I found my sources using Hunter’s online library system. I have several digital sources, and also checked out several printed books. As I am still honing my topic, I searched for a variety of keywords including Faulkner and “dirt” “abjection” “contamination” and “fluidity,” among others, and found sources recommended by Prof. Allred. I will likely add more to this list, and cut some of the below as needed!

My original final project proposal was a Yoknapatawpha entry on Fluidity & Contamination. Prof. Allred noted that this could branch into two different directions: abjection or contamination/dirt/desire.  For now, I have decided to lean into the latter of the two, though I have included sources regarding abjection. Purity is a topic that comes up often in the lives of Faulkner’s characters, and many of the stories’ plots center on the ways this purity is dirtied. The mythical purity of the south, women’s virginity, and the white race are all presented in Yoknapatawpha and subsequently “contaminated,” causing abjection and fear on the part of those who subscribe to, however outright or subconsciously, the ideals of white supremacy, and ultimately revealing fluidity as the natural state of things. 

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

In his book, Theweleit seeks to explain his theory on the fascist man’s need for violence, studying Pre-WWII German soldiers. Much of the book is spent describing the perceived faults of others, particularly women. These faults lay mostly in literal and figurative dirt, mud, mire, contamination, and pollution in women’s bodies and actions. According to Theweliet, the fascist man’s hatred for women can be found in their discomfort with fluidity, things that break up an uncomplicated, easy to digest binary, and threaten the boundary of their own being: what is me and what is other.  Menstruation and other feminine fluids are of the most apartment threats within this framework. 

Fowler, Doreen., and Ann J. Abadie. Faulkner and Race. University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

This collection of essays on race within Faulkner’s work spans many topics. I plan to focus on James A Snead’s essay “Light in August and the Rhetorics of Racial Division.” Snead focuses on Joe Christmas’s lack of “signification” and his refusal on being labeled as white or black. Snead uses the phrase “merging” to describe Joe and other characters’ fluidity, and a blending that so many of Faulkner’s and Joe’s contemporaries would view as impure. 

Fowler, Doreen., and Ann J. Abadie. Faulkner and Women. University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

In another collection of essays, the authors compile essays that investigate Faulkner’s portrayal of women. While I am still working through all of the essays, I plan to focus on Fowler’s own “Joe Christmas and ‘Womanshenegro,’ which discusses Joe’s hatred of women as a symptom of the “fear and rejection” of the “qualities in his own nature that ally him with women and blacks.” I plan to explore how her ideas connect to abjection and vomit, and his disgust with his own racial and gender contamination. 

Fowler, Doreen., and Ann J. Abadie. Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction. University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

(ok, yes, I am clearly a fan of these anthologizers and got stuck in one aisle of the Cooperman stacks!) There’s so much to look at in many of the pieces in this book! However, I plan to lean into Philip Weinstein’s “ ‘Thinking I Was I Was Not Who Was Not Was Not Who’: The Vertigo of Faulknerian Identity.” This essay investigates the relationship between the self and society, where the society can “penetrate” oneselves selfhood and end in tragedy. 

Matthews, John T. William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. 1. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009

I plan to use Matthews as a launching point to discuss Caddy’s dirty drawers, but will likely draw on several chapters to discuss sexuality and race. If the word count allows, I may also end the project with some thoughts on twilight as the ultimate symbol of fluidity, day mixing into night, hybridity, transition, etc. 

Kristeva, Julia, and John Lechte. “Approaching Abjection.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 5, no. 1/2, 1982, pp. 125–49. 

Kriseva’s first section of the Powers of Horror (I still cannot find the entire book in English!) 

Bové, C. M. . [Review of Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, by J. Kristeva & L. S. Roudiez]. Discourse, 11(1), 1988, pp.151–156. 

Of all the reviews I have looked at, this seems to be the most helpful in constructing a definition of abstraction, especially in how it may relate to Faulkner’s writing. 

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger : an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 2003.

An exploration of dirt, purity, and contamination that I plan to apply to all of the novels I discuss. 

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

Yaeger discusses the concept of dirt in Southern Women’s Writing. Still reading this one, but one quote stood out to me: “[The] terror of bodily contamination through contact with a racial ‘ other.’”

Vickroy, Laurie. Reading Trauma Narratives : the Contemporary Novel & the Psychology of Oppression. University of Virginia Press, 2015.

The third chapter of the book is titled “Obsessions and Possessions in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” She discusses Sutpen’s original scene of trauma (being told to go to the back of the house) as a threat to his power and whiteness and as a catalyst for him to prevent contamination in his “pure” bloodline. 

Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. Reaktion, 2000.

In Chromophobia, Bachelor asserts that the chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through color – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge color, either by making it “the property of some “foreign body” – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic.” The book starts as an explanation of literal whiteness and moves into territories that I think could help to explain Joe Christmas. One standout quote from the book: 

“This space [the classical body and whiteness] was clearly a model for how a body ought to be: enclosed, contained, sealed. The ideal body: without flesh of any kind, old or young, beautiful or battered, scented or smelly; without movement, external or internal; without appetites. (That is why the kitchen was such a disturbing place – but not nearly as disturbing as the toilet.) But perhaps it was more perverse than that; perhaps this was a model of what the body should be like from within. Not a place of fluids, organs, muscles, tendons and bones all in a constant, precarious and living tension with each other, but a vacant, hollow, whited chamber, scraped clean, cleared of any evidence of the grotesque embarrassments of an actual life. No smells, no noises, no colour; no changing from one state to another and the uncertainty that comes with it; no exchanges with the outside world and the doubt and the dirt that goes with that; no eating, no drinking, no pissing, no shitting, no sucking, no fucking, no nothing. It won’t go away. Whiteness always returns. Whiteness is woven into the fabric of Culture. The Bible, again: ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.’”

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!. 1st ed., New York, Vintage Books, 1990.

Shreve’s last paragraph echoes the white supremacist voice that fears the fluidity and perceived contamination of miscegenation. I may also explore the racial ambiguity of Bon, and the “dirtiness” of Sutpen’s sexuality. 

Faulkner, William. Light in August: The Corrected Text. Vintage International, 1985. 

Joe Christmas encompasses all that is fluid and mixed, and may be a primary focus of my final project. More importantly, within the problematic framework of the South of his time, with which he seems to internally battle, his whiteness is contaminated by the possibility of blackness. Ironically, even his initial presentation is bound up with that which is mixed or soiled.  He can’t escape the mixing: his clothes upon introduction are both sharp and soiled, formal yet dirty. I may also explore how the town and Christmas view Joanna Burden’s sexuality, namely with phrases like sewer and gutter.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text. Vintage International, 1984. 

Contamination comes up most poignantly when Caddy drawers are literally dirtied. The narrative, following this pivotal moment, unfolds on a deeper level around incest as contamination, and incest as a venue to save one from contamination. 

The detailed narrative of Sutpen’s history in Chapter 7 was a respite from the lack of information regarding his beginnings at the start of the novel. However, this refreshing feeling of being allowed into a previously withheld story was short-lived. As Faulker provided the backstory, he also made clear the problematic mode of telephone-style, regurgitated narration, which serves to intertwine the difficult layers of Sutpen’s history with the messy, unreliable history of the Deep South itself. 

The layered narration, which occurs throughout the novel, is once again apparent in this section. As readers are (finally) given some of Sutpen’s past, we are made all too aware of the filtration system of Southern storytellers it has passed through: Sutpen to Grandpa Compson to Jason Compson to Quentin to Shreve. Throughout the entire section, readers are dared to ask: what information is left out through forgetfulness, and what information is purposefully omitted? What may be added in or emphasized? It is also very interesting that Quentin relays the narrative to Shreve and compares himself to Sutpen and his grandfather to Shreve. While relaying Sutpen’s autobiographical outpour to his grandfather, Quentin says, “I reckon Grandfather was saying ‘Wait wait for God’s sake wait’ about like you are until he finally did stop and back up and start over again with at least some regard or cause and effect even if none for logical sequence and continuity.” (199). Quentin imagines the same sense of urgency to tell the story in Sutpen as he feels, and the same need for clarification and reasoning in his grandfather as he witnesses in Shreve. Throughout all of this, as readers we must constantly be looking for the purposeful framing through which the layered narrators wish (need) to tell the “Sutpen”’ story, and by extension, choose also to tell the macrocosmic story of the South (two grand stories of “falling”).

This need for reasoning and rationalization appears not only in the telling/structure of the story, but also in the content of the “Sutpen” story. After being confronted by the systems of oppression around him, and realizing his whiteness does not prevent him from being at the bottom of this newly discovered hierarchy, Sutpen seeks to climb up the ladder of Southern social order through a very pragmatic plan. In his mind, according to the Compsons, he need only to acquire land, money, and slaves to ascend to this ideal version of whiteness. In his simplistic, rigid plan, Sutpen takes on the desire for a clean bloodline, which leads him to reject his first wife due to her mixed race (212). This choice, according to himself and Grandpa Compson, is rooted in the practicality of his design. In a matter-of-fact, businesslike fashion, Sutpen apparently says, “I merely explained how this new fact rendered it impossible that this woman and child be incorporated in my design” (212). Sutpen goes on to falter along his impossibly straightforward path, parenting another mixed-race child and butchering all of his attempts at traditional white wealth (Matthews, 194). As Matthews points out, the faultiness of Sutpen’s “design” mirrors the problematic obsession with “rational” racial divides. He says, “ It’s the madness of reason that sustains the unnatural fantasy of property, whether of land or other humans (193). Sutpen’s lack of success, and his inability to detect blackness which leads him to inevitably become mixed up with it, highlights the defectiveness of the original divide (or original sin) of the South’s framework: white and black. Of course, as Matthews posits, this supposedly logical social construction is really just that– a construction, just as made up as Sutpen made up his own life of superiority. Matthews says, “only when (white) indentured servants began gaining their freedom and swelling the ranks of freed whites did planters decide to replace them with the sort of laborers who could be kept in permanent subjection: African chattel slaves. The insult Sutpen suffers at the hands of Pettibone’s black domestic slave, rebounds from the stone of debt enslavement structuring Deep South colonial plantation agriculture. In probing the rotten foundations of  New World design, Faulkner discovers layer after layer of insult, of “oppression and exploitation” (191). 

The layers of desperate storytelling (Rosa, Jason, Quentin) reflect the layers of failed justification for the system of slavery. No matter how many times it is told and retold and justified and rationalized– there is no moral or natural reason for slavery or the forced superiority of whites over blacks. Likewise, there is nothing redeeming about a man born into slave holding (Pettibone, previous Compsons) or one who finds his way there after insult (Sutpen). Perhaps, complicit in the same system in a more traditional way, this is why Grandpa Compson insisted on including his belief of Sutpen’s “innocence” while relaying the Sutpen history. 

Of course, all of the guilt, innocence, complicity, and complexity comes to an internal culmination when Quentin is forced to face the question: “why do you hate the south?”

After writing about “vomit” as a way for the body to expel “unacceptable ingestions,” I have started to research more about bodily fluids and the self in terms of Faulkner’s work. The launching point for my final project research has, oddly enough, stemmed from a paragraph I came across in Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, and History. In this work, not directly related to Faulkner, Theweleit seeks to explain his theory on the fascist man’s need for violence, studying Pre-WWII German soldiers. He says (emphasis added), 

“Dirt is, first and foremost, anything that impinges on the tidy insularity of a person, on the person’s anxiously guarded autonomy. This explains the individual’s reluctance to let anything into, or out of, her/himself. Besides avoiding dirt associated with contact or secretion, people regard anything that is only ambiguously part of themselves as unclean. By analogy, they are disgusted at the prospect of contamination, heterogeneity. When confronted with such contamination, they become afraid of falling prey themselves to ambivalence and amorphousness, of losing themselves, of being harmed by a process of amalgamation, insertion, addition, extraction, seepage, or infiltration. That is why […] people so often name commingling and in-between states when as for examples of dirt. This is probably also the basis for the indelible connection between dirt and the primary type of commingling: sex. 

The idea of perceived dirtiness/wrongness as a result of amalgamation seems to connect to several of Faulkner’s characters. Joe Christmas is repulsed by the dirtiness and fluidity of sex and miscegenation; Quentin (and Henry) is obsessed with and simultaneously disgusted by the fluid contamination of sex (and incest and race); Charles Bon is bound up with class, economic, and racial fluidity/contamination– the list goes on. Notably, each of these characters is involved in their own or someone else’s violent end. 

The topic may be too broad, so I hope for it to become more focused as I continue research. I may also explore how fascism connects with all of this, as I think many of the characters we’ve encountered, and their violence, could be considered fascist. After all, Faulkner is writing in the time building up to the peak of Nazism… maybe that’s a whole other paper! 

Any ideas and feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Joe Christmas is introduced towards the beginning of Light in August. He is described as stoic and distant. When he joins the group of men working in the mill, the narrator says, “he did not talk to any of them at all. And none of them tried to talk to him” (34).  While Brown engages excitedly with everyone, Christmas keeps his distance, physically and emotionally, “with brooding and savage steadiness” (39). Christmas passes as a white man, a “foreigner,” but it is suggested to the reader that he is mixed race. Brown calls him the n-word when scapegoating him for their bootlegging, and the dietician in his orphanage does the same in reaction to being caught in the act of adultery. In all of the times and places he appears, he seems to use distance to fight against not only his potential blackness, but also his status as mixed-race, one which is inherently fluid, complicated, and even feminine in its “slipperiness.” As Matthews argues, Joe must expel that something within him that is black and female, “in order to be (or become or remain) white and male” (165). 

Throughout the section, Christmas seems disgusted by blackness and its connections to fluidity and femininity. As he transitions between the racial purgatory of white and black neighborhoods, he starts to notice the fluidity of blackness around him. The narrator says, “the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid and accrete slowly from particle to particle” (114). As he observes the space around him shift from, in his view, manly to something “hot” “wet” and “female,” he gets angry and begins to run away (115). He is repulsed, and uses distance as a means of protecting himself. He drifts in and out of the black neighborhood, and is eventually drawn to a group of black people. Christmas approaches them, yet is seemingly angered by their smell and the women’s haunting voices. After interacting with them, he notices that he has unknowingly pulled out his razor, and yells “Bitches!” (118). However subconsciously, he was drawn to fight this group of people, who for him, represent his own potential to “slip” into blackness. 

Christmas does fight when, as a teenager, he joins a group of white boys who plan to rape a black girl. When it is his turn, he stands, “smelling the woman, smelling the negro all at once; enclosed by the womanshenegro” (156). He looks at her (something he rarely does with others) and actually sees her: peering “down into a black well and at the bottom [seeing] two glints like reflections of dead stars.” In seeing the blackness and humanity in her eyes, and therefore reflected in his own, he becomes repulsed by the idea of having sex with her–  the ultimate act of fluidity and connection to the feminine– and instead beats her. In hitting her, he attempts to distance himself from those qualities he sees in himself. 

Christmas also denies his proximity to womanhood through physical distance and rejecting any kind acts from the women around him. Attempting to get away from Burden (and Brown), he goes to the horse stable to sleep one night.  Once there, he thinks “‘Why in the hell do I want to smell horses? […] It’s because they are not women. Even a mare horse is a kind of man’” (109).  Amidst the abuse from his adoptive father Mr. McEachern, Mrs. McEachern offers him food and money, which Christmas mostly denies. Interestingly, he likes the predictable hardness of the man, and criticizes the unreliable kindness of the wife. The narrator comments, “It was the woman: the soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men. ‘She is trying to make me cry.’” (169). He believes emotion and crying (a liquid act), which would require him to tap into his perceived femininity, are more evil acts than being punched; he would rather be beaten than be forced to face his innate femininity. 

His repulsion of all things fluid and feminine is foreshadowed as he watches the dietician have sex at age five. While watching from behind the curtains, he holds a tube of pink toothpaste he found in her room.  He squeezes the pink, oozing toothpaste, which may represent feminine bodily fluids or body parts. Christmas eats the pink toothpaste and vomits shortly after. He is literally sickened by a symbol of womanly liquids (122). His vomiting causes him to be caught, and he hears, perhaps for the first time, someone call him a “n– bastard.” After giving into the natural urges to watch the act of sex and eat the toothpaste, he is made to feel shame in his connection to the intertwined concepts of blackness, femininity, and sex.

The last few sections of The Unvanquished include very interesting perspectives about gender in the South following the Civil War. 

According to Bayard’s narration, women in the South have a separate stake in the loss of the Confederacy. Through their actions during reconstruction, they are fighting to hold on to the traditional ideals of womanhood, chastity, and gentility.  Bayard seems to suggest that Southern women hold animosity, however subconscious, towards men for losing the war. The women themselves never surrendered, but they had to concede as well. Bayard says, “And so now Father’s troop and all the other men in Jefferson, and Aunt Louisa and Mrs Habersham and all the women in Jefferson were actually enemies for the reason that the men had given in and admitted that they belonged to the United States but the women had never surrendered.” This highlights the women’s lack of autonomy in the outcome of the war, and may demonstrate these same womens’ relentless desire to control what they can– Southern customs. As Drusilla (whom, for this analysis, I hold separate from the other women in the novel) “unsexes” herself and fights to keep her masculinity (her own way of holding on to Confederate values), the Southern ladies fight, in their way, for their hold on the past. Aunt Louisa thinks Drusilla’s actions to help rebuild the house, wear non-feminine clothing, and share sleeping quarters with men (namely John Sartoris) during the war, are defying “and outraging all Southern principles of purity that our husbands have died for” (193).  Louisa and her crew of ladies repeatedly write and visit Drusilla to convince her to change her ways. Later, they force her into marriage with John, in order to keep up appearances. Their persistent fight to force Drusilla into feminine compliance is their way of compensating for the deaths and grave losses of the war, and their way of tying themselves to the customs of the past, even as society as they know it is changing around them. In their minds, if women keep their roles, perhaps the South hasn’t really lost.  Ironically, Drusilla is also fighting for her version of the past, a past where she is still a confederate “man” in the military, fighting for her own freedom. Everyone is battling for their own conflicting versions of Southern standards. In the cases of Aunt Louisa and Drusilla, they both think they are doing what is most Southern and what would make the Confederacy most proud. 

Additionally, there is a group of men that nearly mirrors Louisa’s crew of ladies, fighting to hold on to their concept of Southern order. For the white men, who may not be accustomed to losing, their grasp on seemingly fleeting Southern civility lies in fair fights, dueling, revenge, and keeping black people out of leadership roles. John Sartoris and George Wyatt work together to make sure the election does not favor a black man, Cassius Q. Benbow. Bayard narrates, “Wyatt made a pack of the ballots and wrote them against his saddle and as fast as he would write them the men would take them and drop them into the box[.] It didn’t take long. ‘You needn’t bother to count them,’ George said. ‘They all voted No.’” (210).  As the group of men “holler” in celebration, they are compared to Yankees (the winners of the War). At this moment, in the new “war” of reconstruction, they are winning.  They do everything in their power to prevent the South from changing. Additionally, the men seem to be persistent in upholding another Southern standard, fighting fair and getting revenge. For example, after John’s death, a group of men including Wyatt show up to support Bayard, assuming he would be on a quest for vengeance. As Bayard arrives home after hearing the news of his father’s death, he says, “Then I saw the horses, the faint shine of leather and buckle-glints on the black silhouettes and then the men too– Wyatt and others of Father’s old troop– and I had forgot that they would be there.” They even offer to take on Redmond themselves. He declines, and it’s Bayard who takes on the task of approaching Redmond.  However, he finally defies this southern tradition– where in theory men could continue a nonstop rippling effect of killing a family member for a family member–  when he refuses to avenge his father by killing Redmond. 

Granny stood out to me as the most interesting, prominent, and humorous character of this section. She’s dainty– but she clearly runs the show. Ultimately, Granny Rosa Millard embodies a Southerner trying desperately to hold on to the propriety and tradition of the past, while also slipping (sometimes by force and sometimes seemingly on her own accord) into a more modern role amidst the hardships of war. 

While the war rages around her, she tries her best to hold on to the relics of the past. She urges the children to use decent language, and makes them wash their mouths with soap when they curse or lie (35). While traveling in desperate and dangerous situations, she repeatedly wears her very ladylike “shawl” over her shoulders, Mrs. Compson’s hat, and carries her parasol (129 and others). She prays or makes the boys pray any time they do wrong. These superficial examples demonstrate her attempt to restore decorum while the world as she knows it crumbles around her. 

Most significantly, her quest to protect and later recover the family’s silver illustrates her initial desperation to hold on to the past, particularly a past in which her family is financially secure. In “Retreat,” she insists on having the enslaved workers dig up the trunk of silver that was previously hidden, so she can sleep with it by her side before they travel with it the next morning (42). Later, during their travels, she insists on sleeping in the wagon with the chest of silver despite having an option to sleep inside a house (56). She continually insists on having physical proximity to the silver. While her literal closeness to the family heirloom demonstrates her distrust of those around her, it may also represent her symbolic need to hold on to the dwindling antebellum social order.

Ironically, it is often when she endeavors in things least traditional and least proper that she finds ways to reach out for the civilities of the past. The status quo of her time would certainly include the separation of white and black people in most matters. Despite this, she essentially begins a giant mule scam with Ringo, an enslaved, black child, as her business partner. He spies for them and he forges the letters that convince Union soldiers to give over mules. In the midst of their discussions, when Ringo calls white man Ab Snopes by his first name, something presumably black folks were not allowed to do during this time, she never misses a chance to correct him: “‘Mister Snopes,’ Granny Said” (126). After Bayard and Granny have to run through the woods to hide from Union soldiers, she corrects Ringo’s use of Ab’s name again (133). It is certainly funny to picture her covered in filth from hiding in the undergrowth, running from the consequences of her Union shakedown, correcting his choices.  She continues to keep up southern appearances, despite the fact that she is the one leading and allowing this “sinful” scheme. 

In many ways, Granny Rosa is very similar to Cousin Drusilla. They both have bravely and ingeniously fought against Union soldiers:  Drusilla, by almost running over a soldier with her horse and then threatening to kill it right in front of them in order to escape, and later riding with Satoris’ troops, and Granny, through her numerous, risky travels, hiding the boys in plain sight to protect them, and running an entire scheme against the Yankees for profit. They are powerful in their own ways, and both defy traditional gender roles. However, Drusilla accepts and seeks this defiance, while Granny clings to the norms of the past while acting in modern, brave ways. 

This internal conflict– between her modern strength and her tendency to cling to the courtesies of the past– is ultimately what kills her. Believing no man, even one in a group of frightening ex-soldiers, would hurt a woman, she ventures to their location to try to take their horses. She courageously insists she go on her own because “they won’t hurt a woman” (152). But, the world is different now: men will hurt women, the Confederacy can lose, and even the grandmother of innocent Bayard, who so far has seemed only enchanted by the actions of war, can die. She’s shot (“smell of the powder”) and killed by the men (154). Will her death be the ultimate launch for Bayard into a new era? Will it be the inciting incident for a larger transition?