As members of an inherently classed, raced, and gendered society, our bodies have been constructed to betray our social and political standing whether we want them to or not. William Faulkner heightens this notion in the physical descriptions of the characters in The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, The Unvanquished, Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying. Using specialized and often conflicting depictions of characters such as Drusilla Hawk, Benjy Compson, Gail Hightower, Charles Bon, and Dewey Dell Bundren, Faulkner demonstrates the inadequacy of the American South’s outmoded ways of thinking. It could be argued that through the depictions of transgressive bodies, Faulkner attempts to make larger points about Southern culture, patriarchy, sexuality, sexism, and racism. This paper will seek to answer the following questions: How does Faulkner use depictions of transgressive bodies to make larger points about Southern (and frankly, American) culture writ large? What happens when we, as readers, are confronted with gender transgression that shatters the South’s normative definitions of masculine and feminine? What about normative definitions of sexuality, race, and wealth? Do Faulkner’s physical descriptions reflect the general pattern of how society reflects itself onto the self? 

Preliminary bibliography:

Crowell, Ellen. “The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde’s Trip through Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.” The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 71–124.

Doyle, Laura. “Project Muse.” The Body against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race, vol. 73, no. 2, June 2001. 339-364 , https://doi.org/10.1163/_afco_asc_000f.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! : The Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International, 1990.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. Vintage International, 2005.

Faulkner, William. Light in August. Vintage International, 1932.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Vintage International, 2015.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished the Corrected Text. Vintage International, 1991.

Homans, Margaret. 1997. “Racial composition: Metaphor and the body in the writing of race”. In Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, pp. 77-101. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Matthews, John T., and John T. Matthews. William Faulkner: Seeing through the South, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2012.

Watson, Jay. Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction 1893-1985, University of Georgia Press, 2012.

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

Food is an efficient, ripe window into the metonymic embodiment of historical racial and gendered hierarchies, subversions, and collective anxieties presented in Faulker’s fictional world. Throughout the Faulknarian universe, characters eat in communion with one another, food acting as the material for forging kinship among and between one another’s bloodlines. Food is the shared site of social and economic identity. In what patterns can we see characters’ eating behaviors define or embody the eater’s social identity, and relationship to that social identity– are they compliant to the social hierarchy? Subversive? In studying the behaviors surrounding food and eating in The Unvanquished, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!, we can trace the embodied racial and gendered anxieties through the bodies of Falker’s fictional world. I can perhaps also ask: how do the histories of foodways reliant on slave labor manifest physically and socially in the fictional consumption and rejection of food in Faulker’s world? 

Starting sources:

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! : The Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1990.

Faulkner William. Light in August : The Corrected Text. Vintage international ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1990.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished: The Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International ed. New York, Vintage Books, 1991

Hasratian, Avak.“The Death of Difference in ‘Light in August.’” Criticism, vol. 49, no. 1, 2007, pp. 55–84. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23128768. Accessed 29 Mar. 2023.

Jones, Michael Owen. “Food Choice, Symbolism, and Identity: Bread-and-Butter Issues for Folkloristics and Nutrition Studies (American Folklore Society Presidential Address, October 2005).” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 120, no. 476, 2007, pp. 129–77.JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4137687. Accessed 30 Mar. 2023.

Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Duke University Press, 1995.

Rosenzweig, Paul J. “Faulkner’s Motif of Food in ‘Light in August.’” American Imago, vol. 37, no. 1, 1980, pp. 93–112. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26303816. Accessed 29 Mar. 2023.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. NYU Press, 2012.

Further research needed: thorough investigation of US food history books, articles, etc., for relevant historical context in my reading of Faulkner’s treatment of food.

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

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

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

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

Crowell, Ellen. “The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde’s Trip through Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha.” The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction, Edinburgh University Press, 2007, pp. 71–124.

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

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

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

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

In Faulkner’s South, especially for the female characters that we have discussed over the course of the semester, the concept of marriage is deeply rooted in social (and sometimes economic) transactions and traditional gender roles. Women have been drastically affected by marriage as a result of the gender norms that are placed upon them. One of the norms that becomes a driving force for marriage is a woman’s ability to obtain sexual purity. For the purposes of my final project, which will be a long Yoknapedia entry about the idea of marriage, I will be focusing on the sexual aspects that Faulkner ties into many of the marriages that his female characters experience. The three primary texts that I will be referring to in my entry are The Unvanquished, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom! In order to fully gloss the idea of marriage, especially in regard to how Faulkner implements how this idea affects his female characters’ social, economic, and political environments, I will be focusing on three female characters. These characters are Drusilla, Caddy, and Ellen. I am immensely fascinated with how Drusilla decided to marry John Sartoris as a result of rumblings that she engaged in premarital sex with him, thus showcasing her will to save her reputation. Along with this, I also want to further explore why Caddy’s wedding, as told in Benjy’s perspective, tends to be an emotionally chaotic moment for the Compson family. I am not exactly sure how I am going to write about Ellen’s marriage yet but based on our discussion of her wedding thus far in class, I am intrigued to learn more about the social ties that a Southern wedding can bring about in Faulkner’s world.

In terms of how I will engage in research for my final project, I will definitely be looking for secondary sources through databases such as JSTOR and Project Muse. I will also be doing immense amounts of research utilizing The Faulkner Journal, as I think that this resource helped me tremendously when I was researching for my Yoknapedia entries that I completed for the midterm project. I am not exactly keen on using a platform like Google Scholar, as I tend to become anxious that some of the sources can be a bit too broad and off topic. Along with this, I will also be looking at the bibliographies of the sources that I do choose to include in my final project in hopes that I can find additional information that is relevant to my topic.

I am completely open to any more interesting ideas that I can possibly include in my entry, along with any possible resources that can be beneficial for me as I go about the research and writing process.

For some characters in Faulkner’s universe, “mobility” represents a chance to break away from Southern society’s shackles so that they can reinvent themselves. For others, becoming mobile is a dangerous path that tightens the shackles even further on one’s internal sense of identity, missing sense of identity, or externally perceived sense of identity. For my final project, I will be creating a long entry on Yoknapedia around the idea of “mobility.” I am interested in how the spatial and social movement of characters reinforces or allows them to break out of certain aspects of their identity as defined by Southern society, like how Lena’s persistent movement in Light in August allows her to shed the stationary Southern wife stereotype and become an agent in creating her future. I am also interested in what histories follow characters who move and how, like in Absalom, Absalom! Quentin carries a rich and haunted Southern history with him to Harvard and interprets it with Shreve. Quentin’s movement out of the South and reflection on his Southern identity speaks to a kind of generational mobilization and/or alteration of historical legacies. For my primary texts, I plan to use Light in August to discuss Lena Grove and Joe Christmas and The Sound and the Fury for Quentin and Miss Quentin, and potentially Absalom, Absalom! if I decide to include the history route. I am waffling over whether to include Drusilla from The Unvanquished in this entry as well. I plan on looking on the requisite research sites/search engines like JSTOR, Google Scholar, Project Muse, and Faulkner Journal for secondary sources and literature criticism. I am intimidated by print books but I might consider visiting the librarians at the Hunter Library for their book suggestions to augment my research. Any further leads on where I might find fruitful information is welcome. 

Identity is a fluid concept in the world of Faulkner. In Absolom, Absolom!, Quentin is described as “an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names” (AA, 9), while Light in August is filled with characters whose names are entirely circumstantial and who can be written on by society like parchment. Faulkner is constantly describing people as echoes and shadows of themselves, or, like Reverend Hightower, sagging vessels for a life of non-existence. And yet, a thread through all of Faulkner’s novels is the tragedy of a lost Southern identity and a ceaseless search for solid ground (Light in August‘s peripatetic Lena exemplifies this wandering).

Faulkner brings this lifelong grapple with identity to the surface in Chapter 17 of Light in August. Referring to a sleeping Hightower, he says, “There was a quality of profound and complete surrender in it. Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear…which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death” (LIA, 393). In this description, the “I-Am” — a fixed identity — is based on fleeting (and unflattering) qualities like pride, hope, vanity, and fear. Faulkner then equates the relinquishment of these qualities to death, suggesting there is no “I-Am” without them. My question is— in Faulkner’s conception of the world, is there such thing as true selfhood, or is every person an empty vessel waiting to be filled or drawn upon? Can “the I-Am” be something of substance, or is it always a brew of pride, hope, vanity, and fear?

Preliminary Bibliography:

Fowler, Doreen. “Revising The Sound and the Fury: Absolom, Absolom! And Faulkner’s
Postmodern Turn.” In Faulkner and Postmodernism, edited by John N. Duvall, and
Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 

Henninger, Katherine R. “Faulkner, Photography, and a Regional Ethics of Form.” In
     Faulkner and Material Culture, edited by Ann J Abadie, and Joseph R Urgo,
University Press of Mississippi, 2007. 

Honnighausen, Lothar. Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors, University Press of Mississippi,
2006. 

Lears, T.J. “True and False Things: Faulkner and the World of Goods.” In Faulkner and
Material Culture, edited by Ann J Abadie, and Joseph R Urgo, University Press of
Mississippi, 2007. 

Tebbetts, Terrell L. “‘I’m the man here’: Go Down, Moses and Masculine Identity.” In
     Faulkner and Postmodernism, edited by John N. Duvall, and Ann J. Abadie,
University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 

Weinstein, Philip. “Postmodern Intimations: Musing Invisibility: William Faulkner,
Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.” In Faulkner and Postmodernism, edited by John
N. Duvall, and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 

Similar to The Unvanquished and The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s Light in August depicts the destabilization of social structures and ideologies that organize Southern life in the early twentieth century, revealing their inherent contradictions and incoherencies. The novel’s principal characters, including Lena Grove, Joe Christmas, and Reverend Gail Hightower, are individuals who face marginalization in their communities because they disrupt the dominant social and cultural norms that shape notions of gender, race, class, religion and morality in the South. Throughout the novel, these three characters are objects of public speculation and shame. Members of the community ostracize them but are also intrigued by the air of mystery that surrounds their supposed moral failings and are equally as disturbed by their subversive attitudes towards notions of racial identity, faith and spirituality, and gender roles and relations. In the depiction of these tensions between the individual and the community, Faulkner portrays the fine line between private sin and public spectacle, social position and personal identity, mindless gossip and hate speech, casual conversation and oppressive discourse.

Given this premise, it becomes necessary to examine the social position of each character in question and the public discourse that surrounds them. On the one hand, Lena is an unmarried pregnant woman who travels from Alabama to Jefferson, Mississippi, to find the man who has left her with false promises. The father of her unborn child, Lucas Burch, also known as Joe Brown, is a conman and bootlegger who navigates society by lying and adopting a false identity. However, it is Lena who faces the consequences of their sin or moral transgression because she is pregnant out of wedlock. This is a taboo in Southern Christian society—even her own brother calls her a “whore” (10). Also, strangers such as Mr. and Mrs. Armstid speak in euphemisms as they help her when she hitchhikes to Jefferson, intrigued by her “shape” and story. Upon learning more, Mrs. Armstid looks at her with “an expression of cold and impersonal contempt” while there are several instances in which Mr. Armstid “apparently” avoids looking at or touching her (14-21). However, despite the stigma against pregnancy out of wedlock, these strangers still help Lena because she is a lone woman. The Armstids, for instance, feed and provide her shelter and transportation, but do not help or look at her beyond that, underscoring a side of Southern hospitality that is somewhat jarring and unsettling, as the community is full of unease.

Moreover, in the minds of these people, Lena disrupts the gender divide, or binary, and complicates it due to her position as an unmarried pregnant woman in need of help. Her actions cause Armstid to think about gender relations explicitly: “…she’ll walk the public country herself without shame because she knows that folks, menfolks, will take care of her. She dont care nothing about womenfolks. It wasn’t any woman that got her into what she dont even call trouble…You just let one of them get married or get into trouble without being married, and right then and there is where she secedes from the woman race and species and spends the balance of her life trying to get joined up with the man race. That’s why they dip snuff and smoke and want to vote.” (16-17) Armstid uses the language of racial (or biological) classification to demarcate differences between men and women. He suggests that Lena is able to make such a journey across the country, and in the process, make her sin known to the public (he noticed she didn’t have a wedding ring), because she knows that her social position as a single pregnant woman will push men to take care of her. By doing so, the men fulfill their gender role by protecting and providing for Lena. However, this kind of discourse also suggests a sense of prejudice against women, as he suggests that “marriage” or “trouble” (which may be a euphemism for sexual activity) causes women to become unwomanly, as they try to “join men” and engage in activities and liberties associated with masculine gender identity (such as, voting).

Based on this discourse, one could argue that Lena not only challenges feminine gender norms by (evidently) having sex before marriage but also complicates patriarchal gender dynamics when she decides to search for the father of her unborn child. Despite being weak, pregnant, and endangered without a male guardian, she is able to navigate this terrain and reach Mississippi. Her courage and resilience shows some sort of desperation, however, perhaps the possibility is not lost on Lena that Burch has deceived and abandoned her. In this case, her journey in search of him is significant because instead of accepting her fate, she attempts to hold him accountable and responsible as the father of her unborn child. She overcomes the limitations of her position and station as an abandoned woman and highlights the inherent contradictions in masculine, patriarchal gender norms in which a man is supposed to provide, protect, and be responsible for women. Where is Lucas Burch? By making both Lena’s vulnerability and strength public, Faulkner reveals the double standards between men and women, thus underscoring the contradictory and unstable nature of gender norms and ideals in Southern society.

On the other hand, Joe Christmas is a mixed race man with a mysterious identity and unknown origin. Similar to Lena, he also faces stigma as due to his racial ambiguity and heritage. He engages in illegal activities with Burch/Brown, and is also involved in sexual relations with an older white woman who is ostracized by the town for being a Yankee: “Folks say she claims n— are the same as white folk” (47). He is also involved in her murder, and despite his violent and aggressive nature, it is apparent that his anger and resentment stems from his complex identity as a mixed race individual, as indicated by the speculation of his African American heritage. His position as a traveler and name, which is also strange and lacks clear origins or indication of ancestry, points towards a biblical connection to Jesus Christ. Joe’s ethnic ambiguity highlights the nature of race as a social construct that upholds eurocentric and white-supremacist ideologies. The town’s reaction to his ethnic ambiguity also suggests that white-black or racially divided and stratified communities cannot make sense of racial identity without clearcut binary and hierarchical systems in place. He is constantly speculated to be a “foreigner,” thus highlighting the idea that he does not fit into this racial binary and is thus an outsider, living on the margins of this society (31-2). He is not quite “white” or “black” and remains unaccepted by both communities as he does not fulfill certain stereotypes, norms, and expectations of what an individual of a certain race is supposed to look like. It is ironic that the people of Jefferson are unsure and accusatory, hostile of his potential African American heritage, and yet unable to completely segregate him due to the nature of racial passing. His ethnic ambiguity and proximity to “whiteness” allows him to manipulate his racial identity, thus highlighting the instability of race as a social construct.

Similarly, Hightower is a disgraced minister who is shunned by the church-going community and entire town for his wife’s infidelity and suicide. As a “cuckold” in the eyes of society, he is emasculated by the scandal: “He is not a natural husband, not a natural man” (61). He is also, at one point, compared to Satan when the media bombards him (52). The treatment he faces by members of the community highlights how the town, the media, the public eye, oversteps boundaries, invades his privacy, and makes a spectacle out of personal loss and tragedy. The harassment he faces highlights the blurry line between the town’s gossipmongers and violent hate groups such as the KKK (62).  Hightower’s ambiguous position as a fallen minister thus exacerbates the anxieties of the people in Jefferson, who disgrace him due to suspicions about his failed marriage, his attitude towards black people, and his family’s past. As a representative of religion and morality due to his position as a minister, Hightower’s exile and marginalization is unsettling—what does it say about the spiritual state of this town?

In this manner, Faulkner suggests that the volatile and oppressive nature of discourse around race, gender, class, and religion serves as a reflection of a decadent society in need of renewal, transformation, and justice. This kind of prejudiced, racist, and sexist, and often violent and hateful discourse may stem from fear and uncertainty of the unknown, or from the anger and frustration that comes with social and cultural change. In any case, they are legacies of the past that influence the collective ethos of a community where, as Faulker demonstrates, Anglo-American, Christian, patriarchal, and white-supremacist values dominate society and shape the lives of its individuals. Lena, Joe Christmas, and Hightower each subvert these dominant values in their own ways.

After Armstid drops off Lena at Varner’s Store on her way to Jefferson, she has a brief interaction with Jody Varner in which he informs her that Lucas is likely not at the planning mill, and has been mistaken for a man with a similar sounding name. However, she persists on, and it is not clear in this instance if she is delusional or merely trying to convince herself. She has hope, even if the internal source of this hope is not certain. It is difficult for the reader to understand why she is continuing in such a state with little information to go on, but there is at least some sort of motivation apparent on her part (besides the obvious motivation of wanting to reunite with the father of her child) as she believes that “a family ought to be together when a chap comes. Specially the first one. I reckon the Lord will see to that” (Faulkner 21). Lena has her religious belief to drive her, which is seemingly her last source of hope, as in her vulnerable situation given her circumstances of being a woman pregnant outside of wedlock and the child’s father being absent, she is subject to contempt and rejection from her family. This is a significant commentary on Faulkner’s part, as a young vulnerable girl cannot depend on the support of her those close to her, and must take off on her own, where she receives the support of strangers, and only due to pity. While Lena is representative of the vulnerable figure that her religion teaches are closest to God, the reality of her situation is that she needs to find tangible support as the situation grows evermore dire as the baby’s birth nears. In having Lena struggle through this ordeal, especially considering her enduring, even aloof, disposition, Faulkner demonstrates the failing of cultural and social mindsets on women. Full responsibility for the pregnancy is placed on the woman, and her existence is seen as tainted, leading to awful treatment. With little options, Lena set out on her own to chase a slim chance, robbing the action of significant agency as it was prompted by her situation. Once she is away from that, she is still subject to judgment, though it is veiled with kindness and pity, as shown in the conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Armstid (21-22).

Returning to her interaction with Varner, his thoughts on her demonstrate the disposition which prompted her ordeal, “I would have done the same as her brother; the father would have done the same. She has no mother because fatherhood hates with love and pride, but motherhood with hate loves and cohabits” (26). He confirms that he would have treated her the same way had he been her father or brother. His cultural identity is confirmed despite his tolerance towards Lena. The next sentence presents an interesting idea and is even more intriguing due to its syntax. He personifies fatherhood, acknowledging that it is capable of hate, but seems to suggest that love and pride is the way in which hatred manifests in fatherhood. This is his attempt at explaining the cultural attitude towards a girl in Lena’s situation. It is because of the love and pride that a father holds for his child, which are both strong emotions, that he is able to manifest the equally strong emotion of hatred towards them. The father is so invested in those two emotions, that when something disrupts it, the feelings are corrupted. He does not continue the same syntax for motherhood, as motherhood is not directly personified, and “hate” is used as a noun instead of a verb. The reason for this change may suggest that motherhood is incapable of the direct action of hatred, but motherhood itself can still contain hatred. This highlights a belief in a distinction between men and women, and their individual parental institutions. Motherhood is attributed the verb “loves” and is said to “cohabit.” This gives a much different understanding motherhood compared to fatherhood and constructs an image of a bond or connectedness. Perhaps it refers to the deeper connection of mother and child because of the child beginning life as a part of the mother. Therefore, motherhood will always have the connection to the child that makes it incapable of the action of hate, but it can still contain hatred. In this way Varner shows the belief in significant dispositional differences between men and women, and is perhaps why he thinks what he thinks, but then treats her how he does. He does not have the personal stake in her situation, and so grants her pity, because he is aware of what she has gone through, and what she will go through as her role as a mother begins.