In what can only be described as a very 2013 article for The Atlantic, then-staff writer Michelle Willens, nominally writing about “chauvinist king of the stage, David Mamet,” explores the notion of whether or not male writers can pen female characters with any finesse, depth or dimension. Willens sort of punts on coming down on the any particular side, advocating for the absolutely necessary increase gender parity in the authorial space and then quoting the literary critic Sarah Seltzer, who says, “the attempt at understanding, empathy, and inhabiting the soul of someone whose life experience is not ours, helps us grow as writers, and people too.” Willens’ question is one I have considered often over the past half-decade as I’ve reexamined some of my favorite novels – I laughed again, sadly, in re-reading her article, at the line “Where are the vivid, realistic and rounded portrayals of women in Roth, Bellow, Updike?” – and it has been at the forefront of my mind as we’ve read Faulkner’s work this semester. One need only google “Faulkner and Women” to see that there is a veritable buffet of criticism on the subject, the intersection of Yoknapatawpha scholarship and Academic Feminism being an apparently robust crossing. Our pal Bill may not have a ‘woman problem’ on the magnitude of say Mamet or Mailer, but neither would his novels – the three we’ve read anyway – pass the Bechdel Test. Many of female characters in Faulkner’s work are peripheral at best, appended with harsh physical descriptors, and played as a sort of two-dimensional character of either neurosis (Caroline Compson’s affliction in TSAF), histrionic piety (Cora Tull in AILD), judgement (Martha, described as a “gray woman with a cold, harsh, irascible face” in LIA), or, most often, gossip (Cora Tull again, among many, many others). Addie, As I Lay Dying’s titular matriarch, is one of the few exceptions, but in many ways her narrative functions as a foil to those of her predominantly male kin, and it would be a stretch to call Faulkner’s time in her head a ‘sympathetic portrait’. And yet, in reading Light in August, which represents Faulkner’s most direct attempt to plumb deeper into the experience of racism in the south, and in to central non-white characters, I was struck most not by the psychological portrait of Joe Christmas, but by the familiar character whose narrative bookends the novel, one of Faulkner’s most consistent motifs: a young woman, pregnant and unwed.
What are we to make of the persistence of this archetype in Faulkner’s work? And by taking up their narrative mantle, does the author do this trio (Caddie, Dewey Dell, Lena) any more justice, provide a more dimensional study, than his other female characters? It’s worth pondering. On the one hand one could argue it’s a mark against Faulkner that he lacks the imagination to saddle these young women with any other problem than this pending “unaloneness”, but taken side by side the differences between them provide a way to read Faulkner’s attempts to “inhabit the soul.” In fact, if you probe the difference between the girls, and read through a lens of class dialectic, their parallel plight could be read as a polemic on the limited means available to each. It’s interesting, too, to track across the three novels Faulkner’s growing comfort at spending time in the narrative space of these women. Caddie Compson is in many ways the most self-aware and empowered of the three (the highest borne and educated, as well) and yet we are deprived entirely of her narrative within TSAF. This may well be by design – that profound lack doing more to illuminate the insufficiencies of the narratives of her brothers – but it could also be that Faulkner was not yet ready to attempt such understanding or to inhabit so complex a character, one he himself professed to hold strong emotions toward. By that rubric, Dewey Dell represents baby-steps (a horrible pun!) in the right direction. She has a less sure grasp than Caddie on what little agency she possesses — indeed, she is heartbreakingly resigned, even as she knows she’s being abused, in the last third of the novel – but she is nearly as self-aware. The time we spend inside of her narrative is marked by a distinct mixture of her mother’s anger as the pronounced failures of the men around her, and her brother Darl’s near-spiritual dreaminess. Her narrative holds secrets and any attendant shallowness reads as a specific character trait and not just a lazy signifier of her sex. It’s worth noting here that the adjectives Faulkner uses to these young women (I mean her name is DEWEY Dell) are often “bright” and “warm”, in laughable contrast to his other female sketches of matronly utility. Which brings us to Lena Grove – described no less than 1,500 times as “serene”, as well as “calm”, “warm” and “detached without being bemused” – who in class and disposition falls somewhere between Dewey Dell and Caddie.
Lena’s narrative is defined largely by her naivete and childlike sense of wonder – another knock on Faulkner’s limited imagination here could be his insistent fetishization of a Madonna-like innocence, even in those in possession of carnal knowledge – but is also charmingly idiosyncratic. From the opening pages as she muses on her distance from Doane’s Mill to her yen for the sardines, there is a alluring peculiarity to Lena, even as she appears foolish in her naked class aspirations, or hopeless in her search for Burch, that feel lived in, wholly hers. I was astonished by the many moments in her narrative that held echoes of the future: she asks her father to stop the wagon outside of town and let her walk unaccompanied in the belief that “the people who saw her and who she passed on foot would believe that she lived in the town too,” just as Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird asks her father to let her walk the final blocks to the private school she attends on scholarship; the window in her lean-to that she sneaks in and out of recalls Juliet as much as it presages Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides (…both written by men, it may be worth noting; Shakespeare gets a pass from most critics as some of his most enduring characters are singular females–Team Rosalind forever!!!–though Eugenidies falls under fire from Willens for The Marriage Plot). All of which is to say, there’s a growing boldness in Faulkner’s work as he grows more comfortable inhabiting these female characters – even if it’s only the young objects of desire to whom he affords this designation. It’s worth noting that though it may not have the immediate formal daring of TSAF and AILD, Light in August is the most structurally assured of the three and is crucially bookended with Lena’s narrative.
Carolyn Porter, in her biography of Faulkner, points to Light in August as marking Faulkner’s “move from a single, nuclear family as the focalizing subject of the story to an array of families, both present and past, set within a densely textured culture,” and both she and Avak Hasratian use the phrase “Human Community” to define the larger preoccupation that overtakes his career in its later stages. It says something, then, that our entrée into this new phase in his novels – engaging with broader mechanisms to interrogate the tarnished Soul of the American South, the twinned violence of Masculinity and Misogyny, and our central racial trauma – is not a male proxy for Faulkner but is the solitary young woman at a literal crossroads. I’m not sure how much weight to afford it – like Willens I shall punt! – but there’s something admirable in Faulkner’s naked attempts to, as Michael Gorra puts it in The Saddest Words “[become] better than he was…when writing fiction,” by “[thinking] his way into other people”. It’s fascinating to mark the progress and watch the wheels turn.
