The topic of my paper will focus on depictions of male homoeroticism and male homosocial bonding in the works of William Faulkner, particularly in Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August. Through a focused analysis of the dynamics and relationships that exist between Thomas Sutpen and the enslaved men, Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen, and Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon/MacKenzie, I will explore the ways in which intimacy between men is portrayed and the connection that it has to both upholding traditional power structures and the potential it has to dismantle traditional power structures. As seen through the fear, anger, and violence exhibited through characters like Jason Compson and Percy Grimm – who uphold normative sexuality in order to maintain white patriarchal power in the South – I will argue that Faulkner suggests that male homosocial bonding has the ability to undermine clearly defined and enforced boundaries around class, gender, and race.

Through a combination of keywords and search phrases like “homoeroticism,” “queer,” and “transgressive” alongside “Faulkner,” I located the majority of my sources – both physical books and online journal articles –  through CUNY One Search. I also searched specifically in key publications including The Faulkner Journal, The Mississippi Quarterly, American Literature, and Modern Fiction Studies. 

Primary Source: Absalom, Absalom!

The majority of my paper will focus on the characters and dynamics portrayed in AA, in particular, the dynamics between Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon and Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon. The homoerotic language and behavior not only exists within these pairs, but also between all four of them. Quentin’s character serves as both a connection to the past and the limitations of Southern societal constraints and the possibility of breaking free of those bonds through exploration, imagination, and storytelling. 

Primary Source: The Sound and the Fury

In many respects, Jason Compson IV is a representative of the diminished plantocracy class, and thus is an individual desperate to hold on to existing structures that provide him with power and agency including his race, class, and gender. His “fury” and focus on the destabilizing man with the red tie suggests a homoeroticism that threatens Jason’s control. This novel also provides important context regarding Quentin’s desire for both Caddy and Dalton Ames which mirrors the love triangle in Absalom, Absalom! 

Primary Source: Light in August

This novel depicts the threat that “queer” behavior poses for men like the sheriff and Percy Grimm in their inability to imagine relationships and dynamics outside of those legally sanctioned and socially promoted. This is particularly true when analyzing the dynamics (or even just societal perception) between men like Joe Christmas and Lucas Burch, and Gail Hightower and Joe Christmas. 

Source #1: Harker, Jaime. “Queer Faulkner: Whores, Queers, and the Transgressive South.” The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Edited by John T. Matthews. Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 107-118

In this chapter, Harker presents an overview of the recent scholarship that has been published looking at Faulkner’s novels through a queer critical lens. Harker’s writing analyzes the homoeroticism present throughout Faulkner’s writing and the impact that transgressive gender and sexuality have on destabilizing alliances and power structures. 

Source #2: Boone, Joseph Allen. “Under the Shadow of Fascism: Oedipus, Sexual Anxiety, and the Deauthorizing Designs of Paternal Narrative.” Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. The University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 298-322. 

Boone’s chapter focusing on Absalom, Absalom! analyzes the homoerotic behavior between the central characters and applies theoretical frameworks from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick regarding the fine line between homosocial bonding and homoerotic behavior. This is particularly useful in recognizing the gap between homoerotic desire and homophobic violence. 

Source #3: Jones, Norman W. “Coming Out through History’s Hidden Love Letters in Absalom, Absalom.” American Literature, vol. 76, no. 2, 2004, pp. 339–66.

Jones provides an in depth analysis of the homoeroticism that exists between central characters in Absalom, Absalom! He argues that the history of illicit desire that takes place in Sutpen’s Hundred and in Jefferson more generally continues to influence and “haunt” Quentin, posing numerous ethical questions that stretch beyond sexual desire. 

Source #4: Richards, Gary. “The Artful and Crafty Ones of the French Quarter: Male Homosexuality and Faulkner’s Early Prose Writings.” Faulkner’s Sexualities. Edited by Dana Andrews, Annette Trefzer, and Ann J. Abadie. University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Richards provides biographical information regarding the degree of comfort and frequency in which Faulkner engaged with the gay community in New Orleans (and Europe). The biographical insights into Faulkner’s lived experiences help to explain the presence and prevalence of homoeroticism in his novels. 

Source #5: Bibler, Michael. “Interracial Homoeroticism and the Loopholes of Taboo in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation. University of Virginia Press, 2009. 

Bibler explores queer relationships between men of the planter class in Absalom, Absalom!, and the ways in which homosocial bonds are sanctioned by the elite, but prohibited across lines of difference like class and race. In this case, the existence of queer relations and homosocial bonds relies on the subjugation of poor whites, Black people, and women. 

Source #6: Abate, Michelle Ann. “Reading Red: The Man with the (Gay) Red Tie in Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3, 2001, pp. 293–312.

The criticism explores the possibility that the traveling carnival man wearing the red tie in The Sound and the Fury is a homosexual. Jason’s rage can then be explained not solely on Quentin’s behavior, but on his own emasculation, repressed homoerotic desires, and an usurping of the established order by an outsider with subversive sexual behavior. 

Source #7: Polk, Noel. “How Shreve Gets into Quentin’s Pants.” Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition. University Press of Mississippi, 2008. pp. 22-30. 

Polk explores Shreve and Quentin’s relationship in The Sound and the Fury through a queer lens, pointing out the homoeroticism within their relationship and arguing that Quentin was struggling with his own homoerotic desires and feelings of emasculation, stressors that potentially contribute to his suicide.

Source #8: Tipton, Nathan. “Rope and Faggot: The Homoerotics of Lynching in William Faulkner’s Light in August.” The Mississippi Quarterly , Vol. 64, No. 3-4, pp. 369-392.

The criticism explores the construction of masculinity in Southern society and the extent to which it is complicated by homosocial, homoerotic, and racial complexities. Tipton argues that lynching within Light in August is connected to the erotic, and is infused with overtones of masculine anxiety and homosexual panic. Tipton connects Percy Grimm’s effeminacy to his violent castration of the masculine Joe Christmas in an attempt to prove his own manhood through reliance on his whiteness.  

Source #9: Lopez, Alfred J. “Queering Whiteness, Queering Faulkner: Hightower’s ‘Wild Bulges.’” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 22, no. 1/2, 2006, pp. 74–89.Lopez focuses on Gail Hightower’s character in Light in August to explore the relationship between whiteness and homosexuality, arguing that homosexuality “marks” individuals by distancing them from heteronormative whiteness and aligning them with ethnic minorities, Black people, and other marginalized whites.

Faulkner’s South, as depicted in each of his novels, is a place that is deeply distrustful of outsiders. From Northern soldiers and carpetbaggers to wandering vagrants and travelers, the threat of outside influence – and thus contamination of the South’s strictly enforced and upheld social code – is met with hostility, suspicion, and violence. Characters like Gail Hightower, Charles Bon, and even the man with the red tie, are all viewed as threatening due to their refusal to adhere to the provincialism dictated by the locals of Yoknapatawpha County; however, they have something else in common as well – their queerness. In this sense, Faulkner suggests that queerness is dangerous to the social fabric of a town like Jefferson because it threatens the rigid boundaries that define both race and class, and presents an otherness that is transgressive in its potential to undermine white patriarchal structures. In a society that insists upon strict gender roles and racial separation, the potential for homosocial bonding across race and class is not only provocative, but potentially destabilizing in its ability to redefine power structures. In addition to the transgressive queer behavior associated with outsiders, Faulkner’s novels – particularly Absalom, Absalom! – are rife with homoeroticism. From Sutpen’s physical fighting with the enslaved men to Henry and Bon’s relationship to Quentin and Shreve’s interactions, Faulkner’s focus on homosocial and homoerotic behavior is extensive.

Given the lack of visibility of homosexuality in the first half of the 20th century, and particularly in rural areas of the South, what purpose do Faulkner’s coded homoeroticism and transgressive, queer, ambiguous characters serve in his commentary on the South? Is the radical nature of queerness, and its potential to offer alternative pathways, alluring to Faulkner as an antidote to unquestioned conformity? Is the exposure to otherness liberating or destructive for characters like Henry Sutpen and Quentin Compson? Are Faulkner’s queer characters the problem – deviant and fractious – or the solution, a chance for individuality in a place where one’s role and identity is predetermined? 

Abate, Michelle Ann. “Reading Red: The Man with the (Gay) Red Tie in Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 3, 2001, pp. 293–312.

Bibler, Michael. “Interracial Homoeroticism and the Loopholes of Taboo in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation. University of Virginia Press, 2009. 

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.

 Entzminger, Betina. “Passing as Miscegenation: Whiteness and Homoeroticism in Faulkner’s ‘Absalom, Absalom!’” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 22, no. 1/2, 2006, pp. 90–105.

Jones, Norman W. “Coming Out through History’s Hidden Love Letters in Absalom, Absalom.” American Literature, vol. 76, no. 2, 2004, pp. 339–66.

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

Richards, Gary. “The Artful and Crafty Ones of the French Quarter: Male Homosexuality and Faulkner’s Early Prose Writings.” Faulkner’s Sexualities. Edited by Dana Andrews, Annette Trefzer, and Ann J. Abadie. University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Faulkner’s The Unvanquished depicts the fall of the Confederacy from the perspective of Bayard Sartoris, a boy whose coming of age coincides with the collapse of the Southern way of life around him. While the first half of the novel traverses the years immediately during and following the defeat of the South and the emancipation of the slaves, the details and experiences are filtered through the point of view of a young person working to make sense of his changing world, mirroring the experience of the reader who simultaneously must make sense of a way of life that is deeply grounded in the past. In the same way that the world around Bayard seems chaotic and foreign, Faulkner’s narrative choices emphasize these feelings within the reader as well. 

Bayard’s innocence and naivety about the changes in store for him are immediately evident in the opening pages of the novel as he and Ringo play with a map in the dirt, including a pile of sticks representing Vicksburg. When Loosh laughs at him, sweeps the map away, and says “There’s your Vicksburg,” it becomes clear that Bayard is not fully aware of the most recent news, and the reader works to catch up as well, soon realizing that Ringo, Loosh, and Philadelphy are not family members, but enslaved people (5). In choosing a young boy as his narrator, Faulkner uses Bayard’s ignorance about issues relating to race and equality to normalize the institution of slavery as an unquestionable part of everyday life. Thus, through Bayard’s perspective, it is particularly shocking when he begins to witness the breakdown of his society and the destruction of his way of life. As Bayard, Granny, and Ringo ride towards Drusilla’s home, they pass “white women and children,” whose homes have been burned down by the retreating Yankee forces, “watching [them] from the n— cabins where they lived now like we lived at home” (83). In viewing the destroyed countryside and the societal changes that forcibly accompany it, he realizes that “before it had been like passing through a country where nobody ever lived; now it was like passing through one where everybody had died at the same moment” (84). His youthful confusion in viewing the chaos around him allows the reader to recognize the degree to which the war was destabilizing in every possible way to the white South, not just economically, but socially and emotionally.   

Faulkner’s focus on the destabilization of the South also includes numerous passages that initially depict the joy of emancipation for the enslaved people only to be countered by the disorganization and pandemonium of the mass exodus of people with nowhere to go. Bayard describes Granny attempting to persuade slaves to turn back and go home, only to be told repeatedly that “Hit’s Jordan we coming to” and that “Jesus gonter see me that far” (85). While Bayard does not opine himself during these moments, there is the sense that Faulkner is suggesting an ambiguity surrounding the morality of emancipation with regards to the lack of planning or preparation on the part of the Yankee troops. From Bayard’s perspective, Granny seeks only to help them and give them an option other than aimless wandering and starvation. However, years later in a moment of reflection on the past, Bayard reconsiders these events and sees that for the enslaved people, in their moment of freedom, it was “one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they don’t know where, empty handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom” (81). In reflecting on the past as an adult man, Bayard is able to understand what he simply could not comprehend at the time: the desire for freedom outweighs any sort of logic or loyalty, even if all that one will know is the unknown. 

Bayard is not alone in his struggle to understand the changes that continue to mount around him, and both Granny and Drusilla are forced to abandon their view of life to accommodate the rapid pace of change. While Granny commits herself to the service of others, Drusilla questions what it means to live at all. Sarcastically, or perhaps realistically, Drusilla realizes that the things she once worried about like getting married and having children no longer seem to matter, because “the young men can ride away and get killed in the fine battles” while the slaves “tramp the roads all night waiting for a chance to drown in homemade Jordan,” and instead of sleeping, she can just say “Thank God for nothing” (101). Bayard is incredibly observant, and while he may not grasp the deeper meaning of Drusilla’s comment, the impact that her words have on him are profound. Like the reader, Bayard simultaneously recognizes that his world is gone forever, and that the future is anything but certain.