For starters, Rosa’s house was described as decrepit and old and a product of some bygone era. It was also the focal point for the “ground zero” of the events that are being told. There is a first-hand account aspect in Rosa telling Quentin the story of Sutpen in this place. Being there also creates a sort of bias to the story, allowing Rosa to fill in the story with her own emotional feelings towards Sutpen. She labels Supten as a devil and ogre hinting at her animosity towards him. These personal feelings, like the personal house, loomed over her for most of her life. Jason’s porch takes a slightly more peripheral view of Sutpen’s story and enlists Jason and Quentin to speculate about some of the details. However, Jason’s porch is not that far away from Rosa’s house. This means that Jason’s porch still has a sort of allegiance or connection to the story of Sutpen. It could be seen through the different perspective that Jason brings to the table. He’s not guided by personal feelings, but guided by a peripheral scope aimed at the lives that were going on while he was growing up. Moving forward to a few chapters later, Quentin is now in the east coast where he is about to tell the same story to his roommate Shreve. Quentin is no longer in the south or the ground zero, but in a completely new place free from emotionally driven and first-hand perspectives. Away from the south, Quentin can look on the story from an unbiased tower and build the puzzle as someone detached from the history. The fact that the setting goes from homes to an educational system is equally as interesting because the story of Sutpen is essentially a story of the history of the south. Students outside of Quentin’s dorm room were probably in the middle of their classes studying the same thing in a history class.

The letter that informs Quentin of Rosa’s death serves almost like a passing of the torch or Sutpen’s history to Quentin or the next generation. Now knowledgeable about the events, Quentin is now helming the course of southern traditions. Rosa’s death marks the birth of something new. It also seems to symbolize the end of an era, the final word in a story full of pain. The letter is interrupted right when the contents were debating whether Rosa’s death was painless and provided comfort. This philosophical bit hints at the events of Sutpen being left unresolved. Even if Rosa passed away, his destruction still lingers on albeit through Clytie and Bon’s son. The ignorance of what Rosa must feel in her finality hints at the overall structure of Absalom! Absalom! Mr. Compson, Quentin, and even Rosa don’t have all the answers and/or insights on the story that they are telling. However, they give themselves agency in order to form some kind of cohesion and understanding about everything that they tell. Mr. Compson and Rosa retold the events with limited information, and now Quentin is bracing himself to do the same thing for Shreve.

Alongside the novels that we’ll All be using for primary texts, I found some very helpful sources that helped me to emphasize my main goal of discovering how the women in Faulkner challenge, survive, and arguably, thrive in a society influenced by a patriarchy. Aware of the limitations of some of the databases in terms of content, I went out and tried a handful such as Project muse, Jstor, Elibrary, Onesearch, and the MlA database. Regardless of how different thise databases are, I began my searches by filling in three advance search boxes with the same three key words: “Faulkner”, “Women”, “Masculinity.” It was incredible how the same three words vegetated new material under each database. Some articles repeated, but for each pair there were three new articles for me to dissect. In the end, I ended up choosing 5 of the 7-8 sources that I amassed. I chose these 5 because, after reading them, were just in the same ballpark of my intentions for my final project.

Clarke, Deborah. Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner. N.p., 1994. Print

• Arguably my favorite source out of the bunch, this source touches on the power of the women in Faulkner through their absence. I decided to focus only on the sections on Caddy, but the article continues to describe Addie’s agency as well.  What really drew me to this source is the described paradoxical power that Caddy has in Sound and the Fury. For example, this line says it best for now: “Caddy and Addie, caught in a world which vanquishes women’s bodies, nonetheless exert a powerful control over the literal and figurative, bodies and language, forcing brothers and sons to confront the fragility of their egos in the face of maternal power.”

BLAINE, DIANA. “The Abjection of Addie and Other Myths of the Maternal in ‘As I Lay Dying.’” The Mississippi quarterly 47.3 (1994): 419–439. Print.

• Chosen as a counter argument for the sake of having a peripheral view of all kinds of perspectives, this source stood out to me because of the harsh truth that despite the fact that Anse and some of the other characters are deemed “lacking” Addie is nevertheless dead and rotting as the story progresses. She possesses strength in language yet she is still just a dead body. I’ll start here and continue to flesh out.

Watkins, Ralph. “‘It Was Like I Was the Woman and She Was the Man’: Boundaries, Portals, and Pollution in ‘Light in August.’” The Southern literary journal 26.2 (1994): 11–24. Print.

• I was hooked by this source the second I read the abstract: “Throughout the book Faulkner explores the possibilities of placeless persons who exist partly inside and partly outside society. ‘Light in August’ recognizes the structure of the unconscious categories that shape all social relationships, providing the unifying theme that many deny exists in the book” Of course there are many other “placeless” characters like Joe Christmas, Brown, and Hightower, but my focus will be the placeless state of Lena who is without family, without class, yet she still moves forward.

Polk, Noel. Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Print.

• Interstingly enough, I found this source that pins Faulkner with Eudora Welty (woman) in a battle for the truth about literature chronicling the American South. Readers have adapted Faulkner’s view of the south and therefore his view on Women while totally misunderstanding actual women writers. 

Dews, C. L. (1999). Why I can’t read faulkner: Reading and resisting southern white masculinity. The Faulkner Journal, 15(1), 185.

• Here I came across an article written by a Southern specialist who ironically just can’t read Faulkner’s work. “He (Faulkner) may indeed have been racist, homophobic, and misogynistic.” Dews says. He continues on to debunk and resist southern masculinity as expressed in Faulkner’s work which ultimately also speaks to the role of women within this structure.

In the Jefferson chronicles, Faulkner introduces an assortment of female characters who are equally as much a tour de force as the novels that they inhabit. Characters like Caddy, Dewey Dell, Addie, and Lena all fight against the “Jane Austen” archetype (for lack of a better comparison) of how a woman is supposed to behave in society. Faulkner doesn’t shy away from centralizing fallen women, promiscuity, and unrestrained behavior. It could be argued that the women in our four novels all end up in better places than the men in terms of self realization and this just begs to be dissected. Most of the women aren’t plagued by a crippling state of mind, and if they are, at least they know how to go towards a solution. The questions, therefore are: How does Faulkner use his female characters to challenge the heteronormative behavior of his male characters? Are his female characters socially superior because of their social independence in a rigid world dominated by hyper masculine southern values? Are the women therefore more masculine between the sexes?

Clarke, Deborah. Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner. N.p., 1994. Print

Oklopčić, Biljana. “Destination South: Lena Grove’s ‘Like a Lady Travelling.’” Neohelicon: Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, vol. 46, no. 2, Dec. 2019, pp. 557–573. EBSCOhost, 

Polk, Noel. Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Print.

Bain, Grant. “Boxing Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner, Race, and Popular Front Boxing Narratives.” The Southern literary journal 46.1 (2013): 19–35. Web.

Watkins, Ralph. “‘It Was Like I Was the Woman and She Was the Man’: Boundaries, Portals, and Pollution in ‘Light in August.’” The Southern literary journal 26.2 (1994): 11–24. Print.

MEDORO, DANA. “‘Between Two Moons Balanced’: Menstruation and Narrative in ‘The Sound and the Fury.’” Mosaic (Winnipeg) 33.4 (2000): 91–114. Print.

BLAINE, DIANA. “The Abjection of Addie and Other Myths of the Maternal in ‘As I Lay Dying.’” The Mississippi quarterly 47.3 (1994): 419–439. Print.

Ladd, Barbara. Resisting History : Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Print.

The moment after Joe Christmas kills his father at the dance marks, arguably, the biggest turning point in his life. This moment propels him forward into an unknown world without the guidance of others. In the past, Christmas was sculpted by the people in his orphanage, and after adoption, Mr. and Mrs. McEachern. It’s almost refreshing to see Christmas do exactly what he wanted to do in the past. Earlier on, he has hoped to run away from his adoptive family and even got a rope to use as an instrument to realize his goal. However, he remained trapped under the watchfulness of the family. In a way, this nurturing, albeit abusive, upbringing that Christmas underwent was still structured and fueled a specific identity. Torn between his biracial identity, Christmas had a chance to become a well realized individual under the McEachern, but after killing his father and running away, Joe ultimately buried himself deeper in his own grave. The road became Joe’s new home, but this road wasn’t the road depicted by someone like Walt Whitman but more like a James Cain depiction of the road. Christmas’s road continues to be riddled with disillusionment and obscurity. “and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was not daring to ask.” (LIA 224) The narrator says once Christmas hitches a ride. This instance of the wagon driver not daring to ask who Joe is resonates throughout the rest of his journey. Ultimately, this road leads Joe to the mill where he is further a shadowy figure with no clear distinction. Joe becomes an empty figure that the mill workers fill with their own perceptions of who he is.

         The road in which Joe finds himself symbolizes his inability to identify with any side of his biracialism. He finds himself living in black communities for a time, then among white people and ultimately makes his way back down south. Therefore, a road that canonically mostly symbolizes a path to realization becomes a road that leads deeper down into an already crippling self-disillusionment. He is aimless, taking up a multitude of different occupations that serve no real purpose in his development as an individual. He becomes a wanderer with no family, no identification, and no future. His wanderings seem to find a place to stop when he finds Joanna Burden, but even then, Joe retracts back to his old ways. He kills her and starts back at square one. It’s almost as if Joe is living in a continuous loop where he finds a place in which he could possibly identify with then he succumbs to a violent act that ultimately sets him back on the dark road. Almost like it is his destiny is to be detached from any group. A life of continuous running stems from this initial instance of violence and follows him for the rest of his life. Ironically, a quest for the realization of his manhood becomes a curse that strips it away from him instead.

The assumption that the Bundren’s have a tendency for telepathic episodes with animals isn’t that far off. This gift, or underclass social linguistic penalty reads like a genetic trait that the Bundren’s seem to inhibit in their lineage. Darl seems to be everywhere, know everything, Vardaman seems to have an innate ability to communicate with fishes, Dewey Dell with a cow, and Jewel with his horse. There’s that, but it doesn’t certainly have to mean that they’re actively communicating with them through telepathy, but rather the Bundren’s use animals to understand what is happening around them when they prove incompetent at dealing with their issues on their own. Could Faulkner be saying that animals are capable of more concise speech, thought, and rationalization than humans are? Maybe, because the Bundren’s surely rely on animals to wrap their heads around their qualms. It could also be some kind of social commentary that because of the Bundren’s disconnection with the thriving outside world, they are ultimately uneducated enough to understand on their own, and that even the lowing and shuffling animals seem to have clearer understandings.

          Darl says Jewel’s mother is a horse and associates a flashback of when Jewel first got his horse to the overall remembrance of his mother. In a way, it reads as an instance of jealousy of the favoritism that Addie had for Jewel. And, if we take Cora’s previous assertion that Darl seems to be the favorite, we can argue that Darl wanted to be the favorite but ultimately continued to live in the shadow of Jewel. Darl uses this horse as a symbol to understand his mother while she was alive instead of actually remembering his mother for who she was. Maybe he can’t separate himself from his philosophical voice and continues to use signs to understand the world around him. It’s interesting if this is why Darl calls Jewel’s mother a horse while Jewel doesn’t necessarily share the same association. The symbol of the horse for Jewel is a substitute for his idea of freedom from the Bundren family who stay isolated up in their bluff away from the society on its uprising. Jewel ignores his work around the house because he’s too exhausted from working elsewhere in order to buy his horse, signifying this detachment from familial expectations and bonds. For Addie, this horse could also be signifying the separation from the Bundren’s that she might have secretly wanted but never got close to while she was alive. This explains why she’s so adamant about having her body buried in Jefferson.

         Further on, in order to understand his mother’s death Vardaman studies the fish that he just caught. He sees the way the fish has changed and he uses this a framework to compare his mother’s death to. Vardaman and Darl have an unhealthy way of looking at death because they are unable to make sense of it without injecting some outside force as guidance. Instead of facing the situation, they look away and try to find meaning elsewhere further incapacitating the lower-class human characters. Also, Dewey Dell is preoccupied with a cow who is swollen with milk symbolizing Dewey Dell being swollen with the burden of possibly being pregnant. Dewey Dell has lost her only other female relative so she embraces the only other female around which is the cow whose simplistic need of milking parallels Dell’s.

The themes of order and chaos permeates throughout most of The Sound and The Fury. We first get a glimpse of it during Benjy’s tumultuous section, then this sense of disorientation amplifies during the Quentin section. Jason’s section is arguably a bit more tamed than its predecessors. However, the themes of chaos and disorder still ring true in this, for the most part, straightforward section. The disorder comes to a staggering and violent climax during the Dilsey section as narratives tend to do in their final chapters, even though TSAF is not a conventional at all. The interesting part of this constant ouroboros of chaos and disorder is that, save for Mrs. Compson, the characters who are constantly in a state of disorder are the male characters while the women serve as true north, or the rational voice that keeps the boiling frustrations from spilling over the small pots in which it cooks. (One can argue that Faulkner was a closeted feminist)

            Let’s start with the obvious: Caddy. She serves as the prime obsession of all three brothers. Starting in the Benjy section, Caddy is the only person who can tame Benjy’s tumultuous bellowing and fits, and she serves as his only defender and accepter regardless of his disabilities. She helps to contain the chaos going inside Benjy’s mind in a way that none of the other characters can, aside from Dilsey, whom we’ll get to later.  “Caddy smells like trees” (TSAF Multiple) Benjy says throughout the novel. This one sentence can be read as Caddy bringing Benjy back under control. Moving on to Quentin, whom Caddy also served as a surrogate mother figure to, he hailed Caddy so high in importance that she was ultimately the catalyst for his self-inflicted demise. It can be argued that Caddy is the reason why Quentin is in his state of rupture, but it can also be argued that Caddy is also the only one who can bring back some form of order in Quentin’s life. “If I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother,” (TSAF 172) Quentin says multiple times. 

            Caddy also lingers over the Jason section. She is the reason for Jason’s aggression but could have also been the reason that Jason might have found some peace in his life. Jason’s current life during his narrative is so fixed on Caddy. His life still revolves around her, and in a way, this hatred towards Caddy has brought Jason a new sense of order in his life, even though it’s an awful way to live; he’s the new head of the Compson household, he demands his meals at fixed times, he requires everyone to sit at the table with him, and he also keeps watch over miss Quentin. This is Jason’s new life and it’s all because of Caddy. She has created this new sense of order for him. “I wouldn’t lay my hand on her. The bitch that cost me a job, the one chance I ever had to get ahead, that killed my father and is shortening my mother’s life everyday…” (TSAF 304) Jason says ironically. He definitely feels like hitting her for being the reason for everything that has happened to him. Regardless if its chaos or order, Caddy has the helm in controlling it. It’s interesting to point out that even though Caddy sees through Jason’s malice, she still maintains her cool for the sake of her daughter. She succumbs to his demands and keeps a leveled head just to get the chance the see Quentin further promoting the notion that the women in the novel have clearer heads than most of the men. Caddy’s life is not all fun and games, and arguably worse than her brothers, yet she doesn’t let her emotions get the better of her.

            Then comes Dilsey, who is arguably the most rational and the total embodiment of true north for the entire Compson family. Caretaker of the children and the entire household, Dilsey is the embodiment of strength and reason. Even when Faulkner eloquently describes her old and gaunt appearance, Dilsey manages to maintain order around the house, getting breakfast done on time, running errands for Mrs. Compson, making sure Benjy is taken care of, and most important, keeping the violence between Jason and Miss Quentin to a minimum.  Aside from Caddy being the focal point of chaos and/or disorder within the lives of the Compson sons, Dilsey is the focal point of order within the entire family. She takes Benjy to church on Easter regardless of what the townspeople gossip about, she gets in the way of Jason’s violence, she reassures Mrs. Compson that everything will be okay, while also taking care of her own family. At the very end of the novel, Dilsey tells Luster to drive Benjy around, but careful to not stray off the path, which Luster unfortunately does. This causes Benjy to go into an uproar, but calms back down when he begins to see the familiar route. If only Luster listened to Dilsey’s authorative voice, Benjy would have been hushed in his bubble of constant order.

Carolyn Porter begins her study on Faulkner with an appeasement that almost promises that a second read of The Sound and The Fury will merit many benefits: “Although it (TSAF) seems chaotic at first read, it is, in fact, an exquisitely composed and perfect work,” she says. This poses the question, is she right? Is TSAF actually traversable? Or is it just a dense and garbled bit of pretentious literature that strays from the conventional and well-embraced narrative schema? One can argue that the unrelenting, ubiquitous, and unwarned leaps through the respective narrators’ real-time and flashbacks causes disorientation and feeling of vertigo within the reader, and ultimately turns off the idea of even revisiting the novel. But, to me and Porter alike, we believe that Faulkner gives a bit more credit to the capacity of his readers. There is a map hidden within the structure that, after a second read, or a very careful first read, readers can exploit and take the helm at putting the tumultuous puzzle of the Compson family together. 

The opening section, commonly known as the “Benjy” section serves as a guideline, at least to me, to traversing the rest of the novel. Benjy doesn’t perceive time the way “normal” people do. Everything is happening to him in the present of April Seventh,1928. For him it is his habitual way of experiencing the world, but for us, this constant back and forth could be “dizzying” as Porter better says. This isn’t a cause for alarm, however, because Faulkner has some contingencies in place to help navigate. By naming the sections by their respective present, we are instantly given a center, or a focal point. 

Then, to really battle with the rippling change in time throughout the narrative, it is critical to focus on the secondary characters that take care of Benjy. “Listen at you, now.” Luster said. “Ain’t you something, thirty-three years old, going on that way.” (TSAF. 3) Luster says in his opening bit of dialogue while he and Benjy search for a quarter by a golf course (this golf course also gives us a hint of where we are in time). With this in mind, by placing the character of Luster and the title of this section in cohesion, Faulkner has given us the plan or piece of a blueprint, even though he openly has said that he had no plan at all, to navigate. We know that as long as Luster is in the scene taking care of Benjy, we are in the present, and when Benjy is being taken care of by the likes of T.P and Versh, we are most likely in the past. It is these hints and pieces that place us in specific points in time.

Another hurdle that could distract readers is the characters with the same names that are present within the novel. For example, there are two Quentin’s’, two Jason’s, and two Maury’s. The trick here is to pay close attention to the pronouns attached the names. With this adequate technique, Faulkner is not just all over the place but careful to keep his readers engaged and working to conquer this difficult text. When a “she” is attached to Quentin during the Benjy section, the novel is somewhere near the present in which the name Quentin belongs to Caddy’s illegitimate daughter, and when “he” is attached to Quentin, the pronoun refers to the eldest Compson. Maury could be referring to Benjy’s previous name or Uncle Maury which is simple enough because Uncle Maury is, most of the time, Uncle Maury. 

By exploiting the presences of these characters and roles, we as readers are able to narrow down a time frame and put together a linear and cohesive story in our minds somewhat resembling the well-known story structure, regardless of the difficult style of writing Faulkner embraces. Small details like this help readers keep track of the hazardous events being depicted all at once through Benjy’s jagged perspective, but the issue is that they’re hard to catch and throw us for a loop. This inverses stream of consciousness follows through to Quentins section as well which is, arguably, more difficult than the Benjy section, however, If we’ve been careful, we’ve had some practice on how to read this book with the Benjy section. Benjy’s section serves as, I like to say a “dump of information” which we as readers make sense of in the following sections of the novel.

With this in mind, I believe that Faulkner indeed had a plan, contrary to his own description of his writing process. These subtle hints introduced during the Benjy section of the novel pave the way for how to read the entire novel which fights against the linearity of time in order to create a disorienting but ultimately effective narrative about family, shame, social standings, disabilities, death, and love.