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. 

What is the significance of Bayard Sartoris living in a slave cabin with his family after their house is burned down after the civil war? What about Joe Christmas in a deserted slave cabin in Light in August? Or, as professor Allred pointed out to me, what does it mean that sons of a “horiffic plantocratic father allow the slaves to occupy the big house?” Does it serve as some sort of apology? Investigating the many dwellings in the Faulkner universe will allow me to analyze a physical representation of the suppressed, avoided, and hated mixed up – or “Creole” nature (Glissant) – of the south. Close readings of the dwelling descriptions will allow me to access the mental constrictions that perhaps Faulkner was dealing with himself.

As our class discussed Jason Compson’s character in The Sound and The Fury we were all in agreement about his despicableness. The nature of his character was clear but the road he took to become Jason was less clear. We had glimpses of his childhood in Benjy’s chapter, but we had to fill in the gaps to understand how Jason Compson became Jason Compson. In A Light in August Faulkner presents another troublesome character, Joe Christmas, and time machines us at the start of chapter 6 to present a memory of Christmas’s becoming. While the chapter does not scream: “This is why Joe Christmas is the way he is!” It gives us material to hypothesize the reasons he is who he is.

How does someone reach a stage of such detached hatred?: “Christmas put his hand flat upon Brown’s mouth and nose, shutting his jaw with his left hand while with the right he struck Brown again with those hard, slow, measured blows, as if he were meting them out by count” (120). Christmas’s nonchalant use of violence stems from the fear of his orphanage’s nurse and his brutal foster father. The Nurse’s act of cruelty, threatening to reveal Christmas’ black ancestry, is a direct result of her fear of sexist backlash. Reeling from Joe’s witness of her sexual intercourse (rape?) with a young doctor, she turns from bribery to treachery to remove a child from her life who has no idea what she is so afraid of. His supposed knowledge destroys her: “By the second day she was well nigh desperate. She did not sleep at night. She lay most of the night now tense, teeth and hands clenched, panting with fury and terror” (145). The physical anguish she describes is in fear of punishment for her sex out of wedlock. The young doctor is noticeably absent once he is done in the office. His absence represents the lack of concern he has, as a man, for being revealed. Alone and afraid, the nurse weaponizes racism against a five year old to avoid sexist punishment. In this moment the hate she feared is transferred onto Christmas. The sexism turns into racism which is absorbed by Christmas.

The description of Christmas’ beating of Brown is similar to the description of McEachern’s beating of Christmas: “McEachern began to strike methodically, with slow and deliberate force, still without heat or anger. It would have been hard to say which face was the more rapt, more calm, more convinced.” (160) The same way which Christmas was ‘meting’ his hits out, his foster father beats him ‘methodically’. The cycle of abuse is passed from what is given to the nurse, to what the Nurse and McEachern give to Christmas, to what Christmas gives unto the world. Chapters 5 & 6 give us the experiences that form Christmas, something to understand who he is, even if it does not justify his actions.

Jason Compson is oddly hateful of any relationships of dependence for someone who has been so reliant. He is from a family who built its wealth off of slavery, he had a black women to raise him and his siblings, and he relies on a job offer that never comes from his sister’s failed marriage. There is no acknowledgement of indebtedness from Jason in his chapter. Far from it. Not only does he not appreciate they ways he has benefited from relationships, he insults anyone else’s perceived dependence. As soon as I was thrown into Jason’s consciousness I was made aware of his hate towards women and blacks. Jason believes that Quentin should take her rightful place in the kitchen instead of ‘waiting for six n——‘ (180) to prepare breakfast for her. The problem with waiting for the black help is that they cant ‘even stand up out of a chair unless they’ve got a ban full of bread and meat to balance them’ (180). I am introduced to Jason seeing his hate for his sister because she is reliant on food from black caretakers and his hate for those caretakers because they are reliant on food probably from their work for the Compson’s. Stereotypes of black laziness ooze out of Jason’s thoughts, stereotypes that are so full of irony only a special type of blindness can account for their existence. Southern, aristocratic wealth is so tied up in non-lazy, prodigious black labor that the birth and sustained success of southern agriculture is impossible without blacks. This is probably true pre and post abolition as work changed from enslaved to share-cropping. But to Jason, the South’s success is something that blacks benefit from instead of a success that they took an essential role in. Why is it impossible for Jason to see and appreciate these relationships? To do so would chip away at a southern white man’s sense of superiority. It would chip away at the image of a south that was once beautiful due to the plantation owner’s brilliant orchestration of labor from senseless beings. Perhaps the things that separates Jason and his brother Quentin is that Quentin took an honest look at Southern reliance. The honesty destroyed a structure and ideology that one can build their life around and the destruction led to Quentin’s loss of periods and his suicide. Jason’s consciousness remains in a linear structure with punctuation. His hate seems to fuel his day to day ability to continue. Yet there is his ‘headache’. I interpret this headache as a symptom of the work his mind has to do to believe his interpretations about the world. Whether it is blaming New York jews for his failed cotton gambles or his sister for his lack of desirable employment, his headache is a representation of the toll his lies take.

The Unvanquished gives an exploration of the vacuum that existed following the end of the civil war. The physical destruction, the destruction of the institution of slavery, and the destruction of southern idealism left all southerners – freed-slaves to the aristocrats – staring into the abyss. But through reconstruction of the Sartoris estate, reconstruction of Drusilla’s gender role, and seizing power of the ballot box, the characters of The Unvanquished live up to that namesake.

The loss of the war is resembled by the housing on the Satoris estate. After the main house is destroyed, Bayard, John, and Drusilla all spend time sleeping in the cabins that the former slaves stayed in. The leveling of housing situation represents the leveling of power situation immediately following confederate loss. Questions linger in the air like: “How will power be reorganized?” and “How will race relations change?” However, the initial leveling is soon changed by John Sartoris. At first he ends the black/white shared cabins: “After Granny died Ringo and Louvinia and I all slept in the cabin, but after Father came Ringo and Louvinia moved back to the other cabin with Joby and now father and I slept on Ringo’s and my pallet” (192). Even though they were still in a cabin, John saw to it that the blacks and whites would not sleep in the same quarters. The significance of a shared arrangement is not lost on the Colonel, and this is one of the many acts he undertakes to restore confederate social order. He continues that by rebuilding: “Father had rebuilt the house too, on the blackened spot, over the same cellar, where the other had burned, only bigger, much bigger.” (220) The reconstruction of the house represents the reconstruction of pre-war economic order, plantations built around large houses. Building back ‘bigger’ represents more than a return, an expansion.

The murder of Carpet-Baggers looking to elect a black Cassius Benbow to U.S. Marshal is another act of reconstruction. Ringo alerts Bayard to the changing times after Ringo had visited town to learn why John was banning them from visiting: “I ain’t a n—- no more. I done been abolished” (199). Ringo’s recognition is the reason why John needs to control the election; if blacks people are able to gain the rights that white’s were given in the south, then the social order of the confederacy would be destroyed. John later calls his actions ‘law and order’, suggesting that a free election that may enfranchise black people is chaos.

Another battle of reconstruction is fought on the body of Drusilla. Nick P mentioned in his post that Drusilla is one character who is able to imagine a new future in the wake of the war. Her future holds a different role for women where the goal of their life is to be wedded to a man and bear his children. She is stopped in her tracks by the power of confederate woman looking to reconstruct the gender roles of the war. The dress captures the battle over Drusilla’s identity: “She was already beaten. Aunt Louisa made her put on a dress that night” (201). The dress represents a lack of mobility, a type of labor, and a distance from battle. For Aunt Louisa the dress gives Drusilla a chance to be married, impregnated, and a role in the house. The possibility of Drusilla not being ‘womanly’ is so freighting that it brings her to tears. Perhaps Drusilla’s gender transgressions would represent another loss in the civil war, a loss of lifestyle and values that would be too great for Louisa to suffer. A dress goes on Drusilla to avoid this fate and bring back a way of life.

The acts of reconstruction in the second half of The Unvanquished let me investigate exactly what that title means. It also left me thinking “what is still not unvanquished from a pre-civil war past that structures our lives today?”

There is a lot of movement in The Unvanquished‘s chapter “Raid”. Granny, Ringo, and Bayard looks for the family’s chest of silver, freed slaves journey seemingly without direction (they turn and go back to Mississippi as a new group headed by the unlikely trio), southern soldiers on horses resemble the fading grandeur of the south, and the ripped up railroad is a specter over it all.

Bayard’s fantastic account of his father on horseback captures his coming of age story in a symbol. At this point in The Unvanquished Bayard and Ringo (the latter ironically) are still enamored with the Confederacy and Colonel Sartoris. Bayard’s description of his father on horseback shows how Bayard believes his father is a hero and by extension the confederacy is heroic: “Then Jupiter shot out from between us; he went out exactly like I have seen a hawk come out of a sage field and rise over a fence” (66). On Jupiter’s back, General Sartoris seems like he is flying in the eyes of Bayard. He is a predator that Bayard views magically: “I could see a sky under them and the tops of the trees beyond the hill like they were flying” (66). Between the hawk metaphor and the hyperbolic flight, General Sartoris represents a confederacy that is flying. This is a confederacy that is successful, on the hunt rather than the hunted, and flying into the future.

The symbol fills the imagination of Bayard, who later considers his vantage point of a child: “There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything” (66). Bayard is squarely in his belief phase. He believes in the heroism and a southern future. What is it that he cannot accept? The potential for a southern loss and the moral implications of a side that is fighting to protect slavery. Bayard’s description of the horse adds a new state of movement: “I was still a child at that moment when Father’s and my horses came over the hill and seemed to cease galloping and to float, hang suspended rather in a dimension without time in it” (66). The image of the horse suspended in the air, floating eternally, is also Bayard’s understanding of the Confederacy’s status. It is here and here to stay. To the child there is now way that the father can fall from grace and along with it his army.