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"Not my mother, not my sister, but it's me, O Lord, standing …": Alice Walker's "The Child Who Favored Daughter" as Neo-Slave Narrative - Critical Essay
Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1997 by Neal A. Lester
Not only is the father/brother/master sexually attracted to his daughter/sister/slave, but the physical torture itself echoes descriptions offered by Frederick Douglass. For instance, when the father escorts daughter to the shed--metaphorically a slave quarters--for her punishment, he is sexually aroused by her:
She leads the way to the shed behind the house. She is still holding her books loosely against her thigh and he makes his eyes hard as they cover the small light tracks made in the dust. The brown of her skin is full of copper tints and her arms are like long golden fruits that take in and throw back the hues of the sinking sun. Relentlessly he hurries her steps through the sagging door of boards, with hardness he shoves her down into the dirt. She is like a young willow without roots under his hands as she does not resist he beats her for a long time with a harness from the stable and where the buckles hit there is a welling of blood which comes to be level with the tawny skin then spills over and falls curling into the dust of the floor. (41-42)
Erection imagery prevails the passage, and the scene that immediately follows presents the father "stumbling weakly" (42)--fatigued and/or overcome by the violent/sexual episode that has occurred with his daughter--through the house to the front porch where he "picks up the gun that is getting wet and sits with it across his lap, rocking it back and forth on his knees like a baby" (42). It matters not that Walker does not spell out that a forced sexual encounter is attempted or has taken place. What matters is that this daughter is violated by a father because of his attraction to her, his jealousy of her lover, and his outrage at her parental defiance. Even the letter written by the daughter to her lover is described in phallic terms:
It is rainsoaked, but he can make out "I love you" written in a firm hand across the blue face of the letter. He hates the very paper of the letter and crumples it in his fist. A wet storm wind lifts it lightly and holds it balled up against the taut silver screen on the side of the porch. He is glad when the wind abandons it and leaves it sodden and limp against the slick wet boards under his feet. (42)
Whatever transpires in the shed beyond the beating has not sexually satisfied this father. If he has raped the daughter, his satisfaction is incomplete since she has not remained faithful to him spiritually, emotionally, perhaps even physically. She has without verbal proclamation boldly demonstrated in her actions that her father cannot, does not, and will not satisfy her needs. Hence, after the encounter, he metaphorically masturbates himself to satisfaction for the moment. Masturbation imagery reiterates the father's impotence in controlling a world that extends beyond himself. When he returns to the shed the next morning to "cleanse" his world of wayward daughter, he is once again sexually aroused by her:
... he rises from stiff-jointed sleep and wanders through the house.... At the back door he runs his fingers over the long blade of his pocketknife and puts it, with gentleness and resignation, into his pocket.... In the shed he finds her already awake and for a long time she lies as she was.... and except for the blood she is strong-looking and the damp black hair trailing loose along the dirt floor excites him. (44)
