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Class, Race, and the Policing of Normative Southern Femininity in William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Requiem for a Nun

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Class, Race, and the Policing of Normative Southern Femininity in William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Requiem for a Nun University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2013 Matrices Of Disorder: Class, Race, And The Policing Of Normative Southern Femininity In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, And Requiem For A Nun Claire B. Mischker University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Mischker, Claire B., "Matrices Of Disorder: Class, Race, And The Policing Of Normative Southern Femininity In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, And Requiem For A Nun" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 551. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/551 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MATRICES OF DISORDER: CLASS, RACE, AND THE POLICING OF NORMATIVE SOUTHERN FEMININITY IN WILLIAM FAULKNER’S THE SOUND AND THE FURY, AS I LAY DYING, SANCTUARY, AND REQUIEM FOR A NUN A Dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English The University of Mississippi By CLAIRE BROOKS MISCHKER May 2013 Copyright Claire Brooks Mischker 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT In this project, I apply Judith Butler’s late twentieth century theory of gender performance, outlined in her book Gender Trouble, to three major novels from William Faulkner’s early career, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Sanctuary, and to one novel from his later period, Requiem for a Nun. This project examines the main female characters of these novels: Caddy Compson, Addie and Dewey Dell Bundren, Temple Drake, and Nancy Mannigoe, respectively, to reveal how race and class are indelible to the performance of gender in the literature of the early twentieth century South. The focus of this project will be to discover how the intelligibility of the femininity of these characters is affected when they disrupt the normative performance of their conventional gender roles, especially in maternal contexts. Chapter One lays the historical and theoretical groundwork for the novels discussed. Chapter Two considers Caddy Compson from The Sound and the Fury in the context of her performance as Southern Belle and how the influence of her brothers affects that role. Chapter Three addresses Addie and Dewey Dell Bundren from As I Lay Dying, focusing on how class differences affect their gender performances as rural women. Chapter Four deals with Temple Drake in Sanctuary and how she adapts her gender performance to survive the abuses to which she is subjected. Chapter Five examines the gender performances of both Temple (Drake) Stevens and Nancy Mannigoe regarding matters of race as they inform the intelligibility of the latter’s normative femininity within the context of white elite society. ii Whereas Butler’s theories tend to suggest constructive potential in the disruptions of normative gender performances, applying them to Faulkner’s works, wherein social contexts often foreclose such opportunities, proves less optimistic. However, there is the possibility for the interruption of repetition with the daughters of the main female characters in the novels examined here. iii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my many friends and gracious family who have supported me through the highs and lows of this process. In particular, it is dedicated to Sean Ennis, my partner and willing sounding board, and my son Liam Ennis, who helped me remember my inspiration daily. I would also like to specifically remember Kathryn Olsen, Gabriel Scala, and Beth Seaman as some of the best and brightest friends and scholars a doctoral student can have. Finally, I have to mention Dr. Peter Nicolaisen, without whose class and guidance, I would never become so obsessed with Addie Bundren and the fiction of William Faulkner. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my dissertation director, Dr. Deborah Barker, without whose willingness to work through obstacles, commitment to my project and progress, and tireless reading and revising, I would not have been able to complete this project. I would also like to express my appreciation for my other committee members, Drs. Jay Watson, Kathryn McKee, and Ted Ownby, all of whom contributed their own fields of valuable expertise to my project. Finally, I would like to thank Brenda Robertson, director of the University of Mississippi Writing Center, for her invaluable support and help, both professionally and personally, for the last seven years as I worked on this project. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………………ii DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………………iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………….v I. GENDER BORDER CONTROL……………………………………………………………….1 II. GOT TO MARRY SOMEBODY…………………………………………………………….43 III. EVER A PRIVATE WOMAN……………...……………………………………………….68 IV. SOMETHING IS HAPPENING TO ME…………………………………………………..101 V. SISTERS IN SIN……………………………………………………………………………126 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………151 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………155 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………………163 vi I. GENDER BORDER PATROL “Gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end.”—Judith Butler At the 39th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference on the University of Mississippi campus, where the theme was “50 Years After Faulkner,” Deborah Clarke gave a paper entitled “Considering the Unthinkable: The Risks and Rewards of Decanonizing Faulkner” in which she discussed both the valorization and challenge of Faulkner’s “greatness.”1 Centering on the example of Caddy Compson, Clarke noted that many critics have translated female silence in Faulkner as strength and created presence out of female absences in the text. However, in questioning the validity of those interpretations, Clarke wondered if instead of the power with which critics attempt to imbue them, those silences and absence are simply mistakes, evidence of an inability on the author’s part to portray complex femininity. What this project aims to establish is that Faulkner’s early female characters are portrayed through silence, absence, and controversy specifically because women are so complex. It is inevitable that their performances in Faulkner’s fiction be riddled with contradictions and disruptions precisely because such conflicts arise out of the complexities of femininity. The women of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County have never been strangers to controversy, and the female characters of his early popular novels are no exception. Between 1 July, 2012. 1 1929 and 1931, a period Andre Bleikasten, in The Ink of Melancholy, claims “touches indeed on the miraculous,” Faulkner published three relatively successful, popular novels: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and the “pot-boiler” Sanctuary (xi).2 The author himself seemed to consider these three novels a trifecta when he wrote in the introduction to the 1932 edition of Sanctuary that he tried “to make out of it something which would not shame The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying too much” (viii). Furthermore, Bleikasten asserts that “The Sound and the Fury marked the beginning of a period of strenuous work and stunning inventiveness,” which includes As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary immediately following it (xi); and As I Lay Dying is continuously referred to as a tour de force.3 For these reasons, these three novels, and the women around which they revolve—Caddy Compson, Addie Bundren, and Temple Drake, respectively—especially tend to attract prolific attention among critics and readers of Faulkner. Of writing Sanctuary, Faulkner said of the novel, “I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends […] and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine” (Sanctuary, 1932, viii). As if he could not abandon the woman he’d subjected to the horrific, it was also to the character Temple Drake that Faulkner returned twenty years later in Requiem for a Nun, in which he also reacquaints us with Nancy Mannigoe, a character from the short story “That Evening Sun” that is contemporary with the earlier novels. The women central to these novels, Caddy Compson, Addie and Dewey Dell Bundren, Temple Drake and Nancy Mannigoe, stir up controversy as they run the gamut of gender roles available to women, from belle to mother to corpse and beyond. They are a group plagued by 2 Although the novels were published in this order, The Sound and the Fury in 1929, As I Lay Dying in 1930, and Sanctuary in 1931, Bleikasten (among others) notes that Sanctuary was actually written between the earlier two, but publication was delayed for revision. 3 From Faulkner himself to Bleikasten to Wesley and Barbara Morris. 2 contradiction and conflict, reflecting the gender crises born of Faulkner’s contemporary South still recovering from the Civil War and Reconstruction.4 Gender crises as a focus of scholarship on Faulkner’s work saw its heyday in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, as evidenced by the popularity of Clarke’s own 1994 Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner. Cheryl Minnick, in her annotated bibliography of 1982-1994 gender-related Faulkner criticism, traces the onset of such a focus on gender and sexuality to a 1982 article by Judith Bryant Wittenberg entitled “William Faulkner:
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