Miss+Atkins

Miss Atkins is the dietitian in the orphanage where Joe Christmas grew up. While there, and in a very Freudian scene, Joe catches her having sex. Afraid that he would tell and that she would get into trouble, and possibly lose her job, she places him in a foster home. Miss Atkins seems like a minor character, but her actions that day led Joe Christmas to become who he was. Due to this volatile first introduction to sex, Joe was shaped to distrust woman, and it is the the reason for his aggressive attitude towards sex later on. He feels the need to exert his power over women, in attempt to make up for the woman who ruined his life. The chapter about Joe’s childhood, and when the reader is first introduced to Miss Atkins starts off with, “Memory believes before knowing remembers” (LIA 119). This vague musing shows how the memory of that day and what followed, correlated to the way Joe Christmas understood things about life. Joe sneaks into her office in attempt to take some toothpaste to eat, “he was watching the pink worm coil smooth and slow onto his parchment colored finger” (120). As he watches her enter the room with Charley, he hides behind the curtain, embarrassed about being caught. The narrator notes that “the dietician was nothing to him yet”, the use of the word “yet” foreshadows that Miss Atkins, and the situation that is about to unfold, is going to make Miss Atkins everything to him. His first association to her was that of “something of pleasing association” (120). She brought him food, and it was in her office that he first discovered toothpaste and that kind of oral pleasure. What is interesting is that while Joe Christmas is overhearing them having sex, “the dietitian”, changes to “the woman”. In this subtle name shift Faulkner is showing that when it comes to this primal moment, there is no association to a certain person- she becomes all womanhood- which is where Joe’s mistrust comes from. Joe has a violent reaction to the toothpaste (a phallic symbol), and reveals where he has been hiding. Miss Atkins grabs him, “surrounded by wild and dishevelled hair whose smooth bands once made him think of candy”(Faulkner 122). Again, the association with Miss Atkins had shifted- she has now become a person he once like, to a person who has a “thin, furious voice”(Faulkner 122). Miss Atkins didn’t just introduce Joe to sex, but also made him aware of his race, and his position in society due to his race. In that moment of rage and revelation she calls him “you little rat! Spying on me! You little nigger bastard!(Faulkner 122), which is Joe’s first encounter with the word, and with the animosity that comes from being “parchment colored”. After this interaction, she is described as “she” - no longer a source of pleasure for Joe, but another human being passing through. He waited for her punishment, until “she just held him, not shaking him, as if her hand didn’t know what to do next… “Tell then! You little nigger bastard! You nigger bastard!”(Faulkner 125). When she finally does think of a punishment- placing him in a home where he will be unloved, the narrator notes that she turned “with her natural female infallibility for the spontaneous comprehension of evil” (126). Here, the complete dissociation and then replacement with a negative association is seen. Womanhood has been forever changes for Joe, and he now sees their actions as vindictive and is hesitant to accept their help. His first actual sexual experience was aggressive and has a violent tone to it, “she let herself be half carried, half dragged among the growing plants, the furrows, and into the woods, the trees” (190). This first, violent experience is due to his first interaction with sex, and in this moment he is revisiting the violence he saw in Miss Atkins office. Freud describes uncanny through two German words- //Heimlich// (familiar), and //Unheimlich// (unfamiliar). Through these binary oppositions, Freud is showing that an uncanny feeling is something that is both known and concealed from a person. Just like something familiar can become unfamiliar, something unfamiliar can become familiar, which leads to an ambiguous nature- an interchangeable relationship between both the familiar and unfamiliar. In psychoanalytic thought, repression turns into “morbid anxieties”(Freud 429). What Freud is arguing is that this sense of uncanny is when morbid anxieties reoccur, bringing the adult back to its own repressed infantile fears. This familiar yet unfamiliar feeling, this “uncanny” feeling, is coming back into the conscious mind. So when Joe is confronted with a woman who has made him food and offered him a future, he immediately turns to rage and distrust because that is what he has been used to. This familiar yet unfamiliar feeling of a women somehow having the upper hand leads for Joe to act rashly. Miss Atkins serves as the catalyst for Joe’s mistrust in women. She was his first in some ways- she showed him that he is different, and even though he exists in this gray area of race, but he will never be considered white.

Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams" in // Literary Theory, an Anthology //. Eds. Michael Ryan and Julie Rivkin. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. 397- 329. Print.