Joe Christmas is a very complex character, perhaps one of the most complex literary figures of this century. Much of his complexity is derived from his early relationships with women. Indeed, Joe’s life is shaped very much by the women he encounters as a young boy; the dietician and Mrs. McEachern, and the impact these women have on him is evident most clearly in the two major relationships he has later on in his life: with Bobbie the waitress and Joanna Burden. Although Joe is a man of a truly conflicted nature, living between the absolutes of white and black, it is the women in his life who continually force him to confront and claim one of these absolutes, which he is ultimately unable to do.

Joe’s first and perhaps most traumatic encounter with women occurred at a very early age, while he is still in the orphanage. While hiding in a closet and eating toothpaste, he mistakenly eavesdrops on the dietician having a romantic interlude with another staff member of the orphanage. Joe, a young child, has no idea what is really happening. He is discovered when the toothpaste makes him physically ill and he vomits. From the onset, the physical sensations of sickness and guilt and

“It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men.” - Pg. 169

“Tell niggers that I am a nigger too?” She now looked at him. Her face was quite calm. It was the face of an old woman now.

At first it shocked him, the abject fury of the New England glacier exposed suddenly to the fire of the New England biblical hell. Perhaps he was aware of the abnegation in it: the imperious and fierce urgency that concealed an actual despair at frustrate and irrevocable years, which she appeared to compensate each night as if she believed that it would be the last night on earth by damming herself forever to the hell of her forefathers, by living not alone in sin but in filth.” - Pg. 258

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