Atkinson, Ted. “Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics.” Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. Project MUSE.

Atkinson focuses on the historical context (the Great Depression) in which Faulkner wrote some of his most acclaimed works. Atkinson views Faulkner’s Depression-era novels as an ideological battleground-which was very similar to 1930s America, and explores Faulkner’s own explorations of social upheaval, fascism, and the appeal of strong leadership during troubled times. These ideas were especially important in the South post-Civil War. The war left the South in social turmoil, and fascist ideas were popular in the confused and leaderless southern society.

Spoth, Daniel. “Totalitarian Faulkner: The Nazi Interpretation Of ‘Light In August’ And ‘Absalom, Absalom!’.” The John Hopkins University Press, 2011, vol. 78, no. 1, pp. 239–257., www.jstor.org/stable/41236541.

Spoth’s article goes into depth of how the character “Percy Grimm” from LIA was, according to Faulkner, a “Fascist galahad who saved the white race by murdering Christmas.” It shows Faulkner’s awareness of Nazi and fascist idealism, but rather than openly condemning this character, he leaves that responsibility to the reader. However, when LIA began to be published in Germany in 1935, Spoth alludes to the idea that Faulkner was not happy with its increasing popularity there, and later on in his career tried to use it as a warning of the growing seeds of international fascism.

Follansbee, Jeanne A. “”Sweet Fascism in the Piney Woods”: Absalom, Absalom! as Fascist Fable.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 18 no. 1, 2011, pp. 67-94. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mod.2011.0017

Despite American claims that fascism-like that found in Germany and Italy in the 1930s could not exist in America, signs and examples of fascism and its ideals could be found consistently throughout the country. An ‘American Hitler” could have easily been born and come to power, and almost certainly would have come from the South, where the “fascist fable” converged with the “Southern family romance” in their shared preoccupation with the cultural politics of nation-building.

Pierce, David H. “Fascism and the Negro,” The Crisis, Vol. 42, no. 4, April 1935, pp.107 and 114 (non-consecutive).

Pierce’s article illuminates what will become of the recently freed African-Americans should fascism be permitted to gain power in America. At the time of this article, Germany already considers the negro as an inferior breed of human kind, a concept of which the American South is not only familiar with and supportive of, but believed in this line of thinking throughout its history. Written in 1935, it gives a practical lens to view Faulkner’s South, both in his writing and in real life. Faulkner would have been aware of the concepts explored in this article, and it shows the social debate going on in real life during much of Faulkner’s writing.

Brinkmeyer Jr., Robert H. “The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950.” Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009, ch. 1.

Brinkmeyer discusses the “ghost” lurking in the psyche of the white South-the specter of European fascism. He explores how Southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to fascism, with an emphasis on the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a unique, yet problematic relevance and similarity to the South and its segregated social system. Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide array of authors-including Faulkner-and argues that by engaging their works in contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers were forced to reconfigure their understanding of the South and themselves as Southerners.  

Faulkner, William. Light In August: The Corrected Text, ed. Noel Polk. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text, ed. Noel Polk. New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

I started my search with Zotero and quickly found Atkinson’s book and Follansbee’s article. From Follansbee’s works cited list I found Pierce and Brinkmeyer’s articles, both of which are amazing sources, as they discuss ideas and connections clearly related to Faulkner and fascism. After this I went to JSTOR, Project Muse, and Cuny+, and found Spoth’s article on JSTOR. I found references to an article by Scott Romine titled, “The Narrative Forms of Southern Community,” but was unable to find/access it, I could only find multiple references to it. After this I found very little else that could be useful for my topic, which leads me to the thought that perhaps this is a topic which has not been discussed very much. Atkinson’s work kept being referred to, and there are many reviews of it. However, after looking at quite a few of said reviews they did not seem like they would be helpful to my topic. I will continue to keep looking as I work on my final project, but am satisfied with what I have found so far.

My essay will attempt to understand the semiotic construction of identity in LIA. Faulkner’s novel proposes a radical account for the way in which individuals signify (or fail to) within the ideological structure of society. I believe that in the end, his text reveals the ambivalence of identity, lending is formation to an imagined projection that is determined by the weight of historical and social signification rather than some ontological essence. I have selected two types of sources for this purpose. Theoretical sources dealing with psychoanalysis and sociology to help provide a structure for the ways that identity formation operates, and then critical sources that more closely dissect the text of LIA. 

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and the State.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 2001, pp. 85-126.

Althusser’s essay reexamines classic Marxist analyses of the processes of subjectification. Specifically, he complicates notions of how an individual becomes a subject within society by including ideological factors within his theoretical review. Specifically, he argues that the act of “interpellation” creates subjectivity by placing the individual within the imaginary relations that institutions (concrete or abstract) bring to social psychology. Subjectivity, according to Althusser, is already and always a function of ideological discourse establishing the parameters for what a subject may perceive to be true.

Bleikasten, Andre. “Fathers in Faulkner and Light in August.”  Modern Critical Interpretations: William Faulkner’s Light in August. Edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, pp. 43-55.

The symbolic figure of “the father” goes beyond simple familial dramas and oedipal narratives for Bleiksten. The father is at once an aspirational and prohibitive construct that is internalized not only individually, but also socially. The symbolic father (or phallus) may be seen as the organizing mandate that prescribes or prohibits the way that culture, and therefore personal identification, may be structured. It is against this prohibitive voice that many of the characters in LIA  audit their own cohesion within the greater social whole.

Clarke, Deborah. “Gender, Race, and Language in Light in August.” American Literature. Vol. 61, no. 3, October, 1989, pp. 398-413. 

As a countervailing force against suppressive masculinity, Clarke argues that feminine discourse resists and sublimates patriarchal language in LIA. The racialized feminine fails to signify in a patriarchal discourse, and thereby limits incorporation into its violent and repressive system. It is an excellent exegesis on the ways in which race and gender operate within Faulkner’s text.

Forter, Greg. “Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form.” Narrative. Vol. 15, no. 3, October, 2007, pp. 259-285.

This is an overview of Freudian trauma theory, explicating the effect trauma has in individual psychological development. More than just a disturbing or distressing event, trauma may indeed impact the entirety of an individual’s image of them self. Forter than applies these theories in an analyses of Light in August and Absalom! Absalom! This essay will be crucial to my own interpretation of Joe Christmas, and subsequently, the greater Southern social psyche as Faulkner presents it in general.

Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Translated by James Strachey, W.W. Norton and Company, 1959.

Whether it be religious, political, familial, or even labor, Freud argues that “groups” come together through processes of identification aligning with a projected ego ideal, or in other words, a central abstract principle with which they identify. This in turn affects the composition of the individual’s own ego, making their own self-identification a function of group psychology. As LIA is a text very concerned with the way in which individuals are incorporated or rejected by social groups, it will provide a firm theoretical backbone for my own analysis.

Godden, Richard. Williiam Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words. Princeton University Press, 2007. 

A Marxist reading, Godden’s account of Faulkner’s literature writ large is that of an unconscious class struggle manifesting the racial and social tensions prevalent in Faulkner’s text. What can and cannot be spoken or thought is a function of what social-psychic structures permit. Racial conflict and stigmatization is an impulse intended to repress an unwanted history of labor and economy that undercuts the South’s idealized understanding of itself.

Kazin, Alfred. “The Stillness of Light in August.” William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism. Edited by Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery, Michigan State University Press, 1960, pp.247-277. 

Kazin’s reading of LIA is of a more traditional flavor. He views the tensions and symbolic values within the novel as a paradigm of tension between “becoming” and “being.”  While I find his analyses oversimplified and at times even problematic, he does propose certain symbolic structures that will be useful in my own reading. At the minimum, this essay will help root my own in traditional critical opinion.

Kartinger, Donald. “The Meaning of Form in Light in August.” Modern Critical Interpretations: William Faulkner’s Light in August. Edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 1988, pp. 9-41.

Kartinger’s essay presents an excellent breakdown of social signification in LIA. He isolates several important discourses of signification (such as race, gender), describing how they operate within the text, revealing the ideological forces by which Jefferson county incorporates (or rejects) individuals into its own system of self-identification. As understanding the ramifications of the signification of language within a social context will be crucial to the development of my argument, Kartinger’s essay will help adumbrate the signifying systems at play.

Lacan, Jacques. “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink, Heloise Fink, and Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton and Company, 1966, pp. 237-265.

Lacan argues that the unconscious functions like a system of language. That’s to say, psychology is in itself a signifatory system. The “self” is therefore but a product of a series of unconscious discourses that have been internalized from one’s environment. This conception denies an understanding of an individual as a “platonic essence,” the self being, in a sense, an imagined projection that is linguistically (signifatorily) determined. Crucially, the grounds of the argument reveal the ambivalence of identity, race, gender. The ways we signify ourselves are perhaps not determined by some essential nature, but by what the permissible linguistic iterations an environment (culture, religion, society, etc.) allows.

Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Translated by Wade Baskin. Columbia University Press, 1959.

This is perhaps the seminal text on signification. Saussure details the way in which language, as a signifying system, is a structure that is not representative, but symbolic (metaphorical and metonymic). Language, he argues, is therefore intrinsically ambivalent, corresponding not so much as to a reality that is really there, but an abstraction based upon meaning differentially determined. My understanding of LIA is heavily dependent upon this understanding of signification,

I am writing a long Wiki on Dilsey and Granny as Traditional Southern Women in Faulkner’s novels. Below are the sources:

Backman, Melvin. “Faulkner’s “An Odor of Verbena”: Dissent from the South.”College English 22.4 (1961): 253-56. JSTOR. Web. 15 Apr. 2017.

This article is about the final chapter is The Unvanquished and the way in which Faulkner displays the conflict between Christian morality and a code based on violence. Though Granny is already deceased at this point of the story, Beckman still speaks of her character as a “grandmotherly Robin-Hood” which I will speak about in my paper.

Castille, Philip Dubuisson. “DILSEY’S EASTER CONVERSION IN FAULKNER’S “THE SOUND AND THE FURY”.” Studies in the Novel 24.4 (1992): 423-33. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.

This article, as the title suggests, is about the scene in the last section of The Sound and The Fury where Dilsey and her family go to church on Easter Sunday. In this article Castille writes about the Christian influences behind the novel in its entirety as well as an analysis of the church scene where Dilsey utters the where Dilsey comes to terms with what happened to the Compson family.

Gunn, Giles. “Faulkner’s Heterodoxy: Faith and Family in “The Sound and the Fury”.” Religion & Literature 22.2/3, Religious Thought and Contemporary Critical Theory (1990): 155-72. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.

In this article Gunn writes about different depictions of Christianity and Southern Value shown in The Sound and The Fury. Though the Compson’s are supposed to be this great southern family, they all fall short of the values. The main argument I will be using this article for is to show how Dilsey is indeed the only person in the story to seem to be steadfast in her moral and religious values.

Nussler, Ulrike. “Reconsidering the Function of Mrs. Compson in Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 42.4, William Faulkner: German Responses 1997 (1997): 573-81. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.

This article speaks about the role of Mrs. Compson in The Sound and The Fury, both as a character and her role in the family. Though this article does focus on Mrs. Compson it also shows how Dilsey takes on many of the roles that Mrs. Compson should be taking, such as running the house and taking care of the children. Though Dilsey is only the cook she really is the head of the household, and the only true Christian in the house.

Roberts, Diane. “A Precarious Pedestal: The Confederate Woman in Faulkner’s “Unvanquished”.” Journal of American Studies 26.2 (1992): 233-46. JSTOR. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.

This article is about Granny (as well as Drusilla) and how she took on many male characteristics while still remaining a southern lady. She is strong in her southern values and is the protector of not only her living relatives but the legacy of her family as well.

____________________________________________

Through the Hunter College library website I was able to find all of these sources, but I am hoping I will be able to find more. I look on MLA International, Project Muse, and Google Scholar, and Zotero, but the only database that had anything relevant to my project was on JSTOR (which is always my go-to for papers). As far as search words I think I mostly used “granny” and “unvanquished” or “Dilsey” and “The sound and the fury” and from there narrow the search with “religion/Christianity” and/or “southern values.” I am having a difficult time finding scholarly articles written about Granny. I am hoping that I will find something in someone else’s bibliography or I’ll have to consult a librarian.

Faulkner’s Indians began to interest critics later than other aspects of his work, but there has been a marked evolution in the critical discussion, proving once again that what you see depends on where you’re looking from. More recent postcolonial critical analysis, in dialogue with earlier study, opens Faulkner’s portrayals of Indians to complicated investigations about origins and how/why identity is inscribed. What is the trouble with Faulkner’s Indians? Was Faulkner “playing Indian” for theatrical effect, as a foil, or mediation between his “real” story of white and black?

My research began with standard queries on CUNY+ on “Faulkner” and “Indians” and “Native Americans,” followed by similar searches in the NYPL online catalogue. Then I queried Hunter Library databases JSTOR and ProjectMUSE. I found some articles in the Faulkner Journal and The Mississippi Quarterly, so I searched deeper in those publications. I did get some online chat help from a Hunter librarian in locating an article I was having trouble accessing. I also went to a librarian at NYPL who helped me find what I thought was an article, but turned out to be a chapter in a book on a (what I thought was) completely unrelated subject. A couple of the books I found had very good bibliographies and sent me to other sources.

Works Cited

Dabney, Lewis M. The Indians of Yoknapatawpha: A Study in Literature and History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.

One of the earliest studies of Faulkner’s Indians. Dabney calls them the “neglected people,” the “first phase of his Yoknapatawpha legend,” and the “the point of departure of his novels.” This is a romanticized study that dismisses inaccuracies as artistic license, praising Faulkner’s homage to folk tradition. Dabney is an early proponent of the assimilation critique, the belief that the adoption of European culture marks the decline of Indian culture. This will be expanded, revised, and dismissed by later critics.

D’Alessandro, Michael. “Childless ‘Fathers,’ Native Sons: Mississippi Tribal Histories and Performing the Indian in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.” Mississippi Quarterly (Summer 2014): 375-401.

Proposes that in the inaccurate representations and “troubling caricatures” of his Native American creations, Faulkner seeks to draw readers’ attention to the inherent performativity of the Indians, pointing to “white descendants’ over eagerness to believe such a theatrical version of race” in his stories, contrary to Gage and other critics.

Doyle, Don H. Faulkner’s County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Important work on the history of Chickasaw and Choctaw (and other) tribes of Mississippi going back to contact with the first Europeans (DeSoto) in 1540. Interesting to evaluate how Faulkner used some facts, changed others, and completely disregarded many. Doyle notes that Faulkner’s Indians were not just an “exotic prelude to the advance of whites and their slaves” but “reveal a larger moral judgement of all the inhabitants” of Yoknapatawpha.

Faulkner, William. Collected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Section III “The Wilderness” contains four of Faulkner’s Indian stories. I’ll be looking primarily at “Red Leaves” (and possibly also “A Justice”) to compare variances in how differently Indians are represented in earlier work versus GDM.

—. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage, 1942. 1994.

My primary texts to study will be the “Indian” stories “The Old People,” “The Bear,” and “Delta Autumn.”

Gage, Duane. “William Faulkner’s Indians.” American Indian Quarterly (Spring 1974): 27-33.

Another (limited) early study of Faulkner’s Indians, which Gage calls a fictional “fantasy” and not historical, pointing out several inaccuracies, even where Faulkner often contradicts himself. Gage notes that Faulkner uses his Indians as a sort of middle ground “to accentuate relationships between the races in the South” noting that when Indians are “treated as blacks” it “becomes a profound statement on how meaningless it is to judge people by the color of their skin.”

Galloway, Patricia. “The Construction of Faulkner’s Indians.” Faulkner Journal (Fall 2002/Spring 2003): 9-31.

Looks at Faulkner’s reception of popular ideas of Indians, attributing his interest in part to the popularity of Indian stories in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post (which published several of Faulkner’s Indian stories.) She tracks down scholarly material and local experts (one of whom was a professor of Faulkner’s at the University of Mississippi) accessible to him and disputes Faulkner’s claim that he did no research and just made up his Indians. Galloway concludes that his treatment of Indians is no more exaggerated than his treatment of white characters, though Indians are “the inscrutable Others who provided an infinitely malleable middle term that served Faulkner well for asking any number of questions of the white-black relationship.”

Glissant, Edouard. Falkner, Mississippi. Trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear. 1999. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Meditations of this postcolonial poet reach beyond traditional critical works on Faulkner, posing “what if” and “what next” types of questions. Some general observations of Faulkner’s portrayal of Blacks as the “silent and suffering witnesses” to “the moment when the land suffered a split” between the Indians and the Whites from Europe addresses the “nagging question of original responsibility” only to White people. Indians disappear, the Whites change, but the African family has no claim to constitute a family lineage.”

Hamblin, Robert W. “Beyond the Edge of the Map: Faulkner, Turner and the Frontier Line.” Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Robert W. Hamblin and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 154-171.

Sees Faulkner as influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner’s theories of the vanishing frontier, but more moral and complex than Turner and less deterministic. Faulkner’s characters possess free will and alternative choices; the question of human history is one of “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Relevant to the question of how American identity is shaped.

Johnson, Bruce G. “Indigenous Doom: Colonial Mimicry in Faulkner’s Indian Tales.” Faulkner Journal (Fall2002/Spring 2003): 101-127.

Studies Indians’ “mimicry of colonial authority” as they assume ownership roles and seek property; “Faulkner condemns the colonization of an indigenous people and their land by a Euramerican culture obsessed with ownership.” (Johnson borrows concepts from Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, so I’ll be looking at that too.) How is identity shaped in colonized people?

Kinney, Arthur F. “Faulkner’s Other Others.” Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 195-203.

Finds parallels between Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark and Faulkner’s use of “other others” (Indians) where encoded meanings can “fracture the narratives in which they appear” serving as “informing, stabilizing, and disturbing” elements. The text carries metaphorical meanings with the history.

Moore, Gene M. “Chronological Problems in Faulkner’s ‘Wilderness’ Stories.” Faulkner Journal (Fall 2002/Spring 2003): 51-67.

Studies problems with the chronology of Faulkner’s Indian stories (history of steamboats and Removal) which may look like “carelessness or insouciance on Faulkner’s part” but suggest that he saw his Indians “not in historical and certainly not in sentimental terms, but as figures whose bizarre ‘otherness’ exempts them from the white man’s sense of time.” Interesting to think about how time plays into identity and what exemption from it could mean.

Parini, Jay. One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.

A readable biography with some basic psychological insights and commentary on the work. (The Blotner biography has more detail when searching for specifics.)

Taylor, Melanie Benson. Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and the Lost Cause. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Analyzes writing about American Indians in southern literature as “not just an attempt to cover over the region’s messy beginnings but also a self-interested need to achieve survival and amplification at any and all costs during a particularly critical period of regional recovery” with Faulkner’s “perverse Indian creations” representing his own “rhetoric of doom” and falling within a “biracial cosmos” that views the South as a “persistently black-and-white and antimodern space.” This study is representative of the approach of more recent trends cultural/postcolonial studies critical of Faulkner’s ultimately dismissive appropriation of Indians.

Trefzer, Annette. Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama, 2007.

Focuses a postcolonial lens on literature of the South, citing the national and international climate of imperial expansion. Explores techniques in and motivating forces behind Faulkner’s “playing Indian” and circulating myths. Finds that Faulkner’s Indians “serve to negotiate the boundaries of American culture and the processes of inclusion and exclusion needed to maintain those boundaries and police their limits.” Relevant analysis of uses of mimicry in colonized peoples align with Johnson, Benson and other critics. With respect to considerations of Faulkner’s representations of origins and identity, I want to further explore Trefzer’s theory that writing about Indians meant “coming to terms with anxieties about the fragility not only of an imagined white southern identity but of an American national identity.”

Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Provides insight into the history of the South and how deeply it is ingrained in the Falkner/Faulkner family, shaping this author. Origins and inheritance are key themes in the work, as is an understanding of how close Faulkner, born in 1897, was in time to the history of Mississippi– where some areas were still frontier territory in the 1830s, with whites and blacks coming in numbers (for cotton) only “in the last generation before the Civil War.”

Winston, Jay S. “Going Native in Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner’s America and The Indian.” Faulkner Journal (Fall 2002/Spring 2003): 129-142.

Focuses on Faulkner’s sense of fragmentation and its major role in his work, which causes him to transcend the history that began in 1860 and forge a bond with native inhabitants connected to the land. In GDM, “land and Indian-ness come to be woven into a complex historical tapestry of race, patrimony, and ownership.”

Fraire, Manuela. “No Frills, No-Body, Nobody.” Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being I, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Fraire examines the way clothing (and, specifically, accessories) contributes to a process of self-construction through the work of “identification” (constructive) and “dismantlement” (deconstruction), which offers a useful theoretical frame with which to approach the analysis of clothing and material garments within Faulkner’s works.

Cook, Sylvia J. “Reading Clothes: Literary Dress in William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell.” The Southern Literary Journal 46, 1: Fall 2013.

Cook analyzes Faulkner’s operation of clothing as both a signifying referent towards character identity expression as well as a reflection of individual character placements within social stratifications of race, class, and gender. Performing a close reading of several Faulkner texts, including TSAF, AA, LIA, AILD, and U, Cook places especial focus on how Faulkner’s characters socially contextualize and mediate garments through their own specific focuses. I anticipate contextualizing this against my own readings of how Faulkner’s characters utilize clothing to project, navigate, and de-/reconstruct particular identities.

Gradisek, Amanda R. “The eyes of the strange: Absalom, Absalom! and domestic modernism.” The Mississippi Quarterly 66:2, Spring 2013. 317-338.

Gradisek examines Judith and Rosa Coldfield in AA, using clothing and fashion as one particular lens with which to analyze how they challenge conceptions of the idyllic image of Southern womanhood and femininity. What’s particularly notable is the way the article distinguishes between differing versions of Southern womanhood as articulated within AA–specifically, that there are women and there are ladies, and they are each separate categories. Given Rosa’s initial description, framed within squares of lace and defined by her outmoded garb, as well as the later attention paid to Judith’s plain calico dress, this would provide an opportunity to see the ways in which fashion can illustrate individual expressions of identity not just within a binary (woman/man, black/white), but within the category itself. How does the fabric comment upon the type of woman it contains, and how does that woman express her own container in the choice of what to sew, what to wear, or how to wear it?

Williams, Michael. “Cross-dressing in Yoknapatawpha County.” The Mississippi Quarterly 47, 3: Summer 1994. p. 369-391.

Williams uses the specific frame of masquerade to discuss how female characters (who cross-dress) operate within Faulkner’s works, including LIA, U, and The Mansion, and how those acts of cross-dress emerge out of the paranoia and scrutiny contingent in maintaining binaries of race, gender, and class within the collapsing Southern world. While I am less interested in cross-dressing per se, the framing of such acts highlights the role of spectatorship, audience, and construction within fashion and dressing, which is significant within social identity definition and navigation.

McKee, Patricia. “Playing White Men in Light in August.” Producing American Races: Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrisson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999.

A specific examination of how race is necessarily constructed and performed within LIA along the lines of sight, the text reviews Joe Christmas and Joe Brown’s constructions of self both in how they are perceived by the community (through outfit, through facial expression, etc.) and how they return that line of sight. One point of interest for me is the emergence and placement of both Joes when they first arrive on the scene to work–sized, measured, and judged by the state of the clothes they wear and how they choose to wear it. (Specifically, Joe Christmas’ choice to show up to work in his own uniform rather than in the work overalls that all the other mill men are accustomed to and expect.) One of the frames I intend to examine is race, and Joe Christmas is a pivotal figure whose (failed) navigation of his identities also spills over into a kind of muddying expression of identity through the clothes he wears.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. Vintage International, 1990.

The uniforms of Joe Christmas, both in his early life as a school child as well as in his first emergence at the mill, are significant events I wish to explore. Further, Bobbie’s dress, although appearing somewhat briefly, will provide interesting context and pressure against the sartorial expressions of feminine identity that appear in other Faulkner texts as she lies outside of Southern ladyhood, but pursues performative femininity directly (as opposed to Drusilla, for example, who pursues its binary opposite).

—-. The Unvanquished. Vintage International, 1991.

It is my anticipation that I will center my primary focus on “Raid”, “Skirmish at Sartoris”, and possibly “An Odor of Verbena” given the significant role of Drusilla within those chapters. Primarily, I will be looking to Drusilla and her acts of dress as a means of exploring how clothing and gender operate and how the social environment then interprets significance out of that dress.

—-. Absalom, Absalom!. Vintage International, 1990.

In relation to gender, Rosa Coldfield and Judith Sutpen’s styles of dress will play key roles, especially given the ways in which they may represent abortive expressions of idealized Southern femininity. Further, Charles Bon is significant both in his role as a social good for display–a garment in his own right–as well as in his trendsetting patterns by way of fashion, and his larger significance to the narrative given his racial complications.

In conducting my initial research for this final project, my search terms were general in terms of source text, as well as broad regarding the parameters of my thematic concerns: gender, sexuality, class, fashion, clothing, dressing as well as occasional peeks into materialism and commercialism (where they intersected with Faulkner). JSTOR and Google Books were a boon, but CUNY OneSearch’s library (including full text access to books through the online database) was tremendously (and surprisingly) helpful as well. While I was more interested in seeing how fashion, clothing, and dress (both verb and noun) manifested latent social dynamics and codes within the text, one of the more interesting convergences I had with existing Faulkner scholarship had to do with larger concerns of commercialism and material culture around the time of Faulkner’s writing as well as within Faulkner’s own life. (While the intended focus of my long wiki, at this point, precludes the use of that information, it did lead me down a tangential rabbit hole for a few hours.) While I was hoping that the existing scholarship would help me to narrow my texts further, what I found was that several articles did a wider study across three or four of Faulkner’s works, analyzing individual characters and their fashion and knitting these into a singular argument about what Faulkner was aiming to achieve. What critical scholarship and writing has been done into the topic has seemed somewhat diffuse and sparse, undergirding a larger argument about gender, race, sexuality, performance, etc. or comparing it with other authors and works rather than serving as the focal point of the analysis itself.

Bidney, Martin. “Victorian Vision in Mississippi: Tennysonian Resonances in Faulkner’s “Dark House/Light in August.” ” Victorian Poetry 23.1 (Spring 1985): 43-57. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 26 April 2017.

In the single major literary analysis that examines Tennyson alongside Faulkner, Bidney looks at how In Memoriam illuminates a series of new understandings about Light in August, which was originally titled Dark House in reference to Tennyson’s poem. Bidney shows how the young Faulkner was indeed a reader of Tennyson, and lays out a convincing series of parallels between the poem and the novel, which both, he says, examine “threatening isolation, a difficult and mortifying journey, and a never-completed quest for transcendence” (43). He further suggests that the main characters’ journeys are all better understood through this new context. And happily, he leaves my topic–history–to the side, which leaves some space for expansion on In Memoriam: Tennyson struggles to reconcile a Christian understanding of history, which provides meaning, vs. a more meaningless Darwinian history, a struggle between meaning and meaninglessness that one could certainly trace in Faulkner as well. In addition, Bidney is almost entirely focused on In Memoriam, even though Faulkner’s critical description of Hightower’s actual Tennyson reading material seems to additionally suggest something more along the lines of the historical/mythological Idylls, which provide another potentially fruitful point of comparison.

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Hoffman, Daniel. Faulkner’s Country Matters: Folklore and Fable in Yoknapatawpha. Rouge and London: Louisiana State University, 1989. Print.

Hoffman explores how Faulkner draws on a huge range of historical and mythological sources, from European history to Native American mythologies, to build his Yoknapatawpha County, including, he suggests, previous understandings of history and society—including the myth of aristocratic decline in The Unvanquished, which pairs interestingly with Kozicki’s reading of Tennyson’s Idylls (see below). And while Hoffman traces a huge range of influences, he purposefully avoids tracing out a single unifying argument, a useful reminder that Faulkner (or Tennyson) may very well have no single approach to or understanding of history, but rather picked, chose, and reacted to multiple complex understandings of history and mythology (in Faulkner’s case, Tennyson was one such previous understanding, but not the only one). This is a good reminder for defining the scope of a highly focused argument about Faulkner’s use of Tennyson in considering history (as well as the necessity for a reasonable justification of the project, particularly when faced with the many histories and mythologies upon which Faulkner drew).

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Kozicki, Henry. “A Dialectic of History in Tennyson’s ‘Idylls.’ ” Victorian Studies 20.2 (Winter 1977): 141-157. JSTOR. Web. Accessed 26 April 2017.

Kozicki’s fascinating essay seeks a “systematic historical explanation” for the fall of Camelot in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which I think were very much evoked in Faulkner’s description of Hightower’s reading materials. Rejecting previous explanations about individual moral fault and sin as “simplistic,” Kozicki’s explanation of how history works and empires fall in Tennyson’s work is persuasive and well-supported: he argues that Camelot at first prospers because it must, by necessity, be flexible and reactive to the external and internal forces that challenge it, including those by individuals; its knights exchange a sort of animal “freedom” for a more Christian one. However, once as a society it has peaked and it has overcome all challengers, its power starts to become both oppressive and static, and it starts to fall, destroyed from within. Kozicki draws on close-reading the poem, Tennyson’s archives and letters, and a look at dominant Victorian understandings of history to support his reading.

What to make of this in conversation with Faulkner? Certainly the theme of a fallen society resonates throughout Faulkner; but even allowing for his occasional doubts about racial oppression, it seems unlikely that Faulkner would describe the south as having fallen from within; his descriptions of the Civil War instead suggest bloody oppression by the north. And in terms of character – Kozicki argues that Lancelot and Arthur die as martyrs, Holy Men, the last remnants of their age; but that the grief that surrounds their passing reveals Tennyson’s ambiguity about a Christian understanding of history in which all failures are part of God’s plan. Are any of Faulkner’s characters martyrs? Faulkner’s approach to history seems to have moved well beyond any influenced by a Christian understanding to one closer to Hegel, in which the individual is trapped by history but without being any sort of spiritual, meaningful martyr to it.

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Morris, Wesley, and Barbara Alverson Morris. Reading Faulkner. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Print.

The Morrises examine Faulkner’s navigation of southern history, southern mythology, the southern mythologization of history, etc., and argue, broadly, that Faulkner’s main approach was to examine the past from the perspectives of a series of individuals, and in so doing, examine and resist the mythologization of history while also, in a sense, elevating these histories to myth. In his summary of their project, John T. Matthews writes that “Myth justifies and mystifies, history represents and judges” (120). This, I believe, is a highly useful structure for understanding Faulkner’s approach to history, since all histories, and particularly fictional ones (even ones based on a diary – see Wolff), end up tangling with mythology. In including both, Faulkner is, in a sense, embracing both but also resisting both, and his troubled association with Tennyson – he who embraces mythology—may represent his resistance to a purely mythological approach to history. However, as the Morrises suggest, this does not mean that he does not also entirely embrace history, or entirely reject mythology.

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Tennyson, Lord Alfred. In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849). Tennyson’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts; Juvenilia and Early Reponses; Criticism. Ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc, 1971. Print.

In Memoriam is one of the great Victorian poems; written over the course of more than fifteen years, it tracks the course of Tennyson’s grief for the untimely and unexpected death of his close friend and brother-in-law-to-be Arthur Hallam in 1833. Re-reading In Memoriam with Light in August in mind brought to light new elements. First is the sheer interiority of the poem; it is evident that years pass in the poet’s life but not clear when or where he is, other than stewing in his own grief. There is something rather of Faulkner in that reluctance or inability to move forward. To the extent that time is present, however, it is strikingly (suggestively?) marked by the passage of Christmas. It is during Christmas—as Tennyson notes, a time of hope and evidence of God’s love—with which he struggles greatly with his grief. Faulkner did choose for his main character in Light in August a name that both evoked In Memoriam and, as in In Memoriam, emphasizes grief and isolation during a time that should be one of joy and community.

Perhaps more pointedly, though, is that way that In Memoriam does track the slow, steady passage of time. It may seem to creep or stop entirely, moving only as quickly as the steady tick of a clock – or in this case, Tennyson’s “measured language.” But the eventual result of this, for Tennyson, is a kind of relief from overwhelming grief, and an arrival at a sort of acceptance. For Tennyson, time does, eventually, appear to heal or at least assuage all wounds. For Faulkner, this is less clear. On the other hand, the history that Tennyson battles is a deeply personal one; for Faulkner, the history is both personal and socio-historical.

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Wolff, Sally. “William Faulkner and the Ledgers of History.” The Southern Literary Journal 42.1 (Fall 2009): 1-16. Project MUSE. Web. Accessed 26 April 2017.

Wolff here examines the Civil-War era Diary of Francis Terry Leak, a diary that, according to her research and interviews with family members, Faulkner read many times in the 1930s and used as a source for several novels, including The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner’s historical process here is striking and provides a useful reminder on the contrast between Tennyson’s and Faulkner’s basic source material: an actual physical 19^th-century diary vs. Arthurian mythology with Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur. Certainly both resulting texts are fiction, but the understanding—that such attention is paid to real, anonymous people vs. imaginary kings and queens is certainly suggestive of a basic disagreement as to what kinds of histories are worth telling, according to either writer, and where historical or social truth might lie. (Interesting, too, that Faulkner regularly uses biblical and mythological imagery and reference to elevate his subjects to a higher historical/cultural level.)

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Research Process:

To assemble these sources, I dug through JSTOR, MLAB, Project MUSE, Google Scholar, Google Books, Zotero, and Hunter’s library, searching for keywords on Faulkner, Tennyson, history, and mythology. After having done so, and having weeded out a great many sources about Faulkner’s personal and family history and Civil War influences, I can confidently assert that Faulkner’s philosophy of history is not a particularly trendy topic in Faulkner studies just at present (it apparently peaked in the late 1980s), nor was it ever a particularly popular focus in Tennyson studies. The result is that many of my sources are quite old – usually I’d avoid anything other than the most influential essays that predate the rise of feminist and postcolonial approaches. But this is a sort of old-fashioned project – reading Faulkner through Tennyson, and vice-versa, hoping to gain a sort of illumination of Faulkner’s philosophies of history. Is it cutting-edge? Not exactly, except to the extent that it bridges Victorianism and Modernism, which is something I wish we would see more of. The one essay (Bidney’s) that does address Faulkner’s reference to Tennyson in Light in August is wonderfully extensive, detailed, and well-argued; it is also highly focused on In Memoriam and doesn’t particularly address either writer’s philosophy of history, which gives me plenty of room to explore and play with other Tennysonian resonances in Light in August and Faulkner’s other works.

Akin, Warren. “‘Blood and Raising and Background’: The Plot of ‘The Unvanquished.’” Modern Language Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1980, pp. 3–11., www.jstor.org/stable/3194162.

In this reading of The Unvanquished, Akin delves into the idea of revenge, and states that Bayards choice to not avenge his father’s murder, “redefined part of his heritage”. Bayard changed the vicious cycle that was killing his family- and others in the South, in the name of “revenge” in order to form a more promising future. He is the “real Satoris” a man not measured by how many many he killed, but by the one he did not. This article was a great reading on this novel, and provided a lot of insight into the tradition of revenge in the South, and showed the maturation of Bayard throughout the narrative. Akin also focuses on the effects the Civil War had on a child, stating “This specific war, like the desire for revenge, is partly the result of rigid honor, in the Southern code. And any war brutalizes on a grand scale in the same way revenge brutalizes on a smaller scale”(Akin 7). This text is useful because it shows how the death and blood seen in the Civil War, manifested itself into a blood lust and need for revenge for the defeated South.

Currell, Susan, and Christina Cogdell. Popular Eugenics National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2006. Print.

This novel delves into the history of eugenics- which was a scientific school of thought that focused on the idea of blood- differentiating “good blood” versus “bad blood”. Believers of this pseudo science based their supremacy on the idea that based on their blood they are inherently better than another group of people, and therefore have the right to oppress. This school of thought thrived during Hitler’s regime and was a fundamental principle in Nazism. What Cogdell argues is that this idea of eugenics was especially prevalent in post Civil War South, “the fear that the human body and mine could not be made to fit in with modern times was most intense in the South, where the discourse of social and economic decline resulting from the Civil War still permeated mass culture and economic decline in the 1930’s”(7). Here we see the time Faulkner himself was writing these novels in conversation with the ideas of race that are seen in his works. This text is a great asset to my essay because it shows what society was like in the `1930’s, as opposed to all the other sources I have the are written in retrospect. Understanding eugenics is germane because it shows how people believed that a biological makeup was an essential factor of status and “purity”.

Davis, Thadious M. Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.

This the scene in which the blood is smeared across his forehead in a ritual that is suppose to represent manhood. Killing represents dominations, and “pursuit, possession, and domination all are aspects of the representation of property, property rights, and personal rights”(57). In Go Down Moses becoming a hunter is an ancient rite of passage and “hunter drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit”(Faulkner 192). I think that it would be interesting to see how blood spilt, and the act of killing, plays into power and identity.

Fanon, Frantz“The Negro and Psychopathology”. Literary Theory, an Anthology. Comp. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. 447-461. Print.

This essay written during the time of the Algerian Revolution during French colonial control, delves into the psychology of a subjugated people, and the effects of domination. Fanon debunks the classic Freudian idea that one act of trauma leads to this repressed consciousness, and argues that a black man is faced with these traumas everyday. He describes how a black boy, through reading comics and books, internalizes the notion that the whites are the “heroes”. I thought this article was interesting because of all the Freudian aspects that were seen in Joe Christmas. The scene with the dietician was the trauma that later manifests itself in Joe’s need to overpower women. Joe Christmas struggles with his identity, and he lacks a certain self awareness. According to Fanon, the goal of the Negro is for the “other [white man] to give him worth. That is on the ethical level: self esteem”(467).

Faulkner, William. Light in August. The Library of America, 1985.

In this novel I will delve into Joe Christmas, and how the idea of blood played into his own psyche and self awareness. By going into the scenes in his childhood- particularly with the dietician, Joe and his later behavior can be seen. The idea of blood as holding social differentiations as well as biological is seen in Joe, especially in the scene where he is beat up, and when he is murdered.

Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Random House, 1973. Print.

Much like the other novels, race and the “one drop rule” is a motif throughout the novel. I will focus mostly on “The Bear” chapter of the novel, and focus on how the act of killing and spilling blood is a form of manhood and dominance.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished. Whitehouse Station: Vintage, 1966. Print.

This novel has a lot of blood in it- because it takes place during the Civil War. I am going to assess the relationship between Bayard and Ringo, and what it means to be the “real” Sartoris.  In this novel blood, and the spilling of blood is done in the name of a greater cause- revenge. By analyzing how this lust for revenge drives people to be who they are, and then comparing that to Bayard’s choice to abstain from this vicious cycle, his own character becomes more important.

Haney Lopez, Ian. “The Social Construction of Race” Literary Theory, an Anthology. Comp. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998. 964-974. Print.

In this work, the legal aspects of race are seen. Lopez brings in the example of a family that claimed a free ancestor, yet the fate of their freedom was boiled down to “the complexion of their face, the texture of their hair, and the width of their nose”(965). He argues that race manifests itself in every aspect of life- personal and public- and has roots in economic, political, and social spheres. This has lead to changing the perception that race is a socially, and not biologically produced. I think this essay is the foundation to my argument, because it debunks the notion seen in the novels (especially Joe Christmas) of the “one drop rule”, and that a person’s blood and biological makeup somehow make them lesser than another. For Lopez, race is a “social phenomenon”, and most people living in America don’t understand what race is. Once it is understood that race is a socially constructed idea, that habituality “places physical features to personal characteristics” then the oppression and fatalism that is seen in these works are clearly shown.

The process was a easier than I thought it would be- finding the idea of blood in relation to constructing race had a lot of articles- especially theory based ones. The hard aspect was trying to find journal articles that had to do with my topic. I think that with a topic as broad as mine it is hard to find specific evidence of a scene in the novel, but I found a lot through Zotero, and the CUNY database.  

Faulkner, William. Light in August. The Library of America, 1985. Light in August contains a substantial amount of window imagery. I’m interested in Hightower’s gaze out windows and the racially motivated destruction of the windows of his home following his hiring of two black cooks. Specifically, I’ll focus on the white logic of the racial imaginary that becomes illuminated through Hightower’s increased social consciousness in Light in August.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Random House, 1984. In The Sound and the Fury, Luster defends himself against accusations from Jason and Dilsey that he broke the window through which Quentin escapes. I plan to focus on the racial logic that assumes Luster must authenticate his innocence and how he challenges this logic through visual omniscience.

McKee, Patricia. Producing American Races: Henry James, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison. Duke University Press, 1999. I plan to use this source to expand upon Morrison’s ideas of “blinding” or “impenetrable whiteness” she outlines in playing in the dark. McKee synthesizes Morrison’s theory of a collective white identity that hinges on an imaginative racial economy. I’ll juxtapose Morrison’s ideas on the white imaginary with a visual hermeneutics of suspicion figured by Hightower and Luster.

Morrison, Toni. playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992. Morrison’s text will be useful for exploring what she calls the “figurations of impenetrable whiteness that surface in American literature whenever an Africanist presence is engaged” (TM 33). I’ll argue that the “blinding whiteness” Morrison isolates in American literature is made evident through Hightower and Luster’s visual experience in both Light in August and The Sound and the Fury.

Wilhelm, Randall. “Framing Joe Christmas: Vision and Detection in Light in August.” Mississippi Quarterly: the journal of Southern cultures, vol. 64, no. 3/4, 2011, pp. 393-408. Randall Wilhelm argues that parsing the visual in narrative operates as “a means of potential knowledge and as a narrative tool of power and obfuscation” (RW 394). I plan to apply this argument to Hightower’s gained clarity throughout Light in August and Luster’s ability to see past the constraints of white Southern logic.

My process has included consulting Zotero, Google Scholar, Hunter’s OneSearch and various other search engines. I borrowed Morrison’s playing in the dark from the Hunter library. I was unable to find Producing American Races within the CUNY system, so I’m consulting a preview on Amazon Kindle as a workaround until I can track down a physical copy. I found Randall Wilhelm’s article earlier in the semester, I believe through a JStor search. Moving forward I plan to consult the works cited within the secondary sources I’ve chosen to find more supplementary material. Some of the keywords I’ve looked for include: visuality, windows, shadows, race and imaginary.

For my final research project I’m interested in doing a long wiki on traditional Southern Women, focusing on Dilsey from The Sound and The Fury and Granny from The Unvanquished. Though these women are from different stories and different races, they both share many of the same characteristics of a southern woman that we do not see in other lead female characters like Mrs. Compson, Caddy, Drusilla, Lena or Joanna. Unlike all those women, Granny and Dilsey are steadfast in their Christian and southern values. I will be looking at different characteristics such as protecting and providing for family members, taking on traditionally male roles, and touch on the overall Christian themes found in both characters. I will also be expanding on one of my earlier blogs and looking at both Granny’s and Dilsey’s pivotal church scenes.

Though I may mention other characters from Light in August, I plan to use The Sound and The Fury and The Unvanquished as my primary texts. As far as secondary sources I will be likely go through the Hunter College Library and use the databases Project Muse, Google Scholar, and JSTOR.

For my final project I would like to write about the presence of fascism within Faulkner’s works. It is interesting because the concept of fascism did not gain prominence until the early 20th century, but Faulkner’s Mississippi before, during, and right after the Civil War was abundant with the ideas of it. The most noticeable parallels between World War I’s fascism and that of the south’s during the Civil War is the notion that “the advent of total war and the total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction between civilians and combatants. A “military citizenship” arose in which all citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war.” This, and the attitude of the people in the South towards “carpetbaggers” are startlingly close to the fascism that arose in Italy and then throughout Europe. Since both of these works were written and published after world war I, is Faulkner making the statement that the South, specifically Mississippi, was the real birthplace of fascism? How else can Faulkner’s “South” essentially be a perfect example of fascism before the term was even invented? I will attempt to answer this question primarily using The Unvanquished and The Sound and the Fury. Jason Compson II demonstrates a tendency for fascism in his perspective, what with racism, the suspicion of “Jews” and cities, and his genocidal rage. Meanwhile, through the eyes of Bayard and Ringo we watch the entire south mobilize itself for the war, and everyone plays a part. And throughout all the works we have read, Faulkner seems to give the towns personalities of their own, which are fascist in nature. This can be especially seen in Light In August and Absalom! Absalom! I am unsure what form to write my final project in, but am leaning towards a yoknapedia entry since I can find evidence of fascism in all of these works. For my research, I will start with JSTOR, Zotero, and the Hunter library, and go from there. I will also be looking up where Faulkner was and what he was doing during the first world war to see if he got the inspiration from it to show how its existence was already flourishing in the South. I hope this is not too broad an idea, but if it needs to be narrowed down I could try to focus on just one aspect of fascism and see where that takes me.