FATHER/son Binary

In William Faulkner's Light in August, he portrays an interesting relationship between Joe Christmas and his adopted father, McEachern. Jessica Benjamin labeled binaries as a type of relationship in which one person is dominant over the other. This binary is present between the two. McEachern is a cold, disconnected, violent character who relentlessly attempts to place religious strict religious values upon his son. While he appears to be passionate about his religious beliefs, in reality, he is one of the more detached characters in the book.


What I find interesting in the relationship is that his character rubbed off Christmas. He spends the days working hard to pass the time and becomes extremely hateful. He begins escaping from his house to go into town, partly in an attempt to see the woman he is interested in and also to escape from his harsh home environment. Eventually, his repression at home overcomes when he kills his father following escaping from his home. Multiple times, he yells, "I said I would kill him some day!", swinging a chair back and forth. Almost resembling sociopathic behavior, he laughs at his father's death, mocking to McEacher's wife that, "He's at a dance." Furthermore, when he returns to the restaurant in a flurried attempt to marry the woman he'd briefly been seeing, he lunges at the men who try to remove him from the restaurant, "with something of the exaltation of his adopted father..."
As can be shown, the dominance McEachern tried to display upon Christmas resulted in his destruction as a character.


I think this chapter in the book has strong implications for Jessica Benjamin's binaries. The chapter develops the theme that isolation is a consequence of dominance, as both McEachern and Christmas end up alone. In both of their attempts to display authoritative behavior, they have drastic downfalls in their character.