earticle

영어

This paper aims to reconsider Ike McCaslin’s ecology and its consequences in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses in conjunction with the idea of sovereignty. In opposition to recent skepticism about the ecological potentials of Ike McCaslin’s wilderness experience, this paper re-emphasizes the wilderness as the source of ethically crucial virtues. While learning to hunt in the Mississippi woods, Ike also learns how insignificant a human being is. The wilderness thus provides Ike an occasion to question the primacy of human sovereignty over nature and animals, and by extension to disavow white patriarchal sovereignty over enslaved Africans. But this paper claims that Ike’s wilderness experience has failed, not because it is inherently flawed, but because Ike has failed to render it socially meaningful. To prove this, this paper argues that sovereignty is not just about owning property or lording over humans, nature, and animals, but also about the owning of racial blood. Despite Ike’s complacent belief that he succeeded in leaving behind the bane of sovereignty, Ike has failed to erase the haunting specter of sovereignty in the elusive shape of racial blood.