My paper will focus on transgressive bodies in Light in August, The Unvanquished, Absalom, Absalom! and how bodies are classed, raced, and gendered as a means to reveal their sociopolitical standing in greater society. I want to explore how Faulkner uses depictions of transgressive bodies in his work to make larger points about Southern culture, patriarchy, sexuality, sexism, and racism. As to not overwhelm myself, I have decided to organize my paper by sub-topic rather than character. I have relied on the Hunter College Library website to point me to useful sources to assist me in answering how Faulkner uses depictions of transgressive bodies to make larger points about Southern (and frankly, broader American) culture writ large. 

Clarke, Deborah. Robbing The Mother : Women in Faulkner, University Press of Mississippi, 1992. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=866930.

Clarke analyzes female characters use their bodies in creative ways to realize the possibilities of her own power within the narrow confines of Southern society.

Doyle, Laura. “Project Muse.” The Body against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race, vol. 73, no. 2, June 2001. 339-364 , https://doi.org/10.1163/_afco_asc_000f

Doyle provides a fascinating analysis on how Lena Grove, Gail Hightower, Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden’s bodies function as phantoms that simultaneously promise and withhold the unity of the body—and the nation.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text. Vintage International, 1986.

This is my primary source for all material regarding Faulkner’s depictions the transgressive bodies of Clydie, Charles Bon and Miss. Rosa.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. Vintage International, 1932.

This is my primary source for all material regarding Faulkner’s depictions the transgressive bodies of Lena Grove, Gail Hightower, Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished the Corrected Text. Vintage International, 1991.

This is my primary source for all material regarding Faulkner’s depictions the transgressive body of Drusilla Hawke.

Forter, Greg. Gender, Race, and Mourning in American Modernism, Cambridge University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=691960.

Forter examines the physical manifestations of trauma in the bodies characters in Light in August and Absalom Absalom! thus depicting how racism, patriarchy, gender, heteronormativity and classism physically alter and traumatize their victims and beneficiaries to the greatest extent possible.

Roberts, Diane. “A Precarious Pedestal: The Confederate Woman in Faulkner’s ‘Unvanquished.’” Journal of American Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 1992, pp. 233–46. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27555647

Roberts provides a very interesting analysis on how, through transgression, Drusilla Hawke’s body is no longer a body but a contested zone, an object of contention for nearly all the townspeople and the Sartoris family.

Watson, Jay. Reading for the Body : The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction, 1893-1985, University of Georgia Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3039122

Watson supplements my paper by explaining how bodies in Light in August represent the cultural context of the early twentieth-century Deep South, a world where blood was the most dangerous thing.

Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire : Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990, University of Chicago Press, 2000. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=432317

Yaeger explains how the bodies of many of the characters depicted in Light in August, The Unvanquished, Absalom, Absalom! reveal a preoccupation with the monstrous and the grotesque as well as with the peculiar points of contact between black and white, such as the daily trauma of underpaid labor and the operations of racial and gender politics in the unnoticed yet all-too-familiar everyday.

One of the main themes in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is perception. In the novel, there are four primary narrators, and each attempts to reconstruct the past with a very limited set of available facts. The four main narrators of the story provide accounts of Thomas Sutpen’s life that frequently include contradictory sets of detail and different descriptive approaches. It becomes impossible for the reader to garner what exactly happens in Sutpen’s life or why and how it is significant. This uncertainty and contradiction can be read as a commentary or demonstration of how narratives are shared, told, and changed to benefit the teller. Each narrator seemingly imprints much of themselves onto Sutpen.

According to the four fictitious storytellers, the murder of Sutpen by Wash Jones, and the murder of Charles Bon by Henry Sutpen, can be interpreted appropriately to reveal the whole significance of the narrative. The problem, of course, is that neither Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, nor Shreve were present at these crucial moments. Their reconstruction of history is largely an interpretive act of the imagination. And because three of the narrators are emotionally involved in the South’s shared past, they exaggerate fact into myth and history into legend.

Each narrator accepts certain facts, rejects others, and fills the blanks between action and motive with a hypothesis to fill in the gaps that will enable them to better tell the story. The narrators weigh, judge, and interpret the Sutpen legend from very different perspectives determined by their generation, personal relationship to the South, to Thomas Sutpen himself. By responding differently to the scattered Sutpen jigsaw, each narrator constructs their own version of “truth.” As a result, at the book’s end, four distinct figures of Thomas Sutpen emerge instead of one definitive portrait.

When Rosa tells Quentin about Sutpen’s settlement in Yoknapatawpha County, her perspective is colored as “a grim mausoleum air of puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness” (47). Rosa Coldfield tells her story to Quentin in a dark, hot, and airless room, with the blinds drawn and the doors locked. She has effectively cut herself off from the outside world for over 40 years. In this “coffin-smelling gloom,” Rosa seems almost as much a ghost as the shadowy figures she evokes from her past (4). She acknowledges that her life had been “destined to end on an afternoon in April forty-three years ago” when her brother-in-law Thomas Sutpen insulted the Puritan foundation that Rosa Coldfield had weighed and judged her world when he asked her to marry him (12). Shut up in her house, Rosa has, in essence, been a ghost for forty-three years. Sutpen seemingly haunts Rosa’s every waking moment. Her “outrage” overwhelmingly lends itself to her narrative style and lends itself to her “grim haggard amazed voice” (3). Her narrative style is described thus: “It (the talking, the telling) seemed (to him, to Quentin) to partake of that logic- and reason-flouting quality of a dream” (15). The dead are not dead to Rosa, and she tells her story with immense frustration and anger.

Jason Compson enacts a more detached style of narration. Employing this detachment, Mr. Compson avoids that degree of distorting rage that results when a narrator is perhaps too close to the subject matter. This is not to say that Mr. Compson isn’t immensely delusional in his own right. He has had no personal contact with Sutpen. Instead, he relies on many so-called Southern “Lost Cause” modes of interpretation when handling the subject matter. Mr. Compson’s normative masculine point of view paints Sutpen not as a violent white supremacist but a venerated hero who defied Lincoln and defended the Southern way of life by taking up arms in the Confederate army. To Mr. Compson, Sutpen’s “design” is a representation of the history and heritage of the South. Mr. Compson, the doomed, old, white Southerner barely clinging to power, is forced to inflate the character at the center of his narration. For him, Sutpen’s story becomes the whole declaration of Southern desire, execution, achievement, guilt, fate, and ruin.

The final narration of Thomas Sutpen’s story is a shared point of view from two narrators whose different backgrounds enact two very different degrees of emotional involvement in the reconstruction of the legend. Because Quentin was born and raised in the South, he views the Sutpen story “without the medium of speech” (172). To Quentin, every person born in the South retains a similar consciousness and a finetuned insight into certain modes of thinking because Southerners are united by a common heritage that forces its descendants to look not to the future but constantly to the past. This notion is seemingly inconceivable to Shreve McCannon, the intellectual Canadian. Shreve serves more as a stand-in for the Northern academic reader. He asks many of the same questions a person unfamiliar with Southern culture might ask. At one point, Quentin angrily asserts, “You can’t understand it [the South]. You would have to be born there.” (289).

As flawed as each narrator might seem, we cannot fully fault them for their skewed perspectives. Indeed, isn’t that the way we make our own inferences and determinations about the figures we’ve never met or encountered through the lens of ourselves?

As members of an inherently classed, raced, and gendered society, our bodies have been constructed to betray our social and political standing whether we want them to or not. William Faulkner heightens this notion in the physical descriptions of the characters in The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, The Unvanquished, Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying. Using specialized and often conflicting depictions of characters such as Drusilla Hawk, Benjy Compson, Gail Hightower, Charles Bon, and Dewey Dell Bundren, Faulkner demonstrates the inadequacy of the American South’s outmoded ways of thinking. It could be argued that through the depictions of transgressive bodies, Faulkner attempts to make larger points about Southern culture, patriarchy, sexuality, sexism, and racism. This paper will seek to answer the following questions: How does Faulkner use depictions of transgressive bodies to make larger points about Southern (and frankly, American) culture writ large? What happens when we, as readers, are confronted with gender transgression that shatters the South’s normative definitions of masculine and feminine? What about normative definitions of sexuality, race, and wealth? Do Faulkner’s physical descriptions reflect the general pattern of how society reflects itself onto the self? 

Preliminary bibliography:

Crowell, Ellen. “The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde’s Trip through Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.” The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 71–124.

Doyle, Laura. “Project Muse.” The Body against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race, vol. 73, no. 2, June 2001. 339-364 , https://doi.org/10.1163/_afco_asc_000f.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! : The Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International, 1990.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage International, 2005.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. Vintage International, 1932.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Vintage International, 2015.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished the Corrected Text. Vintage International, 1991.

Homans, Margaret. 1997. “Racial composition: Metaphor and the body in the writing of race”. In Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, pp. 77-101. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Matthews, John T., and John T. Matthews. William Faulkner: Seeing through the South, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2012.

Watson, Jay. Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction 1893-1985, University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990. University of Chicago Press, 2000.

One of the many notable themes in Faulkner’s Light in August is how the marginalized characters transgress traditional notions of home. In John T. Matthews’ article, “From Rednecks to Riches,” in his book Seeing through the South, Matthews argues that Light in August depicts a “crisis of unhoming. Its principal characters leave homes, lose them, never have them, steal them, create makeshift ones – and, in a spectacular instance, burn one down.” (p. 159). Indeed, every character we meet in the novel has no home. As humans, we are often bound up in the notion of home, and when home ceases to exist or becomes the source of suffocation or even peril to a person, a profound instability arises. Using this notion of home, Faulkner seems to extend his considerations on how class frames race and gender by thinking about what a loss of home takes from a person, especially in a region long dominated by notions of home and place. There is so much to cover here, but for the interest of time, I will review how constructs of gender have begun to erode or are transgressed through the lens of the home.

For Lena Grove, home has become something of a prison. Early on, the narrator describes Lena’s home as “a four room and unpainted house with his labor- and childridden wife. For almost half of every year the sister-in-law was either lying in or recovering. During this time Lena did all the housework and took care of the other children,” (p.5). Lena recognizes her destiny in this overbearing woman, and soon after, she seems to have replicated it for herself. The narrator points out that no one, least of which her brother, really cares that Lena is pregnant or that she has left. Again, a stark contrast to Caddy in The Sound and the Fury. Matthews states that families like Lena’s “have less reason to value chastity, since their interests are less served by the sexual and racial barriers that guard privileged status” (p. 160). Off the bat, Lena’s unconventional behavior is startling, especially when taken into account that people, primarily men, are noticing a “strange young gal walking the road” (p. 13). Despite this strangeness and instability, a new form of home arises when Armstid, the farmer, offers Lena shelter for the night. His wife provides her with a sliver of home. At first glance, Mrs. Armstid is one of those labor- and childridden wives. She is resentful of her hard life and chides Lena for not being married and for violating social norms by parading around so blatantly. But Mrs. Armstid deeply sympathizes with Lena, a young woman who has left her cage of a home and is now exploring the country unencumbered. In an implicit show of female solidarity, Mrs. Armstid demands that Lena accept her stash money after smashing the china bank she keeps it in. In female solidarity, Lena has found a transgressive floating home that can be ever available to her in any female community she might find herself.

We see many other outwardly transgressive treatments in the classical notions of home. In her hometown, where her family has lived for generations, Joanna Burden endures ostracism as the price of challenging Jefferson’s social mores. Joanna is the lone survivor of a family of anti-slavery New Englanders who came to Jefferson after the Civil War to assist in the enfranchisement of black citizens:

 She has lived in the house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction. A Yankee, a lover of negroes, about whom in the town there is still talk of queer relations with negroes in the town and out of it, despite the fact that it is now sixty years since her grandfather and her brother were killed on the square by an ex-slaveowner over a question of negro votes in a state election. But it still lingers about her and about the place: something dark and outlandish and threatful, even though she is but a woman and but the descendant of them whom the ancestors of the town had reason (or thought that they had) to hate and dread. (p. 46–47)

Joanna is ostracized for her views and actions surrounding race and for being an undomesticated woman in Jefferson. The word “queer” highlights a sub-theme that links “deviant” sexual activity with disobeying racial traditions. Joanna is dismissed as a sexless, old maid for not associating with her “own kind” yet finds a new variation on home in her mixing in with black lives, arranging education and employment opportunities for Jefferson’s black community (although we are not given much detail yet whether is an appreciated act or if it is reminiscent of the white savior). Joanna is never forgiven for her transgressions on the socially acceptable constructions of home. When one day she is found savagely murdered, her body nearly decapitated, her ability to transgress is ceased. Her earthy body that seeks basic needs no longer exists and can no longer strive, push, or search. Matthews notes that the “town folks’ collective fantasy punishes Joanna sexually for her willingness to mix racially, but also for her refusal to confine herself to wifely domestic activities” (p.164).

As Drusilla Hawk takes over as The Unvanquished’s central woman character, we become privy to a more disruptive kind of gender transgression that shatters Bayard’s definitions of the masculine and the feminine. While Granny’s body is invisible, Bayard provides several details on Drusilla’s body, including her athleticism and masculine presentation. In “Skirmish at Sartoris,” we are told that Drusilla “had deliberately tried to unsex herself” in that she is wearing men’s clothes and fighting the Yankees in John Sartoris’ brigade (189). Drusilla’s “unsexed” body is under constant scrutiny. She ruptures the gender binary by becoming a multiple: both man and woman. Drusilla’s cross-dressing is a direct challenge to ladyhood. When dress standards are transgressed, a challenge to socio-economic strata is issued. Style of dress is a highly regulated semiotic system. It thus becomes a highly contested topic in the novel because it flies in the face of how Southern social order is conducted. By wearing overalls and pants and doing manual labor, Drusilla has rejected the “highest destiny of a Southern woman—to be the bride-widow of a lost cause” and a “shame to her father’s memory” (191). Most shocking to Aunt Louisa and the ladies of the town is that when Drusilla was in the army, she wore “the garments not alone of a man but of a common private soldier” (191). Not only has Drusilla transgressed gender, but she has also transgressed class. Aunt Louisa probably would have at least a sliver felt better if Drusilla had worn a uniform befitting her social status. Drusilla’s subversion is aimed at class and gender, but in her immense privilege, she cannot see how her actions continue to uplift a white supremacist state.

Aunt Louisa’s final straw is when she learns that Drusilla is living with John Sartoris on their plantation. Immediately, Aunt Louisa assumes Drusilla is pregnant out of wedlock. When confronted with Aunt Louisa’s accusations, Drusilla “not only showed neither shame nor remorse but actually pretended she did not even know” what Aunt Louisa was talking about (191). Aunt Louisa accuses her daughter of “flouting and outraging all Southern principles of purity and womanhood that our husbands died for” (193). Drusilla’s body has become an object of contention for nearly all the townswomen and the Sartorises. She has been accused of violating the sacred realm of Confederate Womanhood. Aunt Louisa accuses Drusilla of willfully abandoning the cause for which her father died. Drusilla has defied the role ascribed to her at birth of the virtuous Southern Belle, and by refusing to adhere to it, she has entered an unknown, in-between realm.

Drusilla’s occupation of this in-between realm is short-lived. While Drusilla may have been able to rupture Aunt Louisa’s notions of propriety, she cannot hold up under the pressure of “Southern gentleman” and planter John Sartoris. Aunt Louisa arrives at Hawkhurst “in mourning, even to the crepe bow on her umbrella handle, that hadn’t worn mourning when we were at Hawkhurst two years ago though Uncle Dennison was just as dead then as he was now,” with trunks of Drusilla’s dresses to take back her daughter’s class and gender, demanding that John marry her (200). Despite Aunt Louisa’s shocking behavior, John Sartoris decides to reinstate the violated hierarchies and tells Drusilla, “They have beat you” (203).

At the end of “Skirmish at Sartoris,” however, Drusilla, now dressed in the symbolically significant bridal gown and veil, demonstrates that the construction of her as a Southern Belle is tenuous at best. She reasserts allegiance to toxically masculine spheres of violence and political exclusion by helping John kill the Burdens, who were trying to help formerly enslaved people vote. On returning to Sartoris, Aunt Louisa asks, “so you are not married,” to which Drusilla replies, “I forgot,” (208). Again, we see that while Drusilla may rebel against the rules of ladyhood, she completely aligns herself with the white supremacist, anti-Reconstruction politics that aim to keep the white, wealthy, male landowner in power.

In “An Odor of Verbena,” the instability of Drusilla’s return to Confederate Womanhood is rendered all the more precarious with a troubling account of the dangers of her transgressions. Drusilla’s forced position as John Sartoris’ wife and the lady of the plantation complicates her adoption of masculine values. She now lives in a plantation house “bigger” than the last. She wears skirts and appears separated from the masculine presentations she wishes to embody. Thrown from the masculine realm, Drusilla attempts to employ her notions of classical femininity to manipulate the attraction Bayard feels for her to get him to take revenge on John’s killer. In essence, she wants Bayard to become a surrogate killer for her, so she may vicariously enjoy the infliction of violence that her assigned gender placement does not allow. While the two of them are alone, Drusilla “was quite near…as she stood holding out to me, one in either hand, the two dueling pistols” then she says to Bayard: “Take them…Oh, you will thank me, you will remember me who put into your hands what they say is an attribute only of God’s, who took what belongs to heaven and gave it to you. Do you feel them? The long true barrels true as justice, the triggers…slender and invincible and fatal as the shape of love” (237). 

William Faulkner’s character of Granny in The Unvanquished serves as a fascinating study in the hypocrisy and contradictory nature of the 1800s American South. A core concern in “Ambuscade,” “Retreat,” “Raid,” and “Riposte in Tertio” is power and how people relate to it. Serving as the moral compass of the plantation during the war, Granny is the prototypical southern old lady: proper and severe. While Colonel Sartoris is away with his troop, Granny takes over and runs the plantation, thus stepping into a role usually saved for the man of the house. At no point, however, is Granny’s “ladyhood” questioned or diminished at any point in the novel despite the understanding that she is stepping into a man’s shoes. Perhaps this is because Granny serves as a custodian of the status quo and for “proper” behavior, such as calling for Ringo and Bayard’s mouths to be washed out with soap for lies, swearing, and other “ungentlemanly” activities.

However, in “Ambuscade,” Granny lies when she faces the Yankee captain hunting down Bayard and Ringo. In “Raid,” Granny pushes Union troops to return her stolen property, invoking her race, gender and class privilege, her “borrowed” male authority, and her Southern ladyhood, Granny yells at the Union soldiers, “‘I want my silver! I’m John Sartoris’s mother-in-law! Send Colonel Dick to me!” (105). Later in “Raid,” she asks the escaped enslaved people, “Who are you going to mind from now on?” to which one of the men answers after some time: “You, missy,” (115).

Faulkner tells the story of Granny’s adventures using familiar Civil War tropes: hiding under a hoop skirt, burying the family silver, and outwitting the Yankees. Bayard portrays Granny as a conventional woman through the stories. When Granny confronts the Union soldiers, the Union lieutenant says, “‘ I’d rather engage Forrest’s whole brigade every morning for six months than spend that same length of time trying to protect United States property from defenseless Southern women and n*** and children. Defenseless!’ he shouted:” (143-144). The Union lieutenant’s declaration emphasizes how the Confederate Woman is viewed with pride and condescension.

There is an overarching tension throughout “Ambuscade,” “Retreat,” “Raid,” and “Riposte in Tertio” between the masculine and feminine spheres of Granny’s life. Her masculine acquisition of power pushes her to lie, cheat and steal, but her Southern feminine moralism compels her to condemn her actions and beg for God’s forgiveness. Granny slides between these stereotypically male and female roles quite well at first. An interesting event occurs when she attempts to assuage her guilt by confessing her sins in front of her church congregation. She proclaims: “I did not sin for gain or greed…I did not sin for revenge…I sinned for more than justice…a holy cause even though You have seen fit to make it a lost cause,” (147). Granny is asking for God’s pardon for behaving like a man.

Later, however, Granny’s undulating gender roles become deadly. She miscalculates her status while operating in the male realm of violence and assumes that men will not harm her because she is an old, wealthy white woman. In her naivety, she decries, “I am a woman. Even Yankees don’t harm old women,” (153). It is this attitude and her transgression into the masculine realm that will lead to her murder not at the hands of a Yankee but at the hands of a fellow Southerner.