For my final project, I am writing a traditional research paper that tackles the topic of female sexuality in The Unvanquished, The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. Throughout the semester, we have seen the sexual identities of Faulkner’s female characters and the rigid constraints they face beneath the backdrop of the Southern plantocracy system. In particular, the characters of Drusilla Hawk, Caddy Compson, and Joanna Burden invert the traditional image of a Southern lady. Their sexual expression undermines traditional notions of virginity, gender, marriage, miscegenation, and the dying image of the Southern way of life. In my midterm project, I placed a special emphasis on Faulkner’s wife Estelle Oldham, and the ways in which she contributed to his work. In returning to Judith L. Sensibar’s Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art, I seek to further research the traditional values that permeated Faulkner’s life and how the cultural and sexual upheaval of the 20th century shaped the development of these female characters.

Possible Sources:

Sensibar. (2009). Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art, a Biography. Yale University Press.

Trefzer, & Abadie, A. J. (2010). Faulkner’s Sexualities: Dana Andrews. University Press of Mississippi.

For my final project I wanted to do a longer Yonkapedia of what I started diving into for the previous one in my midterm. For my midterm, I fixated on name/naming in Faulkner’s Light In August. I focused on Joe’s Christmas’ character development and inconsistency of identity within himself and how practically being ‘unnamed’ contributed to the life that he lived out. I could stay within the lines of my midterm but this time include either providing more depth on Faulkner’s choice of naming and creation of  Joe Christmas’ character and/or include Joe Brown / Lucas Burch into the Yonkapedia. 

I don’t know how I’d expand the Yonkapedia enough where I could reach the guidelines of the Final, but if not I also had in mind doing two medium entries that will equate to the final project requirement. I had in mind the idea of “knowing” in Light in August for my midterm as well. The following passage stuck with me throughout the reading of LIA: 

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long grumbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than it’s, set in a grassless cinderstrewenedpacked compound surrounded by a smoking factory purlieus and enclosed  foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoom where in random erratic surges with sparrow liked child trembling, orphans in identical and uniform blye denim in and out of remember but in knowing contant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacnting chimneys streaked like black tears” (119). 

Possible Sources: 

Robinson, Owen. “’Liable to be anything’: The Creation of Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s ‘Light in August.’” Journal of American Studies, Vol .37, No. 1, (2003) pp. 119-133. 

Schreiber Evelyn J. “‘Memory Believes Before Knowing Remebers’”: The instance of the Past and Lucans Unconscious Desire in ‘Light in August.’”  The Faulkner Journal, Vol. 20. No. ½, 2005, pp. 71-84.

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!

At the center of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county, and the driving force between all destruction and rebirth, is sex. Undoubtedly, Faulkner is a man obsessed with sex—that is, sexual deviancy, gendering, suppression, courtship, performance, and torment. In The Sound and The Fury, Light in August, and Absolam Absolam!, each of Faulkner’s major characters undergo a rise and fall (though, not necessarily in that order, or as neatly as the language suggests) surrounding an event in sexual nature, or an (in)ability to reconcile their present self with their animal self. Strong examples of this include Christmas and Joanna’s relationship; Henry and Bon’s relationship; Quentin’s relationship with his sexuality, and his projected disturbance onto Caddy’s sexuality; Jason’s extreme distrust of Quentin and the man with the red tie, made complex by his relationship with the Memphis prostitute, Lorraine; Christmas’ relationship with the prostitute; Lena’s relationship with Lucas Burch (and her pregnancy), to name a few. 

When considering Faulkner’s sexuality in the south, I see an undeniable connection of his language surrounding these events to the language used in describing queer sexuality and suppressive desire. While some of Faulkner’s characters are outright queer coded (Henry, in particular, I notice as we read Absalom Absolam!) even those which are not queer coded speak to queer identity in the sense of their actions and language surrounding erotica. For this paper, I want to look into how Faulkner writes erotics and, more specifically, look into the mirroring of southern sexuality and queer sexuality in his work. The central questions I am looking to answer are: to what extent does queer language and identity speak in conversation with southern morality and suppression in Faulkner’s work? How often is erotica entangled within non conforming identities? Was Faulkner suggesting something about queerness, desire, and humanity through his characters and their sexuality?

Potential Sources:

  Sherazi, Melanie Masterton. “‘Playing It Out Like a Play’: Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden’s Erotic Masquerade in William Faulkner’s Light in August.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 3, 2014, pp. 483–506, https://doi.org/10.1353/mss.2014.0007.

  Jaime Harker. “And You Too, Sister, Sister?: Lesbian Sexuality, Absalom, Absalom!, and the Reconstruction of the Southern Family.” Faulkner’s Sexualities, University Press of Mississippi, 2010, p. 38–.

  Gary Richards. “The Artful and Crafty Ones of the French Quarter: Male Homosexuality and Faulkner’s Early Prose Writings.” Faulkner’s Sexualities, University Press of Mississippi, 2010, p. 21–.

  Vaughn, Matthew R. “‘Other Souths’: The Expression of Gay Identity in Absalom, Absalom.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 3, 2007, pp. 519–28.

  Gordon, Brandon. “Queering the South: The Plantation as Homotopia.” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 44, no. 1, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011, pp. 155–57, https://doi.org/10.1353/slj.2011.0021.

  Richards, Gary. “‘With a Special Emphasis’: The Dynamics of (re)claiming a Queer Southern Renaissance: Document View.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 2, 2002, p. 209–.

  Lopez, Alfred J. “Queering Whiteness, Queering Faulkner: Hightower’s ‘Wild Bulges.’” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 22, no. 1/2, 2006, pp. 74–89, https://doi.org/10.1353/fau.2006.0004.

  Boone, Joseph Allen. Libidinal Currents : Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism. University of Chicago Press, 1998.

An interesting (mini) source for start of exploration: http://www.elisarolle.com/queerplaces/uvwxyz/William%20Faulkner.html 

And some more interesting Faulkner queer writings:

Sapphics poem https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53983/sapphics-56d233cf35eb5 

Lesbian Vampire Screenplay https://lithub.com/about-all-those-unproduced-screenplays-william-faulkner-wrote/  https://lfq.salisbury.edu/_issues/45_3/vampires_detectives_and_hawks.html

For my final project, I will be writing a traditional research paper that will suggest that the materialism and misogyny displayed by Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury is a result of the loss of the traditional southern identity and fall of the influence of the plantation owner caused by Northern influence during Reconstruction. The imposing of the North on the South has caused Jason, head of the family but perpetually dissatisfied, to construct a bleak persona of masculinity and a nihilistic outlook, as a last-ditch effort to hold on to what was lost in this challenge of identity. This multi-generational constructed psyche is the result of the unchallenged power of the Southern plantation owner suddenly experiencing a power shift and culture shock that Reconstruction brought upon. Through Jason’s example, this challenge to this deeply-ingrained identify has created a disposition that literarily has endured to modern day, as culminated in such examples as Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. Is this a mere reflection of Faulkner’s understanding of the reality of his time, or was he attempting to illustrate a broader issue of internalized feelings created and embedded by that change that will continue to create figures like Jason Compson (such as Ellis’ Patrick Bateman)?

Preliminary Bibliography:

Weinreich, Martin. “‘Into the Void’: The Hyperrealism of Simulation in Bret Easton Ellis’s ‘American Psycho.’” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 2004, pp. 65–78. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41157912. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

BRASSETT, JAMES, and LENA RETHEL. “Sexy Money: The Hetero-Normative Politics of Global Finance.” Review of International Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2015, pp. 429–49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24564338. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

GRESSET, MICHEL. “Psychological Aspects of Evil in ‘The Sound and the Fury.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, 1966, pp. 143–53. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26473552. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Hitt, Ralph E. “COMPSON — ANTI-COMPSON: HUMOR IN THE CHARACTERIZATION OF JASON COMPSON IV.” Interpretations, vol. 16, no. 1, 1985, pp. 124–34. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43797854. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Hagopian, John V. “NIHILISM IN FAULKNER’S ‘THE SOUND AND THE FURY.’” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 1967, pp. 45–55. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26278646. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

MOORE, CASEY C. “We’re Not Through Yet: The Patrick Bateman Debate.” The Comparatist, vol. 36, 2012, pp. 226–47. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26237305. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Newhouse, Wade. “‘Aghast and Uplifted’: William Faulkner and the Absence of History.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 21, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 145–65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24908231. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York, Vintage International, 1991

Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. Vintage, 2010.

Based on ecocritical readings of William Faulkner’s novels, I will examine the role of wood in Yoknapatawpha County as a socio-ecological marker of the uncertain boundaries between humans and nonhuman nature, whiteness and blackness, known and unknown. In primary texts such as The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down Moses, wood emerges in various literal and figurative forms: It is the organic material used for fuel, construction, tools, and other man-made products; a body of land in the form of woods, forests, and other mysterious territories; and a metaphor for complex human experiences and crises involving race, class, gender, and the environment. Ecocritical interpretations of Faulkner’s work, such as Susan Parrish’s “Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927,” suggest that a glimpse into anthropogenic activities such as deforestation in the South offers insight into how Faulkner saw “catastrophic environmental experiences, and its knowledge, to shift across the color line” (35). Given this argument, I suggest that in Faulkner’s fictional world, wood imagery is associated with labor, blackness, and ecological entanglement with the nonhuman and the unknowable. I suggest that Faulkner’s treatment of wood as a symbolic entity is closely tied to his ambivalent representations of the white supremacist and capitalist enterprises that use wood to express control over nature, exploit its resources, and racialize beings that the dominant culture deems “other”. In addition to the primary texts mentioned above, I will research the intersections between Faulkner, ecology, and race ideology to gather secondary sources that provide insight into the role of wood as a symbol of socio-political and ontological anxiety in Yoknapatawpha County.

Preliminary Bibliography:

Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, edited by Joseph R. Urgo, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=746917.

Faulkner and the Natural World, edited by Donald M. Kartiganer, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3039920.

Faulkner and Whiteness, edited by Jay Watson, University Press of Mississippi, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=711361.

Parrish, Susan Scott. “Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927.” American Literary History, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012, pp. 34–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41329627. Accessed 14 Apr. 2023.

Sivils, Matthew Wynn. “Faulkner’s Ecological Disturbances.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 3–4, 2006, pp. 489–502. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26467020. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

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

Drusilla Hawk in The Unvanquished. 

Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury.

Joanna Burden…and Bobbie Allen in Light in August. 

I found all of these female-presented characters intriguing when I made their acquaintance within the respective narratives. Taking from the recent review of Deborah Clarke’s book, Robbing the Mother, I believe that all of the aforementioned female-presented characters “have bodies which often prove uncontainable by a phallogocentric society” (Clarke 5). I am interested in exploring how the “disruptive presence” (Clarke 6) of these characters goes against the grain in disrupting and/or destabilizing the “dominant heterosexual frame” (Gender Trouble xi)—a frame upheld by various gatekeepers: either the male-presenting characters, the male-presenting third-person, “objective” narrative voice(s), or, Faulkner-as-author, himself. It is possible to suppose that Faulkner could very well have written his wayward Southern ladies as the stand-by-your-man archetypal woman…but, we have seen how that turns out for characters such as Mrs. Hightower, Mrs. McEachern, Caroline Compson, (Aunt) Louisa Hawk, etc. How does Faulkner construct these female-presented characters in and around the dynamics of that dominant heterosexual frame? 

Taking from Jeff’s suggestion to a previous student’s interest in researching female-presented characters who may be perceived as more “masculine” than male characters, I will definitely be referring to Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity. I hope this will shed light and direct a reading of Drusilla’s cross-dressing, as well as the gender-bending of attributes found in Joanna Burden and (a possible transgender) in Bobbie Allen. I am also finding a return to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble as a supportive source. My interest in Caddy Compson has more to do with her disruptive presence that is “uncontainable” in and around the aspect of the frame illustrated by dynamics of speech acts enacted within the direct access, first-person narratives of her three brothers. Faulkner and Gender has a few chapters that are of interest.

Many of Faulkner’s novels – particularly Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! among those we have read this semester – include instances of infidelity and adultery that play notable roles in the downfalls of prominent patriarchal figureheads such as Hightower and Sutpen. These downfalls thematically mirror the changing post-antebellum ideals with which the modernist South was tasked to grapple. Just as Hightower and Sutpen fall from their hegemonic roles in Yoknapatawpha, so do the ideals of the white patriarchal power structures in the wake of the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century.

The ripple effects of and the underlying biases within the infidelities and adulteries of these novels (I’m thinking in particular of Henry, Judith, and Charles Bon; Hightower’s wife; and Sutpen) provide vivid windows into themes of gender roles, queer relationships, race, morality, incest, family structure, virginity, public versus private life, and the changing ideals that would come to exemplify the southern modernism of Faulkner’s real and fictional worlds. This entry would use the instances of infidelity and adultery in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! (and possibly Go Down, Moses if applicable) as a springboard to delve into the moral attitudes and power structures that make up the characters’ worlds.

Possible sources:

Al-Barhow, Abdul-Razzak. “Focusing on the Margins: ‘Light in August’ and Social Change.” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 42, no. 2, 2010, pp. 52–72.

Behrens, Ralph. “Collapse of Dynasty: The Thematic Center of Absalom, Absalom!” PMLA, vol. 89, no. 1, 1974, pp. 24–33.

Crowell, Ellen. “THE PICTURE OF CHARLES BON: OSCAR WILDE’S TRIP THROUGH FAULKNER’S YOKNAPATAWPHA.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, no. 3, 2004, pp. 595–631.

Curtis, John H. The Journal of Sex Research, vol. 26, no. 2, 1989, pp. 284–86.

DALE, CORINNE. “‘Absalom, Absalom!’ And the Snopes Trilogy: Southern Patriarchy in Revision.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 3, 1992, pp. 323–37.

Donaldson, Susan V. “Faulkner and Masculinity.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 15, no. 1/2, 1999, pp. 3–13.

Hagood, Taylor. “Faulkner’s ‘Fabulous Immeasurable Camelots’: ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ And ‘Le Morte Darthur.’” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, 2002, pp. 45–63.

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

Martin, Robert A. “Faulkner’s American Dream and Hightower.” College Literature, vol. 12, no. 3, 1985, pp. 282–85.

ROBBINS, DEBORAH. “The Desperate Eloquence of ‘Absalom, Absalom!’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 3, 1981, pp. 315–24.VAUGHN, MATTHEW R. “‘Other Souths’: The Expression of Gay Identity in Absalom, Absalom!” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 3, 2007, pp. 519–28.

In the work of William Faulkner, the Lost Cause is a character all its own. It is collective memory and myth. It is the patchwork of the past that is, in a truly Faulknerian manner, not even past. It would be a book-length, Herculean task to give full attention to this perverted rationalization of a present history but for the sake of this paper, I will focus on the religion of the Lost Cause as it pertains to four novels The Unvanquished, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! I will focus on the preacher as the germ of this doctrine, but like any doctrine it oozes beyond the walls of its structures. So, not only the religion but the sermons (Gail Hightower), the words (Rosa Coldfield’s verse), that refuse to let the idea of the Lost Cause lose its vim and vigor, to let it be anything but a key, if not silent and smoldering, part of everyday life.

Preliminary Bibliography

Dobbs, RF. “Case Study in Social Neurosis: Quentin Compson and the Lost Cause.” Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 33, no. 4, 1997, pp. 366–91.

Donaldson, Susan. “Introduction: Faulkner, Memory, History.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 20, no. 1/2, 2004, pp. 3–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24908249. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! : the Corrected Text. Vintage international edition., Vintage International / Vintage Books, 1990.

Faulkner, William. Light in August : the Corrected Text. Vintage international edition., Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1990.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury : the Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International ed., Vintage Books, 1990.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished : the Corrected Text. First Vintage International edition., Vintage Books, 1991.

Gorra, Michael Edward. The Saddest Words : William Faulkner’s Civil War. First edition., Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.

Howe, Irving. “The Southern Myth and William Faulkner.” American Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4, 1951, pp. 357–62. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3031466. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Howell, Elmo. “Faulkner and Scott and the Legacy of the Lost Cause.” The Georgia Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 1972, pp. 314–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41396869. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Newhouse, Wade. “‘Aghast and Uplifted’: William Faulkner and the Absence of History.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 21, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 145–65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24908231. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Watson, Jay. “William Faulkner’s Civil Wars.” The Southern Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1/2, 2013, p. 41–.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. University of Georgia Press, 2009.