Faulkner: the "other" F-Word.
Dec. 10th, 2004 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sihayadesignsIn case you were curious.
The Pigeonhole of Womanhood in the Works of William Faulkner
(No italics-- I cut-and-pasted. I'll fix it when I have the time.)
The women within William Faulkner’s literary works are often characterized as being bound by societal ideals of a very traditional Southern culture. These ideals have a very specific sense of the roles a woman may play within the society. One role is that of the pure virgin, the other is that of the loving wife and mother. In such a society, any woman who wished for any other identity would feel the negative effects their inability to so easily assume these roles. These effects range from a lifetime of marital unhappiness to societal shunning, among other things.
The most startling examples of this occurrence include women like Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, a woman who feels uncomfortable in her roles as wife and mother. There is also Caddy Compson of The Sound And The Fury, the well-to-do girl abandoned by her family and forced into a life of prostitution as a result of her unwed pregnancy because she had no other means of supporting herself. When Rosa Coldfield of Absalom, Absalom! rejects the role of brood mare to Thomas Sutpen’s dynasty, her bitterness at her expected role becomes an all-consuming obsession to express her feelings that results in her being labeled hysterical and subsequently silenced. Joanna Burden of Light in August experiences the upheaval that arises from her own gender duality. All of these women, and others in the novels, share something in common: they all possess traits that would more traditionally be associated with masculinity. As such, each of these characters would have not experienced nearly as much hardship had they been actually born male. Though they are often more traditionally masculine than many of Faulkner’s male characters, these women face hardships that cause their destruction due to their feminine sex and their desire to rise above their traditional gender roles. The sole exception is perhaps Lena Grove, another unwed mother, who is able to circumscribe the societal standards that would otherwise damn her by using her innate goodness and the “damsel in distress” stereotype to her own advantage. In this way, she escapes destruction and accomplishes what the other women cannot-- a sense of autonomy.
Many critics disagree over the gender role that Addie Bundren, the matriarch of the Bundren family, plays in William Faulkner's novel, As I Lay Dying. Some see Addie as a stereotypical female character, vengeful against the constraints that her roles as a mother and a wife have placed upon her. Others see her as a complete anti-stereotype, more masculine, in fact, than the patriarch of the family, Anse. There is one thing of which readers of the novel can be sure -- Addie was not comfortable in her role as wife and mother. She makes this point exceedingly clear in the lone section that she narrates, posthumously, near the novel's mid-point. From Addie's perspective, the reader learns that she married Anse to escape a job she hated as a schoolteacher, and also to satisfy her natural curiosity of sexuality. Simply put, he was there, and he asked her. She accepted, since there was no other rescue from her torment in sight, by simply stating, “And so I took Anse,” (pp. 170) despite the fact that Anse was completely unremarkable. Also contrary to idealistic views of femininity, she views motherhood as a violation of her selfdom, of her “aloneness.” Quite the opposite of the loving mother archetype or the chatty, nagging wife, Addie has proven to be a challenge to readers and critics alike, emerging as gender-bending figure that appears as a contradiction of the traditional Southern stereotype of femininity.
In the article, “Stereotypical, but Revengeful and Defiant: Addie Bundren in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying,” critic Amado Chan argues that the novel portrays Addie quite stereotypically, as a woman unfulfilled by her roles as a wife and as a mother. Chan argues that because she cannot achieve a satisfactory identity in her proscribed role, she becomes revengeful and sexually defiant. Chan argues “women are seldom given the roles of main characters in literary works. Moreover, when they do play major roles, they are portrayed as villains, or as incompetent, unfulfilled, or dead.” However, the critic then states that Addie's particular stereotype reaches far beneath the surface, and as such, she becomes a “more complex than villainous” figure within the novel. From Chan's perspective, Addie is wholly undervalued as a female, portrayed as incompetent due to such menial things as her students' poor hygiene, which is completely irrelevant, to the dysfunctional rearing of her own children. The article then suggests that one of Addie's shortcomings is cited as failing to instill warmth in her family. The critic states that everyone in the family is cold and unfeeling towards her death, which is insultingly simplistic and blatantly untrue. While it is true that each family member's thoughts are preoccupied, many of the children are grappling with the loss of Addie in their own way-- Cash is preoccupied with honoring his mother with the perfect casket, Darl and Vardaman are consumed with questions of existence, and Jewel is brooding the loss of his mother in his own mysterious way, and Dewey Dell laments her lack of time to grieve.
However, these critical views of Addie are second to Addie's view of herself. Her aloneness is not violated by her sexual duties as a wife-- despite the fact that she believes she has been “tricked” by Anse into bearing Darl (172). While she does not view sex as a violation (she “had never been violated until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights”), motherhood, for her, crosses this line because it comes without any warning or choice, pregnancy irrevocably shifts her own view of herself into more than one-- she states, “I was three now” after bearing both Cash and Darl (173). As Jill Bergman notes in “'This was the answer to it': Sexuality and Maternity in As I Lay Dying,” for Addie, the body defines the identity. Given the common metaphor of the soil of the earth to a woman's body, it is easy to see that the soil and one's environment shape the entire worldview and self-view of those on the land. Therefore, when Addie is pregnant, it is her body that defines her because her own mind is no longer the sole determining factor in how she views herself. She is now more than one, needing to temper her wholeness to support this new, imposing life within her-- hence the violation she feels.
To Addie, her personal identity and motherhood are strictly separated, and so Addie's trysts with Whitfield are essentially a form of sexual rebellion against the constrictions of motherhood and against Anse, who she sees as “dead” (pp. 173). In her affair and refusing to be intimate with Anse, she vengefully removes herself from Anse's sexual “economy,” as Chan states, this can be extrapolated to include her removal from her children as well. Her defiance as a stereotypical woman therefore makes Addie remarkable as one of Faulkner's female characters, because it points out that even characters that may be construed stereotypes by some can simultaneously be full of delicate complexity that suggests a transcendence above the simple designation of stereotype.
However, Chan fails to see that Addie's adultery is not wholly about revenge, and for that, Addie is far from the stereotypical woman. In having the affair with Whitfield, she also reclaims a part of herself that she can shape as she pleases and that will not be violated by what she views as the drudgery of motherhood. In a way, her tryst with the Reverend is not only a way in which Addie attempts to get revenge upon Anse, but also to re-build her separate sense of selfhood and emotional virginity as well.
In “'My Children Were of Me Alone': Maternal Influence in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying,” critic Mark Hewson sees Addie's identity as a mirror image of Chan's thesis. Hewson views Addie as an active force in her chidrens' lives-- as an instructional voice teaching the inadequacy of language, which runs counter to the the popular stereotype of women. Just as when Cash is born, Addie knows that “motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it,” that there is no need for such a verbal communication, so does she form an extra-linguistic bond with her children. This bond is evident nearly 30 years later as Cash wordlessly works on her coffin outside her window so that she might see the care with which he treats the task.
In teaching her sons to be distrustful of language, she exerts more power than even the father, thus placing herself moreso in a paternal role than Anse, who is regarded by no one in the family as a strong male figure, but is followed simply due to his traditional position as father and the family's respect for Addie's wishes. Indeed, the boys do not seek approval from their father, as boys are generally wont to do, but instead the need for Addie's approval is what drives the boys of the family throughout much of the novel. Cash seeks her approval through his careful crafting of the coffin, Jewel seeks her posthumous approval by appointing himself the guardian of her coffin, and Darl is continually preoccupied with his inability to form a connection with his mother, and there is tension between Darl and her favored son, Jewel, because of this. Even little Vardaman seeks her approval, though he cannot grasp the totality of the situation, by boring holes into her casket so she can “breathe,” among other things-- his misguided ways of trying to resurrect his mother. No other character has such an enormous amount of influence over the proceedings of the novel, and it is a testament to Addie's character that she is able to be so even when she is no longer able to interact with any of the other characters.
When discussing femininity and motherhood, it is of note that through her mistrust of language, Addie creates a breakdown of communication that leaves a negative imprint on her daughter, Dewey Dell, as well as her sons. Whereas Addie understands the connection between sexual intercourse and human reproduction, her unwillingness to communicate leads to Dewey Dell's lack of knowledge on the same subject-- a parental shortcoming that is partially to blame for Dewey Dell's unwanted pregnancy. It is interesting to see that despite this, they are very alike-- both of the Bundren women are uncomfortable in the role of motherhood. Dewey Dell even goes so far as to try to get an abortion to rid herself of the unwanted child. It is not only the boys that Addie Bundren influences-- Dewey Dell is very much her mother's daughter.
It would seem that had Addie Bundren simply been a man, many of her problems regarding identity would have been easily avoided-- she appears to be somewhat transgendered with traditionally masculine tendencies and a woman's physical body. She has the most influence within the Bundren family even after her death, and this bucks the stereotypical trend of the man as the family leader. In fact, she herself refutes the idea that Anse is any more than a duty to her-- “I would be I,” she says, and I would let him [Anse] be the shape and echo of his word” (179). Though she blames Anse for tricking her into motherhood, she does not at all see herself as under his leadership. Furthermore, had she never given birth, her “wholeness” would have been maintained, negating any internal personality crisis relating to motherhood and the issue of selfhood. The critics rightly see her as a complex character, but in no way is she stereotypical. If anything, Addie Bundren emerges from the novel as an incredible, gender-bending paradox and also as a contradiction of the stereotype of femininity.
The role of Caddy Compson in William Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and the Fury, is a highly complex one, ever-shifting as it varies from section to section of the novel. Each of her brothers tells her story, painting her as a mother figure, a love interest, and as a bitch and whore. Faulkner himself has been quoted as considering Caddy his “beautiful one, [his] heart’s darling,” and the focus of the novel as well (Baum, 41). However, as critic Catherine Baum states in her essay, “The Beautiful One,” each of the brothers’ portrayal is overlain with heavy bias and as such is not to be trusted as an accurate portrayal of Caddy’s true character, which is a more traditionally masculine character.
With so much critical emphasis on the many feminine roles that her brothers impose on Caddy through the filter of their perspectives, it is perhaps easy to overlook Caddy’s own view of herself, a view that is not limited by the social standards that constricted the women of her time. This makes it doubly important that the reader must piece together his or her own view of Caddy, or the “truest” view of her from all of these disparate viewpoints in order to truly unlock the key to her character. This “truest view,” is in fact not defined by her feminine roles according to the novel’s diverging perspectives at all, but rather defined by her complete lack of adherence to traditional Southern standards of femininity overall. Caddy is so unconstrained by these traditional roles of femininity (limited to either wife and mother or virgin) that when her brothers view her through these feminine lenses, it becomes clear that these roles are an ill fit, and suggest that had Caddy been a man within this society, she would not have come to such a tragic end due to her exploration of her sexuality.
The first role she would have been expected to fill in the traditional Southern culture is that of lady as defined by her mother’s ideal, coupled with Quentin’s expectation of honorable virginity. Caddy rejects her mother’s veil of public purity and propriety and instead acts as she pleases-- breaking gender rules and mores that ultimately cast her from her family and into her final role as prostitute.
The role of the prostitute is reserved for those women who cannot support themselves, and it is a role of ultimate sexual taboo. In a society where male chastity is ridiculed, Quentin is considered to have a “husband” in Shreve due to his virginity, and he fervently wishes that he had been the “unvirgin” one, not his sister. During Quentin’s narration, the father notes a double standard in the way virginity is viewed when he says, “In the South, [men] are ashamed of being a virgin… because it means less to women… it was men who invented virginity not women” (96). It is important to Caddy’s story to note that while virginity apparently means less to women, it is of the utmost importance in deciding how they are viewed within society. The father’s view is the view Caddy essentially takes of virginity, which puts her in opposition to her mother’s ideal of what it is to be a lady-- that women are expected to be above pre-marital physical desire, constantly guarding their maidenheads under a veil of purity despite any coquettish overtones inherent in courtship. Caddy obviously does not buy into this Southern ideal of femininity, as evidenced in her early adulthood-- she represents and pursues her natural curiosities in the realm of sexuality, a transgression relegates her to the role of the prostitute since she no longer fits into any of the traditionally accepted feminine roles. As a non-virgin, she can no longer be considered pure. Pregnant before marriage, she cannot be considered a proper wife nor mother to her child.
This sense of natural sexuality likens Caddy to Addie Bundren, the matriarch of the Bundren family in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Like Addie, Caddy also falls prey to the trap of language. They are alike in that they are both characters with intrinsic natural sexuality, both trapped by words that are supposed to define their roles, and yet they feel that those words have no special significance when applied to their lives. Like Addie’s proclamation that “motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it,” Caddy does not equate her Southern expectation to remain virgin with purity-- to her, her virginity means “no more than a hangnail.” For Caddy, sex is a physical exploration of her natural feelings. As Baum states, Caddy’s physical sexuality stems in great part to her “her great desire to communicate love” (Baum, 43). She loved, or at least had strong feelings for, Dalton Ames, as evidenced by the wordless thudding of her heart when Quentin asks of her feelings (187-188). However, her view of the natural consummation of her feelings places her in stark opposition to the stereotypical Southern woman. Had she been a man within this highly contradictory society, her sexuality would have been completely accepted, and she would not have been seen as a black mark on her family’s honor, her name becoming a taboo word within her former home.
However, through the symbol of Caddy with the muddy drawers in the tree, the novel symbolically suggests through foreshadowing that Caddy would never even be able to reach the ideal of the woman who is completely separate from the passions of the flesh, and therefore it seems make sense that since she could never reach such an ideal, she would cultivate more masculine traits that disregarded traditional views of femininity. In her essay, “The Third Eve,” Gladys Milliner states that Caddy is a sort of “fallen Eve, a virgin mother who has lost her virginity, a woman who is a human being, she is rejected by the childlike, immature Adam” (70). Likewise, Caddy is also rejected by her family, and her disowning by her family strongly echoes an exile from the morally corrupt and crumbling Eden that is the decaying South. The novel begins with Caddy climbing a tree with muddy drawers to learn of something she has been excluded from. In a very Eve-like way, she learns of death, and her muddy drawers symbolize what from a Christian perspective would be the taint of sin. To Caddy, however, this is natural for her, a sign that she is of the earth and not above it. Like Dewey Dell in As I Lay Dying, sexuality is intrinsic to Caddy’s character, and she makes no effort to fight her natural urges. Like Eve, who was tempted to gain forbidden knowledge, Caddy’s need to satisfy her sexual curiosity leads to the transgression defying of her society’s conventions of true womanhood. This defiance brings a terrible price: Caddy’s youth is broken down not by her sexual exploration, but by a society who kept her from seeing her daughter and also who Caddy felt gave her no other option than to turn to prostitution, as her family completely shunned her. Whereas Dewey Dell was not cast out from her family, Caddy is cast out by the well-to-do Compsons and sees no other way to support herself.
Prostitution is the absolute inverse of her sexual exploration, the dark side of the sexual coin-- instead of being a natural expression of love and caring, it is manipulative, personally shameful, and highly exploitive. This degradation of her flesh leads to what Baum refers to Caddy being “tragic and damned,” a damnation that is both physical and spiritual (Baum, 48).
This damnation also has effects on her daughter, Miss Quentin, because it introduces her into a world of hardship and mistreatment. Quentin is an extension of Caddy; she bears the burden of her mother’s choices-- symbolically, the taint of sin that is now a trait of all who are born. After questioning why she was even born, Quentin shouts at her tormentor, Jason, “I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere you are” (235). Just as the novel begins with Caddy climbing up a symbolic tree of knowledge, it ends with Quentin climbing down the same treeto run away, eager to be free of the taint that her mother incurred when she took the forbidden bite.
Also due to her choices, another of the stereotypically feminine roles that Caddy is not able to maintain due to her sexuality is the role of mother. In the novel, it appears as though Caddy is the only one who cares for her mentally-retarded brother, Benjy. She takes care of him, feeds him, and arguably sacrifices her own happiness to when Jason threatens to send him to a Jackson mental facility. In this way, Caddy acts as a surrogate mother to her brother, and this puts her in stark contrast with Mrs. Compson, who is cold and uncaring towards her son, Benjy. However, this surrogate motherhood complicates her role in relation to other characters in the novel because it conflicts with her burgeoning sexuality in a time where, as Addie Bundren can attest, sexuality and motherhood were kept in two separate realms. When she becomes sexually active, Benjy experiences a loss of Caddy because she can no longer only be defined by motherly love. No longer does she smell like the trees that are so often equated with natural innocence, but her scent has been replaced by that of womanly perfume.
However, where the loss of virginity would have been a mark of accomplishment and initiation to manhood if Caddy were a man, since she is a woman and trapped in a world of strict feminine expectations, Caddy’s physical exploration of her sexual self merely marks the beginning of her life’s dissolution. When Miss Quentin is born, Caddy faces an awful choice-- her family has cast her out due to the pregnancy, and with no means she can see without any familial support to provide for her daughter, she must vacate the role of mother altogether. With this role ultimately closed to her, she turns to the only option she sees as left open to her, the role of the prostitute, to support herself and send money to her daughter.
Had Caddy been male, her situation would have been entirely different. She would not have broken society’s expectations of chastity, and in fact would likely have been respected for having sexual prowess. No question about her character would have led to a separation from her child, and the tragedy of her life, culminating in dissolution and spiritual damnation as represented through a Nazi alliance, would have been averted. In a society where ignoring societal expectations leads to utter dissolution of one’s life, it seems that Caddy Compson made only one mistake: she was born female. She attempted to live her life more as she pleased, and had she been male, that would have been just fine.
The characters in William Faulkner’s novels are often doomed by their limited agency over their own lives within the traditional Southern society, and the women of Absalom, Absalom! are no different, featuring an entire cast of female characters limited simply by their sex. Judith, though more traditionally masculine than her brother, Henry, is unrecognized by her father, Thomas Sutpen, as the legitimate heir to his legacy. Clytie is allowed entry into his home, but denied any identity other than that of a serving woman, and Milly, Eulalia, and Ellen are all likewise relegated to specific Southern stereotypes of the wife and mother. Perhaps most tragic is Miss Rosa, Sutpen’s sister-in-law and would-be wife whose rebellion against an identity as merely a bearer of Sutpen’s heirs and her subsequent silencing leads to her hysterical demise. Like Caddy Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, these are women trapped by their sex and doomed to tragic, unfulfilled ends despite their possession of traits that are traditionally lauded in the Southern male. In this way, these women function as ghosts, silenced since birth by their complete inability to gain control over their own lives.
Early in the novel, parallels between the sibling pairs of the Sutpen and Compson families begin to emerge. Like the seeming misappropriation of gender in the case of Quentin and Caddy, with Caddy being the more sexually forward of the two and Quentin desperately wishing he were “unvirgin,” Henry and his sister Judith have a similar apparent mix-up of gender. This ambiguity of traditionally gender-relegated traits is apparent from childhood, as when Sutpen is discovered by his wife Ellen, participating in a violent fight with one of his slaves as sport. While Henry, in a more traditionally feminine fashion, screams and vomits, then clings to his mother’s skirt, Judith instead watches the brutality from an opening in an overhead loft (p. 21-22). There are very few clues given about Judith’s demeanor while watching the fight other than a certain impassivity. She and Clytie willingly seek to witness the fight, and her lack of revulsion at this violent scene establishes Judith as a more traditionally masculine figure than her brother.
Judith, like her father, is a strong-willed and capable caretaker of Sutpen’s Hundred. However, as the novel progresses, Judith is consistently undervalued by her father due to his incessant need to secure an heir to carry on his name. Like Caddy Compson, she can be seen as viewed only through the lenses of the men of the novel because her voice is so frequently silenced by Quentin-- to Sutpen, she is only a daughter, a failed attempt at producing a son. To Charles Bon, she is fiancée, but more tellingly, she is a way for the unacknowledged Bon to demand attention from his father, Sutpen, because he notes that his return to Sutpen’s Hundred is “not to see the sister because he had not once thought of her: he had merely listened about her” (255). To Henry, she is the sister whom he loves, and like Quentin and Caddy, Henry has an obsession with Judith’s honor. Though many critics have suggested incestuous overtones between the pair, critic Linda Dunleavy suggests in “Marriage and the invisibility of women in Absalom, Absalom!” that instead Judith acts as “a kind of surrogate for both Henry and Bon. She forms the bridge between her two brothers, providing them with a way to realize their desire for each other, despite the ‘insurmountable barrier, which the similarity of gender hopelessly intervened’ (Dunleavy). Quentin believes that “[Judith] was just the blank shape, the empty vessel in which each of them strove to preserve, not the illusion of himself nor his illusion of the other, but what each conceived the other to believe himself to be,” and in this way, Judith acts not only as sister and lover, but she is also a bridge between too disparate would-be lovers who cannot consummate a relationship. Judith is never seen for who she is with regards to her strong personality and commandeering qualities, but instead how she functions as a vessel to further the emotional saga of the men in the novel. Because of this, Judith is essentially a ghost in the novel, with very little control over her life, voiceless ever since her birth due to her sex.
Another tragedy is that of Miss Rosa, the woman whose incredible drive to tell her account of the events at Sutpen’s Hundred only adds to what Quentin deems as her “hysteria,” a hysteria that ultimately causes her to lapse into a coma prior to her death. Rosa is a character who is exceedingly limited in her agency over her own life. Her story pivots upon one insult that Sutpen lays upon her, an insult that has deep impact upon the rest of her life. When Sutpen suggests that they couple, and if the resulting child is a boy, they should marry, Rosa instantly rejects him as a suitor and instead brands him as a demon. Rosa’s rejection of a life of domesticity wherein she would be no more than a brood mare is a rejection of Sutpen’s view of the wife as a purely incidental, and in this way, a rejection of the Southern view of woman as wife. As Linda Dunleavy notes, “Rosa's impulse to say no to Sutpen is not simply a refusal of sex. Her ‘no’ is a kind of sexual response, an impulsive defense of a sexuality that exceeds the limits of woman's role as breeder. Female sexuality here is figured as a niche which is passive and silently acquiescent.” In this way, Rosa declares her rebellion upon this passive, acquiescent view of femininity, but she is still trapped by societal expectations of a woman that dictate that if a woman is not a wife, she must instead bear the burden of spinsterhood. Through her rejection of Sutpen as a husband, she is in turn unable to bear children, and as Henry and Judith are in fact somewhat older, she cannot even express a maternal instinct as an aunt. As critic Heberden W. Ryan notes “Behind closed doors: the unknowable and the unknowing in Absalom, Absalom!”, “Her resultant embittered spinsterhood denies her an understanding of love and sex, and her virginity… is symbolically another closed door” for her (Ryan). Her rebellion against Sutpen’s expectations effectively leaves her with very few options in the South, and it is her bitterness at the expectation that she be content with the role of child-bearer and little else that leads to her hysteria.
Though Absalom, Absalom! is the story of the demise of the Sutpen and Coldfield families, it is also the story of Rosa’s search to have her story told. However, her silencing by Quentin Compson further incites her fervor to have her side of the story told, a fervor which Quentin simply dismisses as “hysteria.” As critic Betina Entzminger notes in her article, “’Listen to Them Being Ghosts:’ Rosa’s Words of Madness that Quentin Can’t Hear,” hysteria was thought to have been “the neurosis linked to diseases of the female reproductive organs,” associated with those of the “passive sex,” and those “either mentally or morally of feminine constitution.” Entzminger suggests that Rosa’s labeling as a hysteric by Quentin is brought about by his own wish to ally himself more firmly with the patriarchy (despite his own gender confliction), thereby “forcing [him] to re-write her story from the ‘proper’ male perspective” (Entzminger). To do this, he must first silence her voice, and he accomplishes this by dismissing her as a hysteric. Despite Quentin’s prevalent gender conflictions, it can be ascertained that Quentin wishes to be more traditionally masculine (with regards to his his “unvirgin” confliction in The Sound and the Fury), and this theory would seem to be consistent with his character. It is interesting to note that Shreve believes that “[Rosa] refused at the last to be a ghost,” which can be taken to mean that her fervor lives on, however briefly within Quentin, and her drive to have her story told oddly mirrors his obsession with getting to the bottom of the Sutpen legend (289).
Frustrated and completely consumed by the fact that her femininity has left her with such little control over her life, (for she’s equally damned if she marries the “demon” Sutpen or if she rebels against his expectations of her), Rosa assumes the role of ghost even more fully as she delves deeper into the hysteria of her fervor, for “the hysteric, whose body is transformed into a theater of forgotten scenes, relives the past, bearing witness to a lost childhood that survives in suffering” (Entzminger). This is certainly true of Rosa, who begins to manifest the physical symptoms of hysteria, such as shaking hands, shortly before the end of her life. She is hollowed out by her inability to be heard, and soon lapses into a coma that precedes her death.
In conclusion, the women of Absalom, Absalom! are essentially born ghosts. Even before Rosa’s refusal to be simply a breeding partner for Sutpen, she is without options and doomed to a life of solitude without options of change. She is repeatedly shushed and undermined with no man to “protect her” (Entzminger). Judith fares no better—she is completely unable to influence her own life as well, and instead acts as a figure through which the men of the novel could view and use for their own ends. Like ghosts, they are silent and completely ineffectual solely based on their status as women.
Judith Bryant Wittenberg notes in “The Women of Light in August,” that Light in August follows the typical Falknerian theme of “understand[ing] and portray[ing] women struggling with the limitations imposed upon them by a restrictive Southern society” (103). However, Light in August departs from this theme as it also presents two women, Joanna Burden and Lena Grove, who do not fall so easily into these categories of societal judgment simply due to their sex and their sense of natural sexuality. Although they are still separated from society, they stand out as departures from the typical Faulknerian mold because their separation is not wholly dependent on their nonconformity to traditional feminine roles.
In one case of personal downfall, Joanna Burden stands apart from many of Faulkner’s female characters because her damnation is not wholly dependent on her sex. She would nevertheless be a societal outcast whether or not she were female. The source of Joanna’s alienation from society lies in her identity as the child of an abolitionist in the crumbling South just as much as it does upon her repudiation of the role of wife and mother. Her ultimate downfall lies in her own twisted religious zeal, but this, unlike many of Faulkner’s women, does not rest solely upon her sex. However, this is not to say that Joanna does not have her fair share of issues with her own gender. She certainly seeks to challenge her role as a traditional woman through explicit, imaginative sexual encounters with her lover, Joe Christmas, which in essence give her leave to achieve a level of aggressiveness and sexual liberty that would have traditionally only been acceptable for a male partner. Joe describes her as a “dual personality” (234) during their liaisons, personalities that Wittenberg describes as “at once a pleasure-seeking female and… controlling male (Wittenberg, 117). As Joe Christmas is neither black nor white, Joanna Burden is neither entirely male nor female.
As she takes on a more masculine persona, her willingness to pursue the erotic with little regard to her virginity mirrors other Faulknerian women’s desires to shed the skin of the Southern woman who is supposed to have no personal sexual. Indeed, Joe describes their early relation, noting, “there was no feminine vacillation, no coyness of obvious desire and intention to succumb at last. It was as if he struggled physically with another man for an object of no actual value to either.” In her willingness to appear to resist sexual pleasure, Joanna is already subverting the traditional feminine role, even before she begins to become actively aggressive, and thus more traditionally masculine, in the “second phase” of their sexual activity.
During the second stage, in which the novel paints Joanna as a nymphomaniac, she assumes more masculine traits through her willingness to assume agency over her own relationships. She invites a sense of corruption that undermines a traditional feminine expectation, and as she is corrupted, “it could not be said that [Joe] corrupted her” (p. 260). She is wholly in charge of her own corruption, boldly initiating torrid trysts in the fields in a way that no one resigned to the identity of Southern Woman would have dreamed of doing. In a way, these trysts echo a certain sense of rape fantasy, as she climaxes while screaming “Negro! Negro!” as Joe is on top of her. Rape fantasies are by and large expressions of experimentation with power shifts within sexual and romantic relationships, and not only does Joanna represent the male in initiating the tryst, she is simultaneously exploring the release of being the helpless female within the role-playing scene that she envisions in her head.
As Joanna defies the archetype of passive female, and she explores the range of emotions inherent in human sexuality, such as dejectedness, lust, rage, jealousy, and many other emotions. However, after they had been parted for quite awhile after Joanna’s announcement of her pregnancy, Joe makes the mistake of believing that Joanna does fit into the mold of traditional woman after all , as “he had never yet known a woman who, without another man available, would not come around in time” (267). In fact, she is about to make a final, desperate attempt to achieve domination in their relationship, by way of a suicide pact that would claim their lives and finally put them on equal footing for eternity. Only after her death, believing that she has been brutally raped and murdered by a black person, that the town creates an image of her as an idealized woman after all, refusing to accept that what they see as such racial and sexual deviancy could occur within their society. For all of her attempts to break free of the shadow of the Cult of True Womanhood, the title of Southern lady (and of martyr) is thrust upon her in death.
The other exception of femininity in the novel is Lena Grove, who is alienated from society in the fact that she is literally foreign to the town, an outsider who comes seeking the father of her child. Many critics have painted Lena as a somewhat dumbed-down Earth Mother figure. However, it is likely that she is intelligent, and she is using her pregnant, out of wedlock state to her advantage, putting her in stark contrast to Caddy Compson of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Whereas Caddy’s unwed pregnancy leads her to be cast out from her family and society, forcing her to give up her child and become a prostitute with no other means of support, Lena uses her natural positive nature and “damsel in distress” motive of searching for her child’s father to win the goodwill of those she meets. She is able to milk the damsel in distress routine and travel as she wishes rather than being either confined to a traditional female role of housebound wife or being cast out from society. That Lena is willfully playing the damsel to further her own freedoms is subtly intimated in the novel. She is once described as having a face with “either nothing in it, or everything, all knowledge,” which suggests that she is not nearly as one-sided as she appears, and cannot be simply relegated to the status of Earth Mother figure, as many outmoded critics would have readers to believe. This statement suggests that Lena is much more calculating and willing to direct her own fate—in a sense, she relies equally upon her faith in God and the goodwill of those she meets as she does upon her own intelligence and the cunning façade that allows her much more freedom than a woman in her position would ordinarily have for as long as the façade lasts.
Faulkner has said of Light in August “began with Lena Grove, the idea of a young girl with nothing, pregnant, determined to find her sweetheart. It was out of my admiration for women, for the courage and endurance of women” (quoted by Wittenberg, 103). Lena is relentlessly positive with a consistent sense of “God will provide” as she relies on the goodness of others to achieve her aims. There is some consternation with regard to her lost virginity, as Hightower urges Byron to seek “single women, girls, virgins” (316), but her intrinsic goodness allows Lena to circumscribe banishment from society. Though the novel “suggests how powerfully Lena’s fate is – or at least is assumed to be – in male hands,” Lena strikes her own course and assumes agency over her own identity when she sets out to find Lucas Burch, thereby “assert[ing] her own quiddity and her right to act as she wishes” (Wittenberg, 108). In a society where we have seen that premarital pregnancy can lead to the ultimate downfall of a woman, Lena not only asserts her own agenda, but she turns the table on society’s ideal of the traditional gender-relegated power structures within a relationship when she gains the love of Byron Bunch, who follows her against reason. By the story told by the furniture salesman at the novel’s close, Byron follows her with a puppy-like fervor, always returning even when he is frustrated deeply by Lena’s unwillingness to recognize him as a partner. It is clearly Lena who has the upper hand in this situation, as the salesman even notes, “I wasn’t worried about him doing her any harm she didn’t want done to her,” which even inspires a bit of manly pity, as he goes on to say that “I was downright ashamed to look at him, to let him know that any human man had seen and heard what happened” (502-504). For her part, because she knows of her position of power, Lena seems unmoved by Byron’s turmoil, and is content that she will be able to make do “by the grace of God,” without a figurehead male in her life, even when Byron’s name would give her child a measure of legitimacy. As Walter J. Slatoff notes, not only does Lena’s unconventional nature set her apart from other women in Faulkner’s work, her story closing the novel also makes her a sign of hope in general for Faulkner’s crumbling South, as her “full-bodied health, serenity, and faith in the natural order of things, and her pleasure in life, are in sharp contrast to the fanaticism, barrenness, anguish, or despair that mark the other major characters” (Twentieth Century, 99).
In conclusion, the women of Faulkner’s works often assume traditionally masculine traits, including sexual forwardness, action, and strong will. It is not uncommon for the women of the novels to infact seem more masculine than their male counterparts-- this is most evident in sibling pairs such as Henry/Judith and Quentin/Caddy. And yet, it is their feminine sex that damns them due to their inability to easily conform to the expected gender roles that Southern society has relegated to. Lena is the glimmer of hope for Faulkner’s women-- she is not stagnant, trapped inside society’s glass cage. Instead, she has achieved a sense of autonomy, and there is a goodness about her that suggests that she will endure long after the South finally crumbles into ruins.
Works Cited
(Yes, some of the formatting is incorrect. I didn't have time for the HTML.)
Baum, Catherine B. “The Beautiful One.” Caddy Compson. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers. 1990.
Bergman, Jill. ‘This was the answer to it’: sexuality and maternity in ‘As I Lay Dying’. Mississippi Quarterly. (1996): 393. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Chan, Amado. Sterotypical, but vengeful and defiant: Addie Bundren in Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying”. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. (2001): 118. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Dunleavy, Linda. Marriage and the invisibility of women in ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ Women’s Studies, 22.4 (1993): 455-466. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Entzminger, Bettina. “Listen to the being ghosts”: Rosa’s words of madness that Quentin can’t hear. College Literature, 25.2 (1998): 108-131. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International, 1986.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Hewson, Marc. ‘My children were of me alone’: maternal influence in Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying”. Mississippi Quarterly. (2000): 551. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Milliner, Gladys. “The Third Eve.” Caddy Compson. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990.
Ryan, Heberden W. Behind closed doors: the unknowable and the unknowing in ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ Mississippi Quarterly, 45.3 (1992): 295-313. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Slatoff, Walter J. “Lena Grove and Byron Bunch.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Light in August’. Ed. David L. Minter. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969. 99-100.
Wittenberg, Judith B. “The Women of ‘Light in August’.” New Essays on ‘Light in August.’ Ed. Michael Millgate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 100-123.
(No italics-- I cut-and-pasted. I'll fix it when I have the time.)
The women within William Faulkner’s literary works are often characterized as being bound by societal ideals of a very traditional Southern culture. These ideals have a very specific sense of the roles a woman may play within the society. One role is that of the pure virgin, the other is that of the loving wife and mother. In such a society, any woman who wished for any other identity would feel the negative effects their inability to so easily assume these roles. These effects range from a lifetime of marital unhappiness to societal shunning, among other things.
The most startling examples of this occurrence include women like Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, a woman who feels uncomfortable in her roles as wife and mother. There is also Caddy Compson of The Sound And The Fury, the well-to-do girl abandoned by her family and forced into a life of prostitution as a result of her unwed pregnancy because she had no other means of supporting herself. When Rosa Coldfield of Absalom, Absalom! rejects the role of brood mare to Thomas Sutpen’s dynasty, her bitterness at her expected role becomes an all-consuming obsession to express her feelings that results in her being labeled hysterical and subsequently silenced. Joanna Burden of Light in August experiences the upheaval that arises from her own gender duality. All of these women, and others in the novels, share something in common: they all possess traits that would more traditionally be associated with masculinity. As such, each of these characters would have not experienced nearly as much hardship had they been actually born male. Though they are often more traditionally masculine than many of Faulkner’s male characters, these women face hardships that cause their destruction due to their feminine sex and their desire to rise above their traditional gender roles. The sole exception is perhaps Lena Grove, another unwed mother, who is able to circumscribe the societal standards that would otherwise damn her by using her innate goodness and the “damsel in distress” stereotype to her own advantage. In this way, she escapes destruction and accomplishes what the other women cannot-- a sense of autonomy.
Many critics disagree over the gender role that Addie Bundren, the matriarch of the Bundren family, plays in William Faulkner's novel, As I Lay Dying. Some see Addie as a stereotypical female character, vengeful against the constraints that her roles as a mother and a wife have placed upon her. Others see her as a complete anti-stereotype, more masculine, in fact, than the patriarch of the family, Anse. There is one thing of which readers of the novel can be sure -- Addie was not comfortable in her role as wife and mother. She makes this point exceedingly clear in the lone section that she narrates, posthumously, near the novel's mid-point. From Addie's perspective, the reader learns that she married Anse to escape a job she hated as a schoolteacher, and also to satisfy her natural curiosity of sexuality. Simply put, he was there, and he asked her. She accepted, since there was no other rescue from her torment in sight, by simply stating, “And so I took Anse,” (pp. 170) despite the fact that Anse was completely unremarkable. Also contrary to idealistic views of femininity, she views motherhood as a violation of her selfdom, of her “aloneness.” Quite the opposite of the loving mother archetype or the chatty, nagging wife, Addie has proven to be a challenge to readers and critics alike, emerging as gender-bending figure that appears as a contradiction of the traditional Southern stereotype of femininity.
In the article, “Stereotypical, but Revengeful and Defiant: Addie Bundren in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying,” critic Amado Chan argues that the novel portrays Addie quite stereotypically, as a woman unfulfilled by her roles as a wife and as a mother. Chan argues that because she cannot achieve a satisfactory identity in her proscribed role, she becomes revengeful and sexually defiant. Chan argues “women are seldom given the roles of main characters in literary works. Moreover, when they do play major roles, they are portrayed as villains, or as incompetent, unfulfilled, or dead.” However, the critic then states that Addie's particular stereotype reaches far beneath the surface, and as such, she becomes a “more complex than villainous” figure within the novel. From Chan's perspective, Addie is wholly undervalued as a female, portrayed as incompetent due to such menial things as her students' poor hygiene, which is completely irrelevant, to the dysfunctional rearing of her own children. The article then suggests that one of Addie's shortcomings is cited as failing to instill warmth in her family. The critic states that everyone in the family is cold and unfeeling towards her death, which is insultingly simplistic and blatantly untrue. While it is true that each family member's thoughts are preoccupied, many of the children are grappling with the loss of Addie in their own way-- Cash is preoccupied with honoring his mother with the perfect casket, Darl and Vardaman are consumed with questions of existence, and Jewel is brooding the loss of his mother in his own mysterious way, and Dewey Dell laments her lack of time to grieve.
However, these critical views of Addie are second to Addie's view of herself. Her aloneness is not violated by her sexual duties as a wife-- despite the fact that she believes she has been “tricked” by Anse into bearing Darl (172). While she does not view sex as a violation (she “had never been violated until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights”), motherhood, for her, crosses this line because it comes without any warning or choice, pregnancy irrevocably shifts her own view of herself into more than one-- she states, “I was three now” after bearing both Cash and Darl (173). As Jill Bergman notes in “'This was the answer to it': Sexuality and Maternity in As I Lay Dying,” for Addie, the body defines the identity. Given the common metaphor of the soil of the earth to a woman's body, it is easy to see that the soil and one's environment shape the entire worldview and self-view of those on the land. Therefore, when Addie is pregnant, it is her body that defines her because her own mind is no longer the sole determining factor in how she views herself. She is now more than one, needing to temper her wholeness to support this new, imposing life within her-- hence the violation she feels.
To Addie, her personal identity and motherhood are strictly separated, and so Addie's trysts with Whitfield are essentially a form of sexual rebellion against the constrictions of motherhood and against Anse, who she sees as “dead” (pp. 173). In her affair and refusing to be intimate with Anse, she vengefully removes herself from Anse's sexual “economy,” as Chan states, this can be extrapolated to include her removal from her children as well. Her defiance as a stereotypical woman therefore makes Addie remarkable as one of Faulkner's female characters, because it points out that even characters that may be construed stereotypes by some can simultaneously be full of delicate complexity that suggests a transcendence above the simple designation of stereotype.
However, Chan fails to see that Addie's adultery is not wholly about revenge, and for that, Addie is far from the stereotypical woman. In having the affair with Whitfield, she also reclaims a part of herself that she can shape as she pleases and that will not be violated by what she views as the drudgery of motherhood. In a way, her tryst with the Reverend is not only a way in which Addie attempts to get revenge upon Anse, but also to re-build her separate sense of selfhood and emotional virginity as well.
In “'My Children Were of Me Alone': Maternal Influence in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying,” critic Mark Hewson sees Addie's identity as a mirror image of Chan's thesis. Hewson views Addie as an active force in her chidrens' lives-- as an instructional voice teaching the inadequacy of language, which runs counter to the the popular stereotype of women. Just as when Cash is born, Addie knows that “motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it,” that there is no need for such a verbal communication, so does she form an extra-linguistic bond with her children. This bond is evident nearly 30 years later as Cash wordlessly works on her coffin outside her window so that she might see the care with which he treats the task.
In teaching her sons to be distrustful of language, she exerts more power than even the father, thus placing herself moreso in a paternal role than Anse, who is regarded by no one in the family as a strong male figure, but is followed simply due to his traditional position as father and the family's respect for Addie's wishes. Indeed, the boys do not seek approval from their father, as boys are generally wont to do, but instead the need for Addie's approval is what drives the boys of the family throughout much of the novel. Cash seeks her approval through his careful crafting of the coffin, Jewel seeks her posthumous approval by appointing himself the guardian of her coffin, and Darl is continually preoccupied with his inability to form a connection with his mother, and there is tension between Darl and her favored son, Jewel, because of this. Even little Vardaman seeks her approval, though he cannot grasp the totality of the situation, by boring holes into her casket so she can “breathe,” among other things-- his misguided ways of trying to resurrect his mother. No other character has such an enormous amount of influence over the proceedings of the novel, and it is a testament to Addie's character that she is able to be so even when she is no longer able to interact with any of the other characters.
When discussing femininity and motherhood, it is of note that through her mistrust of language, Addie creates a breakdown of communication that leaves a negative imprint on her daughter, Dewey Dell, as well as her sons. Whereas Addie understands the connection between sexual intercourse and human reproduction, her unwillingness to communicate leads to Dewey Dell's lack of knowledge on the same subject-- a parental shortcoming that is partially to blame for Dewey Dell's unwanted pregnancy. It is interesting to see that despite this, they are very alike-- both of the Bundren women are uncomfortable in the role of motherhood. Dewey Dell even goes so far as to try to get an abortion to rid herself of the unwanted child. It is not only the boys that Addie Bundren influences-- Dewey Dell is very much her mother's daughter.
It would seem that had Addie Bundren simply been a man, many of her problems regarding identity would have been easily avoided-- she appears to be somewhat transgendered with traditionally masculine tendencies and a woman's physical body. She has the most influence within the Bundren family even after her death, and this bucks the stereotypical trend of the man as the family leader. In fact, she herself refutes the idea that Anse is any more than a duty to her-- “I would be I,” she says, and I would let him [Anse] be the shape and echo of his word” (179). Though she blames Anse for tricking her into motherhood, she does not at all see herself as under his leadership. Furthermore, had she never given birth, her “wholeness” would have been maintained, negating any internal personality crisis relating to motherhood and the issue of selfhood. The critics rightly see her as a complex character, but in no way is she stereotypical. If anything, Addie Bundren emerges from the novel as an incredible, gender-bending paradox and also as a contradiction of the stereotype of femininity.
The role of Caddy Compson in William Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and the Fury, is a highly complex one, ever-shifting as it varies from section to section of the novel. Each of her brothers tells her story, painting her as a mother figure, a love interest, and as a bitch and whore. Faulkner himself has been quoted as considering Caddy his “beautiful one, [his] heart’s darling,” and the focus of the novel as well (Baum, 41). However, as critic Catherine Baum states in her essay, “The Beautiful One,” each of the brothers’ portrayal is overlain with heavy bias and as such is not to be trusted as an accurate portrayal of Caddy’s true character, which is a more traditionally masculine character.
With so much critical emphasis on the many feminine roles that her brothers impose on Caddy through the filter of their perspectives, it is perhaps easy to overlook Caddy’s own view of herself, a view that is not limited by the social standards that constricted the women of her time. This makes it doubly important that the reader must piece together his or her own view of Caddy, or the “truest” view of her from all of these disparate viewpoints in order to truly unlock the key to her character. This “truest view,” is in fact not defined by her feminine roles according to the novel’s diverging perspectives at all, but rather defined by her complete lack of adherence to traditional Southern standards of femininity overall. Caddy is so unconstrained by these traditional roles of femininity (limited to either wife and mother or virgin) that when her brothers view her through these feminine lenses, it becomes clear that these roles are an ill fit, and suggest that had Caddy been a man within this society, she would not have come to such a tragic end due to her exploration of her sexuality.
The first role she would have been expected to fill in the traditional Southern culture is that of lady as defined by her mother’s ideal, coupled with Quentin’s expectation of honorable virginity. Caddy rejects her mother’s veil of public purity and propriety and instead acts as she pleases-- breaking gender rules and mores that ultimately cast her from her family and into her final role as prostitute.
The role of the prostitute is reserved for those women who cannot support themselves, and it is a role of ultimate sexual taboo. In a society where male chastity is ridiculed, Quentin is considered to have a “husband” in Shreve due to his virginity, and he fervently wishes that he had been the “unvirgin” one, not his sister. During Quentin’s narration, the father notes a double standard in the way virginity is viewed when he says, “In the South, [men] are ashamed of being a virgin… because it means less to women… it was men who invented virginity not women” (96). It is important to Caddy’s story to note that while virginity apparently means less to women, it is of the utmost importance in deciding how they are viewed within society. The father’s view is the view Caddy essentially takes of virginity, which puts her in opposition to her mother’s ideal of what it is to be a lady-- that women are expected to be above pre-marital physical desire, constantly guarding their maidenheads under a veil of purity despite any coquettish overtones inherent in courtship. Caddy obviously does not buy into this Southern ideal of femininity, as evidenced in her early adulthood-- she represents and pursues her natural curiosities in the realm of sexuality, a transgression relegates her to the role of the prostitute since she no longer fits into any of the traditionally accepted feminine roles. As a non-virgin, she can no longer be considered pure. Pregnant before marriage, she cannot be considered a proper wife nor mother to her child.
This sense of natural sexuality likens Caddy to Addie Bundren, the matriarch of the Bundren family in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Like Addie, Caddy also falls prey to the trap of language. They are alike in that they are both characters with intrinsic natural sexuality, both trapped by words that are supposed to define their roles, and yet they feel that those words have no special significance when applied to their lives. Like Addie’s proclamation that “motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it,” Caddy does not equate her Southern expectation to remain virgin with purity-- to her, her virginity means “no more than a hangnail.” For Caddy, sex is a physical exploration of her natural feelings. As Baum states, Caddy’s physical sexuality stems in great part to her “her great desire to communicate love” (Baum, 43). She loved, or at least had strong feelings for, Dalton Ames, as evidenced by the wordless thudding of her heart when Quentin asks of her feelings (187-188). However, her view of the natural consummation of her feelings places her in stark opposition to the stereotypical Southern woman. Had she been a man within this highly contradictory society, her sexuality would have been completely accepted, and she would not have been seen as a black mark on her family’s honor, her name becoming a taboo word within her former home.
However, through the symbol of Caddy with the muddy drawers in the tree, the novel symbolically suggests through foreshadowing that Caddy would never even be able to reach the ideal of the woman who is completely separate from the passions of the flesh, and therefore it seems make sense that since she could never reach such an ideal, she would cultivate more masculine traits that disregarded traditional views of femininity. In her essay, “The Third Eve,” Gladys Milliner states that Caddy is a sort of “fallen Eve, a virgin mother who has lost her virginity, a woman who is a human being, she is rejected by the childlike, immature Adam” (70). Likewise, Caddy is also rejected by her family, and her disowning by her family strongly echoes an exile from the morally corrupt and crumbling Eden that is the decaying South. The novel begins with Caddy climbing a tree with muddy drawers to learn of something she has been excluded from. In a very Eve-like way, she learns of death, and her muddy drawers symbolize what from a Christian perspective would be the taint of sin. To Caddy, however, this is natural for her, a sign that she is of the earth and not above it. Like Dewey Dell in As I Lay Dying, sexuality is intrinsic to Caddy’s character, and she makes no effort to fight her natural urges. Like Eve, who was tempted to gain forbidden knowledge, Caddy’s need to satisfy her sexual curiosity leads to the transgression defying of her society’s conventions of true womanhood. This defiance brings a terrible price: Caddy’s youth is broken down not by her sexual exploration, but by a society who kept her from seeing her daughter and also who Caddy felt gave her no other option than to turn to prostitution, as her family completely shunned her. Whereas Dewey Dell was not cast out from her family, Caddy is cast out by the well-to-do Compsons and sees no other way to support herself.
Prostitution is the absolute inverse of her sexual exploration, the dark side of the sexual coin-- instead of being a natural expression of love and caring, it is manipulative, personally shameful, and highly exploitive. This degradation of her flesh leads to what Baum refers to Caddy being “tragic and damned,” a damnation that is both physical and spiritual (Baum, 48).
This damnation also has effects on her daughter, Miss Quentin, because it introduces her into a world of hardship and mistreatment. Quentin is an extension of Caddy; she bears the burden of her mother’s choices-- symbolically, the taint of sin that is now a trait of all who are born. After questioning why she was even born, Quentin shouts at her tormentor, Jason, “I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere you are” (235). Just as the novel begins with Caddy climbing up a symbolic tree of knowledge, it ends with Quentin climbing down the same treeto run away, eager to be free of the taint that her mother incurred when she took the forbidden bite.
Also due to her choices, another of the stereotypically feminine roles that Caddy is not able to maintain due to her sexuality is the role of mother. In the novel, it appears as though Caddy is the only one who cares for her mentally-retarded brother, Benjy. She takes care of him, feeds him, and arguably sacrifices her own happiness to when Jason threatens to send him to a Jackson mental facility. In this way, Caddy acts as a surrogate mother to her brother, and this puts her in stark contrast with Mrs. Compson, who is cold and uncaring towards her son, Benjy. However, this surrogate motherhood complicates her role in relation to other characters in the novel because it conflicts with her burgeoning sexuality in a time where, as Addie Bundren can attest, sexuality and motherhood were kept in two separate realms. When she becomes sexually active, Benjy experiences a loss of Caddy because she can no longer only be defined by motherly love. No longer does she smell like the trees that are so often equated with natural innocence, but her scent has been replaced by that of womanly perfume.
However, where the loss of virginity would have been a mark of accomplishment and initiation to manhood if Caddy were a man, since she is a woman and trapped in a world of strict feminine expectations, Caddy’s physical exploration of her sexual self merely marks the beginning of her life’s dissolution. When Miss Quentin is born, Caddy faces an awful choice-- her family has cast her out due to the pregnancy, and with no means she can see without any familial support to provide for her daughter, she must vacate the role of mother altogether. With this role ultimately closed to her, she turns to the only option she sees as left open to her, the role of the prostitute, to support herself and send money to her daughter.
Had Caddy been male, her situation would have been entirely different. She would not have broken society’s expectations of chastity, and in fact would likely have been respected for having sexual prowess. No question about her character would have led to a separation from her child, and the tragedy of her life, culminating in dissolution and spiritual damnation as represented through a Nazi alliance, would have been averted. In a society where ignoring societal expectations leads to utter dissolution of one’s life, it seems that Caddy Compson made only one mistake: she was born female. She attempted to live her life more as she pleased, and had she been male, that would have been just fine.
The characters in William Faulkner’s novels are often doomed by their limited agency over their own lives within the traditional Southern society, and the women of Absalom, Absalom! are no different, featuring an entire cast of female characters limited simply by their sex. Judith, though more traditionally masculine than her brother, Henry, is unrecognized by her father, Thomas Sutpen, as the legitimate heir to his legacy. Clytie is allowed entry into his home, but denied any identity other than that of a serving woman, and Milly, Eulalia, and Ellen are all likewise relegated to specific Southern stereotypes of the wife and mother. Perhaps most tragic is Miss Rosa, Sutpen’s sister-in-law and would-be wife whose rebellion against an identity as merely a bearer of Sutpen’s heirs and her subsequent silencing leads to her hysterical demise. Like Caddy Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, these are women trapped by their sex and doomed to tragic, unfulfilled ends despite their possession of traits that are traditionally lauded in the Southern male. In this way, these women function as ghosts, silenced since birth by their complete inability to gain control over their own lives.
Early in the novel, parallels between the sibling pairs of the Sutpen and Compson families begin to emerge. Like the seeming misappropriation of gender in the case of Quentin and Caddy, with Caddy being the more sexually forward of the two and Quentin desperately wishing he were “unvirgin,” Henry and his sister Judith have a similar apparent mix-up of gender. This ambiguity of traditionally gender-relegated traits is apparent from childhood, as when Sutpen is discovered by his wife Ellen, participating in a violent fight with one of his slaves as sport. While Henry, in a more traditionally feminine fashion, screams and vomits, then clings to his mother’s skirt, Judith instead watches the brutality from an opening in an overhead loft (p. 21-22). There are very few clues given about Judith’s demeanor while watching the fight other than a certain impassivity. She and Clytie willingly seek to witness the fight, and her lack of revulsion at this violent scene establishes Judith as a more traditionally masculine figure than her brother.
Judith, like her father, is a strong-willed and capable caretaker of Sutpen’s Hundred. However, as the novel progresses, Judith is consistently undervalued by her father due to his incessant need to secure an heir to carry on his name. Like Caddy Compson, she can be seen as viewed only through the lenses of the men of the novel because her voice is so frequently silenced by Quentin-- to Sutpen, she is only a daughter, a failed attempt at producing a son. To Charles Bon, she is fiancée, but more tellingly, she is a way for the unacknowledged Bon to demand attention from his father, Sutpen, because he notes that his return to Sutpen’s Hundred is “not to see the sister because he had not once thought of her: he had merely listened about her” (255). To Henry, she is the sister whom he loves, and like Quentin and Caddy, Henry has an obsession with Judith’s honor. Though many critics have suggested incestuous overtones between the pair, critic Linda Dunleavy suggests in “Marriage and the invisibility of women in Absalom, Absalom!” that instead Judith acts as “a kind of surrogate for both Henry and Bon. She forms the bridge between her two brothers, providing them with a way to realize their desire for each other, despite the ‘insurmountable barrier, which the similarity of gender hopelessly intervened’ (Dunleavy). Quentin believes that “[Judith] was just the blank shape, the empty vessel in which each of them strove to preserve, not the illusion of himself nor his illusion of the other, but what each conceived the other to believe himself to be,” and in this way, Judith acts not only as sister and lover, but she is also a bridge between too disparate would-be lovers who cannot consummate a relationship. Judith is never seen for who she is with regards to her strong personality and commandeering qualities, but instead how she functions as a vessel to further the emotional saga of the men in the novel. Because of this, Judith is essentially a ghost in the novel, with very little control over her life, voiceless ever since her birth due to her sex.
Another tragedy is that of Miss Rosa, the woman whose incredible drive to tell her account of the events at Sutpen’s Hundred only adds to what Quentin deems as her “hysteria,” a hysteria that ultimately causes her to lapse into a coma prior to her death. Rosa is a character who is exceedingly limited in her agency over her own life. Her story pivots upon one insult that Sutpen lays upon her, an insult that has deep impact upon the rest of her life. When Sutpen suggests that they couple, and if the resulting child is a boy, they should marry, Rosa instantly rejects him as a suitor and instead brands him as a demon. Rosa’s rejection of a life of domesticity wherein she would be no more than a brood mare is a rejection of Sutpen’s view of the wife as a purely incidental, and in this way, a rejection of the Southern view of woman as wife. As Linda Dunleavy notes, “Rosa's impulse to say no to Sutpen is not simply a refusal of sex. Her ‘no’ is a kind of sexual response, an impulsive defense of a sexuality that exceeds the limits of woman's role as breeder. Female sexuality here is figured as a niche which is passive and silently acquiescent.” In this way, Rosa declares her rebellion upon this passive, acquiescent view of femininity, but she is still trapped by societal expectations of a woman that dictate that if a woman is not a wife, she must instead bear the burden of spinsterhood. Through her rejection of Sutpen as a husband, she is in turn unable to bear children, and as Henry and Judith are in fact somewhat older, she cannot even express a maternal instinct as an aunt. As critic Heberden W. Ryan notes “Behind closed doors: the unknowable and the unknowing in Absalom, Absalom!”, “Her resultant embittered spinsterhood denies her an understanding of love and sex, and her virginity… is symbolically another closed door” for her (Ryan). Her rebellion against Sutpen’s expectations effectively leaves her with very few options in the South, and it is her bitterness at the expectation that she be content with the role of child-bearer and little else that leads to her hysteria.
Though Absalom, Absalom! is the story of the demise of the Sutpen and Coldfield families, it is also the story of Rosa’s search to have her story told. However, her silencing by Quentin Compson further incites her fervor to have her side of the story told, a fervor which Quentin simply dismisses as “hysteria.” As critic Betina Entzminger notes in her article, “’Listen to Them Being Ghosts:’ Rosa’s Words of Madness that Quentin Can’t Hear,” hysteria was thought to have been “the neurosis linked to diseases of the female reproductive organs,” associated with those of the “passive sex,” and those “either mentally or morally of feminine constitution.” Entzminger suggests that Rosa’s labeling as a hysteric by Quentin is brought about by his own wish to ally himself more firmly with the patriarchy (despite his own gender confliction), thereby “forcing [him] to re-write her story from the ‘proper’ male perspective” (Entzminger). To do this, he must first silence her voice, and he accomplishes this by dismissing her as a hysteric. Despite Quentin’s prevalent gender conflictions, it can be ascertained that Quentin wishes to be more traditionally masculine (with regards to his his “unvirgin” confliction in The Sound and the Fury), and this theory would seem to be consistent with his character. It is interesting to note that Shreve believes that “[Rosa] refused at the last to be a ghost,” which can be taken to mean that her fervor lives on, however briefly within Quentin, and her drive to have her story told oddly mirrors his obsession with getting to the bottom of the Sutpen legend (289).
Frustrated and completely consumed by the fact that her femininity has left her with such little control over her life, (for she’s equally damned if she marries the “demon” Sutpen or if she rebels against his expectations of her), Rosa assumes the role of ghost even more fully as she delves deeper into the hysteria of her fervor, for “the hysteric, whose body is transformed into a theater of forgotten scenes, relives the past, bearing witness to a lost childhood that survives in suffering” (Entzminger). This is certainly true of Rosa, who begins to manifest the physical symptoms of hysteria, such as shaking hands, shortly before the end of her life. She is hollowed out by her inability to be heard, and soon lapses into a coma that precedes her death.
In conclusion, the women of Absalom, Absalom! are essentially born ghosts. Even before Rosa’s refusal to be simply a breeding partner for Sutpen, she is without options and doomed to a life of solitude without options of change. She is repeatedly shushed and undermined with no man to “protect her” (Entzminger). Judith fares no better—she is completely unable to influence her own life as well, and instead acts as a figure through which the men of the novel could view and use for their own ends. Like ghosts, they are silent and completely ineffectual solely based on their status as women.
Judith Bryant Wittenberg notes in “The Women of Light in August,” that Light in August follows the typical Falknerian theme of “understand[ing] and portray[ing] women struggling with the limitations imposed upon them by a restrictive Southern society” (103). However, Light in August departs from this theme as it also presents two women, Joanna Burden and Lena Grove, who do not fall so easily into these categories of societal judgment simply due to their sex and their sense of natural sexuality. Although they are still separated from society, they stand out as departures from the typical Faulknerian mold because their separation is not wholly dependent on their nonconformity to traditional feminine roles.
In one case of personal downfall, Joanna Burden stands apart from many of Faulkner’s female characters because her damnation is not wholly dependent on her sex. She would nevertheless be a societal outcast whether or not she were female. The source of Joanna’s alienation from society lies in her identity as the child of an abolitionist in the crumbling South just as much as it does upon her repudiation of the role of wife and mother. Her ultimate downfall lies in her own twisted religious zeal, but this, unlike many of Faulkner’s women, does not rest solely upon her sex. However, this is not to say that Joanna does not have her fair share of issues with her own gender. She certainly seeks to challenge her role as a traditional woman through explicit, imaginative sexual encounters with her lover, Joe Christmas, which in essence give her leave to achieve a level of aggressiveness and sexual liberty that would have traditionally only been acceptable for a male partner. Joe describes her as a “dual personality” (234) during their liaisons, personalities that Wittenberg describes as “at once a pleasure-seeking female and… controlling male (Wittenberg, 117). As Joe Christmas is neither black nor white, Joanna Burden is neither entirely male nor female.
As she takes on a more masculine persona, her willingness to pursue the erotic with little regard to her virginity mirrors other Faulknerian women’s desires to shed the skin of the Southern woman who is supposed to have no personal sexual. Indeed, Joe describes their early relation, noting, “there was no feminine vacillation, no coyness of obvious desire and intention to succumb at last. It was as if he struggled physically with another man for an object of no actual value to either.” In her willingness to appear to resist sexual pleasure, Joanna is already subverting the traditional feminine role, even before she begins to become actively aggressive, and thus more traditionally masculine, in the “second phase” of their sexual activity.
During the second stage, in which the novel paints Joanna as a nymphomaniac, she assumes more masculine traits through her willingness to assume agency over her own relationships. She invites a sense of corruption that undermines a traditional feminine expectation, and as she is corrupted, “it could not be said that [Joe] corrupted her” (p. 260). She is wholly in charge of her own corruption, boldly initiating torrid trysts in the fields in a way that no one resigned to the identity of Southern Woman would have dreamed of doing. In a way, these trysts echo a certain sense of rape fantasy, as she climaxes while screaming “Negro! Negro!” as Joe is on top of her. Rape fantasies are by and large expressions of experimentation with power shifts within sexual and romantic relationships, and not only does Joanna represent the male in initiating the tryst, she is simultaneously exploring the release of being the helpless female within the role-playing scene that she envisions in her head.
As Joanna defies the archetype of passive female, and she explores the range of emotions inherent in human sexuality, such as dejectedness, lust, rage, jealousy, and many other emotions. However, after they had been parted for quite awhile after Joanna’s announcement of her pregnancy, Joe makes the mistake of believing that Joanna does fit into the mold of traditional woman after all , as “he had never yet known a woman who, without another man available, would not come around in time” (267). In fact, she is about to make a final, desperate attempt to achieve domination in their relationship, by way of a suicide pact that would claim their lives and finally put them on equal footing for eternity. Only after her death, believing that she has been brutally raped and murdered by a black person, that the town creates an image of her as an idealized woman after all, refusing to accept that what they see as such racial and sexual deviancy could occur within their society. For all of her attempts to break free of the shadow of the Cult of True Womanhood, the title of Southern lady (and of martyr) is thrust upon her in death.
The other exception of femininity in the novel is Lena Grove, who is alienated from society in the fact that she is literally foreign to the town, an outsider who comes seeking the father of her child. Many critics have painted Lena as a somewhat dumbed-down Earth Mother figure. However, it is likely that she is intelligent, and she is using her pregnant, out of wedlock state to her advantage, putting her in stark contrast to Caddy Compson of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Whereas Caddy’s unwed pregnancy leads her to be cast out from her family and society, forcing her to give up her child and become a prostitute with no other means of support, Lena uses her natural positive nature and “damsel in distress” motive of searching for her child’s father to win the goodwill of those she meets. She is able to milk the damsel in distress routine and travel as she wishes rather than being either confined to a traditional female role of housebound wife or being cast out from society. That Lena is willfully playing the damsel to further her own freedoms is subtly intimated in the novel. She is once described as having a face with “either nothing in it, or everything, all knowledge,” which suggests that she is not nearly as one-sided as she appears, and cannot be simply relegated to the status of Earth Mother figure, as many outmoded critics would have readers to believe. This statement suggests that Lena is much more calculating and willing to direct her own fate—in a sense, she relies equally upon her faith in God and the goodwill of those she meets as she does upon her own intelligence and the cunning façade that allows her much more freedom than a woman in her position would ordinarily have for as long as the façade lasts.
Faulkner has said of Light in August “began with Lena Grove, the idea of a young girl with nothing, pregnant, determined to find her sweetheart. It was out of my admiration for women, for the courage and endurance of women” (quoted by Wittenberg, 103). Lena is relentlessly positive with a consistent sense of “God will provide” as she relies on the goodness of others to achieve her aims. There is some consternation with regard to her lost virginity, as Hightower urges Byron to seek “single women, girls, virgins” (316), but her intrinsic goodness allows Lena to circumscribe banishment from society. Though the novel “suggests how powerfully Lena’s fate is – or at least is assumed to be – in male hands,” Lena strikes her own course and assumes agency over her own identity when she sets out to find Lucas Burch, thereby “assert[ing] her own quiddity and her right to act as she wishes” (Wittenberg, 108). In a society where we have seen that premarital pregnancy can lead to the ultimate downfall of a woman, Lena not only asserts her own agenda, but she turns the table on society’s ideal of the traditional gender-relegated power structures within a relationship when she gains the love of Byron Bunch, who follows her against reason. By the story told by the furniture salesman at the novel’s close, Byron follows her with a puppy-like fervor, always returning even when he is frustrated deeply by Lena’s unwillingness to recognize him as a partner. It is clearly Lena who has the upper hand in this situation, as the salesman even notes, “I wasn’t worried about him doing her any harm she didn’t want done to her,” which even inspires a bit of manly pity, as he goes on to say that “I was downright ashamed to look at him, to let him know that any human man had seen and heard what happened” (502-504). For her part, because she knows of her position of power, Lena seems unmoved by Byron’s turmoil, and is content that she will be able to make do “by the grace of God,” without a figurehead male in her life, even when Byron’s name would give her child a measure of legitimacy. As Walter J. Slatoff notes, not only does Lena’s unconventional nature set her apart from other women in Faulkner’s work, her story closing the novel also makes her a sign of hope in general for Faulkner’s crumbling South, as her “full-bodied health, serenity, and faith in the natural order of things, and her pleasure in life, are in sharp contrast to the fanaticism, barrenness, anguish, or despair that mark the other major characters” (Twentieth Century, 99).
In conclusion, the women of Faulkner’s works often assume traditionally masculine traits, including sexual forwardness, action, and strong will. It is not uncommon for the women of the novels to infact seem more masculine than their male counterparts-- this is most evident in sibling pairs such as Henry/Judith and Quentin/Caddy. And yet, it is their feminine sex that damns them due to their inability to easily conform to the expected gender roles that Southern society has relegated to. Lena is the glimmer of hope for Faulkner’s women-- she is not stagnant, trapped inside society’s glass cage. Instead, she has achieved a sense of autonomy, and there is a goodness about her that suggests that she will endure long after the South finally crumbles into ruins.
(Yes, some of the formatting is incorrect. I didn't have time for the HTML.)
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Bergman, Jill. ‘This was the answer to it’: sexuality and maternity in ‘As I Lay Dying’. Mississippi Quarterly. (1996): 393. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Chan, Amado. Sterotypical, but vengeful and defiant: Addie Bundren in Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying”. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. (2001): 118. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Dunleavy, Linda. Marriage and the invisibility of women in ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ Women’s Studies, 22.4 (1993): 455-466. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Entzminger, Bettina. “Listen to the being ghosts”: Rosa’s words of madness that Quentin can’t hear. College Literature, 25.2 (1998): 108-131. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International, 1986.
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
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Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Hewson, Marc. ‘My children were of me alone’: maternal influence in Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying”. Mississippi Quarterly. (2000): 551. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Milliner, Gladys. “The Third Eve.” Caddy Compson. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990.
Ryan, Heberden W. Behind closed doors: the unknowable and the unknowing in ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ Mississippi Quarterly, 45.3 (1992): 295-313. Accessed via Academic Search ASAP.
Slatoff, Walter J. “Lena Grove and Byron Bunch.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Light in August’. Ed. David L. Minter. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1969. 99-100.
Wittenberg, Judith B. “The Women of ‘Light in August’.” New Essays on ‘Light in August.’ Ed. Michael Millgate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 100-123.
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Date: 2004-12-10 11:25 am (UTC)In such a society, any woman who wished for any other identity would feel the negative effects of their inability to so easily assume these roles.
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Date: 2004-12-11 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-11 04:17 am (UTC)Faulkner: the "other" F-Word.
Or, on second thought, maybe that's a good thing.
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Date: 2004-12-14 10:16 pm (UTC)Except maybe As I Lay Dying. That one's funny.