The Human Stain: An Academics Downfall

The Human Stain is about a story of Coleman Brutus Silk, a classic professor and sometime dean of faculty at Athena College in western Massachusetts who is hectored by the forces of political correctness and hate. Coleman Silk, Roth's protagonist and an epitome of secrecy and self-invention was born into a lower-middle-class African- American family with serious cultural aspirations. An exceptionally brilliant student and an invincible champion in the ring, Coleman did not ever suspect that he would be discriminated in America because of his ethnic affiliations.

Playing confidant to Coleman, Zuckerman soon learns of his friend’s affair to Faunia Farley, a thirty-four year old janitorial help with the Athena College who doubled up as a cleaning woman in the local post office, and how the relationship has changed his outlook on life. Irritated with sexual jealousy and misplaced feminist sympathies, Delphine Roux, the Yale-educated literary theorist who heads the combined language and literature department at Athena, reads into Coleman’s affair a classic stance of misogyny and hopeless defeat of the female, and on impulse sends him in unsigned scandalous

letter. Coleman in the intrusion of his personal life, goes into self exile and seeks solace in the company of Faunia, his fellow traveler and mistress. Driven by loneliness Zuckerman visits a classical music rehearsal held in Tanglewood finding Coleman and Faunia together. He anticipated that Coleman was after all harboring a secret. Despite of Coleman’s air of being someone firmly established, if he need an obstinate and purposeful opponent, the angry faculty giant who quit rather than take their humiliating crap, somewhere there’s a blank in him too.

I don’t begin to guess what (213). Finally, at Coleman’s funeral, Zuckerman moved by the solemn understanding that the proper presentation of Coleman’s secret is his problem to solve (45). Resolves to depict Coleman’s disaster and disguise(45)in his fiction. Zuckerman begins to comprehend that there is no way he could quarantine the turbulence and intensity that living entails that this acceptance of common human stain, is what eventually lends his life as a human being and a novelist its importance. The stature of the distressed white woman lies at the heart of The Human Stain.

clever but illiterate, primitive yet refined, erotic and puritanical, her mystery exerts an irresistible force on the male protagonist and on the narrator. Faunia is introduced in the novel’s very first paragraph, as befits her centrality: It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk—who, before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena College for some twenty-odd years... confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one , he was having an affair with a thirty-four-year old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. Twice

a week she also cleaned the rural post office, a small gray clapboard shack that looked as if it might have sheltered an Okie family form the winds of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s and that, sitting alone and forlorn across from the gas station and the general store, flies its American flag at the junction of the two roads that mark the commercial center of this mountainside town. There is purity and mortality, incarnated by Faunia and Coleman. Faunia’s youthfulness serves as a counterpoint to Coleman’s mortality; Coleman’s age makes Faunia seem rather eternal, a trope which is toughened through her metonymic

identification with the American landscape, which is eternal by definition. The description of Faunia begins with the phrase “looked as if”, for Coleman , are looking at her. Faunia is observe from the outside, like Coleman. Faunia is a metaphor of an American landscape. She is a cleaning lady, whose job is to remove dirt and grime. To return object to their spotless state of purity and cleanliness. Coleman had first seen the woman mopping the post office floor when he went around late one day, a few minutes before closing time, to get his mail- a thin, tall,

angular woman with graying blond hair yanked back into a ponytail and a kind of sternly sculpted feature usually linked with the church- ruled hardworking goodwives who suffered through New England’s harsh beginnings, stern colonial women locked up within the reigning morality and submissive to it. Her name was Faunia Farley and whatever desolation she endured she kept cloaked behind one of those inexpressive bony faces that hide nothing and bespeaks an immense loneliness. Faunia lived in a room at a local dairy farm where she helped with the milking in order to pay her rent.

Coleman, the non-white male, looks at Faunia , while she, the white female, attempts to render things cleaner and purer . Faunia was compared to A New England women from Puritan times who were locked up. The trope of imprisonment is important, because Faunia has not broken free of her ex-husband. The figure of the abused white woman is inevitably linked to that of the abusive male. Whether it’s her ex-husband or her father or stepfather, whether she merely bears the scars of earlier traumatisms, or whether she maintains a masochistic connection to her abuser, as in Faunia’s case, this

figure is bifurcated. Whether it’s through completive or repetitive analepses, the abusive male becomes part of the story. Puritan women, were “obedient” to the “reigning” morality, “reigning” belonging to the lexical field derived from “king. ” Faunia’s face is “impassive. ” Her misery was “concealed, . Faunia’s “graying, blond hair” and to her work “milking” on a “dairy farm,” Faunia is compared to a piece of wood or stone with her “severe sculpted features”, as though she were a part of the landscape. Her physique suggests a lack of sensuality: “thin,” “angular”, “expressionless bony faces”.

Indeed, her face makes us think of a human skull, which prefigures her role in inducing the male protagonist’s death. The verb “yanked” is interesting: it evokes Faunia’s aristocratic origins as an American Yankee while suggesting her status as victim of a violent, domineering austerity: her hair wasn’t just demurely tied back in a modest ponytail; it was yanked back. Her very coiffure testifies to her status as a victim of violent oppression, as an austere manifestation of America’s puritanical past. The figure of the abused white woman is bifurcated, which an onomastic study

confirms: “Faunia” suggests her symbiosis with the fauna of the American landscape, her primitive, animal nature, while “Farley” indicates that she continues to belong to her ex- husband Lester Farley. Lester will track her like an animal, eventually succeeding in hunting her down. Before Lester, there was the sexually-abusive stepfather: “Fondling her from the day he arrived and couldn’t stay away from her. This blond angelic child, fondling her, fingering her- it’s when he tried fucking her that she ran away. ” (28) . Faunia tries to escape, running away from home at age fourteen,. Faunia was

a failed mother. She is free to dedicate herself sexually to the male: “In bed is the only place where Faunia is in any way shrewd.. A impulsive physical shrewdness plays she plays in bed. Nothing escapes Faunia’s attention. Her flesh has eyes. Her flesh sees everything. In bed she is a powerful, rational, unified being... ” (31) All of Faunia’s talents are determined in the act of love-making, where she has the inherent cleverness and the sensory perceptions of an animal. Outside of the bedroom, on the other hand, she is helpless: “I am in the company of a blank-eyed, distracted, confused kid.

” (31) Later that afternoon, Coleman took me to meet Faunia at a small dairy farm six miles from his house, where she lived rent-free in exchange for sometimes doing the milking. The dairy operation, a few years old now, had been initiated by two divorced women, college-educated environmentalists, with each coming from a New England farming family and who had pooled their resources- pooled their young children as well, It was a unique operation, nothing like what was going on at the big dairy farms, nothing impersonal or factory like about it, a place that wouldn’t seem like a dairy farm

to most people these days. It was called Organic Livestock, and it produced and bottled the raw milk that could be found in local general stores. There were just eleven cows, purebred Jerseys, and each had an old-fashioned cow name rather than a numbered tag to identify it. Their milk was not mixed with the milk of the huge herds that were injected with all sorts of chemicals, and because uncompromised by pasteurization and unshattered by homogenization, the milk took on the tinge, even faintly the flavor, of whatever they were eating season by season . In the local weekly, a letter to the editor

will regularly appear from someone who has recently found a better life out along these rural roads, and in reverent tones mention will be made of Organic Livestock milk, not simply as a tasty drink but as the embodiment of a refreshing, sweetening country purity that their city-battered idealism requires . All he ever did there was watch her work. Even though there was rarely anyone else around at that time, Coleman remained outside the stall looking in and let her get on with the job. She knew he was watching her; knowing she knew, he watched all the harder- and that they weren’t able to couple down

in the dirt didn’t make a scrap of difference. Often they said nothing. (45-47) It was Faunia who heavy-handed like the beast of burden. Faunia Farley, thin-legged, thin- wristed, thin-armed, with clearly discernible ribs and shoulderblades that protruded, and yet when she tensed you saw that her limbs were hard, when she reached or stretched for something you saw that her breasts were surprisingly substantial, and when, because of the flies and the gnats buzzing the herd on this close summer day, she slapped at her neck or her backside, you saw something of how frisky she could be.

You saw that her body was something more than efficiently lean and severe, that she was a firmly made woman abruptly poised at the moment when she is no longer ripening but not yet fading, a woman in the prime of her prime, whose fistful of white hairs is basically enticing just because the sharp Yankee contour of her cheeks and her jaw and the long unmistakably female neck haven’t yet been subject to the conversion of aging. She was a thin-lipped woman with a straight nose and clear blue eyes and good teeth and a prominent jaw. We stood there watching while she milked each of the

eleven cows- stood there while she went through the same unvarying routine with every one of them, and when that was finished and she moved into the whitewashed room with the bin sinks and the hoses and the sterilizing units adjacent to the milking parlor, we watched her through that doorway mixing up the lye solution and the cleansing agents... [48-50] Les Farley, Faunia's estranged husband, who eventually sends his wife and her Jewish lover to their graves is himself an embodiment of secrecy. And given his disturbing past, it is hardly surprising that the formation of a stable identity remains an

fragmentary project in his life. A Vietnam veteran who suffers from PTSD , he has experimented with dairy farming and other odd jobs before joining a road crew. Farley's avatar as a bloodthirsty killer, which had twice enlisted him for participation in the horror-ridden theater of war in Vietnam. Seeking to avenge the death of his boys in a house fire for which he holds Faunia directly responsible, Farley is on her trail. He is enraged to learn that Faunia's current lover is an academic, Jewish, and much older than Faunia. It is the enduring presence of such a traumatic past in his consciousness that

drives him to have both Faunia and Coleman killed. Secretive himself, Farley is strangely clueless about Coleman's African-American racial identity. Privy to this secret through Ernestine, Zuckerman in Coleman's grave ruminates thus: "Buried as a Jew, I thought, and, if I was speculating correctly, killed as a Jew. Even in his death Coleman is able to carry off his pretentions successfully. A female counterpart to Coleman, Faunia, too, has a secret and an authorship of a life all her own. Born into a prosperous white family south of Boston, she has to

voluntarily banish herself from all that has gone into constituting her identity in order to escape a lascivious stepfather and a complicitous mother. Forever haunted by a psychopathic husband and a traumatic past that testify to the power of "the ruthless" over "the defenseless" (240), Faunia lives from moment to moment and is grateful for the small mercies of life. Through the narrator's lens, we glimpse the terrain of despair that has been her life: "Was she thinking about how long it had all gone on?

The mother, the stepfather, the escape from the stepfather, the places in the South, the places in the North,the men, the beatings, the jobs, the marriage, the farm, the herd, the bankruptcy, the children, the two dead children. No wonder half an hour in the sun sharing a pizza with the boys is paradise to her" (161). If occasionally Faunia is put off by "the privilegedness of his [Coleman's] suffering" (234), she is often moved by "[h]is generosity" (236). Conclusion The Human Stain efficiently explores the transgressively impudent quest for freedom of its central characters that is attempt through with the comedy of self- inventions and misconception.