marked tendency to read a subtext offather-daughter incest in Sanctuary, such as John N. Duvall’s Faulkner’s Marginal
Couple and Kathleen M. Scheel’s “Incest, Repression, and Repetition-Compulsion.”
２ Most notable is Myra Jerlen’s Class and Character in Faulkner’s South, which
recognizes Go Down, Moses as a candid disclosure of blacks’ contribution of blood to themaking of whites’ family lines.
３ Those surveys are as follows: Carney Landis’ Sex in Development (New York: Harper& Brothers, 1940), Alfred C. Kinsey et al.’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female(Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953), Judson Landis’ “Experiences of 500 Children with Adult
Sexual Deviance” (Psychiatric Quarterly Supplement 30, 1956: 91-109), John Gagnon’s“Female Child Victims of Sex Offences” (Social Problems 13, 1965: 176-92), and David
Finkelhor’s Sexually Victimized Children (New York: Free Press, 1979).
４ Those surveys are as follows: S. Kirson Weinberg’s Incest Behavior (New York:
Citadel Press, 1955), Herbert Maisch’s Incest (New York: Stein & Day, 1972), Nancyz
Lukianowics’ “Incest” (British Journal of Psychiatry 120, 1972: 201-12), Karin
Meiselman’s Incest (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978), and Blair Justice and Rita
Justice’s The Broken Taboo (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1979).
５ Accordingly, as perpetrators fathers overwhelm mothers. Mother-son incest occurs at
the same rare intervals (average 2.8%) as father-son incest does (average 2.6%).
６ Milly’s mother Melicent Jones appears only in the “Chronology” and “Genealogy”
following the text of Absalom, Absalom! Glissant claims, however, that her oddly
belated appearance is the very key to the mystery deliberately hidden behind the novel.
Certainly, it is no wonder that, in his madness for a male heir, Sutpen resorted toreproduction by his own flesh and blood, considering how dreadfully he abhorred “thecontamination by black blood.” Moreover, the assumption furnishes an intelligent
reason why, in the morning of Milly’s childbirth, Wash Jones, her grandfather andSutpen’s handyman, exploded and killed her and her baby girl with a scythe, as well as
his merciless master. I wish to thank Professor Tanaka Hisao for his calling myattention to Glissant’s stimulating argument and the great resemblance which
Carothers’ sexual taking of Tomasina has to Sutpen’s taking of Milly.