Analysis. Joe Christmas and Miss Burden are bound by a variety of similarities, but rather than unite and stabilize the pair

Joe Christmas and Miss Burden are bound by a variety of similarities, but rather than unite and stabilize the pair, these similarities ultimately divide and upend them. Like Hightower and Byron, they are outsiders, living on the fringes of a society that spurns or ignores them. Both are seen as foreigners: Joe as an enigmatic racial presence, Miss Burden as a transplanted Yankee whose liberal family politics scandalized the town and resulted in the murder of her brother and grandfather. In addition, Faulkner represents both characters as fractured and divided, two beings whose fruitless search for wholeness and self-unity brings them tragically together.

Whereas Joe’s personal schism is seen through the lens of race and biracialism, Miss Burden’s split is expressed in terms of gender. At first a distinction is made between their platonic, daytime relationship and their sexual life that plays out only under the cover of darkness. “It was as though there were two people,” Faulkner writes of Miss Burden. Later, over the course of a few paragraphs, the double presence that Miss Burden embodies is expressed in terms of “a dual personality: the one the woman... the other the mantrained muscles and the mantrained habit of thinking born of heritage and environment with which he had to fight up to the final instant.” In this brief passage, Faulkner characterizes not only the historical and personal legacy with which his characters struggle—the same environmental factors that also forged and influenced Joe’s behaviors—but also the self-generated and willful desire for power, supremacy, and control that would divide the lovers to the end.

Ultimately, it is Miss Burden’s impulse and desire for control—and greater clarity—in their relationship that prompts Joe’s violent retaliation against any attempt to cage or collar him. Fundamentally, Miss Burden does not understand her relationship to Joe, why she is drawn to him or why she feels a growing dependence on their intimacy. Like Joe, for Miss Burden the bond between them is as unsettling, confusing, and personally threatening as it is desirable and difficult to resist. As a result, she struggles to find ways to make it more defined or tangible, claiming at first that she is pregnant, then offering to put him in charge of her affairs. Later, she proposes that he attend a black college and then be trained by her lawyer in Memphis, with the intent of him ultimately assuming responsibility for her legal matters.

These attempts that Miss Burden makes to codify their relationship, to nurture and connect emotionally with Joe, provoke his ire and set off a chain reaction ending in Miss Burden’s death and the burning of her house. Joe feels doubly threatened by her, as she displays both feminine intimacy (which he resents, as he did with Mrs. McEachern) and a masculine impulse to master and rule. Miss Burden is a complex and unresolved presence that Joe, in the end, feels he must eliminate rather than attempt to understand. As attraction turns to contempt and eventual hatred, Joe derives pleasure from the fact that he has corrupted Miss Burden and that he uses sex to humiliate and control her. Miss Burden’s guilt at her physical and eventual spiritual submission fuels her impulse to counsel and improve Joe, much as she does with the constituents of the black colleges she advises. Ultimately, Joe sees Miss Burden’s actions as a form of patronage and unintended condescension that he cannot abide.

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