In the solitary chapter Addie has to personify her character in As I Lay Dying, she explains her lack of attachment to language as being rooted in the idea that words never reflect the complexity of the experience they attempt to communicate. Describing them as “just a shape to fill a lack” and “when the right time came you wouldn’t need need a word” (Faulkner 172), Addie reflects on various stages of her life during which words were used or forgotten in her presence, or by her, emphasizing how the unreliability and inaccuracy of words can only cause unnecessary pain and miscommunication. As a result, acceptance of a wordless state affords Addie greater emotional freedom. 

Operating on a principle embedded within her psyche from a very early age by her father, a principle which states that the point of living was to prepare to stay dead (Faulkner 169), Addie develops a rather impersonal attitude and straightforward approach to handling various aspects of life, life bearing children and interacting with others. The way in which she narrates her chapter matter-of-factly glosses over various life milestones with abrupt statements lacking description, like the repetitive mention of: “So I took Anse”  (Faulkner 170-171) to point to Addie’s emotional detachment from life, as manifested in her dismissal of words. Originating at the stage at which Addie had her first child, Cash, Addie’s dysfunctional conclusion that “living was terrible” marked her abandonment of language: “that was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say” (Faulkner 171). Proceeding to elaborate on several instances in which this claim proves apparent, Addie mentions how the scholars who defined concepts like motherhood, pride, and fear, must never have felt or understood the scope of such things, in order to ascribe a brief word to define an experienced so nuanced with polarizing and indecipherable feelings. Describing her acceptance of a world crippled by an attachment to language, Addie explains how her husband’s use of the word “love”, although unnecessary, remains his choice. By then, Addie has already become accustomed to society’s use of words, and appears freer for it: “Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, let Anse use it, if he wants to” (Faulkner 172). In the end, even Cora’s reprimands and judgement holds no influence over her, as Addie simply concludes that those same words which breed sin, also grant salvation. Juxtaposing a word’s ability to be both powerful and ineffectual, as based on perception, Addie logically emphasizes the unnecessary nature of language, attributing to words a sphere of influence that could be avoided with a freeing abandonment of language, such as her own.

Although Addie’s rejection of language remains rooted in dysfunction, not unlike Dewey’s own, it’s difficult to blame her for desiring a less complicated relationship with life. Her theory of language, resting on the fundamental claim that words are only a “shape to fill a lack”, logically exposes all the weaknesses of language, namely that of inaccuracy in conveying meaning, and leading to miscommunication among people who, as she states, spill the same blood when struck. Although this relationship to language, paired with her troubled upbringing ends up distancing Addie from her husband, children, and neighbors, rendering her unable to ground herself in life by finding beauty and meaning in simple things, had she been more positive and open-minded, this theory could have, in practice, led to a happier life.

With the obvious image of “laying dying” as a notably overarching representation of the  liminal state in the novel, there are a few subtler in-between states that contextualize the build up to and effect of Addie’s eventual death. Some of these in-between states reveal themselves in the form of each character’s individual goals, and the gradual ways in which they strive to attain them, whereas other representations of this state manifest in physical states, whether this be literal body decay or natural developments in the body. 

Continually putting emphasis on the hardworking aspect of rural life, where the weather beats down on the body and the hot air suffocates, the novel’s attention to grotesque details in relation to both the bodies of animals and the characters speaks to each character’s preoccupation with attaining any small comfort. With each character ultimately working towards a goal, the liminal state of Addie’s slow dying becomes mirrored by the in-between states of each character en route to fulfilling a personal goal. For Cash, it’s the purchase of new carpentry tools, for Dewey, it’s reaching a doctor to get a pregnancy, for Anse it’s the purchase of new teeth, and so on. “It’s a hard country on man; it’s hard” Anse states, shortly after the death of his wife, “But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. It will” (Faulkner 111). The simultaneously comical and disconsolate nature of the irony of being excited to have an excuse for going into town, both to bury his wife and get new teeth, unmistakably paints all of these individual side-motives for taking the coffin into town as liminal in-between states of slow progression in conjunction with the overarching state of slowly dying. The second manifestation of liminal in-between states comes in the form of developing physical states, namely, but not limited to, those of Dewey and Cash. While Anse’s developing inability to toothlessly eat “God’s own victuals as a man should” (Faulkner 37) represents bodily decay on a small scale, Cash’s continual use of a broken leg offers a stronger example of being on this threshold between health and infection, or physical activity and disability. Contrasting repetitive reminders of Addie’s breathing with not only the sound of Cash’s hammering of the coffin, but also the growing awareness that Cash’s infection will soon have festered up to a point at which he can no longer walk, Faulkner highlights this physical decay as a representation of liminality. Likewise, Dewey’s physical developments, as a result of pregnancy-related growth, also marks an in-between liminal state. Her thoughts, becoming increasingly more plagued by worry, despair, and frustration, reflect the slow physical development of her pregnant body, highlighting an in-between state of emotional and physical life or death that mirrors Addie’s own dying.

Employing this central motif of the liminal state in his novel As I Lay Dying, Faulkner makes use of smaller, in-between representations of liminality, as manifested in personal goals and physical states, to emphasize the build up to and impact of Addies’ death. These smaller liminal states, in conjunction with “to lay dying”, serve to highlight how complex and diverse challenges of rural life can be, where the simplicity of concepts like life and death remain the only familiar and grounding aspects of living with unpredictable tasks and developments. Death may occupy the mind, but a preoccupation with dealing with its aftermath offers a small relief from more ambiguous problems at hand.

Traced back to Addie’s neglectful attitude towards having Dewey to negate the birth of an illegitimate child, Dewey’s impulsive decisions and solitary nature cause her to have an unnatural relationship with both unexpected changes in her body and her emotions. Among these changes, Dewey’s pregnancy notably keeps her mind fixated on one goal: getting to the town doctor for an abortion. In her mind, this is the only rational solution. Her preoccupation with the body dysmorphia that follows her discovery of pregnancy, owing to God’s natural signs, and her obsession with reaching this goal clearly manifest in her behavior and daily life at home, leading her to not only disregard the death of her mother, but also grow to hate and harm Darl for wordlessly finding out about her state.

Suffering from a form of dysmorphia from a very early age, as a result of Addie’s dismissive attitude, Dewey grows up as the only daughter among a household of sons, with the sole point of reference for her emotions and bodily changes being the mother she struggles to emotionally connect to. Bearing a very basic understanding of pregnancy in mind, one which reflects the natural and impersonal process of the birth of farm animals, Dewey can only attribute feelings of frustration and disgust towards her state. On the one hand, life has taught her, through the lens of her own emotionally damaged upbringing and Addie’s detachment to her children, that childbearing isn’t a pleasant or useful life experience. On the other, all Dewey has as a point of reference for emotions and bodily functions linked to women stem from her own exploration and her experience with female farm animals. In the chapter during which the family’s cow chases Dewey, moaning to be milked, Dewey, in frustration, lectures her: “What you got in you aint nothing to what I got in me, even if you are a woman too…He could fix it alright, if he just would. And he doesn’t even know it” (Faulkner 63). Seeping into her contemplative state, even as she goes about fulfilling her everyday routine, Dewey considers all the options she has, all the while insisting on independently finding a solution. Arguably, Lafe could “fix it” if he knew, in the form of ten dollars for the doctor, as we later find out, but this isolation again reflects Dewey’s insistence on taking control of the situation like she had to take control of her life growing up, without the healthy comfort of relying on someone like a mother. Amidst a tumultuous description of uncomfortable visuals in this chapter, namely that of the dead fish seeping blood quietly, the dead air paired with the death earth and dead darkness, and that of humans as tubs of guts, Dewey’s thoughts chaotically whirl and repeat. Starting the chapter with a meditation on worry, and whether or not she, or Cash have any conception of it, she closes the chapter with much the same, with little development: “I don’t know whether I’m worrying or not. Whether I can or not. I don’t know whether I can cry or not…I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” (Faulkner 64). Remaining confused about her emotions, it’s no surprise that her obsession with maintaining control over what she can, her confusion with that which she cannot understand, and her physical dysmorphia regarding her pregnancy, lead her to making irrational impulsive decisions, as she does when she sets Darl up for arrest, and physically beats him for finding out about her pregnancy on his own. 

In the end, all that should have held some meaning to Dewey, like maintaining a healthy relationship with her brothers, or tending to her mother in her final hours of life, didn’t. Increasingly overwhelmed by the thoughts running through her head, Dewey eventually reaches a point where her disgust towards pregnancy trumps everything else, even her own instincts of self-preservation, as she goes to the doctor and lays her life at his hands, comforted at last by the idea of reaching her goal.

Sources’ Summary that Will Be Used in the Final Research Paper on Reverend Gail Hightower (Note: the text in italics belongs to the cited paper while the other text belongs to me; this means that I won’t use quotation marks)

West, Ray B. Jr. “Faulkner’s Light in August: A View of Tragedy.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5-12. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable   /1207135.  

William Faulkner’s principal subject in all his fiction has been the rise and decline of Southern society.  At its best, this society contained energy, honesty, and beauty; yet even at its height it embodied the seeds of failure in its history of human injustice in dealing with the native Indians and its Negro slaves.  The weakness of this society consisted, in part, in its very aristocratic ideals, which denied the possibility of change, and the drama of most of Faulkner’s works results from this attitude; an attitude of arrogance towards the inevitable movement of time; a pride in the society it had created, which is both admirable and tragic, but doomed (West 5).

This is a very interesting point as Faulkner parallels Hightower with post bellum Southern society in their “denial of change” and “the inevitable passage of time”, reflected in his perpetual reliving of his grandfather’s exploits in the Civil War. 

At its most general, then, Faulkner’s problem is one of permanence and change. It presents a contrast between a view of life as static, therefore putting little emphasis upon time, and a view that sees life as in constant flux… Yet whenever one of his characters attempted to remain in the world of past values, the result was, at its worst, pathetic, at its best, almost tragic (West 6).

Hightower is one of Faulkner’s characters that chooses to remain in the past and mentally revive, by the elevated window at twilight in his house of Jefferson, a moment his grandfather participated in the Civil War (although he was killed soon after the event Hightower rememorates, stealing chickens in a coop).  In this case, there is no doubt that “both characters and events were celebrating a way of life that was dead or dying; they were not prefiguring a world that lived or promised to live” (West 6). 

“Light in August, where the expiatory figure of Joe Christmas, combined with the innocent faith of Lena Grove, provide a moving and eloquent (though not uncomplicated) image of sacrifice and regeneration”―both sacrifice and regeneration replicate in Gail Hightower’s life, whose unresolved ills led to an isolated martyrdom that it is reversed by the end of the novel (West 6). 

“Hightower had come originally as the minister of a local congregation in Jefferson, because the town had been forever imprinted in his mind as the scene of his grandfather’s heroic action during the Civil War, when he had come as one of a daring band of horsemen to burn the stores of the occupying General Grant.  Hightower’s obsession with the past amounted to a fink of madness that tinctured his religion and drove his wife to debauchery and death” (West 9).

This quotation fits my paper (maybe part of it) because it explains the past event and Hightower’s fixation with it, as his grandfather is depicted as some brave hero of the South.  His disregard of the ignoble end which his grandfather met (chicken stealing) reflects his denial of the realities of the death of the Southern way of life.  

“It was like I was the woman and she was the man:” Boundaries, Portals, and Pollution in Light in August.  Watkins, Ralph. The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 11-24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20078093.  

This paper establishes that “beneath the apparent relations of society and community there exists a “structure of unconscious categories, which exercises powerful influence over human behavior” (Watkins 11).  Watkins then indicates that “[t]he central theme of Light in August is not the individualized condition of alienated persons or outsiders but the placelessness of persons who have, either through their own efforts or because of some twist of fate, become located in the margins of society” (Watkins 11).  Hightower illustrates the latter as he seeks to revive the grandfather’s role in the Civil War.  Symbolic anthropology explains “the various ways in which a person or persons, places, and things become liminal―that is, at or on the threshold or boundary of a given social structure―occupying a status or place that is outside the normal patterning of society and, therefore, appearing to be placeless or perpetually out of place (Watkins 12).   Hightower fails to conform to the chivalrous ideal of the Southern gentlemen, driving his wife to look outside the marriage for fulfillment and relegating him to outsider status amidst the definitions of polite Southern society.  In Jefferson, outcasts exist in direct opposition to Southern honor, as there are those who are constantly watching to ensure the forces of propriety in a determined society are obeyed: Doc Hines is representative of this archetype. “Honor may be seen as a people’s theology, a set of prescriptions endowed with an almost sacred symbolism, whose chief aim was to protect the individual, family, group, or race from the greatest dread that its adherents could imagine,” Under the guise of maintaining honor, all the vile undercurrents of intolerance can be swept in order to “protect” the community from these “greatest dread” (non-traditional gender roles, racial equality), relationships inconceivable to the Southern sensibility, from which the group would need protection. 

This paper explains how the novel even though it was written during the Great Depression, it does not allude to it: the long history of labor struggle in the Southern timber industry is not even mentioned (Neilson 446).  Yet Light in August show the determining power of a very different kind of history.  Hightower, who grew to ‘manhood among phantoms, and side by side with a ghost’ (474) and who preached sermons ‘full of galloping cavalry and defeat and glory’ (63), is defined by struggle with his grandfather’s martial legacy.  History as ever in Faulkner’s fiction shapes the present.  But in LIA this history appears in the form of romantic legend, a patrimony of honor haunting both Hightower and the South.  “A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks.  But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage… It’s the dead ones… that he can’t escape from” (75).  This paper, in this quoted section, highlights many aspects related to Hightower that are relevant to my thesis, such as his fight with the past and his emotional incapacity of disconnecting with the dead; therefore, he neglects his present life. 

Another point that the paper makes, though small but I will use it anyway, is the author’s own fears for the upcoming change that is reflected in LIA.  The authors say: we see the novel as decidedly anti-radical, and thus mirroring Faulkner’s own fear of radical change (448).   

Race, Mixed Heritage, and Unreconcilable Racial Dualities in Light in August

Atkinson, Ted. “The Impenetrable Lightness of Being: Miscegenation Imagery and the
Anxiety of Whiteness in Go Down, Moses.” Short Story Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 209, Gale, 2015. Gale Literature Criticism, Originally published in Faulkner and Formalism, edited by Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie, UP of Mississippi, 2012, pp. 129-143. Although this work examines the novel Go Down, Moses, many of the ideas discussed, apply within the same historical and racial context of Light in August. Atkinson discusses how just like in Light in August, Go Down Moses investigates the relation of the individual and community, and whether the individual is perceived as being accepted or rejected by their community. He also discusses the behavior of the central character of Lucas Beauchamp, and his experience with societal judgement due to his race. Much of the content discussed in this essay can also be used within the circumstances of Joe Christmas, in Light in August, which is why I believe this essay is still relevant to my topic.
Friday, Krister.”Miscegenated Time:The Spectral Body, Race, and Temporality in Light in
August” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 170, Gale, 2006. Gale Literature Criticism. Originally published in Faulkner Journal, vol. 16, no. 3, Fall 2000, pp. 41-63. In this essay Krister Friday discusses the essential role miscegenation plays in the lives of many of the characters, specifically in the life of Joe Christmas. Fridays examines the consequences of miscegenation, and how many of the characters must accept the complexities resulting from these racial unions, since these unions are in complete opposition of racist ideologies, and Southern values.
Jackson, Chuck. “American Emergencies: Whiteness, the National Guard, and Light in August.”
The Faulkner Journal, vol. 22, no. 1-2, 2006, p. 193+. Gale Literature Resource Center. In this essay, Jackson Chuck discusses racial divisions, racial interpretations, and the communal view on racial ambiguity. He also discusses “whiteness” and “blackness” in the context of the South, and specifically in Light in August.
Wilhelm, Randall. “Framing Joe Christmas: vision and detection in Light in August.”
The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3-4, 2011, p. 393+. Gale Literature Resource Center. In this essay William Randall discusses imagery, and visual light in Light in August, and how this plays a role in illuminating or obscuring certain parts of the narrative. He also explores how race, and light play a role in the projection of Joe Christmas, as a murderer. I believe this essay will be useful since this will help my discussion of the many complications associated with racism, within the Southern historical context of the novel.
Barhow, Abdul-Razzak al-. “Focusing on the Margins: ‘Light in August’ and Social Change.”
The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 42, no. 2, 2010, p. 52+. Gale Academic OneFile. In this work Barhow, discusses racial and social ideologies, and how racist ideologies create marginalized members of society.

3. As the chapter develops it is evident that Quentin has told Shreve the Sutpen story before. Shreve knows many of the events of the story, but the questions and comments he makes help us as readers, continue to make sense of the story. Shreve unlike Quentin and Rosa, isn’t connected or associated in anyway to the story, therefore he also offers us objectivity in his narration. Shreve is not American, so his point of view and narration isn’t steeped or influenced by Southern values. Even if Shreve is somewhat familiar with the history and events which have influenced American culture, his limited knowledge comes from history books, not from being involved in that history. Shreve is a good listener, and he seems sincerely interested in knowing more about the story and Southern culture. His lack of prejudices also allow him to respond and reason objectively. Shreve initially reacts to the story in a distant and detached manner, (even if later on in the chapter he seems far more interested in the account) since he doesn’t possess any regional loyalties influencing his reasoning. By choosing a person outside of the United States, Faulkner adds a truly objective narrator, and with this move, Faulkner is able to subjectively engage us in the story and narration. As readers, we also in addition to Shreve and Quentin follow the narrative back to Sutpen’s Hundred. We also see both Shreve and Quentin get wrapped up in some kind of acting or role playing, as they internalize the events of the story and project their versions of Henry and Bon. They share a sort of closeness and intimacy both to each other and the narrative, which makes their retelling vivid and interesting.

Ch. 5 ; How does Rosa end her narrative? What is Quentin’s reaction to the ending, and what are some of the differences in orientation that emerge through this reaction?

Rosa ends her narrative telling Quentin about the murder of Charles Bon by Henry. Rosa is the only narrator who has lived during the events of the story, yet her recollection of these events is greatly colored by forty years of hatred towards Sutpen. She refers to Sutpen as a demon, her version of the story has an accusatory tone, and she blames Sutpen for all the problems and difficulties the Coldfield’s have endured. Rosa takes her resentment further, and blames the the fall of the South on men like Sutpen and their malicious influence on Southern society. At the end of her narration, it also clear why Rosa accepted Sutpen’s proposal initially, and then soon after declined his proposal. As a young woman, she was optimistic and romantic. However, when Sutpen demanded a son before the engagement, this frank, vulgar, and bold request, offends Rosa’s sense of decorum and romance. Miss Rosa believes that Sutpen is really evil because he has failed to become the romantic chevalier she was searching for. And when she contemplated the complete downfall of the Coldfield family, she felt compelled to blame their destruction on someone. Since no one had disappointed her as much as Sutpen did, it was easy to blame him. Rosa’s hatred and outrage results from her feeling violated by Sutpen’s proposal, and her romantic dreams of marriage being shattered, and this is how she ends her narration. Quentin begins to takeover as the main narrator, and his desire is to organize all versions of the story into one complete story. So it may have seemed that Quentin was just a passive listener, but in reality Quentin was listening all along in order to put the story together cohesively. It will be Quentin’s narration that will give us a broader, and subjective perspective on the account. Quentin has heard of this story not just from Rosa, but from his grandfather, and so with the facts he has received from his grandfather, Quentin can now see things with a degree of objectivity. The shifts in perspective, and in narrators allow us to add meaning to the story, and at the center of Quentin’s narrations is man’s relationship to the past. Quentin’s narration seems more concerned with how much of an individuals past and customs influence their future. What really determines a person’s future? Their adherence to their values, in this case southern values? Quentin seems to believe so. So Quentin is more than just another narrator in this novel, in some ways, he is as involved as Miss Rosa Coldfield in this myth. Quentin realizes that his environment and world are the same in which Sutpen lived and operated in, and that this myth and its implications are part of his culture and history as well, one that cannot be simply ignored. The Sutpen story is a part of Quentin’s life, a story that becomes his as well through his grandfather’s association with Sutpen. This story has now become an integral part of his heritage as well, and Quentin receives his basic impressions of the myth through his father’s and grandfather’s retelling of the Sutpen story. He becomes so involved in the story, that after hearing Rosa’s version and his grandfather’s version, he interprets the story in his own way. So while Rosa’s narration is greatly tainted and influenced by her hatred, Quentin’s interpretation, and retelling of the story is different. Quentins interpretation and narration allow him the much needed space to reflect and meditate on how this story has any bearing on him, and his future.

After several revisions this is what I have so far.

I plan on focusing on the femme fatales of Carmen and Vivian in The Big Sleep as compared to Caddy in Faulkners works. This list will definitely be whittled down. Possibly, I’d also like to explore depictions of sexuality since “The Big Sleep” has a central issue of sexuality and pornography at the center of its investigation and The Sound and the Fury have a central theme of female virginity, sexuality and promoscuity. I mostly used Jstor using the key words ‘Faulkner’ combined with ‘femme fatale’ ‘film noir’ and ‘The Big Sleep’.

Dussere, Erik. “Introduction: Unknown Legends.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 3–10. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24908431. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Use in essay: to introduce the noir genre and how uncertain the definition is and its connection to Faulkner’s work which is also uncertain. How mystery and the noir genre attempt to perceive objectively what is mostly impossible to see objectively. “Faulkner is as problematic a category as ‘noir.’” The seemingly parallel in timeline between Faulkner’s writing career and the rise of the noir genre. The structural similarity between noir and Faulkner. How Faulkner places the reader in the form of detective in “Absalom, Absalom!” by providing multiple different perspectives of the same events to the reader the same way that the people a detective questions provide differing accounts of the same events, leading the detective and the reader to rely on their own perception to discern the truth. “The book’s narration moves not towards closure but loops back endlessly into its own tortured telling.” The paralleling theme of “radical subjectivity.” “the difficulty of reconstructing the past in Absalom, Absalom! -influenced the style of many noirs…” “

Robbins, Ben. “Inscrutable Images and Cultural Migrations: Wartime Noir and the Compson Appendix.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 28, no. 1, 2014, pp. 55–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24908434. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Use in essay: the connection of the femme fatale and Caddy. Faulkner wrote the Compson Appendix after penning 3 noir films and walking out on his contract with the studio. The Caddy section of the Compson Appendix has more femme fatale themes than the portrayal of Caddy in The Sound and The Fury. “The way in which these new images depict Caddy differs considerably from her presentation in ‘The Sound and the Fury.’ Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole appendix is Faulkner’s reimagining of Caddy in this later depiction as a transnational femme fatale.” Brings attention to inconsistencies between The Sound and the Fury and the appendix, showing Faulkners evolution from his initial work to his later work which was influenced by his time in Hollywood. 

Librach, Ronald S. “ADAPTATION AND ONTOLOGY: The Impulse towards Closure in Howard Hawks’s Version of ‘The Big Sleep.’” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, 1991, pp. 164–175. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43796498. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Connection between The Big Sleep’s “confusing” plot line and Faulkner’s own confusing plot structures. Hawks quote “during the making of The Big Sleep, I found out, for the first time, that you don’t have to be too logical. You really should just make good scenes. You follow one scene with another and stop worrying about hooking them together.” This was no doubt in part because of Faulkner’s own writing style as exhibited in The Sound and The Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Which does not follow a typical point A to point B straight line logic but as Librach says loops back and forth.

KENLEY, NICOLE. “The Southern Hard(Ly)Boiled: Knight’s Gambit, The Big Sleep, and Faulkner’s Construction of the Popular.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2012, pp. 339–366. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26467195. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Justifies the connection between Faulkner’s literary output and his Hollywood career instead of isolating the two from each other. “Ironically, Faulkner wrote the material that critics try to explain away as not literary enough for precisely that reason– the popular medium provided him a platform for making an argument about high literature that he could not make from within it.” While Faulkner was openly disdainful of his time in Hollywood the experience did change his writing style. Often it is not the things we most enjoy but those that we least enjoy that change us as people. Authors are forever expressing themselves while writing even while not intending to. Therefore every experience changes their writing. While Faulkner’s hatred of Hollywood is well known, he was once quoted as saying “Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.” his criticisms were not of the writing itself but of the people, calling Los Angeles “The plastic asshole of the world.”

“William Faulkner.” Hawks on Hawks, by Joseph McBride, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, 2013, pp. 69–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgsgb.14. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Personal accounts of Howard Hawks on William Faulkner, giving personal insight to the author himself and his time in Hollywood. Account of how Faulkner wrote in Joan Crawford’s part in Today We Live solely because Hawks told him too, establishing how women served a function in his narrative instead of being fully fleshed out characters. It also has funny anecdotes on Faulkner and stories about his alcoholism. In Chapter 23 “Bogart and The Big Sleep” he also explains that Raymond Chandler did not know who killed ‘so and so’. Chandler’s lack of surity of his own plot is symbiotic with Faulkner’s own ambiguity when it comes to his writing.

TROMLY, LUCAS. “‘Lady Tiger in a Tea Gown’: Decadence, Kitsch, and Faulkner’s ‘Femme Fatale.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 3, 2009, pp. 457–477. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26476715. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

An in depth analysis of Faulkners portrayals of the femme fatal through his poem “XXXVII” the novels “Soldiers Pay” “Flags in the Dust” and “The Sound and the Fury” as a threat to patriarchal order through control of her own sexuality. This also connects the femme fatale as a symbol of modernity. The femme fatale, Tromly says, “invariably entails the downfall of the men she attracts” which parallels with Caddy causing the downfall of the Compson men through her sexuality. He goes on to quote Peter Nicholl saying “the energies that drive the femme fatale constitute a larger sociopolitical critique, claiming that in decadent culture, sexual perversity ‘spells the ruin of bourgeois rationalism.’” He later offers an in depth analysis of XXXVII’s central character Lilith, the original femme fatale though he does not use the name Lilith until the third staza, making ‘her’ any and every woman until specified. He later argues that female sexuality in The Sound and the Fury “transfixes and horrifies men and is frequently associated with death”.