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Perspectives on Lynching in William Faulkner's Fiction and Nonfiction

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Perspectives on Lynching in William Faulkner's Fiction and Nonfiction Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Master’s Theses Student Theses Spring 2020 Perspectives on Lynching in William Faulkner's Fiction and Nonfiction Tabitha Fisher Bucknell University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/masters_theses Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Fisher, Tabitha, "Perspectives on Lynching in William Faulkner's Fiction and Nonfiction" (2020). Master’s Theses. 236. https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/masters_theses/236 This Masters Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Theses at Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master’s Theses by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Perspectives on Lynching in William Faulkner’s Novels and Nonfiction By Tabitha Dawn Fisher A Thesis Submitted to the English Department Graduate Committee Bucknell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Master of the Arts in English April 2020 Approved by: _____________________________________ Thesis Adviser: Professor Michael Drexler _____________________________________ Department Chair: Professor Anthony Stewart i TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 “Never Got Outside That Circle”: Reading Faulkner’s Denial Of Racial Performativity and the White Supremacist Narrative in “Mob Sometimes Right” (1931) and Light in August (1932) ..... 9 “Mob Sometimes Right” ............................................................................................................. 9 Light in August Overview ......................................................................................................... 19 Critical Commentary ................................................................................................................. 20 A Comparative Reading Of Light in August ............................................................................. 32 Biological Determinacy............................................................................................................. 33 Talk And Circumstance ............................................................................................................. 37 Willing And Unwlling Racial Role Play ................................................................................... 43 The Lynching (?) Of Joe Christmas .......................................................................................... 47 Limning The Gap: The Missing Perspective............................................................................. 53 The “Practical Reason Of His Future”: Lynching, (Mis)Representation, and Black Liberation in Intruder in the Dust (1948) and “Letter To The Leaders In The Negro Race” (1956)................. 56 Intruder in the Dust Overview .................................................................................................. 58 Critical Commentary ................................................................................................................. 60 Imagination’s Function in Intruder in the Dust ........................................................................ 81 Faulkner’s Fantasy and an Intruding Reality ............................................................................ 85 Lucas Beauchamp ..................................................................................................................... 85 Lucas Lynched .......................................................................................................................... 94 Imagining Lynching .................................................................................................................. 95 Reactionary Lynching (Mis)Representation ............................................................................. 98 Further Fantasies: A New South ............................................................................................. 105 1956: Inflexible Flexibility...................................................................................................... 107 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 115 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 121 ii His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven. His father, by the cruelest way of pain, Had bidden him to his bosom once again; The awful sin remained still unforgiven. All night a bright and solitary star (Perchance the one that ever guided him, Yet gave him up at last to Fate's wild whim) Hung pitifully o'er the swinging char. Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view The ghastly body swaying in the sun: The women thronged to look, but never a one Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue; And little lads, lynchers that were to be, Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee. “The Lynching,” Claude McKay 1 INTRODUCTION William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1949, in the middle of his life and after an already-substantial publishing career, that he wished to be “abolished and voided from history” (Gresset ix). Faulkner’s comment to Cowley may be read with a certain level of drama as well as remorse for a path Faulkner at once willingly chose and the trajectory of which he could not have predicted. Cowley’s publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946 set the stage for Faulkner to transcend the bounds of authorhood to become a cultural icon. In the midst of the Cold War, Faulkner published Intruder in the Dust (1948), a novel he used to express views of lynching and the roles of the north and south in black liberation. The novel encapsulated views which Faulkner had expressed more subtly in other texts and propelled Faulkner into a racial conversation heightened by budding civil rights legislation. From there on, Faulkner brought himself fully into the public scene by publishing a series of letters and interviews on integration, drawing mingled praise and ire which follows his legacy today. Rather than pulling away from the public eye, a course of action Faulkner seems to consider in his letter to Cowley, the 1950s saw Faulkner dive headlong into advising the nation, and the globe, on its collective path. As Michel Gresset writes in his Faulkner Chronology, “[By 1955] Faulkner is now a public figure. He no longer refuses to appear in public in his own country, and, even though he may hesitate at times, he usually accepts the requests of the State Department to participate in cultural events abroad” (91). As Faulkner took on this new role, the conflicts between his loyalty to the everyday norms mandated by southern white supremacist ideology and his ideals of human liberty became more pronounced as people like W.E.B. DuBois and Richard Wright challenged him on his statements. Although popular opinion notes a shift in Faulkner’s political awareness beginning in the 1950s, I would argue that this shift can be seen 2 much earlier, and nascent expressions of Faulkner’s confused racial viewpoints may be found as early as 1931 in his fiction and nonfiction texts. In this project, I aim to seek out such expressions and to understand Faulkner’s written treatment of systemic racial injustice as exemplified by the lynching of black men throughout his career against the backdrop of United States racial tensions. I seek to discover how Faulkner’s explorations of lynching practices and white supremacist ideology changed between his early and late novels and nonfiction. I also seek to develop an understanding of how critical perspectives of Faulkner as racially progressive or regressive have traditionally, and incompletely, been formed through an inspection of his literary texts. Even historicized treatments of Faulkner tend to focus exclusively on his fiction texts. To provide a more holistic understanding of Faulkner’s developing depictions, I will provide critical commentary on two of Faulkner’s novels alongside a comparative reading of said novels with two of his nonfiction texts. For my selections, I will read Faulkner’s nonfiction letter “Mob Sometimes Right” (1931) alongside Light in August (1932) and Intruder in the Dust (1949) alongside the essay “Letter to the Leaders in the Negro Race” (1956) for their presentations of lynching and black rights. To do so, I will engage in a close study of the circumstances surrounding Joe Christmas’s murder in Light in August and the community action in Lucas Beauchamp’s murder trial in Intruder in the Dust and compare the representation of lynching in these circumstances to Faulkner’s publicly espoused views in local and national news publications. This, I hope, will demonstrate disparity or cohesion in Faulkner’s commentary on the racial violence and political circumstances which characterized Faulkner’s historical context. In my exploration, I will underscore concepts in Faulkner’s depictions of lynching that demonstrate a stance that 3 reinforces white supremacist narratives, opposing critical recuperative trends that obscure such themes. In doing so, I rely on scholarship premised on historicizing Faulkner’s texts. Scholars such as Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Erin Kay Penner,
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