Segregation and Exclusion: A Politics of Fear in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn Child of God, Cormac McCarthy describes a fear politics that features social-spatial segregation and social exclusion in the modernized American South. By examining the motive of Lester Ballard, a social outcast, to hunt females and to live with their corpses underground in the everyday context, McCarthy traces the origin of fear back to the social transformation of the agrarian South caused by the aggression of capitalism, commodity economy, and consumerism. The acquisitive ideology and inequality in material possession breed fear politics and allow the citizens’ alarmed perception of insecurity to affect social justice. Residential differentiation, invalidation of public space, stigmatization, and physical violence are the specific representations. However, as fear politics leaves the root of danger and crime untouched, its effectiveness seems doubtable. McCarthy implies that instead of eliminating fear, such a political culture encourages the spreading of fear and may mislead individuals toward wrong values and illegal deeds.