'I am telling': The discourse of incest and miscegenation in William Faulkner's 'Go Down, Moses' and 'Absalom, Absalom!' and Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon'

Critical assessments of incidents of incest in William Faulkner's and Toni Morrison's oeuvre have typically treated incest as symbolic of a larger theme. Such approaches presume that incest is a signifier and as such the act is less significant than the grander idea it represents and that a hidden meaning lies at the center of the fictional incest. This study elevates incest from the role of mere signifier by examining the discourses of a specific form of incest which brings together the socially constructed expressions of incest and race. This "racialized incest" is examined in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, Absalom, Absalom!, and Morrison's Song of Solomon. In the instances under consideration the incest occurs between a character who is socially constructed as mixed race and one who is not.; In addition to the negative social connotations of either incest or miscegenation alone, racialized incest is a transgression of a greater magnitude; it is a social offense demanding a resolution. I demonstrate that in all three instances, the resolution comes from the circular ascription of blame for the incest on the miscegenated feminine participant.; Key to blaming feminine characters and to bringing a resolution are the discourses of the novels which I examine using the theoretical work of French social critic Michel Foucault. This analysis reveals that in each of the three works, the blaming process results in the feminine character being cast out in a futile attempt to restore the social and racial order.