Mixed Race Studies

The Caste Taboo in William Faulkner’s “Elly” and “Mountain Victory”

EuroAmerica: A Journal of European and American Studies
Volume 25, Number 3 (September 1995)
pages 1-24
Online ISSN:1991-7864; Print ISSN: 1021-3058  

Wen-ching Ho
Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Simca, Republic of China

Miscegenation is “the ultimate horror.”
—Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge (414)

In William Faulkner’s social milieu, white male hegemony fostered a double standard which condoned one form of miscegenation, between white men and black women, while vehemently prohibiting the other form. Both condonement and prohibition had to do with maintaining the existing racial structure. To be more specific, one means of ensuring white dominance was, as James Kinney has pointed out, to extend their mastery over blacks to the bed, where the sex act itself served as ritualistic reenactment of the daily pattern of social dominance. Another means of sustaining white dominance was to deny the offspring produced from miscegenetic liaisons. By relegating mulattoes to the status of blacks, whites could maintain the sharpness of racial distinctions and the attendant power relationships. A corollary of the imposed classification is the evolution after Reconstruction of a more stringent line of racial demarcation called the “one-drop rule.” The rule classed as a Negro any individual with a known trace of Negro blood in his veins. The notion that “one drop of black blood makes a Negro” eventually came to color all discussions on the subject of miscegenation, particularly the taboo form.

As Gunnar Myrdal has noted, the entire Negro problem in America hinges upon this social definition of “race,” with which came the whole stock of valuations, beliefs, and expectations in the two groups, causing and constituting the order of color caste (117). Joel Williamson expresses a similar view when he says summarily that one central fact about the transformation of race relations during the years from 1850 to 1915 is that the whites of the South led the nation in turning from a society in which some blackness in a person might be overlooked to one in which not a single iota of color was excused (109). Booker T. Washington explained the situation quite graphically at the turn of the century: “It is a fact that, if a person is known to have one per cent of African blood in his veins, he ceases to be a white man. The ninety-nine per cent of Caucasian blood does not weigh by the side of one per cent of African blood. The white blood counts for nothing. The person is a Negro every time” (158).

Closely associated with the evolution of the one-drop rule were three strains of thought that interacted to shape white America’s attitudes toward interracial mixture and the nature of mulattoes: polygenism, Lamarckism, and Darwinism. Polygenism contributed ideas about racial differences and inferiority, especially through its emphasis upon notions of racial “genius” and of race as a supraindividual entity. Lamarckism offered an explanation for the evolution of races and the development of the racial essence which, once in the blood, passed on to succeeding generations. The Darwinian notion of hereditary variation not only reinforced feelings of racial superiority and inferiority but in its concentration on evolutionary change also underscored the need for care in terms of which characteristics should be perpetuated or eliminated.

These strains of thought operated together to shape the racial thought in the half-century after Emancipation. They provided late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century academicians the theoretical basis for “scientific” ideas about race in general and miscegenation in particular. The academicians shared the following beliefs: (1) Negroes were temperamentally, physically, and intellectually different from whites; (2) Negroes were also inferior to whites in at least some of the fundamental qualities where-in the races differed, especially in intelligence and in the temperamental basis of enterprise or initiative; (3) Such differences and differentials were either permanent or subject to change only by a very slow process of development; and (4) Because of these permanent or deep-seated differences, miscegenation, especially in the form of intermarriage, was dangerous, for the crossing of such diverse types invariably resulted in a short-lived and unproliflc breed…

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