Yeah, I'm whining here

Progress Bar from Writertopia

Yeah, that's the Master's paper progress. GAH! Good thing I had the Watchmen fun last weekend because I think I can only come away from the computer to eat during this one. Oh and Battlestar Galactica. Too bad I didn't structure my studies to do a paper on that show. I would probably want to write that.

I finally got to my thesis paragraph in the introduction, so now I have to figure out the shift into the body of the paper.

What is surprising is how often incest is used as a theme. It shows up in Flags in the Dust, one of his earliest works, but the use is probably best remembered from The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner layers miscegenation with incest in the fine old plantation families of Yoknapatawpha County as if just one of the sexual crimes wasn’t bad enough. Granted, Faulkner didn’t shy away from portraying people as evil, inept, corrupt, broken, or as decent as people are capable of being. So seeing incest as a theme one or twice would make sense, after all, there has probably been a taboo against ever since people formed tribes. Yet, Faulkner uses it over and over again, as well as change what incest represents and how it is portrayed in each novel.

Incest, much like non-sexual child abuse, can become a cycle that is repeated in families. Looking at it like that, instead of just something disturbing that affects the characters, one can see the attraction to keep using it as a theme. It becomes added to the Past that the characters are struggling to grapple with, just like the Civil War and race relations and tied those two themes together as well as remaining another cycle to be perpetuated, acknowledged, or broken within the world Faulkner created.

I keep wanting to stop and footnote myself to explain word choices. Miscegenation was a crime for most of the South before and after the Civil War (hell, some places might still have it on the books unenforced). Only the crazy French around New Orleans seemed to give a damn about not treating their children by slaves as slaves; one of the reasons why New Orleans had a thriving free black society much sooner than other Southern cities. Plus the fact that I view it as a form of rape. It was not the same as consensual slavery the BDSM crowd enjoys.

Bah, time to drive home.