Sex Pigs?

Lord of the Flies; William Golding; Literary Fiction; +10; Lucy Snider at Look What I Found In My Brain!

There was a lot of sex involved in my reading of this novel.

No, no, I didn't have a lot of sex while I was reading it... Neither meaning of that, actually.

No, but reading a book about a group of violent young boys seems to make girls talk a lot about sex. Short version: turns out most of us would rather do Jack than Ralph. Even in fiction, nice guys finish last.

There's also a lot of weird sex stuff going on in the book. Aside from Piggy's sexual fixation on Ralph and Roger's sexual fixation on Jack, and Ralph and Jack's perverse and ultimately mutually destructive inarticulate, violent attempt at courtship, there's the whole thing with the pigs.

When Jack's band hunts and kills the sow... It's gang rape. The enthusiastic, crazed, myopic boys, frustrated and possessed of an excess of energy, chase, bring down and impale, repeatedly, the only female creature they've encountered. As if that weren't enough violent, sexual imagery on its own, Golding makes a point of spicing things up with descriptions of the panting and the squealing done by boy and sow alike. He also has an extremely graphic description of one of the boys' spears (subtle, I know) entering the sow's anus. Yes, it really was that gross.

Not long after the sow-hunting/gang-bang scene, we get the fainting at the sight of the dead pig, enacted by one of the more frail members of the tribe. I always thought it sounded like a variation the Oedipal complex. The pig has already been established as a metaphor for the sexual female, but this pig also issues condemnations and proclamations of its omniscience. Also, the pig is a source of nourishment. It just always screamed “fear of the sexualized mother,” to me.