The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 23 (2012)

Faulkner’s Black and White Oedipal Drama
in “The Fire and the Hearth”

Koichi SUWABE*I.
Go Down, Moses, which concludes William Faulkner’s “major
period,” is arguably the Southern novelist’s most mature work in that it
develops the racial theme more directly and fully than do his other masterpieces written at the zenith of his writing career. The novel’s seveninterconnected stories demonstrate how deeply Lucius Quintus (old)
Carothers McCaslin’s sinful treatment of his black slaves—his sexual
exploitation of Eunice and their daughter Tomasina—in the Old South
have affected his descendants, both black and white. Critics have agreed
that Go Down, Moses is one of the most important works in Faulkner’s
opus. And they have examined in detail the book’s central character Isaac(Ike) McCaslin’s “heroic” decision to give up his inheritance as a patriarch of the McCaslin clan in “The Bear.” Relatively less attention has
been paid to the serious effects of Ike’s apparently sincere decision on
his black and white relatives. In this essay I focus on Lucas (Quintus
Carothers McCaslin) Beauchamp and Carothers (Roth) Edmonds in“The Fire and the Hearth” to suggest that Faulkner succeeds in fully relativizing the “tragedy” of the white hero of romantic irony (Ike) and creating an African American character (Lucas) with his own positive voice*Associate Professor, University of Tokyo

97

98

KOICHI SUWABE

and story rather than only appearing as the negative mirror of racist ideology.
Whereas Rider’s tragedy in “Pantaloon in Black” illuminates theworld from which Ike has averted his eyes, in that he obviously does notknow what has happened to the black McCaslin offspring, “The Fire andthe Hearth” presents the same world in more direct relation to Ike’s
renunciation of his patrimony. In other words, whereas the signiﬁcanceof Rider’s story lies at least partly in his namelessness, which indicateshis unrecorded McCaslin identity, the importance of the story of Lucasand Carothers (Roth) Edmonds is inseparable from their acute consciousness that they, a Beauchamp and an Edmonds, are both descendants of old Carothers.
Although Ike only brieﬂy appears in the ﬂashback that presents
Lucas’s demand for his McCaslin legacy on his twenty-ﬁrst birthday, thestory of Lucas and Roth is inextricably interwoven with Ike’s “heroic”
decision in “The Bear,” because “without him,” as Thomas C. Foster
points out, “the conﬂict between Lucas and Roth would not exist” (64).
The constant friction between Lucas and Roth stems largely from thefact that Lucas is a “man-made” black McCaslin, whereas Roth is a
“woman-made” white McCaslin. If Ike, as the last “man-made” white
McCaslin, had assumed the “right” position as a patriarch or “father” of
the family, both Lucas and Roth might have found themselves comfortable as Ike’s “sons” in their “ordered places,” to use a Faulknerian expression. The legitimate king, however, mysteriously abdicated andannihilated this stable oedipal order. Although John Carlos Rowe statesthat “of course, [Roth] knows the history of miscegenation in theledgers” (90), I doubt that Roth learns about the sins of old Carothers inthe same way as Ike does. Ike has probably never told anyone the reason for his renunciation since his dialogue with Carothers McCaslin(Cass) Edmonds on his twenty-ﬁrst birthday (and perhaps even Cass does
not know the reason for Eunice’s suicide). The result is that “Lucas’s
interpretation that Cass somehow beat Isaac out of the patrimony is not
atypical of the community’s sentiments” (Brinkmeyer 217). Ike, likeColonel John Sartoris in The Unvanquished, declares that he is the “deadfather” in the modern world, and “The Fire and the Hearth” presents theconfusion and struggle of the “sons” in the chaotic world after the deathof the strong father.

FAULKNER’S BLACK AND WHITE OEDIPAL DRAMA

99

II.
Between Lucas and Roth, apparently Lucas deals better with the deathof the “father,” for he can simply hate Ike, whose “suicide” is an unforgivable insult to his pride as a “man-made” McCaslin. From his viewpoint, this dead father “had turned apostate to his name and lineage byweakly relinquishing the land which was rightfully his to live in town
on the charity of his grandnephew” (Faulkner 39). “Not only is Lucas
conscious of his being a McCaslin,” James Early observes, “he is extremely aware of his role as the last of an older generation” (82). Given
that Ike is the only important male character who belongs to Lucas’s generation in the present of the story, it is small wonder that critics haveregarded Lucas as “Ike’s counterpart” (Hochberg 59) and contrasted him
with Ike (Brooks 253–54). Lucas is an old-fashioned man who loves “theold days, the old time, and better men than these” (Faulkner 43–44). He,
however, is not a man of romantic irony like Ike, who is not only disillusioned with the modern world but also transcends the disillusionment.
Unlike Bayard Sartoris in The Unvanquished, Lucas is not a person who
doubts the righteousness of the past way of life. It is important that Lucas,
as Thadious M. Davis observes, “does not seem at all aware of the circumstances surrounding the birth of his mixed-race, nearly white father,
Turl” (156). Thanks to Ike’s repression of the history of the McCaslins,
Lucas, unlike Ike and Bayard, does not have to know the “father’s sin.”
Lucas’s ignorance of the dark history of the McCaslins makes it possible for him not only to be proud of his McCaslin blood, but also to beobedient to the (anachronistic) oedipal pattern. As John N. Duvallargues, for instance, Lucas’s attempt to eliminate George Wilkins might
be “a version, albeit an inversion, of Oedipal desire” (80), especiallygiven that Lucas thinks: “It will be a lesson to him about whose daughter
to fool with next time” (Faulkner 61; Faulkner’s italics here and throughout in quoted sentences). Furthermore, as Davis writes, “there may be a
conscious repression of Turl at work” when “on his twenty-ﬁrst birthday Lucas asks for the money old Carothers left for his father in his will”(156–57), which reminds us of the young Faulkner’s own repression of
his father by admiring his great-grandfather. Interestingly enough, Lucaschanges his name from “Lucius” to “Lucas,” again in the manner reminiscent of the young Faulkner who added “u” to his family name. Lucas’s
similarities to Faulkner put aside, this name-changing episode suggeststhat in order to be a “man” Lucas eventually has to deal with his

100

KOICHI SUWABE

grandfather even if he uses his white ancestor at ﬁrst to beat his black
father—his confrontation with Zachary (“Zack”) Edmonds provides theopportunity.
As some critics have demonstrated, Lucas’s confrontation with Zackis signiﬁcant in various respects. For example, this confrontation reveals
itself as a racial problem for Lucas because, “by taking Molly into his
house to nurse his motherless son, Zack exhibits his assumption that
Lucas and Molly are primarily his servants rather than primarily husband and wife” (Zender 79): “ ‘I’m a nigger,’ Lucas said [to Zack]. ‘But
I’m a man too’ ” (Faulkner 46). In the wider context of the novel, moreover, this episode is closely linked to old Carothers’s “systematic rapeof African-American women” (Rowe 82), because Lucas, if unknowingly, “has transformed his own wife into Eunice, suspecting Zack of
behavior that their shared ancestor, old Carothers, had inﬂicted ﬁrst on
Lucas’s great-grandmother” (Kinney, Go Down, Moses 91). Realizing
Lucas’s suspicion, Zack says: “So that’s what you think. What kind ofa man do you think I am?” (Faulkner 46). As Dirk Kuyk Jr. assumes,
Lucas’s inferred answer would be “a man like Carothers” (45). Whileignorant of old Carothers’s inhuman treatment of Eunice, Lucas knows
what his white ancestor did to Tomasina (in which sense his suspicion
is not totally groundless). This is how the Zack-Lucas-Molly triangle
puts Lucas in the place where he “got to beat old Carothers” (Faulkner
53) as well as Zack, who, as if to help the Negro “son” fully understandthe (double—or triple) oedipal situation,1 challenges Lucas as the strong“father”: “Come on then. Do you think I’m any less a McCaslin justbecause I was what you call woman-made to it? Or maybe you aint evena woman-made McCaslin but just a nigger that’s got out of hand?” (54).
Before analyzing the consequence of Lucas’s confrontation withZack, I have more to say as to what the “father” Zack’s jeopardizing of
his marriage with Molly means to this “son.” Lucas has two (or more)“fathers,” as do Ike and Sam Fathers. Unlike Sam, however, Lucas is notan epic character. He has to live and struggle in the actual modern worldfrom which Ike has “freed” himself to secure his transcendental position. Unlike Ike, he has to establish himself as a “man” in the racist
community that treats him like a “boy.” It cannot be a coincidence that
Faulkner contrasts Lucas’s blazing marriage with Ike’s barren one with
Lucas’s emblematic “ﬁre on the hearth”: Ike’s “ ‘ﬁreless rented room’ . . .
contrasts detrimentally with the ﬁre in the house of Lucas Beauchamp’shouse” (Creighton 134). Whereas Ike has to turn down his femme fatale

FAULKNER’S BLACK AND WHITE OEDIPAL DRAMA

101

wife’s temptation so as not to be a “man” like his grandfather, Lucasneeds his wife so that he can be a “man” like his grandfather. “Lucas’s
marriage with Molly,” as Davis points out, “is one of the visible signsof his freedom and manhood” (139). In other words, for this oedipal“son,” his wife assumes the position of a femme fatale who promises
him masculinity. Lucas’s “identity as a man is dependent on Molly’s
presence in his home” (Bealer 120). Although Lucas behaves like a“master” in that he treats Molly like his property or trophy wife (Lucasgets her in town, as Anse Bundren gets his wife in As I Lay Dying), heis in fact a “slave” to her in that he cannot lose her at any cost.
For Lucas, to “kill” the “father” Zack and keep the “femme fatale”
Molly are two sides of the same coin. This “romantic” coin is perhaps
everywhere in modernist ﬁction: we have only to remind ourselves ofthe stubborn romantics such as Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises or
Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. The author of Go Down, Moses, however, is conscious that this coin is an anachronism, as the ambiguous
result of Lucas’s “patricide” suggests: Lucas throws away his razor as if
to throw away the stereotyped image of a Negro and pulls the gun’s trigger, but it turns out to be a “miss-ﬁre” (Faulkner 56).
In a sense, this “miss-ﬁre” does not change the fact that Lucas has
accomplished his aim, winning the “virility contest” (Gray 187–88). He
successfully “kills” his “father,” and this “gesture forever establishes
Lucas’s dominance over Zack” (Klotz 739), as Roth later painfully suspects (Faulkner 112). When Lucas, after his confrontation with Zack,
thinks, “I reckon I aint got old Carothers’ blood for nothing, after all.
Old Carothers. . . . I needed him and he come and spoke for me” (57; myellipses), he seems to have not merely established himself as the new“father” but also to have even achieved a reconciliation with his whiteancestor. As Philip M. Weinstein notes, “Deﬁantly risking his own life
and Zack’s, Lucas answers—as no one else in Go Down, Moses does
answer—the old man’s original challenge” (97). It is understandable inthis light that Nancy Dew Taylor calls Lucas a “man who successfully
deals with his mixed racial heritage” (59).
Lucas’s “success,” however, is possible and secure only so long as heremains in the oedipal or ahistorical world of the Zack-Lucas-Molly triangle, just as Ike’s renunciation is successful and secure only so long as
he remains in the mythic, ahistorical world of the lost wilderness. As soon
as he resumes his life in the actual world, or in the Symbolic, to employa Lacanian term, Lucas cannot but say to himself: “How to God . . . can

102

KOICHI SUWABE

a black man ask a white man to please not lay down with his black wife?
And even if he could ask it, how to God can the white man promise hewont?” (Faulkner 58; my ellipses). “This question,” Charles H. Nilon
notices, “poses the paradox of the ideal and the real” (19). Lucas can bea hero in the ahistorical world, the ideology of which enables him to refer
to Zack “as Mr Edmonds, never as Mister Zack, as the other negroes did”
(Faulkner 101) and makes him believe that “the sheriff was a redneck
without any reason for pride in his forbears nor hope for it in his descendants.” In the actual racist community, however, Lucas has to be awarethat “to the sheriff Lucas was just another nigger” (43).
Lucas “kills” the “father” and wins the femme fatale in the closed oedipal world; however, once placed in the wider social context, “the pistol’s miss-ﬁre,” as Richard Godden puts it, at best “represents anhonorable draw,” because “to kill Zack is suicide” (51). It is not just that
Lucas would be lynched if he killed Zack (Joiner 57), for this result
would satisfy his heroism as the rebellious “son”: “I would have paid. I
would have waited for the rope, even the coal oil. I would have paid ”(Faulkner 57). It is rather that the “miss-ﬁre” indicates that Lucas cannot be such a “hero” in the actual world, or even that the romantic worldthat enables him to be such a “man” is dependent on the real world, justas Ike’s heroism is dependent on the loss of the wilderness or on theactual world outside the mythologized wilderness.2 The Imaginary isretroactively “discovered” when the subject enters the Symbolic—thisLacanian logic neatly applies to Lucas’s heroic act as a Negro. Whatmakes his confrontation with Zack heroic is always already interwoven
with the social fact that he is a “nigger” who deﬁes the law of the
Symbolic, just as Ike refuses to submit to the communal law that tells
him to inherit the patrimony.
From the moment Lucas establishes himself as a “man,” he ﬁnds himself in a world where he cannot be a “man.” The gun’s “miss-ﬁre” by nomeans represents his defeat. Even so, it still represents his “ﬁgurative
castration” (Clark 71). This is the kind of paradox Ike aprioristically transcends through his romantic irony, which makes him “wise” enough not
to yield to the emasculating femme fatale’s temptation or fake promiseof manhood. Lucas, however, is not a man of romantic irony. He is a
Faulknerian romantic who stubbornly denies his castration, clinging to
the romantic, anachronistic code, and struggling to maintain or repeat
the moment of his establishment as a “man.” This romantic struggle puts
him in an impasse and even makes him look pathetic. Because the ahis-

FAULKNER’S BLACK AND WHITE OEDIPAL DRAMA

103

torical world he vainly struggles to recover is the utopia where his establishment as a “man” would have nothing to do with his race, however,his pathetic struggle serves as social criticism precisely because it ispathetic. For instance, Lucas’s pride as a “man-made” McCaslin deconstructs itself as a dramatic irony on him, but the source (and object) of
this irony is the social context, namely, the racist community. Furthermore, and more important, Lucas’s struggle for utopia functions as a radical criticism of Ike’s transcendence of the struggle, because Lucas’s
romantic dream is exactly what Ike has personally achieved (by “freeing” the “Negro” Sam) on the communal presupposition that the “enduring” Negroes would have to wait for a long time until racism disappears:“Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America” (Faulkner
344).
Jay S. Winston writes: “Lucas has, in a fashion, stepped outside the
racial divide” (137). The world “outside the racial divide” is Lucas’s
utopia, the world where only the law of the jungle or the law of old
Carothers prevails, the world where he can beat Zack, “who was not theman his father had been but whom Lucas, the man McCaslin, had accepted as his peer to the extent of intending to kill him” (Faulkner 44),
just as Cass, from Lucas’s viewpoint, can beat Ike because he is “aMcCaslin only by the distaff yet having enough of old Carothers
McCaslin in his veins to take the land from the true heir simply because
he wanted it and knew he could use it better and was strong enough, ruthless enough, old Carothers McCaslin enough” (44). Believing in such alaw, Lucas throws himself into the endless struggle with the actual racist
world where the color of his skin is more important than his metaphysical pride in his paternal ancestor.
It is no wonder that Lucas tries to differentiate himself from the other
Negroes. (His “standardized” English, for instance, suggests his recognition of himself as superior to other Negroes [Ross 242].) It is not that
he despises his own “black blood” or even that “Lucas’s role models arewhite patriarchs, not black” (Bell 228), but rather that he despises anyone who is not a “man-made” McCaslin or who cannot behave like a“man-made” McCaslin in order to prove that he is a “man” in the racist
world. To perform as a “man” in such a world, Lucas ﬁghts against, orat least distances himself from, the “Negro” community. “While hemaintains physical ties to Molly, Nat, and George,” Keith Clark observes, “we do not see him as an integral part of this black conﬁguration
on a deeper, psychological level” (70). Even though Rider takes Lucas

104

KOICHI SUWABE

as his model, “Lucas does not share [the] type of intimacy [we see in‘Pantaloon in Black’] with either Molly or the black community. Nordoes Lucas value bonding with the black community over his own personal authority and autonomy” (Bell 231). As a result, Lucas cannot be
but a lonely man whose “actions are grounded less in love, whether
familial or communal, than in pride and contempt” (Latimer 4). The emotional bond with others is what Lucas has to sacriﬁce in order to be a“man.”
Lucas’s pathetic struggle makes him resemble another Faulknerianromantic who despises everyone, takes pride in his paternal lineage,
misses the lost old days, regards women as commodities, and has anobsession with being a “man”—Jason Compson in The Sound and theFury. Viewed in this light, Lucas’s interest in or rather obsession withmoney is not surprising. Lucas’s vain efforts in the gold hunt remind us
of Jason’s speculation in the cotton market, especially because of its
futility: Lucas fools the salesperson with his salted mine trick, but thefact remains that he wastes money and energy on nothing. Furthermore,
as is the case with Jason, money is not simply money to Lucas. Moneyis, ﬁrst of all, “for Lucas one of the primary signiﬁers of manhood”(Davis 137), as it is for Jason (and for many other male characters inFaulkner’s works). As some critics have observed, moreover, “whenLucas ﬁnds the gold piece, he may attach excessive symbolic importanceto it” (Matthews 236): “He thinks it is part of his monetary legacy fromold Carothers McCaslin” (Kinney, Go Down, Moses 115). Ironicallyenough, Lucas violates the sacred place called the “Indian mound” toﬁnd the McCaslin legacy Ike repudiated by imitating his Indian “father.”
The (probably nonexistent) buried money represents for Lucas what
Quentin’s college tuition, Caddy’s ﬁrst car in town, or the promised bankjob represents for Jason: (the dispossession of ) what Lucas, as a Negro
McCaslin, never had. Lucas has to “steal” it by his own hands to be a“man” (as Jason steals money from his mother, sister, and niece), which
is why he tries to get from Roth three hundred dollars at ﬁrst and, when
Roth rejects his request for a loan, steals Roth’s mule to pay for the divining machine, even though he still has “them three thousand dollars old
Carothers left [him]” (Faulkner 122). “You’ve got over three thousand
dollars in the bank,” Roth reasonably says to Lucas. “Advance yourself
the money” (77). Lucas, however, cannot touch the money ( just as Jason
can only either lose or hoard the money he has stolen) for the same reason
that his elder black Beauchamps have refused to receive the McCaslin

FAULKNER’S BLACK AND WHITE OEDIPAL DRAMA

105

legacy. Lucas’s unusable money, as well as the misﬁred gun, embodies
how difﬁcult it is for him to be a “man” in this racist community. He succeeds in getting the metal detector with the salted mine trick, but themachine, which should tell him how to be a “man,” “dont seem to know
how to say nothing but No” (90) to this black man.
Like Jason, Lucas in his quest for masculinity is destined to be a failure. As the repressed Miss Quentin (or Caddy) completely emasculates
Jason in the end, Molly emasculates Lucas with her request for a “voce”(divorce). Whereas some critics have favorably evaluated Molly’s action
because “Mollie’s threat to divorce herself from the man in her family
uniﬁes both her family and ‘The Fire and the Hearth’ ” (Robinson andTown 197), others have expressed their ambivalence toward or even disappointment at Molly’s frustration with Lucas’s gold hunt for the same
reason, and especially for their appreciation of Faulkner’s characterization of Lucas as a hero who struggles to achieve his independence in a
racist world. Davis remarks that “Molly becomes the instrument that will
tie Lucas to a reality he longs to subvert. . . . Molly is . . . a tool of whitesociety” (138). Walter Taylor practically makes the same point when hestates that “Molly never appealed to other blacks when she was in trouble; she turned to whites like Edmonds and Stevens” (142). It seems tome, however, that these evaluations of Molly ignore the polyphonic quality of this novel and reduce her subjectivity to being part of Lucas’s story(or Roth’s), even though she struggles to get her own “voce/voice.” It
might be that Molly, as a character whose “portrayal was drawn directlyfrom Mammy Callie” (Blotner 414), “herself is sentimentalized andstereotyped throughout this section” (Sensibar 116). She, however, is a
novelistic or typically Faulknerian female character, who not only exists
in relation to other characters but also subverts the other characters’
romantic, patronizing expectations. The full analysis of Molly, which
requires a detailed study of the ﬁnal story, “Go Down, Moses,” would
be beyond the scope of this essay; here I would like to stress that the failure of Lucas’s romantic quest for utopia is inevitable even without her
interference, and that her involvement with it is the result of Lucas’s own
exploitation of her in his quest for masculinity.
When Molly asks Roth to help her to get a “voce,” Lucas says: “I’ma man. . . . I’m the man here. I’m the one to say in my house, like you
and your paw and his paw were the ones to say in his. . . . I’m going tobe the man in this house” (Faulkner 116–17; my ellipses). This line not
only indicates how seriously, desperately, and obsessively Lucas is

106

KOICHI SUWABE

determined to ﬁnd (or “steal”) the buried money to be a “man” because“he is willing to destroy his last remaining communal afﬁliation in theservice of his heroic self-conception” (Zender 80), but also it exposes
the limit of his gender performance. In this scene, Lucas’s routine statement that he must be the “man” does not function as a proper gender
performance, for Molly denies his authority as the “man” of the house.
Lucas, in fact, cannot but remark that he is himself satisﬁed with his marriage (Faulkner 116). His statement that he is the “man” is not a positive
declaration of his masculinity but just a forced, empty negation of his
emasculation, which might remind us how he thinks when he sees Molly
after his confrontation with Zack: “Women, he thought. Women. I wontnever know. I dont want to. I ruther never to know than to find out later
I have been fooled ” (58). Lucas, not sure whether he has been cuckolded,
decides not to think about the terrible possibility, repressing his castration anxiety. One’s very fear of castration, however, symbolically equals
castration ( Žižek 203). Lucas can likely forget (or repress) his castration(anxiety) because Molly does not behave suspiciously. The repressed,
however, returns in the form of the emasculating femme fatale who challenges and deﬁes his authority as a “man.” It cannot be a coincidence
that Faulkner makes Molly refer to Roth as “Mister Zack” (Faulkner 118)
as if to remind Lucas of the ambiguous result of his confrontation withZack.
“In the world of Go Down, Moses,” Elisabeth Muhlenfeld points out,
“Faulkner invests his female characters with great strength . . . a life
afﬁrming strength ﬁrmly rooted in reality” (210). The female characterwith “strength ﬁrmly rooted in reality” is often a femme fatale to a maleromantic in Faulkner’s novels, and it is little wonder that Molly, the representative of such female characters in this novel, wins the battle with
Lucas by appealing to the “law,” which works against Lucas as well as
against Jason. Lucas keeps negating his castration until the last moment,
but he is compelled at last to admit defeat and appease Molly, telling thecourt that they will not get a divorce. Molly, after all, is at the center of
his romantic dream, and he cannot lose her at any cost. (Rider’s story,
which comes next in the book after Lucas’s, suggests what Lucas’s life
might be like if he lost Molly.) That he has no other way to proceed thanto call Roth “Mister Roth Edmonds” (Faulkner 124) so as not to lose his
femme fatale is for him “a moment of unparalleled humiliation”: “Theproud heir of Carothers has transformed himself into a humbled sambo”(Kinney, “Faulkner” 335, 336). Lucas is castrated in the Symbolic,FAULKNER’S BLACK AND WHITE OEDIPAL DRAMA

107

though he will probably continue his gender performance in his domestic sphere, as his purchase of a small sack of candy for Molly suggests(Faulkner 125).
This is how the racist community or “reality” beats Lucas in the end,and some critics, as I have mentioned, have found it problematic that
Molly is the agent of the reality that represses the Negro hero’s attempt
to subvert the racist ideology of the South. Lucas’s “defeat,” however,is not Faulkner’s failure but his success in creating a subversive Negro
character. The very fact that Lucas cannot recover his utopia, it seems
to me, powerfully testiﬁes to the fact that the author of Go Down, Moses
does not sentimentalize the Negro hero’s struggle against the racist ideology of the actual South. “It is Lucas Beauchamp,” Margaret M. Dunnputs it, “in whom the heritage of racial exploitation is most complexly
reﬂected” (414). This complex reﬂection of the heritage of racial exploitation or, put more simply, Lucas’s tragic fate would be obscured if
Faulkner let Lucas have his utopia. Go Down, Moses is the ﬁrst (and last)novel in Faulkner’s career that presents a Negro hero (and also the ﬁrst
African American character who has an inner voice in Faulkner’s novel)in the manner in which Faulkner presents tragic white romantics such as
Jason, Quentin, Horace Benbow, and Joe Christmas (if he is in fact
white). Molly’s frustration with Lucas’s romanticism does not represent
the white Southern author’s interference in a Negro hero’s effort to establish himself as a “man” in the racist world, but suggests that Faulkner,
for the ﬁrst time in his work, presents black characters as subjects who
stand in their own right.
III.
Referring to Roth, the Negro woman in “Delta Autumn” says to Ike:
“He’s not a man yet. You spoiled him. You, and Uncle Lucas and Aunt
Mollie. But mostly you” (Faulkner 343). Perhaps it is impossible to better her succinct explanation of Roth’s relation to Ike, the “dead father.”“The weakness or absence of fathers,” according to John T. Matthews,“challenge their sons to speak paternal strength or presence into existence, to create fathers so as to rebel strongly against them” (215). I wonder whether this observation is applicable to Roth. Ike chooses Sam as
his “father” to establish himself as a man of romantic irony. Lucas ﬁnds
his “father” in Zack (or old Carothers) and beats him to establish himself as a romantic “man.” Roth’s problem, however, is that he cannot

108

KOICHI SUWABE

have a “father” to challenge in order to establish himself in the ordinary
oedipal manner, in which sense Ike’s mysterious renunciation deeply
inﬂuences Roth’s growth as a man in charge of the McCaslin heritage.
Critics have often pointed out Ike’s failure in performing the role ofRoth’s “father.” “[Ike’s] absconding . . . allows Roth Edmonds to live
the unexamined life of his forebears, with no alternative community
voice to check or reprove him” (Wagner-Martin, Introduction 6), in somepart because “Ike’s powerless position has prevented him from preparing a young hero [like Roth] to take over his role” (Latimer 6). As Carl
E. Rollyson Jr. summarizes, “by not becoming actively involved in his
heritage, Ike not only deprived Roth of a chance to see Ike’s principles
in operation but left him to work out very complex problems for himself ” (110). While these critics have clariﬁed what Ike fails to do forRoth, it seems to me that they have failed to analyze what Ike does forRoth (or for the Edmondses) by the relinquishment of his patrimony.
John G. Peters, who tries to defend what numerous critics, as well as
Cass, have called Ike’s escape from his responsibility, contends that “thealternative is no better. None who accepted the inheritance is admirable,
certainly not Carothers McCaslin or Zack and Roth Edmonds” (42). Thisview, however, is unfair to the Edmondses because it obscures the factthat they cannot be “admirable” at least in part—or in large part—becauseof Ike’s renunciation. It is not that Ike’s ethical decision foregrounds theshortcomings of the Edmondses. It is that Ike, “freeing” himself fromthe curse or debt of his ancestor(s), places the Edmondses in a difﬁcult
position where they cannot but feel guilty about the status of their family, not so much because they are supposed to take care of the cultural
debt instead of Ike,3 as because they, as the “woman-made” McCaslins,
think of themselves as “usurpers” (Faulkner 111).
This feeling of guilt is difﬁcult for Roth to remove because Ike still
lives in the community as a constant reminder of his family’s status as
undeserved “usurpers.” Perhaps “[Ike’s] acceptance of a monthly stipend
from the plantation he refused to run is a sad compromise with his ethical ideal” (Kern 43), but I would also point out that the payment of thisstipend, however nominal in economic terms, has emotionally burdened
the Edmondses. Ike has long made them redeem Hubert Beauchamp’s
IOUs for him. “ ‘We’re not usurpers,’ the boy [Roth] said [to his father],cried almost. ‘Our grandmother McCaslin was as much kin to old
Carothers as Uncle Buck and Buddy. Uncle Isaac himself gave—Uncle
Isaac himself says . . .’ He ceased” (Faulkner 111; Faulkner’s ellipses).

FAULKNER’S BLACK AND WHITE OEDIPAL DRAMA109

The little Roth’s halting suggests that he suffers from irredeemable guilt
precisely because Ike gave the patrimony to the Edmondses rather thanthey “usurped” it.
If the Edmondses actually “usurped” the righteous heir Ike’s heritage,
Roth might be even proud of his family, as Lucas respects Cass becauseof his wrong assumption as to what happened between Ike and Cass.
Roth, however, knows better than Lucas, and Lucas’s presence, as wellas Ike’s, constantly makes him self-conscious of his emasculating position as a “woman-made” McCaslin, which makes him deeply insecure
about his own status as the head of the McCaslin/Edmonds/Beauchamp
family. Although a similar psychological burden might fall on Zack(about whom the novel does not tell much), Roth’s insecurity is probably much more serious than Zack’s because he does not have a strong
father like Cass. Zack says to his son, who is bewildered by his father’s
apparently unnatural relationship to the “nigger” Lucas, “I always beat[Lucas] shooting except one time. And as it turned out, I even beat him
then” (Faulkner 111). Zack is in a way right: it turned out that Zack beatLucas—because they live in a racist world, not in the ahistorical oedipal
world. This (support of the) particular social context, however, whether
or not the little Roth is conscious of it, does not make him proud of his
father. Roth senses in adolescence “something which had happened
between Lucas and his father . . . because they were themselves, men,
not stemming from any difference of race nor because one blood strain
ran in them both,” and, in his late teens, thinks: “It was a woman. . . . My
father and a nigger, over a woman. My father and a nigger man over anigger woman. . . . And by God Lucas beat him. . . . Edmonds. . . .
Edmonds. Even a nigger McCaslin is a better man, better than all of us”(112; my ellipses). He evaluates the relationship of the two men from a“de-historicizing” point of view and is compelled to conclude that his
father is not a—or the—“man.”
Lucas, when he represses his biological father, can ﬁnd his oedipal
father in Zack or in old Carothers. This “family romance,” however, isdysfunctional for Roth precisely because he is supposed to be sociallysuperior to Lucas, who otherwise could be Roth’s strong “father” as theman who has beaten his biological father. Repeatedly emphasizing that
Molly “had been the only mother [Roth] ever knew” (Faulkner 97; seealso 106, 107, 113, 126), Faulkner indicates the existence of the oedipal
issue in Roth’s life. The little Roth has two houses but “actually prefer[s]the negro house, the hearth on which even in summer a little ﬁre always

110

KOICHI SUWABE

burned, centering the life in it, to his own” (107). The Beauchamp house
is Roth’s “home.” “One day,” however, “the old curse of his fathers, theold haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident ofgeography, stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong andshame, descended to him” (107). Roth refuses to sleep with his foster
brother Henry Beauchamp, and this social action marks his “fall” orentrance into “his heritage” (110). Roth instantly feels ashamed of himself for his rejection of his foster brother, but “it was too late then, forever and forever too late” (109) for him to admit that he is ashamed of
his act: the Beauchamps do not allow him to do so when they, as Davisputs it, turn “the tables on Carothers” (206) and make him eat alone(Faulkner 110). Davis also observes: “He is denied reentry into the black
family’s world as an equal and the result for him is devastating. He isleft to occupy the very position he forced on his excluded black brother”(206) and “cannot feel racially superior when he is denied familial bonding and left to eat alone” (204). Whereas this interpretation clariﬁes thesubversive nature of this scene (as well as Henry’s sudden, unexplained
disappearance after this scene), illuminating “black retaliation in a withdrawal to a closed circle of family and intimacy inaccessible to whites”(205), I would like to emphasize that the Beauchamps’ exclusion of Rothmeans at once that Roth can never get rid of his guilt and that he cannever become the righteous “son” to Lucas—both because of his sociallypresupposed racial superiority.
Since he cannot redeem his guilt feelings or beat his black “father,”Roth remains an emasculated boy. All he can do is try to repress his guilt
and his inferiority complex as a (“woman-made”) boy who can never
become the “father.” Probably, if Roth were an ordinary boy in a Southern community, this repression would not be too difﬁcult, thanks to its
racist ideology. “Masculinity and manhood,” Davis points out, “are notunmarked by race in Carothers’s culture, and therefore, in order tobecome an independent being within a racially explicit southern culture,
he must distance himself from blacks and accept his racial identity as
white” (201–02). Roth, in fact, never thinks of Henry as far as we know:
his loss of his black brother “cannot be acknowledged for what it is in
the South” (Bockting 208). His lack of grief at the recognition that Molly
is not his real mother (Faulkner 107) probably also stems from his interiorization of the racist ideology (Sensibar 108).
If Roth really succeeds in the repression of his oedipal feelings toward
the black family, however, why is he obsessed with the “nigger” Lucas?

FAULKNER’S BLACK AND WHITE OEDIPAL DRAMA

111

And why does he, just like his “beaten” father, let the “nigger” behave
as he does? Takaki Hiraishi suggests that “the repression of [Roth’s] own
feelings [toward the Negro family] is almost complete” when Roth asks
his father why he allows Lucas to behave as he does (82), but the pointis that Roth’s repression of his feelings toward the Beauchamps remains
just almost complete. Roth, for instance, probably would not have to“discover” that Lucas beat his father ( just as Ike needs to “discover” thesins of old Carothers to live like Sam) if the repression were reallycomplete. To turn this around, Roth’s failure to have a strong father
makes it difﬁcult for him to repress his ambivalent feelings toward the
Negro family. Zack says to Roth: “I’ll make a trade with you. You letme and Lucas settle how he is to treat me, and I’ll let you and him settle how he is to treat you” (Faulkner 111). In short, Zack confesses that
he cannot show or teach Roth how to build a relationship with Lucas or
how to repress his personal feelings in order to treat Lucas simply as a“nigger.”
Noticing that Roth is more tolerant toward Lucas than he is toward
other Negroes such as Samuel Worsham (“Butch”) Beauchamp, DavidPaul Ragan contends that it comes from his familiarity with Lucas aswell as from his feelings about Molly (306n16, 306–07). I, however,assert that Roth cannot punish Lucas because he is “not a man yet”
(Faulkner 343) or is fated to remain an emasculated boy. Roth has nostrong white “father” from whom he can learn how to handle a “nigger.”
And he has never had a chance to “kill” his black “father,” either. Precisely because he is culturally prohibited from taking the Negro man as
his equal or as his “father,” Roth is impotent in his relation to Lucas. As
a result, Lucas comes to represent to him what he cannot overcome:[Roth] thought with amazement and something very like horror: He’s more
like old Carothers than all the rest of us put together, including old Carothers.
He is both heir and prototype simultaneously of all the geography and climate and biology which sired old Carothers and all the rest of us and ourkind, myriad, countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who
fathered himself, intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers musthave been, of all blood black white yellow or red, including his own. (114–15)

This passage testiﬁes to Roth’s failure to repress his personal feelings
toward his Negro family, redeem his guilt feelings both toward theBeauchamps and toward the McCaslins, establish himself as the head of

112

KOICHI SUWABE

the Edmondses/Beauchamps/McCaslins, and become a “man” in the historical South as well as in the ahistorical oedipal world.
To conclude my argument, I would like to show a few examples ofRoth’s trouble and impotence in his relation to Lucas. “The Fire and theHearth” has three chapters, and in each of them Roth tries to avoid his
confrontation with Lucas. In the ﬁrst chapter Roth learns that Lucas has
secretly made whiskey on his land (perhaps Roth has long, if unconsciously, tried not to know this disturbing fact), and he asks Lucas, “Wasthat still they found in the creek yours?” When Lucas asks Roth in return,“Do you want me to answer that?”, however, Roth “violently,” or almost
hysterically, cries, “No!” (69). Then, in the second chapter, Roth learns
that Lucas has stolen his mule, but he has a “second thought” instead ofpunishing him immediately. Reminiscent of Jason, who also lacks a goodmodel as a patriarch, Roth procrastinates about having his confrontation
with the elder Negro: “If that mule aint in her stall by sunup tomorrow,
I’m going to telephone the sheriff. Do you hear me?” (85). And, in thethird chapter, when Molly asks for his help with Lucas’s gold hunt, Rothorders Lucas to “get rid of that machine”: “You bring that thing up to
my house the ﬁrst thing in the morning. You hear me?” (118). Lucas, as
usual, ignores his “master’s” words and fails to appear next morning,and “for a moment [Roth] thought of going to Lucas’ house” (119). Roth,however, drops the idea and avoids a situation in which he would haveto deal with Lucas until the next morning when he learns that Molly
almost killed herself following his advice. Paralyzed in his dysfunctionalfamily romance in the racist South, Roth cannot have a stable relationship with Lucas, either as a “son” or as a “father.”IV.
Lucas struggles to go back to the oedipal world (or to the Imaginary)because he cannot be a “man” in the actual South (or in the Symbolic),
and Roth struggles to behave as a “man” in the actual South because hehas to repress his family romance fantasy. If Ike assumed his “rightful”
position, he could be the “father” both in the oedipal world and in theactual South for both of the two “sons” who struggle in vain to be “men.”Ike, however, has been the “dead father” who, as it were, embodies the
futility of the two men’s romantic struggles. Since it is impossible to killthe “dead father” (as is shown in The Unvanquished), it is little wonderthat the conﬂict between Lucas and Roth apparently never ends. Molly’s

FAULKNER’S BLACK AND WHITE OEDIPAL DRAMA

113

intervention with Lucas’s quest for his utopia, one might argue, not only
makes Roth ﬁnally confront Lucas but also leads to his victory when
Lucas calls him “Mister Roth Edmonds.” This “happy ending,” however,is not Roth’s own achievement but rather an instance of Molly’s“spoiling” him. As Lucas will probably continue his masculine gender
performance to ﬁght against his curse/cage as a “man-made” black
McCaslin, so probably Roth will continue to suffer from his curse/cageas a “woman-made” white McCaslin—though, in “Delta Autumn,” wewill learn that Roth’s struggle in the McCaslin cage turns out to involve
Ike, the “dead father” who imprisons him in his cage.
NOTES
1

In this essay, I use the word “Negro” to suggest the ideologically problematic implications in Faulkner’s work.
2
Faulkner, as Susan Willis points out, makes Ike and Boon Hogganbeck go to thecity—where Boon even proposes that they go to the zoo, that is, the artiﬁcial wilderness—before the ﬁnal hunt of Old Ben (93).
3With the possible exception of Cass, the Edmondses are probably ignorant of theincest sin of old Carothers; if Zack knew, probably he would not name his son after old
Carothers. Note that Roth’s birth comes after Cass’s death.

WORKS CITED
Bealer, Tracy. “ ‘Just Git the Womenfolks to Working at It’: The Construction of Black Masculinity in Go Down, Moses.” Atenea 28.1
(2008): 117–31.
Bell, Bernard W. “William Faulkner’s ‘Shining Star’: Lucas Beauchamp
as a Marginal Man.” Kinney, Critical Essays 224–33.
Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. Single vol. ed. New York:
Vintage, 1991.
Bockting, Ineke. “Whiteness and the Love of Color: The Developmentof a Theme in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.” Skei 197–201.
Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. “Go Down, Moses and the Ascetic Imperative.” Faulkner and the Short Story: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha,
1990. Ed. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: UP of
Mississippi, 1992. 206–28.
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990.
Clark, Keith. “Man on the Margin: Lucas Beauchamp and the Limitations of Space.” Faulkner Journal 6.1 (1990): 67–79.

114

KOICHI SUWABE

Creighton, Joanne V. William Faulkner’s Craft of Revision: The Snopes
Trilogy, The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses. Detroit: Wayne
State UP, 1977.
Davis, Thadious M. Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, andFaulkner’s Go Down, Moses. Durham: Duke UP, 2003.
Dunn, Margaret M. “The Illusion of Freedom in The Hamlet and Go
Down, Moses.” American Literature 57 (1985): 407–23.
Duvall, John N. “Silencing Women in ‘The Fire and the Hearth’ and‘Tomorrow.’ ” College Literature 16.1 (1989): 75–82.
Early, James. The Making of Go Down, Moses. Dallas: Southern
Methodist UP, 1972.
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Foster, Thomas C. “History, Private Consciousness, and Narrative Formin Go Down, Moses.” Centennial Review 28 (1984): 61–76.
Godden, Richard. “Agricultural Adjustment, Revenants, Remnants, andCounter-Revolution in Faulkner’s ‘The Fire and the Hearth.’” Faulkner
Journal 12.2 (1997): 41–55.
Gray, Richard. “Across the Great Divide: Race and Revision in Go
Down, Moses.” Skei 185–93.
Hiraishi, Takaki. “ ‘Mammy’ as Faulkner’s Repressed Mother: Molly
Beauchamp’s Genealogy.” Etudes Faulknérienne 3 (2002): 77–84.
Hochberg, Mark R. “The Unity of Go Down, Moses.” Tennessee Studies
in Literature 21 (1976): 58–65.
Joiner, Jennie J. “The Slow Burn of Masculinity in Faulkner’s Hearthand Morrison’s Oven.” Faulkner Journal 25.2 (2010): 53–68.
Kern, Alexander C. “The Growth and Achievement of Faulkner’s ‘The
Bear.’ ” Platte Valley Review 4 (1976): 26–45.
Kinney, Arthur F., ed. Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The McCaslin
Family. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.
—. “Faulkner and the Problematics of Procreation.” Connotations
8.3 (1998–99): 325–37.
—. Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time. New York:
Twayne, 1996.
Klotz, Marvin. “Procrustean Revision in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.”William Faulkner: Critical Assessments. Vol. 3. Ed. Henry Claridge.
East Sussex, UK: Helm Information, 1999. 731–44.
Kuyk, Dirk, Jr. Threads Cable-Strong: William Faulkner’s Go Down,
Moses. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1983.

FAULKNER’S BLACK AND WHITE OEDIPAL DRAMA

115

Latimer, Kathleen. “Comedy as Order in Go Down, Moses.” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 10 (1984): 1–8.
Matthews, John T. The Play of Faulkner’s Language. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1982.
Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth. “The Distaff Side: The Women of Go Down,
Moses.” Kinney, Critical Essays 198–212.
Nilon, Charles H. Faulkner and the Negro. New York: Citadel P, 1965.
Peters, John G. “Repudiation, Wilderness, Birthright: Reconciling Conﬂicting Views of Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin.” English Language Notes
33.3 (1996): 39–46.
Ragan, David Paul. “The Evolution of Roth Edmonds in Go Down,
Moses.” Mississippi Quarterly 38 (1985): 295–310.
Robinson, David W., and Caren J. Town. “Who Dealt These Cards?: The
Excluded Narrators of Go Down, Moses.” Twentieth Century Literature 37 (1991): 192–206.
Rollyson, Carl E., Jr. Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner.
Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984.
Ross, Stephen M. “Thick-Tongued Fiction: Julia Peterkin and Some
Implications of the Dialect Tradition.” Faulkner, His Contemporaries,
and His Posterity. Ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Tübingen, Ger.:
Francke, 1993. 229–44.
Rowe, John Carlos. “The African-American Voice in Faulkner’s Go
Down, Moses.” Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite
Fictions and Fictive Communities. Ed. Gerald Kennedy. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP: 1995. 76–97.
Sensibar, Judith L. “Who Wears the Mask: Memory, Desire, and Racein Go Down, Moses.” Wagner-Martin, New Essays 101–27.
Skei, Hans H., ed. William Faulkner’s Short Fiction: An International
Symposium. Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1997.
Taylor, Nancy Dew. Annotations to Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. New
York: Garland, 1994.
Taylor, Walter. Faulkner’s Search for a South. Urbana: U of Illinois P,
1983.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Introduction. New Essays 1–20.
—, ed. New Essays on Go Down, Moses. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1996.
Weinstein, Philip M. What Else But Love?: The Ordeal of Race inFaulkner and Morrison. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.

116

KOICHI SUWABE

Willis, Susan. “Aesthetics of the Rural Slum: Contradictions and Dependency in ‘The Bear.’ ” Social Text 2 (1979): 82–103.
Winston, Jay S. “Going Native in Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s Fragmented America and ‘The Indian.’ ” Faulkner Journal 18.1–2 (2002–
03): 129–42.
Zender, Karl F. Faulkner and the Politics of Reading. Baton Rouge:Louisiana State UP, 2002.
Žižek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman andCausality. London: Verso, 1994.