Clothes may make the man, but do they make the subject? As Celia Marshik explores, fashion and clothing comes to bear a large role in a modernizing world, participating “in a process of self-recognition and self-consolidation that is always already fraught” (16). Yet what—or, perhaps, whose—self is being consolidated, and in what image? In Faulkner, clothing does not come without its requisite strings; clothing—flimsy, rumpled, soiled, pressed, or otherwise—comes to reflect on not only individual characters and their standings within the social dynamic, but also on the dynamics of power that exist between characters as well.

From Drusilla’s struggle to clothe herself in menswear in The Unvanquished, against the kinds of outfits the other Southern matrons prefer she wear, to Caddy’s muddy drawers, clothing effectively relates both an individual’s social standing and something of interiority and individuality as well. Like everything else within Yoknapatawpha County, it is not unilaterally one or the other—neither good nor bad, neither fully liberating nor entrapping. For example, while Drusilla may be able to achieve liberation “standing there…in her dirty sweated overalls and shirt and brogans,” she is simultaneously effectively disciplined and potentially defeated once she is forced into a dress, a sartorial expression of femininity and womanhood. In TSAF, Quentin (II) is able to perform small acts of defiance and resist Jason’s authority through her dress, which he finds cheap, tawdry, and socially defining (as a reflection of his family/house). When she finally is able to make her escape from the home, she leaves behind “a soiled undergarment of cheap silk a little too pink”, both a sign of her escape and a reinforcement of her constructed self-image (TSAF). Much like her mother’s incident with the muddy drawers, Quentin’s clothing teems with indications of personal identity, as much as it remains rife with explosive (social, familial, personal) consequences.

I anticipate beginning my research by examining scholarship on identity construction processes and operations of gender within Faulkner to see how fashion would fit within those models. I intend to then utilize those models against incidences of dressing and re-dressing within the texts of U, TSAF, and LIA. While I expect primarily focusing on gender, I intend to include Joe Christmas, a figure straddling numerous lines within binaries of identity, in contrast to the defined and defining women of Faulkner’s works, in part due to his impossibility of placement. Just as he eludes fixed positioning, Christmas’ garments are also neither one nor the other, both “dusty” and “decent”, “soiled” and “white.” If clothes reveal or shape identity, how is an amoebic socially-nomadic entity to be dressed? What does he “change” into and out of? And who determines the social construction of meaning within an outfit—the people whose bodies fill it out, or the people who view it? In a long wiki entry, I seek to explore how the texts navigate these concerns, locating fashion within Faulkner’s other means of identity-craft and expression.

For my final project I will be doing a long wiki entry focusing on the word blood. I want to focus on how blood dictates race, family, death (murder), and symbolizes the entry into adulthood.

In The Unvanquished blood is seen in a number of aspects. The first is the relationship between Bayard and Ringo, and how they are so similar yet their futures will be different, based on the color of their skin, and the fact that Bayard is the “real” Sartoris. Another aspect that is seen is blood lust- the Civil War serving as this staging area for murder. Bayard’s father is depicted as this strong overwhelming man, but towards the end of the novel we learn that he has “killed too much”. The need for revenge is debilitating which is seen in Drusilla. Because she is a woman, Drusilla cannot avenge her beloved and is forced to adhere to the societal expectations which makes her lose it at the end. Bayard and Ringo kill Gumby on their quest, which becomes a rite of passage for them to become men- and in what was thought to bring Bayard to become a “real” Sartoris. What interested me most in The Unvanquished was in the chapter that Bayard has the opportunity to avenge his father’s death, but instead spares the man’s life. This absence of blood examines this idea of what it meant to be a “real Sartoris”, and a real man.

For the use of blood in Light In August, I will focus on a few characters in specific scenes. I wrote about the idea of Joe Christmas and blood in one of my blog posts, but I will branch on that- bringing in the Shakespearian aspects (Shylock), and the idea of the “one drop rule”. I will also focus on the scenes where Joe Christmas is beat up, and when he is killed, and how the rhetoric of the novel correlates to the the idea of blood rushing. I will also look at how blood serves the woman in the novel-Bobbie took Joe’s virginity, and when he finds out that she is a prostitute, he feels betrayed, and it is another instance in which a woman has betrayed him. This all culminates into the very gruesome, and bloody murder in which Miss Burden is found. Lena is also chasing the idea of blood- she is chasing the biological father for her unborn child. The child serves as this mixture of blood between two people who don’t need to/ want to be together.

– I plan on also using Go Down Moses as another novel depicting the idea of maturity in blood (but I have not got to reading it yet). Also, I may use TSAF and how blood is seen through the connections the siblings have to each other- Benjy’s reliance on Caddy, Quentin (Caddy daugher) and her relationship with Jason. All of the characters are needed to carry on this Compson line, which is seen in this “blood is thicker than water” mentality that they have. The loss of Caddy’s virginity causes this unhinging in the family dynamic. Quentic commits suicide- the absence of blood.  

– I will be looking at the history and beliefs of eugenics, and how this pseudo- science perpetuated the idea that there is such a thing as “good blood” and “bad blood”, and other scholarly articles on what blood and race means in Faulkner’s works.

– Potential Thesis (very broad, but will fine tune as I write)- Blood is a powerful tool each character possess, which holds ideas of race, gender, revenge, family, and maturity. The absence of blood, or the absence of blood spilling actions, also causes chaos and further forms characters.

For my final project, I would like to expand my second Medium Wiki entry and continue to look at the way other characters in Light in August define Joe Christmas’s race as they see fit. As a point of departure, I will respond to critic Avak Hasratian’s claim that, “A categorical crisis follows the accusation that Christmas kills a white woman, as other characters in the novel try and fail to define him as black” (63). He understands the community’s frustration with Christmas’ ambiguous racial behavior as evidence of its inability to categorize the protagonist (Hasratian 79). To support his claim, Hasratian refers to the following textual moment: “He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad” (LIA 350). I would like to press against Hasratian’s argument by offering and examining evidence of the way that the protagonist’s “parchmentcolored” features and his racially ambiguous behavior revealed in the statement “He never acted like either a nigger or a white man” allow him to be anything to anyone in the text. As evidence of this, I intend to examine various instances in which other characters supply definitions of Christmas’ racial being which function to explain him or serve a specific purpose. For instance, Joanna Burden construes Christmas’s being ways which allow him to fulfill various personas for her. He can be a clandestine Negro lover as well as a potential college educated race leader. On the other hand, to some of the work’s African American characters, Christmas’ looks and behavior indicate that he is a white man. For example, the black man interviewed by the sheriff points to rumors about Christmas’ light-skinned appearance and cohabitation with another white man to conclude that he is a white. Interestingly, the African American parishioners at the revival meeting seeing that Christmas is “white” and that his face is “not black” thereby determine that he is “Satan himself” (LIA 322). Finally, to the white community, Christmas is “That nigger murderer” (LIA 346). Upon learning of Christmas’ supposed African American ancestry, this community immediately sees the murder case in light of race and takes every opportunity to demonize Christmas as the black murderer of a white woman. Taking the abovementioned accounts of this character’s race under consideration, I propose to extend my analysis to look at how the various community groups’ assessments of Christmas lead to his multiple subject formations. I would argue that the competing definitions of the protagonist reveal how it is possible for an individual to maintain multiple social identities which are contingent upon the group defining him. Such definitions become functional classifications for the many community elements that come into contact with the protagonist since they allow the community to construct a particular understanding of the individual based on his racial assignment. By looking at examples that demonstrate how community elements successfully categorize Christmas, I hope to further explore the way that his multiple subject formations develop.

Hasratian, Avak. “The Death of Difference in Light in August.” Criticism, 49.1, 2007, pp. 55-84.

For my final project, I plan to write a long Yoknapedia entry on windows in Faulkner’s work. Faulkner sites windows with frequency throughout many of the texts we’ve read. In The Sound and the Fury, Caddy climbs a tree to peer into the window of her house in order to get one last look at Damuddy as her brothers watch from below. Later in the novel, Luster is forced to defend himself while he is interrogated by Jason and Dilsey, who assume he has broken the window through which Quentin escapes. In The Unvanquished, the stolen chest of silver is foreshadowed by Granny’s dream where she gazes out a window into the orchard and witnesses the stealing of the riches. At the beginning of Light in August Lena opens a window; this opening signals the loss of her virginity and is also a catalyst for the remainder of the novel’s narrative motion. Windows continue to operate as a notable thematic in Light in August, which is perhaps best witnessed through consideration of Hightower. First, Hightower’s windows are smashed with a brick by the KKK in response to his hiring of black cooks. Also, the narrator is especially attuned to the way Bunch perceives Hightower as he glances through windows as if Hightower “himself is unaware, as if something inside the man were trying to warn or prepare him” (TSAF 81). Hightower’s glance, like Lena’s initial opening of the window, propels the narrative and offers illuminations of what is to come. In this sense Hightower’s glance might be “the reflection of what he himself already knows and is about to tell (TSAF 81). 

In addition to isolating sites in Faulkner’s texts where windows are mentioned, I plan to tie the Yoknapedia entry together via an exploration of windows as lines of sight and illumination. I’m especially interested in the way windows function as a hermeneutic of suspicion, specifically, how lines of sight in and out of windows serve as entry points for interrogating dominant Southern ideologies and buried national histories. In many cases, lines of sight through windows also allow Faulkner’s characters to glance horizons of possibility and future-oriented spaces.

Windows are an especially fertile site for articulating the rhetorical with the visual in Faulkner. The role of the visual in Faulkner has been explored by scholars such as Randall Wilhelm who argues that the discussion of the visual operates as “a means of potential knowledge and as a narrative tool of power and obfuscation” (RW 394). In this way the visual lines of sight windows frame in these texts offer the framework for perceiving issues of race, culture, humanity, freedom, subjection, agency, etc. in Faulkner.