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The House Motif in Faulkner

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The House Motif in Faulkner As if the Wood of which it was built were Flesh: The House Motif in Faulkner. Dissertation angefertigt von Dirk Bork zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie Vorgelegt im Fachbereich Sprachen und Literaturwissenschaft der Universität Osnabrück 2007 Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Karrer Table of Contents Acknowledgements………….…….……………………………….III List of Abbreviations………..……………………………………….IV 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………1 2. The Literary Motif……………………………………………………18 3. Southern Architecture………………………………………………...21 4. Yoknapatawpha as a House Society…………...……………………..36 5. The House Motif in Literature……………………………………… 43 6. The House Motif in Faulkner..…………………………...…………48 6.1 Private Houses in Faulkner…………………………………….62 6.1.1 Plantation Houses…….….…………..………62 6.1.2 Mansions….……………………………..…..87 6.1.3 Town Houses……………………………..….97 6.1.4 Cabins……..………………………………..112 -II- 6.2 Public Houses in Faulkner………………………………………134 6.2.1 Stores..…………………………………...……...134 6.2.2 Courthouse and Jail……………………………..144 6.2.3 Banks……………………………………………152 6.2.4 Barbershops……………………………………..160 6.2.5 Churches………………………………………...162 6.2.6 Brothels………………………………………….169 6.2.7 Public Open Spaces….…………………………..174 6.3 House Related Imagery in Faulkner.............................................176 6.3.1 Attics………………………….…………………176 6.3.2 Doors…..………..…………....…...………..……180 6.3.3 Windows……………………...…………………214 6.3.4 Porches……………………....………………….235 6.3.5 Fences……….…………………………………..251 7. Conclusion…………………………………………………………268 Works Cited Appendix -III- Acknowledgements This dissertation would have been impossible without the support of my advisor, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Karrer, whose thoughtful response to my project and the time he has taken from his busy schedule to read my manuscripts has been tremendously appreciated. I also want to thank Dr. Lothar Ern for our long conversations about American fiction and culture. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my wife, Ricarda. Without her encouragement and aid I would not have completed this project. -IV- List of Abbreviations Publication Abbreviation Publishing Date Soldier’s Pay SP 1926 Mosquitoes MOS 1927 Flags in the Dust FID 1973 The Sound and the Fury SF 1929 As I Lay Dying AILD 1930 Sanctuary SAN 1931 Light in August LIA 1932 Pylon PYL 1935 Absalom, Absalom! ABS 1936 The Unvanquished UNV 1938 The Wild Palms WP 1939 The Hamlet HAM 1940 Go Down, Moses GDM 1942 Intruder in the Dust INT 1948 Knight’s Gambit KG 1949 A Fable FAB 1950 Collected Stories CS 1951 Requiem for a Nun RFN 1951 Big Woods BW 1952 The Town TOW 1957 The Mansion MAN 1959 The Reivers REI 1962 Uncollected Stories US 1979 Faulkner in the University FIU 1959 Selected Letters SL 1977 All the publishing dates of Faulkner’s short stories presented in the text of this dissertation refer to the earliest date a story is known to exist. 1 1. Introduction Like many readers who have encountered Faulkner’s fiction for the first time, I started reading Faulkner with “A Rose for Emily” and this story generated a growing and never ceasing fascination with the writings of the Southern author. Faulkner’s style of writing is unique and the creation of his mythological domain of Yoknapatawpha County is still unsurpassed in American literature. Moreover, the variety of his subject matters and the richness of his characters will always invite fresh and new critical perspectives on his body of work. However, one particular aspect of his writings attracted my attention as soon as I read the short story “A Rose for Emily” for the first time: Faulkner’s use of the house motif. The landscape of Yoknapatawpha County is replete with all kinds of houses, ranging from big mansions of the plantation elite to Negro cabins and poor white sharecroppers’ shacks. Faulkner’s fictitious houses harbor a quality that makes them loom large in the reader’s mind. Take, for instance, the decaying Grierson house that serves as a reminder of the vanished grandeur of the Old South, or the burning Sutpen mansion that reflects the downfall of the Old South, or think about Nancy’s simple cabin that cannot protect her from her murderous husband. All these different types of houses leave the reader behind with indelible impressions a long time after having finished a Faulkner novel or short story. The houses set within Yoknapatawpha County are more than mere shelters for their inhabitants – they are architectural metaphors demarcating class, race, and gender. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard asserts, “House images move in two directions: they are in us as much as we are in them” (1964, xxxiii). In the light of this, Faulkner’s houses do visualize social structures by revealing a great deal of those who dwell in them. Carsten and Hugh-Jones likewise stress this assumption: “The house and the body are intimately linked. The house is an extension of the person; like an extra skin, carapace or second layer of clothes, it serves as much to reveal and display as it does to hide and protect” (1995, p.2). Kohn also stresses the significance of the house motif. According to him, it is important to note how Faulkner “uses the image of the house [...] as a symbol for the lives of the characters who live in or aspire to them“ (1983, p.79). 2 In the past, literary criticism tended to regard the natural world as the central element in Faulkner’s fiction and produced thus quite a bulk of research papers, books, and essays on this topic. Time and again, literary critics showed how single works of the Southern author are to be read in the context of the disappearance of nature as, for instance, the fourth chapter of “The Bear” in Go Down, Moses, the short story collection Big Woods, or “The Wilderness” section of the Collected Stories do demonstrate. For further information on this issue consult Christadler’s Natur und Geschichte im Werk von William Faulkner (1962), Faulkner and the Natural World (1999) by Kartiganer and Abadie (eds.), and Faulkner and the Ecology of the South (2005) by Urgo and Abadie (eds.). Unlike Faulkner’s rendering of the natural world, the fictitious houses edifices of Yoknapatawpha County are mostly neglected by literary critics. Hines, one of three critics dealing solely with architecture in Faulkner’s works so far, criticizes the disproportionate relation between published literary criticism on the role of nature on the one hand and available criticism on the function of built environments in Faulkner’s writings on the other hand as follows: Much has been said and written on the ubiquity of nature in Faulkner’s works – the woods, the bear, the natural landscape – but relatively little has been done on Faulkner’s equally great interest in the built environment, the opposite of nature, as symbol and metaphor of larger issues, attitudes and moods. There is, in fact, throughout Faulkner criticism a puzzling imbalance between the attention given to nature and that given to architecture. This is unfortunate, since ‘novelistic architecture,’ according to critic William Ruzicka, ‘has much to say about the way that characters view the world they inhabit, the effect of the fictive environment upon those who live within it, the image and significance of a fictive place, and the meaning of dwelling there’ [Ruzicka 1987, p.2] (1996, p.2). As this dissertation will show, an analysis of Faulkner’s fictitious houses is undeniably as significant for an understanding of the Yoknapatawpha saga as an analysis of its imaginary natural world – or maybe even more important. Although the disappearance of nature and the appearance of more and more built structures in Faulkner’s fictional world are in fact two sides of the same coin, it still amazes the reader that one aspect is fully researched whereas the other is not. 3 The critical evaluation of Faulkner’s works began in the late 1930s. This coincided with the rise of the New Criticism with “whose values and methods [Faulkner’s] works were basically compatible” (Grimwood 1986, p.101). Outstanding among older treatments of Faulkner’s writings is O’Donnell’s article “Faulkner’s Mythology” (1939). This essay, which divides Faulkner’s world into Snopeses and Sartorises and thus into “the amoral and ethical” (Meriwether 1973, p.235), principally presents Faulkner as a maker of myths [through analysis of his symbolism]. Likewise, Faulkner’s first exegetes like Brooks, Warren, Millgate, and Vickery published books on Faulkner that belong still today to the most useful and probably best critical studies ever made of Faulkner’s writings. After Faulkner’s Nobel Price Speech, in which the awarded emphasized rather universal values like individualism and existentialism, Faulkner scholarship soon tended to explore Southern reality in his works – as indicated by the different themes of the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference [see, for instance, The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: The Actual and the Apocryphal (1976) or Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance (1981)]. The publication of New Directions in Faulkner Studies (1983), which “demonstrates an urge to depart from the New Critical past and illustrates the basically conservative temperament of Faulkner studies” (Grimwood 1986, p.101), demarcates a paradigm shift in Faulkner scholarship. Since then, Faulkner criticism neglected the analysis of rather abstract ideas and focuses instead on the study of single concrete themes and motifs in the Southerner’s writings – as indicated by such books as Faulkner and Humor (1984), Faulkner and Women (1985), Faulkner and Race (1986), and Faulkner and Gender (1994), for example. Based on the annual conferences, these books are fine explorations of Southern reality and history as rendered in Faulkner’s fictional world. A survey illustrating the changing critical approaches to read and to understand Faulkner offers Caron’s article “Faulkner’s Critical Reception” in A Companion to Faulkner (2007). Although this dissertation belongs to the bulk of Faulkner criticism that focuses on a single theme or motif to analyze the complex realities of Faulkner’s fictional world, this study of the house in Faulkner nonetheless also highlights the issues class, race, and gender, which are inseparably linked to this literary motif.
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