The words that direct my research are ‘house’ and ‘cabin’. These words allow me to surf across the Faulkner scholarship that deconstructs the symbols in the structures and the symbolism of the roommates in those structures. It also opens up the world of research on Faulkner’s own house, Rowan Oak – giving me the ability to apply the literary analysis I will do for Faulkner’s fictionals structures to his real structure. Following Glissant, ‘miscegenation’ and (lesser so) ‘creolization’ are also research terms. I was looking for how the houses and cabins of Faulkner represent the reality of miscegenation along with the psychological denial of it. I relied on the Hunter College Library website and the numerous academic resources it sent me out to! 

Akin, Warren. “‘Blood and Raising and Background’: The Plot of ‘The Unvanquished.’” Modern Language Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1980, pp. 3–11. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3194162. 

Akin studies how Colonel Sartoris needs to reconstruct his mansion to keep the ‘aura’ of power that existed before the war. The plans for these constructions come when they remain in the cabins. 

Bleikasten, André. The Ink of Melancholy : Faulkner’s Novels from the Sound and the Fury to Light in August, Indiana University Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4746225.

Bleikasten zones in on the symbolism of the dilapidation of Big Houses. There is the fully inhabited one in The Sound and The Fury and the more sparsely inhabited one in Absalom, Absalom!. The dilapidation helps us investigate the fall of the Old South. 

Faulkner, William. Light in August. Vintage International, 1985.

The cabin on Burden’s property is a setting for living, miscegenation, and birth of a white child. The analysis of these events deepen our understanding of the social realities of the South. 

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Vintage International, 1984.

The view from outside the Compson’s big house reveals the state of plantocratic power. 

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!. Vintage International, 1986.

The mansion on Supten’s Hundred opens itself to so many interpretations. The hands it took to build it, the hands it was left in, and its ultimate demise and the end of the novel lend itself to symbolic interpretation. 

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished. Vintage International, 2011.  

Slave cabins became essential housing after the civil war. This leveling of the place of rest reveals the intertwined nature that white southerners fear so much. 

Glissant, Édouard. Faulkner, Mississippi. Translated by Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 1996

Glissant’s travel log via literary analysis centers racial mixing in Faulkner’s literature. ‘Creolization’ and ‘Miscegenation’ are the central terms of this mixing, and I want to study those terms in relation to Faulkner’s strucutres. 

Godden, Richard. “Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions.” ELH, vol. 61, no. 3, 1994, pp. 685–720. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873340.   

Godden’s analysis applies Hegelian master slave dialectics to Absalom, Absalom!. Masters must fight themselves psychologically to not reveal their total reliance on the slave. The necessity of the slave in building their houses and masters lodging in cabins following the civil war reveal the intertwined existence (this is also represented by slavery’s role in building The White House). 

Sobelle, Stefanie E. “The Inscapability of Dwelling in Yoknapatawpha County.” The Imagery of Interior Spaces, edited by Dominique Bauer and Michael J. Kelly, Punctum Books, 2019, pp. 171–92. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv19cwdj8.11 

Sobelle compares Faulkner’s literary style to Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural style: open with many different entrance points. This is then put into contrast with the material of Faulkner’s text, where buildings and rooms can hold people and their personalities.