Mrs.+McEachern

Mrs. McEachern is married to Mr. McEachern, a strict, religious man who adopts Joe Christmas in LIA.

 Mrs. McEachern seems desperate to form a connection or relationship with Joe Christmas. It is never really made clear why Mr. McEachern decided to adopt in the first place, and to choose Joe as well, but we as readers can be pretty sure Mrs. McE did not have a say in it. She did not come with her husband to the orphanage, she simply accepted both him and Christmas when they came back from it. When she first appears in LIA, Faulkner’s initial description of her is of someone beaten, emotionally and spiritually, and the further we read the safer it is to assume it is Mr. McE who is responsible, “She was dressed, in black, with a bonnet—a small woman, entering timidly, a little hunched, with a beaten face. She looked fifteen years older than the rugged and vigorous husband. She did not quite enter the room. She just came within the door and stood there for a moment, in her bonnet and her dress of rusty yet oftenbrushed black, carrying an umbrella and a palm leaf fan, with something queer about her eyes, as if whatever she saw or heard, she saw or heard through a more immediate man-shape or manvoice, as if she were the medium and the vigorous and ruthless husband the control” (148). She is a character who has been thoroughly broken, likely by the cold, distant, yet demanding Mr. McE. When she is first introduced in the novel, she is waiting for Joe and Mr. McE to finish with the catechism Mr. McE is trying to make Joe learn so they can go to church. She never bothers them, even though she checks up on them several times as if to remind them about church. But she never interrupts them, probably because she knows better, and eventually gives up on going to church. She never interrupts anything her husband does, rather she waits for him to acknowledge her, that way she won’t do something he might not like. I understand this mode of thinking quite well, actually: that it might be better to just avoid confrontation and conflict entirely, in an effort to keep the peace. When Joe is about to be confronted for lying and selling his heifer, Mrs. McE does not try to stop her husband, she just waits, “It was not yet full dark and she could see her husband standing in the barn door. She did not call. She just stood there and watched the two men meet” (162). Even if she had tried to interfere at this very moment, both men would not have let her, not out of concern for her but because they feel she has no place or right coming between them. The unique personalities of the two men would have thought this, but probably so would many other men in the South. A woman was not supposed to question the authority of men, they were expected to be obedient and unquestioning.  Only once does Faulkner describe her going out of character and confronting her husband in an attempt to help Joe; when she tries to take the blame for Joe’s lying. She tries to make her husband believe that she bought Joe the suit with her own money, but Mr. McE already found out the truth from Joe, so it was too late. It is right after this scene that Faulkner goes into more detail about her, and how she saw Joe as salvation from a life devoid of feeling, “She was waiting on the porch—a patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation at all save the neat screw of graying hair and the skirt—when the buggy drove up. It was as though instead of having been subtly slain and corrupted by the ruthless and bigoted man into something beyond his intending and her knowing, she had been hammered stubbornly thinner and thinner like some passive and dully malleable metal, into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes” (165). Faulkner’s description of her is inhuman, comparing her to metal and making her life seem empty and devoid of meaning. He does not even giver her a first name, though we learn Mr. McE’s is Simon. This section goes on to explain how from the very beginning she tried to love Joe, or at the very least form a bond with him. Unfortunately for her Joe had already learned to distrust women and any kindness shown him. While Joe tried to distance himself as far as possible from being like his adoptive father, they are similar in their refusal to form any sort of meaningful relationship with her.

 Her relationship with Mr. McE is tricky to explain but easy to understand. I do not think he ever loved her, or even trusted her, and that might be why she is as Faulkner depicts her. So it is interesting when she tries to connect with Joe, because it is almost like she is rebelling against Mr. McE by doing so. She sees Joe as another chance to bond with another person, to maybe give her life meaning. Her attempts at connecting with Joe are done in secret, because it is likely Mr. McE would disapprove, but her continuous attempts to bond can be seen as a small, quiet defiance of the patriarchal system she seems trapped in. They show she still has some level of independence, of a will to live through connecting with another person. We as readers never see or hear of her interacting with anyone besides Joe and her husband. She does not go to town with them when they do, she remains back at home. Her isolation from other people probably makes her even more desperate to form a relationship with Joe, and she does not give up even when her attempts are rebuked. When she brings Joe food to his room after he faints from hunger, she acknowledges that she knows her actions would get her into trouble with Mr. McE if he found out. She tells Joe this, maybe in an attempt to bond through a mutual dislike of her husband. She tries convincing Joe to eat by saying things like “‘I know what you think. It aint that. He never told me to bring it to you. It was me that thought to do it. He dont know”’ (154). He refuses the act of kindness, the attempt at bonding, but remembers it when he is older and looking back at his life. When he is older Joe sees clearly the innocence and desperation behind her actions, how he could have been her savior when she was starving for connection, affection, anything, “At seventeen, looking back he could see now the long series of trivial, clumsy, vain efforts born of frustration and fumbling and dumb instinct: the dishes she would prepare for him in secret and then insist on his accepting and eating them in secret, when he did not want them and he know that McEachern would not care anyway; the times when, like tonight, she would try to get herself between him and the punishment which, deserved or not, just or unjust, was impersonal, both the man and the boy accepting it as a natural and inescapable fact until she, getting in the way, must give it an odor, an attenuation, an aftertaste” (167). Joe is such a complex, onion kind of character that it is difficult to focus on other characters who seem much more one-dimensional and lacking in complexity. But in thinking and writing about Mrs. McE, she becomes a little more complicated. She never stops trying to bond with him, even after he gets older and constantly rejects her. It is interesting that she seems to hold out on this thin thread of hope that maybe one day, eventually, he won’t reject her, but we as readers know what she does not about Joe and his way of thinking. He never forgets the acts of kindness she did for him, despite his refusal to accept them, and through his remembering we see that she did have an impact on him, but Faulkner is vague in just how she affected him.

 When Joe begins stealing money from her, she does not punish him or tell on him. She tries to talk to him about it, yet another attempt at connecting with her adopted son, which fails. In her final scene, after Joe comes back after killing Mr. McE, we see one last time her attempt to connect with him. He comes back and takes the rest of the money she had been saving and hiding from her husband for years. He has basically admitted to killing Mr. McE at the dance, and is in the process of taking her money and leaving. She does not say anything as he does this, she does not try to stop him. After all this time, even after he killed her husband, she still holds out hope that maybe they can connect, that maybe he might want her help. I think it is a part of the human condition to feel needed, and without it we feel incomplete. Mrs. McE probably never felt needed, by her husband or Joe, so when Joe comes back for the money, either she lets him take it as a way to help him, or she has just given up. Faulkner deliberately denies her a reaction to Joe’s actions, and readers never know what she may have been thinking. We feel sympathy for her, and pity, the very feelings she tries to show Joe, and the very feelings Joe fears most. I do not think her situation in life was uncommon in the South, or in general, but Faulkner turns her motherly hopes and instincts into a form of rebellion against the patriarchal system. Her female agency, however little it was, ends up being used against her when she tries to bond with Joe. Her acts of kindness only make him distrust and disrespect women more, and through her Faulkner makes us question the role or presence of female agency in the south, and where it fits within a system broken by war. A war by men.