Light in August Gender Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #4

He was thinking now, aloud now, "Why in hell do I want to smell horses?" Then he said, fumbling: "It's because they are not women. Even a mare horse is a kind of man." (5.10)

Christmas is repeatedly disgusted by women and expresses the need to get away from them.

Quote #5

On all sides, even within him, the bodiless fecundmellow voices of n***o women murmured. It was as though he and all other manshaped life about him had been returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female. He began to run, glaring, his teeth glaring, his inbreath cold on his dry teeth and lips, toward the next street lamp. (5.23)

Christmas smells black women and he begins to writhe with disgust. It's pretty complicated, but we can see it as another manifestation of his own self-hatred.

Quote #6

It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice. He was used to that before he ever saw either of them… 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… "She was trying to make me cry. Then she thinks that they would have had me." (7.55)

Christmas prefers the meanness of men to the kindness of women.