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• Title: Terrorizing Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha County (Critical Essay)
• Author : The Faulkner Journal
• Release Date : January 22, 2008
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 221 KB

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In Absalom, Absalom! Quentin Compson's epiphany that Clytie "owns the terror" (295) is a white conceptualization: to white (and terrified) Quentin, Clytie embodies the fears of race-mixture that characterize any white supremacist society, certainly the pre-Civil Rights-era South. Quentin, though one of the most confused and tortured individuals in Yoknapatawpha, is, up until this point, at least sure of one thing: he is sure of his race. He knows he is white, and he knows--or thinks he knows--how to negotiate the racial codes of his culture, even if he is less sure about the gender codes, the sexuality codes, the honor codes, and all the rest. But confronted with the fact of Clytie's mixed racial heritage, Quentin's last bulwark against the complete fragmentation of his identity comes under ideological siege: if Clytie can exist as half-black, half-white, what meaning can there be in Quentin's whiteness? If "nature" itself can allow such an ideologically "wrong" admixture to be, to exist, to live, to breathe, and to function, then the entire ideology becomes suspect, giving rise to "terror" in those who espouse and benefit from the ideology. And further, if this embodiment lends power (it is something Clytie "owns"; it is, somehow, property, and property, in a capitalist society, is power), then the fear becomes very deep indeed--nothing less than the entire world, specifically, in this case, Quentin's world, is at stake. As Rosa Coldfield puts it, one might as well "watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too" (112). Though Rosa seems to scoff at the notion that such an event would ever be possible, Quentin begins to understand that because of Clytie and others like her, perhaps that fall is at hand--and what is more, perhaps it should be. And if it were to happen, what would Quentin be left with? Without caste, there could be no whiteness, and without whiteness, Quentin, and others like him, would have no self. Clytie's existence thus terrorizes Quentin's whiteness; the "terror" that Clytie "owns" is a white terror, a white's terror, of becoming not white. But if Clytie were to speak about terrorizing whiteness (which, of course she does not--cannot), she would likely hold a different view. For Clytie, as for most if not all of Yoknapatawpha's Negroes, terrorizing whiteness is not something to do; it is something one experiences. It is a noun, not a verb. Acts and ideas of terror pervade the history of white domination of nonwhites in the South; indeed, slavery itself is a terrorist institution. Terror is, in many ways, the mechanism by which whiteness both asserts and enforces its power.

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