Volume 50, Number 7 · May 1, 2003
Desire and Dread
By Joyce Carol Oates
Property
by Valerie Martin
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 196 pp., $23.95
Deep in the dark xenophobic soul of humankind there would seem to be a special terror of miscegenation: the 'mixing'—'mongrelization'—of races. Where one race imagines itself as purer, closer to divinity than others, the terror may involve extreme acts of violence, even genocide. It seems self-evident that cultural, social, religious taboos are simply traditional ways of assigning a questionable objective value to primitive drives. For most of us, taboos lie too deep for introspection, let alone exorcism. We can analyze the biological underpinnings of taboos regarding incest, for instance, but we would probably not wish to attempt to violate them.
Review, 3556 words
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