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.

Hightower’s words are not as disparate from his actions when Bunch returns to announce that Christmas has been captured. Bunch arrives to discover a sleeping Hightower. The clean, fresh clothes and folded hands of this sleeping man make him appear pontifical (363). But his repose is disturbed and he quickly becomes the sweaty large man we recognize from his earlier encounter with Bunch. He is easily excited by the news and request that Bunch bears this Sunday evening. His excitability is mirrored by his verbal and physical presence in this scene. Where he merely sweated steadily while maintaining composure over his verbiage the last time this pair spoke, his speech is littered with (longer than em) dashes that indicate an audible redirect or correction: “But it is not right to bother me, to worry me, when I have          when I have taught myself to stay          That this should come to me, taking me after I am old, and reconciled to what they deemed          ” (364-365). In this climactic instance of speech, Hightower is trying but can’t find the words to admit to Bunch why he is no longer a reverend. It is not only his ability to clearly communicate that cracks under duress, but he begins to cry in a way that subverts his first conversation with Bunch.

Previously, his sweat was depicted as tears streaming from his entire body. Now, his benignant facade is cracked and his tears are real though diminished in sentimental value: “Once before Byron saw him sit while sweat ran down his face like tears; now he sees the tears themselves run down the flabby cheeks like sweat” (365). This switch is focalized through Byron and could reveal that that he lacks empathy. To look at a large man cry and imagine the tears are sweat is insensitive. I’m not calling Byron out for body-shaming, he conveys that he is not an empathic person through his next words to Hightower too. In the next few lines, he assumes that because of the reverend’s title and position, he can handle any news a man could bring to him.

Hightower has the potential to be remembered for his deeds. In spite of his current state of disgrace and in direct opposition to his forefathers. Offering the remaining scraps of his reputation for the soul of Christmas (whose guilt or innocence is impossible to know for sure) would be the honorable thing to do if he felt it necessary to protect Christmas’ life or if Christmas was definitely innocent. But he knows that Byron does not come to make his request out of tremendous care for Christmas but rather to undermine Brown and save Lena. This is why Hightower says he refuses Byron’s request. Christmas’ recently revealed heritage is unstated here, but must be involved in his decision subconsciously. The news Christmas’ his being part black evoked an alarming physical reaction from Hightower. On some level, the reverend must be thinking of Byron’s request through the lens of his own Confederate family history.

BP5

The physical descriptions of Hightower during Bunch’s telling of Christmas’ story paint a picture of the Reverend that is rife with contradictions. His calm voice “sounds light, trivial, like a thistle bloom falling into silence without a sound, without any weight” and is belied by “the still, flaccid, big face…suddenly slick with sweat” (89). His meditative posture resembles “that of an eastern idol” and clashes with the Christian title of Reverend he once held (90). He does not say or do much during his exchange with Bunch, so his limited  dialogue and Faulkner’s descriptions of his body are supposed to give readers a sense of his feelings about race.

Knowing Hightower’s history as a proud descendant of Confederates gives us insight into how we might read the contradictory descriptions of his speech and actions. Hightower hasn’t heard the news of Burden’s death yet. The first bit of gossip he is presented and has to accept is that Christmas is black. His body contorts in separate parts and ways as if it were the features of a face trying to maintain airs: “There seems to come over his whole body, as if its parts were mobile like face features, that shrinking and denial” (89). Though his voice is light and airy, his physical reaction is a manifestation of the Confederate pride in his bones. His body wants to reject the new addition to his brain, the knowledge that Christmas is part black.

Knowledge of Christmas’ heritage has visibly disturbed Hightower. There is not another mention of  the features of his body demonstrating a denial, but the sweating continues steadily has Bunch relates to Hightower Christmas’ crime. Perhaps the movements that the narrator noted in Hightower’s body are a series of microexpressions that he cannot control but reveal one’s true fears or emotions

At the end of the story the sweat is transformed into tears: “Hightower with that look compassionate and troubled and still…with his eyes closed and the sweat running down his face like tears” (100). His whole body is crying at the news of black on white violence. But to reiterate the troubled upbringing of a man who reveres Confederate ancestors, his first words at the end of the story are not about the murder but to ask if it is “certain, proved that he has negro blood” (100). He prioritizes knowing Christmas’ true racial identity before offering condolences, expressing sympathy, or asking about any other part of the case. His response to the news is punctuated with  the lament “Poor man. Poor mankind” (100). This is a loaded phrase that could be read as Hightower’s complete disavowal of Confederate ideology. As a former reverend, he could be expressing pity for a man who will surely be lynched if Bunch’s story is true. However, when Hightower has a chance to defend Christmas’ life and provide him with an alibi, he refuses.

BP4

(Final Project Proposal)

As scholars, we tend to be quick to castigate manual laborers as less apt, less adept and perhaps more obstinate. In reading Faulkner, I realize that he sits on something of a high horse in terms of literary craft, however, I can’t ignore the hyper-focus he casts on labor in relation to the community of his towns. Whether it be the sawmill community in Light in August, the architects in Absalom, Absalom! or Jason Compson’s storefront business in TSAF, Faulkner is commenting on the role of labor in fostering community, nationhood and personal identity and how they are all interconnected, whether for better or for worse.

In one literary analysis on Faulkner and commercial culture, a student of Faulkner reasons that, “Whatever the original inspiration for the Snopes forenames, they function ultimately as ironic public reminders, signs at once of the distance and relation between American commercial history and a disenfranchised family’s own underclass identity” (Skinfill). While the provocative nature of the Snopes’ line constitutes a case study in and of itself, the writer’s point on “function” of labor in generating a shared identity between person, family and town is not lost.

In a revealing episode of Absalom, Absalom! justice Jim Hackett welcomes a bruised and bloodied Bon Jr. back with an indictment speech to a full court house professing that, “At this time, while our country is struggling to rise from beneath the iron heel of a tyrant oppressor, when the very future of the South as a place bearable for our women and children to live in depends on the labor of our own hands… What are you?” (165). At this juncture, the son of Bon has been repressed from entering the social structure of Jefferson and thus is unknown by the judge or the town. Regardless, it is vital for him to assume a purposeful role in the society or otherwise, he will not only fail to contribute to the country at its hour of greatest need (civil turmoil), he will remain unknown without identity  and thereby continue to be interpolated as a miscreant and troublemaker.

The pragmatic mindset of the judge is rooted in capitalist-industrialist ideals, the same ideals which threatened the ecosystem of a rural Southern society not economically per se but culturally. It’s worth noting how Skinfill calls attention to the normalized fragmenting of the family unit with relation to labor. Martyn Bone, a scholar of Southern literature, takes this notion a step further applying it to the region as a whole: “confronted by capitalist speculation in, and despoilation of, the rural South, Faulkner was not averse to indulging a neo-Agrarian ‘aesthetics of anti-development’ ” (Bone 21). In Bone’s view, Faulkner is engaging in a region-wide sentiment of dissociation from the norm or capitalization and development simply by not engaging with the latter.

One of Faulkner’s strongest examples worthy of consideration towards this position is the Compson household in TSAF. Upon the suicide of Quentin and the shaming of Caddie, Jason takes it upon himself to maintain the Compson household financially through his business endeavors and money laundering. In spite of monetarily sustaining the entire household and repeating it constantly to satiate his ego, Jason causes a near disintegration of the family and meets near death via his shaming of Quentin, an action the result of his “need” to sustain and maintain the well-being of the house and its inhabitants. Jason can not be a mogul in both his business and his family lives without repercussions whereas Dilsey, a black maid at the bottom of the economic food chain, glues the household together tighter than Jason could even fumble it apart. In that respect, Faulkner’s Compson household signifies how obsession with labor and economic development potentially compromise the integrity of the family.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Works cited (so far)

Bone, Martyn. The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Baton Rouge: Baton Rouge: LSU, 2005.

Skinfill, Mauri. “The American Interior: identity and commercial culture in Faulkner’s late novels.” The Faulkner Journal, vol. 21, no. 1-2, 2005, p. 133+.

My proposal is inspired by a moment in Absalom, Absalom! in which Jason Compson ruminates on Henry Sutpen’s (lack of) understanding of his sister’s virginity: “Henry, the provincial, the clown almost, given to instinctive and violent action rather than to thinking, ratiocination, who may have been conscious that his fierce provincial’s pride in his sister’s virginity was a false quantity which must incorporate in itself an inability to endure in order to be precious, to exist, and so must depend upon its loss, absence, to have existed at all” (AA! 76). Faulkner’s exploration of the “false quantity” concept extends through many of his texts.

The most obvious parallel is in The Sound and the Fury, when Quentin can only contextualize Caddy’s virginity by losing it. The false quantity of virginity is fundamental to the culture of the Antebellum South. What is the implication when something, even something as intangible as virginity, is defined by its negation? By it’s “inability to endure”?

The intangible becomes much more cherished with the knowledge that it can and will be lost. Beyond virginity, this also applies to race. Many of Faulkner’s characters are fixated on racial identity and “whiteness” becomes a false quantity in Yoknapatawpha. In this case, it is not the absence of white (black) that is worrisome. Rather, it is the loss of a white racial identity that concerns the characters. They can only perceive of “whiteness” along with the inevitability of miscegenation.  Joe Christmas’s internal conflict is fueled by this false quantity.

I believe that other false quantities are more subtle, but still present in Faulkner’s work. Childhood and/or innocence must come to an unavoidable end. The Compson children, Bayard and Ringo, and Joe Christmas exemplify this concept. It would be interesting to explore the ways in which adults act toward children, as a result of the false quantity of childhood. Bayard’s retrospective narrative provides a perspective in which a character reflects on the false quantity of his own innocence.

I’ve also considered thought – more specifically “ratiocination” which is the “process of exact thinking” or “a reasoned train of thought” (medium Wiki to follow!). The Compsons really personify this false quantity – Caddy is presented as someone who thinks very rationally (supported by the fact that she never narrates). Jason’s section of TSAF shows some slippage, brief moments of unreasoned thought. Quentin is next, with many passages that are disconnected and lack exact thinking. Benjy, of course, exemplifies a total loss of ratiocination. The ratiocination false quantity is like a literary device for Faulkner. His writing is often defined by the relinquishment of reason. Here, I plan to use research about Faulkner’s stream of conscious writing style and it’s significance.

In addition to research about Faulkner’s style, I think that most of my sources will focus on the big topics (virginity, childhood/innocence, race) since early research hasn’t yielded much about false quantities specifically.