University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 1-1-2013 Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond Phillip Andrew Gordon University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Gordon, Phillip Andrew, "Gay Faulkner: Uncovering a Homosexual Presence in Yoknapatawpha and Beyond" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1391. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1391 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]. GAY FAULKNER: UNCOVERING A HOMOSEXUAL PRESENCE IN YOKNAPATAWPHA AND BEYOND A dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English The University of Mississippi by PHILLIP ANDREW GORDON June 2013 Copyright Phillip Andrew Gordon 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This dissertation is a biographical study of William Faulkner (1897-1962) as his life coincided with a particular moment in LGBT history when the words homosexual and queer were undergoing profound changes and when our contemporary understanding of gay identity was becoming a widespread and recognizable epistemology. The connections forged in this study--based on archival research from Joseph Blotner’s extensive biographical notes--reveal a version of Faulkner distinctly not anxious about homosexuality and, in fact, often quite comfortable with gay men and living in gay environments (New Orleans, New York). From these connections, I reassess Faulkner’s pre-marriage writings (1918-1929) for their prolific reference to homosexual themes. I culiminate these early years with a new reading of Darl Bundren from As I Lay Dying (1930)--the first novel Faulkner completed after his marriage--for the way Darl’s community constructs him as queer and the way he defines his own gay identity as a “wounded” soldier who was exposed to homosexuality during his time at the war in France. Then I turn towards the changes Faulkner’s perspective underwent after his marriage, in the 1930s, as he wrote his major novels. Finally, I turn towards the final years of his career and assess Faulkner’s depiction of V. K. Ratliff in the latter novels as a Cold War homosexual of the Snopes trilogy, whose presence throughout Faulkner’s career crystalizes in the closing scenes in The Mansion (1959) as the final verdict on the great saga of Yoknapatawpha County. This study is a developmental narrative of Faulkner’s queer identity throughout his life and of his mastery of gay representation through its many emanations in the first half of the twentieth century. ii DEDICATION For Mom, Dad, and Steve and for Meghan, Marty, and Jim iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT No scholar is an island. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous financial, archival, academic, and moral support of more people than I could ever list here. The majority of this dissertation was written under the generous support of the Francis Bell McCool Dissertation Fellowship for Faulkner Studies, sponsored by Campbell and Leighton McCool, in honor of Campbell’s mother. Other generous funding came from a research grant sponsored by the Graduate Student Council at the University of Mississippi and a semester long fellowship sponsored by the Graduate School at the University of Mississippi. The research in this study comes primarily from four archives. Thanks to the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. Also, thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin, and particularly to Jennifer Shapland, a public service intern who happened to be assigned to my initial inquiry and went out of her way to help me track down and obtain materials for this project. Thanks as well to Jennifer Ford and her wonderful staff in Special Collections at the University of Mississippi for their help with documents relating to Hubert Creekmore. It is a blessing to have such excellent resources so close to home and have such an excellent team to care for them. Thanks, thanks, and thanks again to Drs. Bob Hamblin, Chris Reiger, and Lisa Speer at Southeast Missouri State University for their patience and hospitality in the Center for Faulkner Studies and their Special Collections. The backbone of this study is the material contained in the Brodsky/Faulkner Collection housed iv at the library in Cape Girardeau. I cannot thank them enough for being such generous custodians. Special thanks to Lisa Speer, who always had her door open when, after hours of staring at old letters, I just needed to talk with a receptive audience about all the cool stuff I was finding. Numerous mentors have guided me not only through the dissertation but to it in the first place as well. As a hapless undergraduate who transferred to the University of Tennessee at Martin, I stumbled into an English department that would forever change my life. Thanks to the late Dr. Carl Buchanan, whose small but poetic advice on a cold February evening would eventually turn into the central metaphor of the first two chapters of this study. To Dr. Lynn Alexander, with whom I travelled to Oxford for a marathon reading of Absalom, Absalom! and decided that Oxford was were I needed to be. To Dr. Daniel Pigg, whose short essay on Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled” gave me the first significant inroad to making this argument at all. To Dr. Jeff Miller, for whom I first read Absalom and As I Lay Dying and in whose class I first pondered what “gay Faulkner” might mean. And to Dr. Neil Graves, an Ole Miss alum and UTM professor, who has been my friend and confidant for seven years now, and whose haunting and beautiful water color of Rowan Oak will one day grace the cover of this book. Thanks to Dr. Benjamin F. Fisher, ostensibly a formidable Edgar Allen Poe scholar, but whose encouragement and--on a more practical level--extensive revisions and copy-editing made what were some ugly scratches on a few pieces of paper into the legible document below. And thanks, finally, to the friends who have put up with me and inspired me while I have wept over spilled milk and leapt for joy over my greatest accomplishments. To Mel, Chris, Kelli, Sara, v Amy, Ann Marie, and Hillary. See below for evidence of what your friendship helped me see through to its conclusion. What follows would not be there without you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii DEDICATION iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT iv INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: “QUAIR” FAULKNER 27 CHAPTER 2: QUEER FAULKNER 47 CHAPTER 3: GAY FAULKNER 100 CHAPTER 4: CADET FAULKNER 161 CHAPTER 5: QUEER SOLDIERS 189 CHAPTER 6: GAY DARL 228 CHAPTER 7: LA VITA NUOVA 281 CHAPTER 8: MEDIATED VISION 312 CHAPTER 9: THE FAULKNER WE KNOW AND DO NOT KNOW 350 CHAPTER 10: V. K. RATLIFF, A BIOGRAPHY 397 ENDNOTES 435 WORKS CITED 511 VITA 527 vii INTRODUCTION The study that follows seeks to understand the life and work of William Faulkner in relation to the gay history that ran adjacent to that life and with which Faulkner often engaged in the various performances so vital to his sense of identity. William Faulkner lived from 1897 to 1962, a time of tremendous change in the cultural recognition of homosexuality and in the ways in which gay men performed their identities against the backdrop of that cultural recognition. By the time of Faulkner’s adolescence and coming-of-age, a generation after gay Mississippians such as Stark Young and William Alexander Percy, homosexuality as a particular identity category had entered the mainstream consciousness of Western Europe and the United States, the stage on which Faulkner’s canonical status is measured and the cultural milieu in which he grew up. By the time of Faulkner’s death, a distinct genre of gay literature had developed primarily as a niche market but was well on its way to a general readership thanks to works from the 1940s and 1950s by well-known authors such as Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, among many others. Considered by many to be a great American author so highly esteemed for what Toni Morrison has called his “gaze,” or “his refusal-to-look-away approach” (297), and for his critical explications of history, Faulkner was aware of this tradition, knew gay people, participated in settings distinctly recognizable as gay, and wrote homosexuality into his fiction from his earliest attempts at poetry to the final novels of his prolific career. I argue that from this participation Faulkner forged for himself what I am calling an “apocryphal” gay identity. While we so far do 1 not have information to confirm or deny whether Faulkner engaged in physical sexual acts with other men, the identity he forged for himself--evidence of which has long existed in the biographical record--suggests that he did, in fact, understand what it meant to “be gay.” In his specific cultural moment and geographic location, this understanding greatly influenced his work. To articulate this aspect of Faulkner’s life and work, this study will primarily fuse two fields of scholarly inquiry: Faulkner Studies and Queer Theory. While technically, this study seeks to intervene into both fields, especially in regards to Faulkner Studies, a better model for the goal of this study might be to say that it seeks to participate in a long conversation. Primarily, this study functions as a new addition to the biographical record of Faulkner’s life but also as a turn in the current canon within Faulkner Studies of essays concerning Faulkner and queer sexuality.