This annotated bibliography is an expansion of the preliminary sources I had gathered for my project proposal. I started the process by browsing through Zotero library for relevant books and journal articles related to Faulkner and ecology. Then, I used Hunter OneSearch to look for these sources and find other sources that take an ecocritical approach to Faulkner’s works. I have been browsing through databases such as Proquest Ebook Central and JSTOR to find articles and books related to Faulkner, ecology, and wood. Naturally, my keywords have been “Faulkner,” “ecology,” and “wood” across these databases, and I have also been searching for “wood” and “woods” in several ebooks. Although I have found some insightful and useful material that fits the scope of my research topic, I plan to expand my research and browse through other databases and resources to find additional primary and secondary sources that focus closely on Faulkner’s treatment of wood.

Primary Sources

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!. Vintage, 1990.
In this novel, wood is a prominent motif that is consistently used to describe the Sutpen house. It is also described as an organic material akin to human flesh, alluding to notions of transcorporeality and speaking to experiences of wilderness, labor, deforestation, and the connections between human and nonhuman nature. This source is relevant because it underscores the function of wood as a symbol of experiential knowledge and ecological embeddedness.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. Vintage, 1990.
In this novel, wood imagery emerges in two primary ways: through “chopping” and “entering”. Characters are chopping wood, using products made of wood, and oftentimes, physically entering in and out of the woods. This source highlights the connections between wood-labor-production, and the relationship between characters like Joe Christmas and the woods, offering room to explore the function of wood imagery as a signifier of capitalism, race, modernization, and the natural world.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Vintage, 1990.
In this novel, wood imagery is associated with the unknown realms of the environment as well as the human mind—memory, emotion, and knowledge. In particular, there are scenes in which wood imagery is associated with a type of black feminine knowledge, and by extension, white appropriation of that knowledge. This source elucidates how wood is associated with blackness, excess, and gender and sexuality in the white imagination and subconscious mind.

Faulkner, William. Go Down Moses. Vintage, 1990.
In this novel, the “big woods” or forest is an important place of conflict and action, subjected to destruction, exploitation, and environmental abuse. This source is relevant because it highlights the problematic (i.e., hostile yet interdependent) relationship between humans and the natural world.

Secondary Sources

Parrish, Susan Scott. “Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927.” American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012, pp. 34–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41329627. Accessed 14 Apr. 2023.
This journal article suggests that a glimpse into anthropogenic activities such as deforestation in the South offers insight into how Faulkner saw “catastrophic environmental experiences, and its knowledge, to shift across the color line” (45). This source offers a substantive reading of environmental experiences in the novel, and examines how the ecological entanglement between characters and nonhuman nature provides insight into anxieties about whiteness, blackness, and ontological experience in the novel.

Sivils, Matthew Wynn. “Faulkner’s Ecological Disturbances.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 3–4, 2006, pp. 489–502. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26467020. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.
This journal article suggests that ecological disturbances such as deforestation illustrate “a strong connection between environmental abuse and human suffering—especially in terms of racial oppression” (489). This source connects environmental damage in the land of the South to the plight of African Americans, and thus draws a parallel between anthropogenic and white supremacist systems of exploitation and oppression.

Watson, Jay. William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity. Oxford UP, 2019.
In the second chapter of this book, Watson traces the modernization of timber and lumber industries in the US South in relation to the modern economy of wood in Light in August, examining the production, distribution, circulation, and destruction of furniture in the novel. This source highlights how this economic representation of wood both reinforces and subverts “Faulkner’s anatomy of Jim Crow’s psychological and social order” (30).

Additional Sources:

Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, edited by Joseph R. Urgo, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=746917.

Faulkner and the Natural World, edited by Donald M. Kartiganer, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3039920.

Matthews, John T. William Faulkner : Seeing Through the South, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=428098.

Saikku, Mikko. “Faulkner and the ‘Doomed Wilderness’ of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 3, 2005, pp. 529–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26476607.

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! allegorizes the antebellum South with the unsettling story of Thomas Sutpen, a man whose rise to power through the accumulation of economic and social capital is both dependent on and haunted by the legacy of slavery—an institution that relies on racial ideologies to justify the oppression, exploitation, and dehumanization of enslaved people. Faulkner suggests that the South is also dependent on and haunted by the institution of slavery and the ideologies that sustain it. Hence, reflective of Southern history and its violent, dark, and rather “barbaric” past, Sutpen’s own cursed past emerges through his self-destructive fixation on creating a patrilineal and racially pure-blooded dynasty. In this context, the presence or “problem” of miscegenation threatens his plans for Southern glory as a powerful planter, and more importantly, endangers the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist ideologies that sustain plantocratic societies at large.

Given the role of plantation slavery in the South, the novel’s exploration of racism, racial difference, and racial purity is inherently connected to, and complicated by, notions of socioeconomic power and capital. For instance, Sutpen’s racial and class consciousness emerges during his time as a child working on a plantation with his father: “He had learned the difference not only between white men and black ones, but he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men, not to be measured by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room. He had begun to discern that without being aware of it yet. He still thought that that was just a matter of where you were spawned and how; whether you were lucky or not lucky…” (158). Sutpen’s experience on the plantation is marked by a realization of the “difference” between white and black people, difference based not only on skin color but on hierarchical notions of power, as the institution of slavery ideologically necessitates. However, within this social space and its hierarchical organization, Sutpen’s realization of the difference between white men with power and white men without power—rich white men and poor white men—complicates this ongoing notion of racial difference and signifies the emergence of intraracial conflict and anxiety fueled by class inequality. If slavery is justified by white supremacist ideologies based on racial difference, then what becomes of poor white men who are also under the power of the rich white men, and subjected to inequality and dehumanization under an exploitative economic system? In order to benefit from a plantocratic system that also exploits and subjugates disadvantaged whites, Sutpen dreams of establishing himself as a powerful planter and creating a dynasty of his own based on class distinction and racial purity. However, in doing so, he reveals the ideological incoherencies at the heart of slavery as an institution, one in which inter- and intra- racial differences and hierarchies are based on socioeconomic paradigms of oppression and exploitation rather than false notions of inherent biological difference.

Hence, the theme of miscegenation emerges as a threat to white supremacist notions of racial difference and purity, ideologies that sustain plantocratic hierarchies based on socioeconomic status and power. For instance, even the speculative retelling of Henry and Bon’s fatal encounter underscores this anxiety: “So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear” (249). In this rendition, Bon questions Henry’s discomfort about his racial background and obsession with racial purity by juxtaposing the intolerance of miscegenation with the permissibility of incest, and thus underscoring the hypocrisy and double standards at play. The juxtaposition of these two social taboos, miscegenation and incest, signify two forms of contamination that reveal the instability of racial purity as a concept. On the one hand, there is the threat of racial mixing, which is in many ways inevitable and inherent to human evolution and history, and on the other hand, there is the danger of incest, which not only marks a greater transgression of social and religious values but also highlights the genetic risks of inbreeding as a way to maintain pure-bloodedness. On a larger scale, this question of miscegenation and incest, the mixing of bloodlines versus the extreme purity of bloodlines, also refers to Southern society and its values at large: Is racial purity so important, that miscegenation is more troubling than incest, which is perhaps more self-destructive, transgressive, and immoral per social norms? Is the desire for a pure-blooded white society so fundamental to the plantocracy that incest becomes acceptable and even unavoidable? Sutpen’s obsession with a pure-blooded, white dynasty thus underscores the dangers of racial purity and consequently, the instability of the white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist values that sustain the plantocracy of the South.

Based on ecocritical readings of William Faulkner’s novels, I will examine the role of wood in Yoknapatawpha County as a socio-ecological marker of the uncertain boundaries between humans and nonhuman nature, whiteness and blackness, known and unknown. In primary texts such as The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down Moses, wood emerges in various literal and figurative forms: It is the organic material used for fuel, construction, tools, and other man-made products; a body of land in the form of woods, forests, and other mysterious territories; and a metaphor for complex human experiences and crises involving race, class, gender, and the environment. Ecocritical interpretations of Faulkner’s work, such as Susan Parrish’s “Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927,” suggest that a glimpse into anthropogenic activities such as deforestation in the South offers insight into how Faulkner saw “catastrophic environmental experiences, and its knowledge, to shift across the color line” (35). Given this argument, I suggest that in Faulkner’s fictional world, wood imagery is associated with labor, blackness, and ecological entanglement with the nonhuman and the unknowable. I suggest that Faulkner’s treatment of wood as a symbolic entity is closely tied to his ambivalent representations of the white supremacist and capitalist enterprises that use wood to express control over nature, exploit its resources, and racialize beings that the dominant culture deems “other”. In addition to the primary texts mentioned above, I will research the intersections between Faulkner, ecology, and race ideology to gather secondary sources that provide insight into the role of wood as a symbol of socio-political and ontological anxiety in Yoknapatawpha County.

Preliminary Bibliography:

Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, edited by Joseph R. Urgo, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=746917.

Faulkner and the Natural World, edited by Donald M. Kartiganer, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3039920.

Faulkner and Whiteness, edited by Jay Watson, University Press of Mississippi, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711361.

Parrish, Susan Scott. “Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927.” American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012, pp. 34–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41329627. Accessed 14 Apr. 2023.

Sivils, Matthew Wynn. “Faulkner’s Ecological Disturbances.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 3–4, 2006, pp. 489–502. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26467020. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Similar to The Unvanquished and The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s Light in August depicts the destabilization of social structures and ideologies that organize Southern life in the early twentieth century, revealing their inherent contradictions and incoherencies. The novel’s principal characters, including Lena Grove, Joe Christmas, and Reverend Gail Hightower, are individuals who face marginalization in their communities because they disrupt the dominant social and cultural norms that shape notions of gender, race, class, religion and morality in the South. Throughout the novel, these three characters are objects of public speculation and shame. Members of the community ostracize them but are also intrigued by the air of mystery that surrounds their supposed moral failings and are equally as disturbed by their subversive attitudes towards notions of racial identity, faith and spirituality, and gender roles and relations. In the depiction of these tensions between the individual and the community, Faulkner portrays the fine line between private sin and public spectacle, social position and personal identity, mindless gossip and hate speech, casual conversation and oppressive discourse.

Given this premise, it becomes necessary to examine the social position of each character in question and the public discourse that surrounds them. On the one hand, Lena is an unmarried pregnant woman who travels from Alabama to Jefferson, Mississippi, to find the man who has left her with false promises. The father of her unborn child, Lucas Burch, also known as Joe Brown, is a conman and bootlegger who navigates society by lying and adopting a false identity. However, it is Lena who faces the consequences of their sin or moral transgression because she is pregnant out of wedlock. This is a taboo in Southern Christian society—even her own brother calls her a “whore” (10). Also, strangers such as Mr. and Mrs. Armstid speak in euphemisms as they help her when she hitchhikes to Jefferson, intrigued by her “shape” and story. Upon learning more, Mrs. Armstid looks at her with “an expression of cold and impersonal contempt” while there are several instances in which Mr. Armstid “apparently” avoids looking at or touching her (14-21). However, despite the stigma against pregnancy out of wedlock, these strangers still help Lena because she is a lone woman. The Armstids, for instance, feed and provide her shelter and transportation, but do not help or look at her beyond that, underscoring a side of Southern hospitality that is somewhat jarring and unsettling, as the community is full of unease.

Moreover, in the minds of these people, Lena disrupts the gender divide, or binary, and complicates it due to her position as an unmarried pregnant woman in need of help. Her actions cause Armstid to think about gender relations explicitly: “…she’ll walk the public country herself without shame because she knows that folks, menfolks, will take care of her. She dont care nothing about womenfolks. It wasn’t any woman that got her into what she dont even call trouble…You just let one of them get married or get into trouble without being married, and right then and there is where she secedes from the woman race and species and spends the balance of her life trying to get joined up with the man race. That’s why they dip snuff and smoke and want to vote.” (16-17) Armstid uses the language of racial (or biological) classification to demarcate differences between men and women. He suggests that Lena is able to make such a journey across the country, and in the process, make her sin known to the public (he noticed she didn’t have a wedding ring), because she knows that her social position as a single pregnant woman will push men to take care of her. By doing so, the men fulfill their gender role by protecting and providing for Lena. However, this kind of discourse also suggests a sense of prejudice against women, as he suggests that “marriage” or “trouble” (which may be a euphemism for sexual activity) causes women to become unwomanly, as they try to “join men” and engage in activities and liberties associated with masculine gender identity (such as, voting).

Based on this discourse, one could argue that Lena not only challenges feminine gender norms by (evidently) having sex before marriage but also complicates patriarchal gender dynamics when she decides to search for the father of her unborn child. Despite being weak, pregnant, and endangered without a male guardian, she is able to navigate this terrain and reach Mississippi. Her courage and resilience shows some sort of desperation, however, perhaps the possibility is not lost on Lena that Burch has deceived and abandoned her. In this case, her journey in search of him is significant because instead of accepting her fate, she attempts to hold him accountable and responsible as the father of her unborn child. She overcomes the limitations of her position and station as an abandoned woman and highlights the inherent contradictions in masculine, patriarchal gender norms in which a man is supposed to provide, protect, and be responsible for women. Where is Lucas Burch? By making both Lena’s vulnerability and strength public, Faulkner reveals the double standards between men and women, thus underscoring the contradictory and unstable nature of gender norms and ideals in Southern society.

On the other hand, Joe Christmas is a mixed race man with a mysterious identity and unknown origin. Similar to Lena, he also faces stigma as due to his racial ambiguity and heritage. He engages in illegal activities with Burch/Brown, and is also involved in sexual relations with an older white woman who is ostracized by the town for being a Yankee: “Folks say she claims n— are the same as white folk” (47). He is also involved in her murder, and despite his violent and aggressive nature, it is apparent that his anger and resentment stems from his complex identity as a mixed race individual, as indicated by the speculation of his African American heritage. His position as a traveler and name, which is also strange and lacks clear origins or indication of ancestry, points towards a biblical connection to Jesus Christ. Joe’s ethnic ambiguity highlights the nature of race as a social construct that upholds eurocentric and white-supremacist ideologies. The town’s reaction to his ethnic ambiguity also suggests that white-black or racially divided and stratified communities cannot make sense of racial identity without clearcut binary and hierarchical systems in place. He is constantly speculated to be a “foreigner,” thus highlighting the idea that he does not fit into this racial binary and is thus an outsider, living on the margins of this society (31-2). He is not quite “white” or “black” and remains unaccepted by both communities as he does not fulfill certain stereotypes, norms, and expectations of what an individual of a certain race is supposed to look like. It is ironic that the people of Jefferson are unsure and accusatory, hostile of his potential African American heritage, and yet unable to completely segregate him due to the nature of racial passing. His ethnic ambiguity and proximity to “whiteness” allows him to manipulate his racial identity, thus highlighting the instability of race as a social construct.

Similarly, Hightower is a disgraced minister who is shunned by the church-going community and entire town for his wife’s infidelity and suicide. As a “cuckold” in the eyes of society, he is emasculated by the scandal: “He is not a natural husband, not a natural man” (61). He is also, at one point, compared to Satan when the media bombards him (52). The treatment he faces by members of the community highlights how the town, the media, the public eye, oversteps boundaries, invades his privacy, and makes a spectacle out of personal loss and tragedy. The harassment he faces highlights the blurry line between the town’s gossipmongers and violent hate groups such as the KKK (62).  Hightower’s ambiguous position as a fallen minister thus exacerbates the anxieties of the people in Jefferson, who disgrace him due to suspicions about his failed marriage, his attitude towards black people, and his family’s past. As a representative of religion and morality due to his position as a minister, Hightower’s exile and marginalization is unsettling—what does it say about the spiritual state of this town?

In this manner, Faulkner suggests that the volatile and oppressive nature of discourse around race, gender, class, and religion serves as a reflection of a decadent society in need of renewal, transformation, and justice. This kind of prejudiced, racist, and sexist, and often violent and hateful discourse may stem from fear and uncertainty of the unknown, or from the anger and frustration that comes with social and cultural change. In any case, they are legacies of the past that influence the collective ethos of a community where, as Faulker demonstrates, Anglo-American, Christian, patriarchal, and white-supremacist values dominate society and shape the lives of its individuals. Lena, Joe Christmas, and Hightower each subvert these dominant values in their own ways.

In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner depicts the social, moral, economic, and spiritual decline of the Compsons, an aristocratic, white Southern family living in the early 20th century. The novel is set in an era of post-Civil War racial violence, a time in which modernization, industrialization, migration, and cultural movements are diversifying and changing the identity and landscape of American society. In an introduction to the novel, Faulkner describes a moving image that is central to its creation: “Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window of her grandmother’s funeral while Quentin and Jason and Benjy and the negros looked up at her muddy drawers.” In this highly gendered, racial, and allegorical image, Caddy is more than a young girl with a curiosity for the unknown. In this moment, she is a symbol of innocence and sin, progression and decline, signifying contradictory ideas that move beyond the act of a child climbing a tree. I suggest that in addition to biblical imagery, the tree signifies family lineage and history as well as a life force that undergoes cycles of death and renewal over time. The funeral depicts the death of a matriarch, and by extension, the lost legacy of the previous generation. In this case, the mud-stained drawers represent the inheritance of loss.

On the one hand, the “muddy drawers” foreshadow the shame that Caddy and her family face in the future, when her sexuality deems her promiscuous and immoral. The image of this sullied underwear is suggestive of lost virginity and tainted reputation, and by extension, notions of female honor and chastity. The socio-cultural context and historical factors surrounding the setting of the novel—as in, the patriarchal, racist, and classist ideologies that shape the post-Civil War era of the South—suggest that the female body, in the form of the white Southern belle, represents the ideals and anxieties of upper class, plantation-owning, European American families like the Compsons. Caddy’s muddy drawers allude to social, moral, and sexual transgressions that signify the decline of the Compsons’ honor, fortune, and glory. In many ways, the muddy drawers are as much theirs as they are hers. To each brother, the loss of their sister is at once the loss of home and family ties, the loss of traditional norms, values, and ideals, and most interestingly, the loss of capital.

Therefore, in this particular scene, which is a crucial memory Benjy frequently recollects, the characters occupy a liminal space between past, present, and future. The troubling fate of the Compson family thus generates a complex portrait of the South at a crossroad between the preservation of traditional systems in place and the adaptation to modern ways of life. Even In terms of form and composition, the novel shows signs of a departure from traditional ways of storytelling and a plunge into literary modernism. Faulkner articulates this shift through the disconnection and rearrangement of dates, events, and experiences based on memory, thus disrupting normative depictions of chronological storytelling. In Benjy’s stream of consciousness, there is the lack of a conceptual understanding of time. Due to this, the tension between tradition and modernity is almost entirely tied to the image of Caddy and the muddy drawers and the smell of trees—sensory experiences and images that exist in Benjy’s mind. As Faulkner himself highlights, Benjy’s nonconforming and fragmented narrative in the first part of the novel captures the entirety of the story, but requires a bit of “temporizing” and clarification through the other sections. Although the story unfolds over the course of four days, the thought processes and fragmented memories of each character gives readers glimpses into various experiences and times in their lives, highlighting the expansive nature of the past.

Whereas there is an absence of time in Benjy’s narrative, Quentin’s stream of consciousness depicts an obsession with it. In his narrative, Faulkner also explicitly highlights the destabilization of binary and hierarchical relations in terms of gender, class, and race. Quentin’s struggle to find meaning and truth behind the traditional belief systems and ideals reflects the clash between traditional Southern values and the forces of modernity and change, embodied most prominently by the industrial, urban, and cosmopolitan North. During his time at Harvard, Quentin is hyperconscious of clocks, watches, and “sound of ticking [they] can create” (76). At first glance, Quentin’s obsession with time suggests that he is stuck in, or rather, obsessed with the past. He yearns for an existence in which the pressure of time—of movement, change, progression, and decline—cease to exist. Moreover, his neurosis stems from the bleak future of his family, a future marked by social disintegration and economic failure. The clock itself represents the mechanization of time in an industrialized and modern society, redefining what it means to exist and be human. His anxieties, in this case, are multifaceted. Quentin is unable to make sense of the tensions between traditional ideals and the emerging values of modernism—one in which his identity and positionality as a white, Southern, Christian, aristocratic young man grows unstable.

More specifically, Quentin’s masculine, racial, and class anxieties are rooted in hierarchical and binary social systems that are collapsing before his very eyes, and this is best highlighted in his obsession with Caddy’s virginity and gender ideals at large. As the first-born male heir of the Compson family who is also studying at Harvard and attempting to take responsibility for his sister’s sexual transgression, Quentin carries the heavy weight of social and familial expectations. Having received a family heirloom in the form of a broken watch from his father, Quentin struggles to reconcile with the disorder that time and human existence represents. In fact, he describes clocks “contradicting one another” and restates his father’s words: “Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (85). Whereas clocks represent mechanized time, a feature of modern life and industrial labor, time itself cannot be measured and contained within this framework. The pressure of time, a progression towards an uncertain future filled with failure, eventually causes him to take his own life. Quentin’s understanding of masculinity also plays into this notion of time, since it depends on his ability to provide for and protect his family as the Southern gentleman and patriarch.

However, Quentin believes that he has failed to live up to these societal expectations and gender norms due to his inability to “protect” Caddy’s virginity and honor. Similarly, Benjy fits into this framework as well, for his castration (also indirectly caused by a preoccupation with Caddy) signifies a loss of masculinity, sexuality, power, and patriarchal lineage. Just as Quentin loses the ability to carry on the family legacy when he commits suicide, Benjy loses his ability to preserve the lineage of the Compson and carry on the family name and blood due to his castration. Jason, on the other hand, also struggles with masculinity and preserving the legacy of the Compson family due to the lack of socioeconomic credit and capital. Unlike Quentin, Benjy is unaware of concepts such as time and Southern ideals due to his mental disability. He is also physically incapable of passing down the Compson family name, Jason on the other hand, is the opposite of Quentin in terms of his disposition and values. He is angry, bitter, cynical, greedy, and has no intention of carrying the family name. Miss Quinton, who is the sole member of the new generation of the Compson family, is born to the only daughter of the family. Interestingly, Dilsey is the only character who is capable of renewing, reviving, and rebuilding the legacies of the past into the future. As Faulker suggests, she is the “future,” and as Benjy recollects, she is the person who takes off Caddy’s muddy drawers and cleans them. There are layers to this representation of Dilsey, a Black woman who serves the Compson family and experiences oppression and marginalization due to her positionality but also sustains an elevated position in the narrative as a restorative figure.

In this manner, the overarching themes of time, tradition, and modernity are rooted in the three brothers’ fixation on their sister and her “muddy drawers”. The Compson siblings deviate from the implicit and explicit norms that shape their social positions: Benjy is mentally disabled and mute, Quentin is neurotic and suicidal, Jason is angry and bitter, Caddy is subversive and sexually liberated. The concept of time, which is weaved through the narrative in the forms of absence and excess, complicates the novel’s preoccupation with memory, history, and the past. Faulkner uses his experimental writing style, as well as the setting and plot of the story, to imply that behind the Compson family’s disintegration lies a deep tension between the traditional values of the South and the emerging modern world. In this context, intersections between gender, race, and class highlight how notions of power and honor are both regulated and destabilized by contradictory ideas of masculinity-femininity, whiteness-blackness, wealth-poverty. Each perspective in the novel suggests that these ideas do not fit within the binary relationship often attributed to them. Ultimately, the novel contemplates this challenge—the tensions between the old and the new ways of thinking that both emerge and dissipate with time.

In The Unvanquished, William Faulkner revisits the American Civil War from the perspective of the Sartoris family, underscoring the contradictions and anxieties that shaped the social landscape and values of the antebellum South. From the opening scene, the themes of equality, solidarity, and freedom emerge against the troubling backdrop of slavery, white supremacy, anti-black racism, war, and violence. The notion of unity beyond race, although complicated and paradoxical at times, appears in the novel through the friendship and brotherhood between Bayard and Ringo. Although the two friends cannot escape the legacy of slavery within their family and the consequences of race ideology on American society at large, their coequal dynamic implicitly subverts the hierarchical relations that uphold the institution of slavery in the war-torn South. 

From the beginning of the novel, the friendship between Bayard and Ringo highlights the ways in which the Civil War causes a rift in antebellum Southern thought, revealing its internal contradictions. For example, when Bayard reflects on the urgency of the war and its implications for enslaved Black people such as the ones who work for his family, he goes on to describe his friendship with Ringo in poetic, sentimental language: “Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny ‘Granny’ just like I did, until maybe he wasn’t a n—r anymore or maybe I wasn’t a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer: the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane (Faulkner 7). Despite the oppressive power structure between the enslaver and the enslaved, Bayard and Ringo enjoy a friendship based on a form of equality and unity that transcends racial difference and hierarchy. Growing up like twin brothers, the boys are one and double, mirror images on the one hand and foils on the other. Through the acknowledgement of their relationship as equals and copartners, Bayard explicitly challenges notions of racial identity that separate them into binary positions (i.e., white/black). In such turbulent times of warfare and violence, the pair are instead described as two moths, two feathers searching for a state of freedom above the hostility and chaos around them. 

Despite this idealistic tone, the social conventions of the antebellum period and the reality of the civil war interrupts these emerging notions of freedom, friendship, equality, and cross-racial solidarity. In the scene following this reflection, Bayard stands in one stirrup with his father while Ringo holds the other and runs beside the horse (Faulkner 8). Their social positions, defined by racial and class hierarchies, are ever-present and subtly impact how the two individuals move in this scene. However, the text oscillates between these two contradictory positions, and for the most part, questions and subverts this hierarchical system. For instance, Bayard admits that “Ringo was a little smarter” than he was, and eventually, taller and more mature as he works with Granny (Faulkner 81, 126),  Although there are inherent structural limitations to Ringo’s character and position as an enslaved person, these instances implicitly challenge white supremacist and racist ideologies that lie at the heart of slavery as an institution, one that dehumanizes enslaved black people, and relegates them to an inferior position in relation to white people. In his reflections, Bayard refuses to see Ringo as a commodity despite the racial hierarchy and power structure in place. Throughout the text, he suggests that they are companions who protect and support each other: “I caught Ringo and held him as he slipped off and then a little later Ringo caught and held me from slipping before I even knew that I had been asleep” (Faulkner 60). In this manner, the social “omnipresence” of racism and hierarchical relations is constantly challenged by the recurrent themes of cross-racial solidarity, unity, and friendship based on mutual respect and equality. 

Therefore, in the first half of the novel, the friendship between Bayard and Ringo is suggestive of a form of racial justice, a sense of freedom from the shackles of a dehumanizing and oppressive institution that permeates the nation and sows divide. That being said, however, Bayard himself appears conflicted with this understanding of race and freedom amidst the backdrop of a civil war. This conflict is highlighted in his thoughts on the symbolism of the railroad as a means of motion and movement: “It was as if Ringo felt it too…the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people” (Faulkner 81). Although Bayard first describes this impulse as “reasonless” and delusional for enslaved African Americans, his stream of consciousness reveals a certain shift by the end of the thought. He comes to the conclusion that the impulse to leave the familiarity and security of the known in hopes of freedom and the unknown, is an experience that is universal to all humans, regardless of race. Despite his reservations, Bayard humanizes the struggle for freedom, an understanding that, in many ways, is made possible through his friendship with Ringo.