I found these sources through Hunter’s online library system, using the keywords “Faulkner” and “sexuality,” and/or “queer,” and via suggestions from Prof. Allred after my proposal. I also used the Zotero library for “Coming Out through History’s Hidden Love Letters in Absalom, Absalom!” I also am choosing to limit my research around Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August for the purpose of keeping my analysis based on close readings rather than ambiguous comparisons. As per my paper pitch, my questions remain:

-To what extent does queer language and identity speak in conversation with southern morality and suppression in Faulkner’s work? 

-How often is erotica entangled within non conforming identities? 

-Was Faulkner suggesting something about queerness, desire, and humanity through his characters and their sexuality?

Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality, volume 1: An introduction. Vintage Books. 

Foucault’s History of Sexuality will serve as my framework to plot and point at the nature of Faulkner’s restrictive erotic’s, in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. Majorly, it will be my key to understanding the “regime of power-knowledge-pleasure” that sustains power systems and propagations of knowledge. Furthermore, Foucault speaks on how an individual is defined by how he or she fits into a doctrine of sexuality (such as that seen in various religions, economic systems, family moral). This will guide me in uncovering one of my primary questions, How often is erotica entangled within non conforming identities? 

Sensibar, J. L. (2010). Faulkner and Love: The women who shaped his art. Yale University Press. 

Sensibar provides bibliographical assertions on Faulkner’s life and his varying modes of loving throughout. Most importantly, she highlights both how Faulkner’s women often subject culture norms, in addition to bringing forth the erotic suppression Faulkner himself may have felt in both heterosexual and homosexual relations. This, too, will serve as important framework to expose the psychological / emotional landscape of the writer, and thus, the psychological and emotional landscapes of his characters and their language surrounding erotic’s. 

Jones, Norman W. “Coming Out through History’s Hidden Love Letters in Absalom, Absalom!” American Literature, vol. 76 no. 2, 2004, p. 339-366. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/169224. 

This source does a particularly good job of exposing the homosexual desire (and tragedy) of Quentin and Shreve, Henry and Bon, and, more broadly, of closeted southern gentleman and gentlewoman. Jones’ reading of the boys in their erotic retelling of Henry and Bon speaks greatly to the homosexual repression suggested in Faulkner and Love and the systems of power which would deny the sexuality to be enacted on as described in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. 

Sherazi. (2014). “Playing It Out Like a Play”: Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden’s Erotic Masquerade in William Faulkner’s Light in August. The Mississippi Quarterly, 67(3), 483–506. https://doi.org/10.1353/mss.2014.0007

Sherazi delves into the complex racial and gendered erotics which Joanna Burden and Joe Christmas perform throughout the three years of their co-residency on her property. Sherazi, most importantly, detangles the “racialized and gendered structures of domination,” exposing the systems of power which denounce the two characters’ affairs as something between racial and sexual theory. This source speaks most directly to the heterosexual fear and shame tied to Faulkner’s writing, and also depicts a mirror to the homosexual shame noted in other sources.

Deborah E. McDowell. (2010). Must Have Been Love: Sexualities’ Attachments in Faulkner. In Faulkner’s Sexualities (p. 94–). University Press of Mississippi.

McDowell creates an important connection to the discussion of sexuality and “the sordid details and the brutal history of slavery and segregation at the heart of his entire Southern cycle— concubinage, incest, and tangled interracial genealogies” which permeate through much of Faulkner’s depictions of love and trauma. This source will speak more broadly to the relationship between sexuality and Faulkner’s “search for a language of love” with a backdrop of mass violence enacted through a country on the bounds of identity. 

(Primary Source) Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! : the Corrected Text. Vintage international edition., Vintage International / Vintage Books, 1990.

Of Faulkner’s books I am choosing to focus on, Absalom, Absalom! is of perhaps greatest importance. While much of the Eros is within the unsaid, there is plenty here to analyze—from Bon to Henry, Shreve to Quentin, Rosa to Clytie, and so forth. 

(Primary Source) Faulkner, William. Light in August : the Corrected Text. Vintage international edition., Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1990.

Light in August is second most important in my argument surrounding sexuality. I am looking to analyze Joanna Burden and Joe Christmas’ relationship, alongside Joe’s own erotic upbringing (toothpaste) and the relationship between sexuality and race and power.

“But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.” 

It has long been established that touch is one of humanity’s most basic, primal needs (though, historically, and even in contemporary society, a need which is withheld, underplayed, or overplayed for performance). Desire, sexuality, and physical pleasure often permeate through Faulkner’s mind and writing, and so it is no surprise that underneath much of the Sutpen mythology is a kind of deformed decorum and sexuality which adds an edge to much of what isn’t said. Much like The Sound and The Fury, Faulkner situates what the southern antebellum society labels as perverse at the center of psychological drives toward damnation—Henry killing Bon, a reaction to the sexuality they share alongside the sexuality which he projects onto his sister; Sutpen’s sleeping around, his ‘breed-like’ mentality, his eventual impregnation of the 15 year old and death, among a few—and while sexuality still holds a strong grip over the plot movement of Absalom, Absalom!, I would like to postulate that, at least for Miss Rosa, it is not sex which drives her, but the desire to simply be touched. 

Throughout the novel, it is driven home that Miss Rosa has somewhat of an isolated childhood; in her own words, she likens “that unpaced corridor which I called childhood” to the “projection of the lightless womb itself” (PAGE NUMBER). In chapter five, when the bulk of her think piece on humanity and touch comes to the forefront, she notes “as a child I had more than once watched her and Judith and even Henry scuffling in the rough games which they (possibly all children; I do not know) played, and (so I have heard) she and Judith even slept together, in the same room…” (112) highlighting that where Judith, Henry, and Clytie’s childhood’s merged (marked, particularly, by their ability to engage in physical closeness, violent, playful, or in rest) Miss Rosa could only speculate, never having experienced it herself, and hardly having known anyone else. While scholars have at times speculated on the queer, sometimes incestual nature between Clytie and Judith, Clytie and Rosa, Henry and Judith, and so forth, I believe largely the theories focusing on the queer nature between the women do not properly engage with Miss Rosa’s isolation. At the center of these theories is the emotionally driven, multiple page account of Rosa and Clytie’s touch, and where queer readings suggest Rosa is caught in this moment because of the inert sexuality which enraptured her, I suggest (though, of course, noting the other obvious queer references throughout Absalom, Absalom!) that Rosa is stunned by the touch itself, rather than the person who is touching her. 

The touch comes as Rosa tries to make her way up the stairs, toward the crime scene (where Judith waits with her dress and Bon’s body). Clytie attempts to stop her with words, and then physically, with her body. As Rosa follows the seconds leading into and after this encounter, she repeatedly notes she could not be stopped but by “the hand, the touch” (110). As soon as Clytie does physically assert herself, Rosa describes the “shocking impact” as something which “abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both…” (112). Her initial response, she describes as “not to her, to it speaking to it though the negro, the woman…” centers the touch as a kind of existence rather than an action, and when she reacts aggressively, she notes “we both knew it was not to her I spoke” (112). In other words, it is not the person, the identity, Clytie, whose touch startles her so much, but the physical dissolve of boundaries, the act of touching skin to another skin, which is alien, “not yet outrage…receiving no answer”, and which stopped her “dead” (111). The physical touch, which she is unknown to, not just sexually, but in its simplest of definitions, undoes conceptual boundaries which she places between the “I” and the “Other”, and the two of them are now “joined by that hand and arm which held us, like a fierce rigid umbilical cord, twin sistered to the fell darkness which had produced her” (112).

I’d really love to further delve into this distinction between sexuality and touch. I believe there is a lot of rich close reading to be done which can discuss not only the restrictiveness of erotica in Faulkner’s South, but the isolation which comes from the Past to the Present, the Future to the known, the Other to the Self.

At the center of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county, and the driving force between all destruction and rebirth, is sex. Undoubtedly, Faulkner is a man obsessed with sex—that is, sexual deviancy, gendering, suppression, courtship, performance, and torment. In The Sound and The Fury, Light in August, and Absolam Absolam!, each of Faulkner’s major characters undergo a rise and fall (though, not necessarily in that order, or as neatly as the language suggests) surrounding an event in sexual nature, or an (in)ability to reconcile their present self with their animal self. Strong examples of this include Christmas and Joanna’s relationship; Henry and Bon’s relationship; Quentin’s relationship with his sexuality, and his projected disturbance onto Caddy’s sexuality; Jason’s extreme distrust of Quentin and the man with the red tie, made complex by his relationship with the Memphis prostitute, Lorraine; Christmas’ relationship with the prostitute; Lena’s relationship with Lucas Burch (and her pregnancy), to name a few. 

When considering Faulkner’s sexuality in the south, I see an undeniable connection of his language surrounding these events to the language used in describing queer sexuality and suppressive desire. While some of Faulkner’s characters are outright queer coded (Henry, in particular, I notice as we read Absalom Absolam!) even those which are not queer coded speak to queer identity in the sense of their actions and language surrounding erotica. For this paper, I want to look into how Faulkner writes erotics and, more specifically, look into the mirroring of southern sexuality and queer sexuality in his work. The central questions I am looking to answer are: to what extent does queer language and identity speak in conversation with southern morality and suppression in Faulkner’s work? How often is erotica entangled within non conforming identities? Was Faulkner suggesting something about queerness, desire, and humanity through his characters and their sexuality?

Potential Sources:

  Sherazi, Melanie Masterton. “‘Playing It Out Like a Play’: Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden’s Erotic Masquerade in William Faulkner’s Light in August.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 3, 2014, pp. 483–506, https://doi.org/10.1353/mss.2014.0007.

  Jaime Harker. “And You Too, Sister, Sister?: Lesbian Sexuality, Absalom, Absalom!, and the Reconstruction of the Southern Family.” Faulkner’s Sexualities, University Press of Mississippi, 2010, p. 38–.

  Gary Richards. “The Artful and Crafty Ones of the French Quarter: Male Homosexuality and Faulkner’s Early Prose Writings.” Faulkner’s Sexualities, University Press of Mississippi, 2010, p. 21–.

  Vaughn, Matthew R. “‘Other Souths’: The Expression of Gay Identity in Absalom, Absalom.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 3, 2007, pp. 519–28.

  Gordon, Brandon. “Queering the South: The Plantation as Homotopia.” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 44, no. 1, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011, pp. 155–57, https://doi.org/10.1353/slj.2011.0021.

  Richards, Gary. “‘With a Special Emphasis’: The Dynamics of (re)claiming a Queer Southern Renaissance: Document View.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 2, 2002, p. 209–.

  Lopez, Alfred J. “Queering Whiteness, Queering Faulkner: Hightower’s ‘Wild Bulges.’” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 22, no. 1/2, 2006, pp. 74–89, https://doi.org/10.1353/fau.2006.0004.

  Boone, Joseph Allen. Libidinal Currents : Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. University of Chicago Press, 1998.

An interesting (mini) source for start of exploration: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/uvwxyz/William%20Faulkner.html 

And some more interesting Faulkner queer writings:

Sapphics poem https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53983/sapphics-56d233cf35eb5 

Lesbian Vampire Screenplay https://lithub.com/about-all-those-unproduced-screenplays-william-faulkner-wrote/  https://lfq.salisbury.edu/_issues/45_3/vampires_detectives_and_hawks.html

Throughout most of Faulkner’s work, a complex relationship between womanhood and southern culture is brought into the spotlight. In The Sound and The Fury, Caddy’s femininity is what drives the collapse of the southern-ideologically rooted family, and in The Unvanquished, the women—specifically Granny and Drusilla—serve as examples of what a delusional culture becomes as it unravels. Light in August is no different, and as Matthews suggests, Faulkner dives into “the desperate heartbreak of those seeking only to leave lives unburdened by the massive communal delusions of the past,” primarily through the “[negotiated] lives [of women] ruled by masculine authority,” (161). Women are, thus, a vehicle for Faulkner to describe what holds onto the South (cultural performance and chimera) and what ultimately leads to its destruction (the complete disregard of human nature, subordination of women, black people, and so forth). 

Light in August is teeming with these instances of women’s vanquishment, but I was most engrossed by the relationships between Reverend Hightower, the discharged minister, and the women in his life. Upon learning Hightower’s backstory, it became apparent that if Faulkner’s women were vehicles to the uncovery of southern delusion, Rev. Hightower was the man in the passenger seat serving as a witness to its demise. 

The most poignant relationship Reverend Hightower holds is the relationship with his deceased wife, of who we never learn a name, who Matthews describes as “a woman without purpose, her misery invisible to her husband’s preoccupations,” and who had “already been groomed by her seminarian father for duty as a pastors wife,” (163). The important word Matthews mentions is groomed, and I believe this relationship between the Reverend Hightower and the unnamed wife, though brief, speaks largely to what Faulkner understands as a cornerstone of the greatest failures of southern antebellum culture: anyone who is not a white man is raised like an animal to serve him and his honor. Faulkner enters this ideology carefully, yet directly, in Byron’s internal monologue, stating “women have to be strong and should not be held blamable for what they do with or for or because of men, since God knew that being anybody’s wife was tricky enough business” (62). 

Ultimately, Rev. Hightower’s unnamed wife falls out a window in a Memphis hotel during an affair, after having spent time in a sanatorium, and dies. As a result, the Reverends life falls apart, and he is boycotted at the church until he must step down, and even then the townsfolk attempt to push him out of Jackson, their distaste for him going as far as beating and death threats. In this scenario, where the Reverend’s wife faces feminine hysteria at her complete lack of freedom, Faulkner provides not only tragedy for the deceased, but for the surviving husband, who loses everything at the impossible southern customs. Furthermore, he directly correlates the collapse of the minister and wife’s life to Rev. Hightowers obsession with “his grandfather being shot from the galloping horse” (64) in Jackson during the war—the causation between past systems of social responsibility and a society becoming aware of its inequities is distinct.

Rev. Hightower also sits passenger to the tragedy of two other women—his cook, who faces rumors of sleeping with him and is forced to quit out of sheer survival—and his neighbor, who loses her baby in childbirth. His cook must lie and declare “her employer asked her to do something which she said was against God and nature,” to protect herself from the K.K.K., and so once again, at the hand of a southern idealists society which realized “all at once” that a woman spent time alone in the house with the Rev., who must not have been “a natural husband, a natural man,” (71). Comparatively, at the center of the pregnant neighbor’s tragedy, the Reverend is praised despite a dead child, the doctor and  father of the child “approving of Hightower’s work,” and the woman’s loss hardly highlighted at all (74). These women display the ways in which Reverend Hightower’s position in a delusional southern class system is both detrimental to him, in the case of his wife and cook, and benign or even praise-worthy, in the case of the mother and the deceased child. 

Quentin’s character is muddled, neurotic, and flattened across time as a prisoner rather than as a recorder (like Benji), catalyst (like Caddy) or refuser (like Jason). Where we expect a reliable narrator to take a stand, Faulkner gives us the solemn southern scholar who is tied to the past more than he is living in the present. I was really troubled by this character because while he felt well defined and fully fleshed out, he was distant, paradoxical, and his form broke apart on the page. For this reason, he is my favorite character — where the other characters are fleshed out, present, and discernable, Quentin is a slave to his experience, in a way that the very experience of waking up and checking the clock somehow relates to the ghosts of antebellum ideals which haunt him.

In other words, Quentin is a fragment of human experience. He is the mind at work trying to find a reason for its survival in a world which contradicts itself into violence. He is the conflict point for what the ideal southern caste system is supposed to be and what happens when the doors to its oppression are opened too wide. In fact, as he reflects on the disintegration of this southern illusion, specifically in regards to Caddy, we physically see him diminish into verse, where perhaps the most disturbing points of the novel occur: he resorts to suggesting suicide—“I held the point of the knife at her throat” (152)— or even incest— “I’ll make you say we did Im stronger than you” (149). Yet, Quentin’s violence lacks any sort of punch. In the sections where he threatens Caddy, his syntax becomes child-like and empty of power, and when he threatens Caddy’s lover, he faints. This violence which fills Quentin is devoid of any real release. 

As a cog, Quentin stands helplessly as the ideological pillars of his world fall to the ground– and take his family with them. He both resents his father and is bound to him, constantly repeating his nihilistic rants despite his innate need to repel them; he both desires Natalie and detests his sexual appetite for her in the face of gentility; he despises what his sister has done, even considering killing her, and yet his hate stems from his obsessive love for her. 

At the heart of Quentin is the paradox of any society — where marriage is driven by sex, it is considered a death for Caddy (“When they touched me I died” [149]), and the only way she can be saved is through Marriage, where another man may trade his protection for her virginity. He understands this structure that has been set and grows to know it is inescapable — even as a man, with less restraint, he recounts his play in the game while he escorts the lost little girl home. 

By the time we reach Quentin, he is already gone. He is consumed by his experience and role in a world of which he can find no real moral meaning within, despite the heavy emphasis of morality in his southern upbringing. The result is a shattered character, of which functions like a broken mirror as a reflector of a society which can not be totally summarized by a character of more normative syntax such as Jason. Even as we continue into the final sections of The Sound and The Fury, we are followed by these echoes of human experience which surround Quentin relentlessly into his eventual death, and forced to surrender to the weight of a southern illusion that has been broken through one intimate glance at The Compson’s. 

From “Ambuscade” to “Riposte in Tertio”, Faulkner’s protagonist Bayard moves through the Civil War and the collapse of southern ideals as a young boy. Where much of war literature is directly violent, either through flashbacks of said violence, or present lived dialogue and action, Faulkner writes about the Civil War in a way that a child moves his plastic soldiers across a map. More so than the egregious brutality of the white south slave owners, or the ghastly ferocity of man vs. man in battle, we hear of stolen mules and cut-free cattle. Where the violence of men is unavoidable, Faulkner writes instead of the “sound like somebody had shut his hand over his mouth” (70). I believe that this is a very purposeful stylistic choice. Speaking through the Bayard, Faulkner needs to be able to account for the war from a place of a child’s understanding of violence and trauma. The result of this normalized trauma from the child’s perspective is either a complete avoidance of said violence (i.e., when Granny apologies for her sins, and the world has fallen apart around her, Bayard focuses on the “hickory branch just outside the window, turning yellow; when the sun touched it, the leaves looked gold” [147]) or the reconfiguration of said experience, say, by surrealism. 

This ‘Southern Surrealism” is apparent from the very first line of The Unvanquished, where Faulkner writes “Behind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map” (3). Where Faulkner is quick to note that “Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile…”, he intentionally places the ‘living map’ image at the forefront of the novel. Placing this surreal suggestion that the two boys held a living map centers the audience in the childlike perspective that will continue to situate the civil war throughout much of the book.

The surrealism continues to flourish as we move forward the different short stories, Bayard describing Loosh as “hanging there against the lighted doorway like he had been cut out of tin in the act of running,” or Louvinia’s toenails as “faintly soiled feathers on the floor about a foot below the hem of her nightgown as if they were not connected,” Joby with “his mouth hanging open and his eyes like two eggs,” the sky as if “the whole rime of the world was full of horses running along the sky,” the soldiers with “peaceful expressions…like so many dolls,” the railroad as “a long empty gash cut through the trees,” and Brother Fortinbride with “bones looking like they were coming right out through his face,” as some of many. 

It should be noted, though, that the surrealism begins to fall shorter in “Riposte in Tertio”. I believe this is likely because Bayard, at the age of 15, is beginning to understand the severity of war beyond what his childlike perspective had previously allotted him. Faulkner includes Bayard’s reflection on weather, “maybe it was because you are not conscious of weather until you are fifteen,” to illustrate this coming-into-awareness (147). Additionally, we begin to see what is perhaps the most direct violence thus far, when Granny is killed by Grumby. The correlation of violence and surrealism is made rather clear through these chapter progressions. 

A question I still have is why much of the surrealism centers around Faulkner’s Black characters specifically. I have considered that it is (1) because Faulkner, writing from as a white man, must lean into the fantastical to understand experiences that are not his own or (2) because much of the violence and evidence of violence occurs in Black people rather than White people, and so, as demonstrated above, the level of surrealism would surely rise. However, I’m not sure if that is a fully fleshed out answer, and I’m curious about looking into this more.