순수의 이념과 오염의 육체

The Ideology of Innocence and Polluted Body: A Reading of William Faulkner’s Light in August

This paper explores the obsession with purity and refusal of pollution dominating the white male ideology of the American South through the lens of Julia Kristeva's conception of abjection. Abjection is a concept referring to a psychic mechanism that the subject throws out the object blurring the boundary between its inside and outside by making it dirty. This abjection mechanism is, I argue, the underlying psychic structure of the Southern ideology in which the blackness and the femaleness are represented as sharing the characteristics of the abject: the dirty body threatening pure spirit. Joe Chritmas, the protagonist of Light in August, is an indeterminate figure resisting a clear classification into either the white or the black, and thereby deconstructing the Southern social system built upon this racial classification. Southerners’ violent refusal of him culminating in Percy Grimm's castrating act is the abjection process through which they attempt to rebuild their racial and gender boundary. Joe's tragedy lies in the fact that he follows the very logic of the white male society that expels and sacrifices him as the abject. I argue that Faulkner in Light in August succeeds in revealing the abjection mechanism of the Southern ideology that Joe himself internalizes, yet colludes with it by mystifying Lena as the symbol of maternal purity.