ABSENT COMPANY : ELEGIAC CHARACTER IN THE NOVELS OF FAULKNER AND WOOLF A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Erin Kay Penner January 2012 © 2012 Erin Kay Penner ABSENT COMPANY : ELEGIAC CHARACTER IN THE NOVELS OF FAULKNER AND WOOLF Erin Kay Penner, Ph.D. Cornell University 2012 This dissertation examines the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf through a formal lens that allows us to look beyond their differences in culture and nationality to what I argue is their shared fascination with the elegy. In taking up the elegy Faulkner and Woolf also rewrite the genre, using the novel to offer pointed critiques of the poetic tradition in three distinct stages of elegiac reinvention. In the first, Faulkner and Woolf abandon the pastoral elegy’s single narrative in favor of several competing narratives; in this they use to their advantage what Bakhtin calls the novel’s heteroglossic capacity. In the second stage, the authors foreground the voices of the dead and thus draw attention to the way the traditional elegy silences the elegiac subject. In a final manipulation of elegiac convention, Faulkner and Woolf blur the distinction between the elegist and the elegiac subject through a series of character doublings, and in doing so they renegotiate the terms of the protagonist’s position in the modernist novel. Like the subject of the first chapter, The Sound and the Fury , which revels in the different voices of its elegists, Woolf’s The Waves , the subject of Chapter Two, stresses both the harmony and the dissonance in the mourning hymn of its six speaking characters. In the third chapter, I analyze the surprising eruption of the voices of the dead in Jacob’s Room and As I Lay Dying , voices that challenge the eulogies of the other characters. In the final chapters of the project I shift from the novel’s contribution to the elegy to the way in which elegy rewrites the terms of the modern novel. Woolf’s and Faulkner’s use of the elegy in Mrs. Dalloway and Go Down, Moses , respectively, enables the authors to change the dynamic between protagonists and minor characters, keeping the elegiac subject at the center of the story, but attending to the voices of the elegists who remain, warily, on the margins of the narrative. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Erin Kay Penner was born and raised in Iowa. She registered to major in English before setting foot on campus at Yale University, from which she received her Bachelor of Arts in 2005, magna cum laude . Graduate study in the Department of English at Cornell University followed immediately afterward. iii First to my parents, later to Katherine and Nathaniel, and always to Sydney iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My literary interests can be traced directly back to my mother, whose own reading addiction keeps her up too late at night, but my fixation on modernism’s unruly texts stems from a handful of courses in my undergraduate education, in particular Lee Patterson’s seminar on Ulysses and Vera Kutzinski’s on Faulkner. Lloyd Pratt then patiently led me through my first major research project, a senior thesis on Faulkner, and got me to start asking the right questions. My interest in Woolf is somewhat more recent. My thanks to my graduate committee chair, Molly Hite, for encouraging my new interest all the way through papers, exams, and now a dissertation. She regularly urged me to mess up my tidy arguments in order to get somewhere interesting: precisely the nudge I needed. My committee members considerately assumed different roles in guiding me through the program. Roger Gilbert allowed me to keep pursuing my poetry interests through his seminars in modern American poetry; I learned much about reading fiction from the close readings of poetry in his classroom. Kevin Attell gamely took on the task of keeping me honest in my argumentation. Although I doubt that the arguments in the following work are up to snuff, I am keeping his notes at hand as I consider revisions, and I hope to do better. I was only at Cornell two years before Doug Mao moved to Johns Hopkins, but his meticulous notes on the papers I submitted doomed him to remain on my committee for the rest of my graduate work. My thanks to him for making room for one more student, for his judicious comments on every draft I sent him, and for his generosity in sharing potential paths for developing the material I have produced. Lastly, my thanks to Jim Adams, now of Columbia University, for his patience; he was a member of my graduate committee for nearly all of my time at Cornell, as well as the Director of Graduate Studies, and he fielded a number of questions from me in those years. As I began work on the dissertation, I was awarded the Shin Yong-Jin Graduate Fellowship by the Department of English at Cornell. It gave me a wonderful opportunity to teach formally v complex narratives to undergraduates. I learned a great deal from my students about the variety of approaches to non-linear narratives, and about the texts I assigned, which included works by Faulkner and Woolf. My thanks to those students for their hard work and for our rewarding classroom conversations. In addition to the teaching opportunity, the Shin fellowship provided me with an additional semester of research support, which gave me the time necessary to develop a strong foundation for the project as I found my way through the early chapters. My work at Cornell was aided immeasurably by my classmates, who manifested good teaching and engaged research in all their variety. My particular thanks to Corey Wronski-Mayersak for her support as we shared an office, exams, and life. Two Ithaca friends, Kate Klein and Stephanie Gehring, both creative writers, read through drafts of my dissertation, engaged in long conversations with me about the ideas in it, and, most importantly, showed me how to develop a sense of ownership about my work as coursework gave way to independent research. In watching them write when no one made them, I learned much about setting my own pace and my own pleasure with the work at hand. That proved particularly helpful when I moved to England in my final year of graduate study and wrote the second half of my dissertation in a cold garret on Holywell Street in Oxford. My final thanks to my family for their patience with me throughout this project. It has been a constant—and demanding—presence in my life for several years, and they gamely accepted the additional company. My parents continued their cheerful support of my academic endeavors from afar, swooping in to offer help at key times. Sydney was a model of partnership, offering academic companionship, reading drafts, and, perhaps most importantly, giving me the time I needed to work as first Katherine and then Nathaniel appeared. My thanks to these last two for allowing me to move continually between work and play, so that this project remains fresh and interesting to me yet. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch ..........................................................................................................................................iii Dedication..........................................................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents............................................................................................................................................vii List of Abbreviations .....................................................................................................................................viii 1 Beauty Reduced to Telling: An Introduction to Modern Grief Work ............................................1 2 Monopolizing Mourning: Competitive Elegy and the Fragmented Subject in The Waves ..........39 3 When the Dead Write Their Own Elegy: As I Lay Dying and Jacob’s Room ...................................81 4 Lessons from a Hostess: Sharing Elegiac Space in Mrs. Dalloway ................................................131 5 Song and Silence: Unproductive Grief in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses ..........................186 Works Cited ....................................................................................................................................................241 vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS William Faulkner AILD As I Lay Dying GDM Go Down, Moses SF The Sound and the Fury Virginia Woolf CSF Complete Shorter Fiction JR Jacob’s Room MD Mrs. Dalloway TW The Waves viii I Beauty Reduced to Telling: An Introduction to Modern Grief Work Oh the dead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy. – Virginia Woof, To the Lighthouse Caddy Compson, the absent central figure of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury , is a magnet for attention in Faulkner’s work. In his own estimation she is “the beautiful one . my heart’s darling” ( Faulkner in the University 6). His desire to preserve that beauty, however, compels Faulkner to keep her at a distance from the storytelling; when asked why Caddy was not one of the novel’s narrators, Faulkner responded: “That’s a good question. That—the explanation of the whole book is in that. Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what