“Tobe! Show these gentlemen out”

480 Mississippi Quarterly profoundly, or realizes how bereft he would be facing this town on his own, or anything. That’s beyond the story’s imagination, and perhaps beyond Faulkner’s as well. Following Lacan and Žižek, Argiro finds the story’s glimpse of the Real in the “grimace of love” fixed on Homer’s skeletal face. Such a Real may involve more than the failure to gratify sexual desire. Homer’s has become a death’s head, with a look that reflects the putrefaction of an entire social order, and returns the gaze of any member of the audience willing to see the lack structuring self and community. You might say that the unthinkable for the community Faulkner depicts is that its origins lie in the reduction of some human beings to the status of inanimate chattel; that race is a fiction meant to justify the stealing of their very lives from others no different from ourselves; that present social reality is wholly compromised by continuing practices of subjugation, the exercise of advantage, and the refusal to act in ways that acknowledge such governing illusions. Of course Jefferson knows all this too, but they act as if they do not. Some things are left unthought so we are not inconvenienced; others remain unthinkable lest we be undone altogether. “Tobe! Show these gentlemen out” Donald M. Kartiganer University of Mississippi “MISS EMILY AFTER DARK” DIVIDES SHARPLY BETWEEN SPECULATION IN ITS first half on the possibility of incest between Emily and her father and that Homer Barron is partly black, and, in its second half, analysis of possible miscegenation between Emily and her servant Tobe. For me the major strength of the essay lies in the latter material. A part-black Homer Barron adds little to the story. As a Yankee and a “day laborer”— even a foreman—Homer is already, in the eyes of the community, an inappropriate suitor for a “high and mighty” Grierson, and Emily’s possible murder of him can be explained, as it usually has been, as an act of outrage against him for his readiness to bed her but not marry her. That she might also be dismayed by his racial mixture could be one more reason for her outrage, but insofar as it replicates her relationship with Tobe, I think it buries the central difference between the two relationships and diminishes the overall power of the story. 481 Roundtable on “Miss Emily After Dark” As for the suggestion of incest, a violently protective father is not sufficient evidence in itself, but more important, it detracts from what I take to be the chief thrust of the story: the characterization of Emily Grierson, not primarily as a psychically damaged and compulsively driven woman, but as one who methodically and deliberately challenges virtually all the social, historical, sexual, and ideological boundaries within which she lives, especially as those boundaries are described, implicitly and explicitly, by the narrator. Above all, there is the boundary—social and literary—of the spinster stereotype: “dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse,” designed to render a woman more pathetic than powerful in her various displays of defiance. Faulkner’s creation of women who challenge these boundaries—they exist in far greater numbers in his fiction than comparable male characters—certainly influences my reading of the story and Thomas Argiro’s essay, but it is tempting to see her as a version (sui generis to be sure) of Caddy Compson, Addie Bundren, and Temple Drake, to take only those women who either precede or more or less coexist with her creation. It is with the treatment of Tobe that the essay offers new material, not only in keeping with what I take to be the story’s major contribution, but its crowning example. Thomas Dilworth proposed a miscegenative relationship between Emily and Tobe in an earlier article, but Argiro expands the idea considerably, and more persuasively. What I find most striking—now that this essay has forced me to think about it—is that, while never commenting on the possible oddity or even scandal of Emily’s living situation, the narrator carefully marks the movements and gradual aging of the Negro: from...