THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

WILLIAM FAULKNER AND THE FALLEN WOMAN

JEFFREY ROMANO SPRING 2016

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in English and Communication Arts and Sciences with honors in English

Reviewed and approved* by the following:

Michael Bérubé Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Literature Thesis Supervisor

Xiaoye You Associate Professor of English and Asian Studies Honors Adviser

* Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. i

ABSTRACT

This thesis examines the prevalent character archetype of the fallen woman in various novels by William Faulkner. These characters, some of the most interesting and vital in

Faulkner’s oeuvre, are discussed, along with their implications both for Faulkner’s fictional county of Yoknapatawpha and for the post-Civil War South itself. Literary scholarship as well as historical analysis is cited to present a fuller picture of the Southern cultural context found in

Faulkner’s novels, and the place of the fallen woman in the context of Faulkner’s works as a whole.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction……………………………………………………………………….…1

Family Legacy in the South…………………………………………………………3

Disruptive Sexuality and Female Agency…………………………………………..13

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..35

BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………..36

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Introduction

In William Faulkner's fiction, many repeating character archetypes occur across different narratives, acting out similar but still distinct stories. One of the most prominent of these figures is that of the “fallen woman,” a young woman who lost her virginity outside of marriage.

Disgraced by the community and detested by her family, this character suffers in a society in which sexual purity is a paramount virtue for women and girls. She can be naïve and earnest like

Lena Grove, promiscuous and flighty like Temple Drake, frightened and desperate like Dewey

Dell Bundren, or strong and capable like Candace Compson, but she is always vitally important to her story. The fall of the old South in Faulkner occurs in parallel with the fall of a young virgin girl, and the families who scorn the young girl are microcosms of a larger society that bears numerous scars in collective memory from the recent Civil War. I argue that the fallen woman is an essential, central part of the Faulknerian mythos, intersecting with Faulkner's major themes such as the past and the family, and revealing many aspects of the South's fall and the reasons for it. In many ways the social constructs, gender roles, and powerful institutions of the

South surround and oppress the fallen woman, but she plays a critical role in defining those facets of society as well.

In this essay, I argue that the fallen woman is essential to the overall themes of the

Faulknerian mythos. She catalyzes the fall of the old South by holding a mirror up to the faults of its family structure. Among these are the gender roles that both the men and women of the most

2 recent generation are unable to fulfill, and the legacy of decay that these families retain.

Whatever her role in finalizing the fall of the old South and the family institutions that make it up, however, the fallen woman represents only the most recent step in the long history of the

South. To adequately understand the context of the 20th-century South, and place Faulkner’s fallen woman in that context, we must first establish the position of the South’s quasi- aristocracy, and the position of the South itself in American society.

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Family Legacy in the South

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which Faulkner's novels primarily take place, the American South had entered a difficult post-Civil War era. In this context, I mean to say both that this period was after the end of the Civil War, and was shaped largely by fallout from the

Civil War due to the South's defeat and the subsequent elimination of the economically and culturally vital institution of slavery. The proud South took a severe hit to its self-image, and many southerners were left with a moral and intellectual quandary. Gwendolyn Chabrier in her critical work Faulkner's Families: A Southern Saga, describes that difficulty: “The aware

Southerner, who instinctively loves the South, must simultaneously accommodate himself to its historical responsibility for slavery and to the loss in the Civil War of everything that that pre- war society held dear” (2). Coping with the blame of nearly tearing apart the Union, and preserving the institution of slavery, became a large part of Southern life. In this way, the past took hold of the present. Correspondingly, Faulkner's fiction frequently explores the tendency of the South to look back on its own past, and the effect that the past exerts on the present. As the lawyer Gavin Stevens says in one of Faulkner's most famous lines: “The past is never dead. It's not even past” (73). In Faulkner's vision, the present is made up of the past, in large part because those in the present cannot avoid looking back at it. One example of the influence of the past in general and the Civil War in particular is the character of Reverend Gail Hightower in Light in

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August. Hightower arrived in Jefferson as a young man, harboring a childlike enthusiasm for the story of his grandfather who died during the Civil War (61). Hightower's obsession with his cavalryman grandfather's image permeates several aspects of his life, both at the pulpit and at home. “It was as if,” Faulkner writes, “he couldn't get religion and that galloping cavalry and his dead grandfather shot from the galloping horse untangled from eachother, even in the pulpit. And he could not untangle them in his private life, at home either perhaps” (62). In Faulkner as in the post-Civil War South, the past is “tangled up” with many aspects of life, including one of the most vital southern institutions: the family.

In a largely rural, agrarian environment, isolated families served as the typical unit for southern society, and a model for the social and economic institutions of the South. “The old patriarchal family,” writes Chabrier, “exemplified to a large degree the relations between ruler and ruled” (11). Planter, slave master, and gallant Confederate soldier all had one common progenitor: the father. Just as, in the South, so much is tangled up with the past, so too is it tangled up with the family. Regional identity, personal identity, status in the community, were all determined by the family (Chabrier 11). In Faulkner, these two major obsessions of the South, the past and the family, become themselves intertwined in the image of the southern planter aristocracy. Thus, the aristocratic nature of the South is one of the major things that set its image apart from that of the North and the United States in general. As Daniel Aaron notes in his article

“The South in American History,” the “decorous agrarian South” stood in opposition to a

“restless, shifting, money-minded North” (Aaron 11). In popular perception, the South's structure was feudal and agrarian in opposition to the increasing industrialization and urbanization of the

North. The journalist Edward A. Pollard provides an example of this perception, writing that the

5 prototypical southerner was descended from “the Cavaliers who sought the brighter climate of the South, and drank in their baronial halls in Virginia confusion to roundheads and regicides”

(Aaron 9). Through the use of such terminology, Pollard exemplifies the perception of the South as aristocratic and quasi-feudal, laying the groundwork for the distinctly southern family legacies that are so vital to Faulkner's fiction. It should be noted, however, that in the South an entirely new form of aristocrat had emerged, distinct from the European model that preceded it.

The Southern aristocracy differed from its European counterpart in that it was established in an astonishingly short time, and did not involve inherited titles or an established peerage. “In the colonial South, and even as late as the early part of the nineteenth century,” writes Chabrier,

“rough frontiersmen through their own industry were able to become aristocrats in the Southern sense of the term by accumulating vast amounts of land and slaves” (16). All the essential components of European feudalism remain: vast tracts of agrarian land and serfs to work that land. However, without the pre-existing family history inherent in European aristocratic families,

Southern aristocracies built themselves from the point of land acquisition. In light of the increased centrality of land in the Southern aristocracy, it makes sense that Faulkner would begin his account of the Compson family in the appendix of The Sound and the Fury not with Quentin

Maclachan, the first actual Compson, but with the Indian chief Ikkemotubbe. Ikkemotubbe's contribution to the Compson family was that he “granted out of his vast lost domain a solid square mile of virgin North Mississippi dirt,” establishing the Compson family's hearth and the foundation for its later legacy (403). When the South lost one half of the feudal equation in the

Civil War, namely the slaves, the reality of the landed southern aristocracy suffered considerable damage, but the romantic image of such aristocrats became all the stronger. Once the reality had

6 evaporated, all that was left for the young descendents of these quasi-aristocrats was to look back into the past, and try to keep up the family's proud image as much as they could.

The Compson family in The Sound and the Fury, for example, takes great pride in their legacy, a pride that becomes an obsession for some family members. The Sound and the Fury’s

Appendix, titled “Compson: 1699-1945,” quickly establishes the aristocratic, even monarchical associations of Compson family history by beginning the first entry on the chief Ikkemotubbe with the description “A dispossessed American king” (403). From the estate of this dispossessed king, Jason Lycurgus, the first of the Compson line to arrive in the town of Jefferson, procured his land and established his stake. The one square mile was known as the “Compson Domain… since now it was fit to breed princes, statesmen and generals and bishops, to avenge the dispossessed Compsons from Culloden and Carolina and Kentucky” (408). This single passage cements two important points about the Compsons’ history: first, that the land was obtained from an “American king” and called a “Domain” underlines the aristocratic connotations of the family’s history, and second, that even at this early stage, family history is a primary motivation, the act of avenging the “dispossessed” Compsons who had been driven out of their respective lands. Faulkner's repeated use of the term “dispossession” foreshadows the fate of the Compson family: to drift away into lower-class obscurity. Even after the age in which Compson family produced important people had long passed, various decisions the Compsons make show how vital the maintenance of and adherence to their aristocratic image really is.

As the financial means of the Compson family dwindled, the governors and generals of the past having given way to the drunken lawyer Jason III (henceforth Mr. Jason), regard within the community and some piddling portion of their former land holdings became all that was left

7 of their former status. And as the basis for that status erodes, it becomes more and more important to keep the upper-class aristocratic image alive despite its hollowness, even if maintaining the image requires great sacrifices. For instance, the family cannot afford to have

Quentin spend an entire college career at Harvard, but sell off part of their precious “Compson

Domain” in order to send him there for just one year. Quentin’s going to Harvard is a symbolic gesture, done to keep his mother Caroline happy and to maintain the family image, thus maintaining the appearance that the family is wealthy. Quentin is able to see this himself during some of his final moments in life, thinking “because Harvard is such a fine sound” and “forty acres is no high price for a fine sound” (“Sound” 217). While the depletion of the Compsons' material wealth and land holdings necessitates an effort all the more strenuous on their part to maintain their image, in this case they actually give up a significant part of what they have left just to make the image last a little bit longer. Mr. Jason does the same when he agrees to take care of Caroline’s habitually drunk brother Maury, all the while frequently mocking and disparaging him. This leads Caroline to protest: “My people are every bit as well born as yours”

(“Sound” 53). Caroline clings to her lineage, of which Maury is a part, even though she has been technically made part of the Compson family. Maury is essential to her pride in her legacy, as shown when Caroline names one of her sons after her brother, and then changes the name when the son is found to have a mental disability. Maury’s presence also gives Jason III a sense of his own family's superior legacy, though for a different reason. “I admire Maury,” he says. “He is invaluable to my own sense of racial superiority. I wouldn’t swap Maury for a matched team”

(“Sound” 52). Mr. Jason implies that, by his pathetic nature, Maury serves as an example that

Mr. Jason can use to make himself and his family look better by comparison. Mr. Jason’s use of

8 the word “racial” is also interesting given that no indication is ever made in the novel that Maury is black or of mixed-race. This suggests that, to Mr. Jason at least, family upbringing and social status are on the same continuum as race when it comes to determining one’s status in the hierarchy of Southern caste and class structure. The Compsons' status is reinforced by their knowledge that there are still people lower on the caste and class continuum than they are, whether they are poor whites or Negroes. Quentin uses different language when he describes his father’s sense of “the celestial derivation of his own species” (“Sound” 218). Quentin thereby exaggerates the Compsons’ alleged elevation above other whites even further, to some kind of spiritual, quasi-religious realm. In either case, family legacy ranks up there with two more key pillars of southern society: race and religion. Thus, in the world of Faulkner, titles and honors held by past members, holdings in land and wealth, and racial hierarchy all work together to elevate the legacy of southern families.

Members of the Compson family are willing to sacrifice practical considerations such as land and money in service of the mere image of their own wealth and good breeding. Why they would do this, or why Faulkner’s characters more generally place such vital importance on their families’ images, is a key question. One possible answer is that the modern families have nothing else to live for. The Compsons are hardly well off in The Sound and the Fury, especially after

Mr. Jason dies and leaves his son Jason IV (henceforth Jason), a humble hardware store employee, as the primary breadwinner of the family. Other Faulkner characters toil away in similar lower-class conditions, such as Lena Grove’s unnamed brother in Light in August. The first and only description of the man is as follows: “He was a hard man. Softness and gentleness and youth (he was just forty) and almost everything else except a kind of stubborn and despairing

9 fortitude and the bleak heritage of his bloodpride had been sweated out of him” (“Light” 6).

Pride in his lineage is one of only two qualities that sustains him after all else has been “sweated” out of him by his long and tedious work. Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying is in a similar position: stuck in a marriage with a man she does not love, with children she considers a burden, living life miserably and with no discernible purpose. She blames her husband Anse for her state, and makes him promise to bury her in her family’s plot in Jefferson, forty miles away from her home, in an act she specifically calls “my revenge” (“Dying” 164). Unhappy with her current

“family,” Addie instinctively seeks a sort of cruel refuge in the place where her kin are buried, symbolically associating herself with them and distancing herself from the rest of the Bundrens.

Other characters in the novel, such as Cora Tull, recognize the nature of this displacement as rooted in family association, though she misidentifies it as the Bundrens “Refusing to let her lie in the same earth” as the rest of the family (“Dying” 21). No indication is ever made that either

Lena Grove’s family, or Anse Bundren’s, have anything close to the aristocratic bearing the

Compsons once had, yet these characters still cling to their family history with a sense of pride, using it as a sense of comfort. Violating the sanctity of that respectable image, despoiling that family legacy, is an unforgivable crime.

Crucial to the southern family image of Faulkner’s fiction is the maintenance of the marriage vow, which dictates the proscribed behavior for women who enter into it. In keeping with the male's role as the head of the household and overall dominating force in society, the woman correspondingly is expected to uphold “the ideals of perfection and submission” in marriage (Chabrier 58). Marriage serves as a way to ensure public approval, to create a facade of legitimacy and felicity that can cover up indiscretion. We see such conduct when the Compsons

10 desperately try to see Caddy married before her potential suitor could figure out that she is pregnant by another man. Caddy's repeated protestation to Quentin that “I’ve got to marry somebody” is telling in this regard (“Sound” 139). The Compsons' attempt to essentially con

Herbert into marrying Caddy reinforces the notion that marriage in the South frequently serves as a move to maintain the kinds of appearances families want to maintain, and exposes what is frequently the nature of marriage in Faulkner: that it is done more for cynical gain than for love or any sort of familial union. When Eula Varner marries Flem Snopes in The Hamlet, the same kind of marriage the Compsons attempted between Caddy and Herbert is made successful. Eula keeps her and her family's good name intact, and Flem gets ownership of property in

Frenchman's Bend. Given the cynical, calculated nature of many of the marriages in Faulkner, it seems that the vow of marriage, and therefore the family, is less a legitimate, loving pairing within the institution of religion, and more a restrictive institution. Just as much as the

Compsons' attempts to save face are cynical and fraudulent, so too is an institutional formality of marriage that merely offers the hollow appearance of virtue where none exists. Marriage is crucial to any discussion of fallen women, because it is the only difference between a virtuous southern wife and a disgraced “whore” expelled from her home.

Female virginity, as one of the key pillars of a family's status and image, is vital to the maintenance of a family's image in the South. Reflecting poorly back on the “honor” of the family as a whole, the presence of such a fallen woman can tarnish the reputation of, or even destroy, a family legacy. The connection between virginity and family legacy is implied in The

Sound and the Fury when Quentin, who is very conscious of his family's place and their history, displays an utter obsession with his sister's sexuality, questioning her about it and thinking of it

11 even as he approaches the last hours of his life. Faulkner makes this implication explicit in the novel's appendix when he writes that Quentin “loved not his sister's body but some concept of

Compson honor precariously and (he knew well) only temporarily supported by the minute fragile membrane of her maidenhead as a miniature replica of all the whole vast globy earth may be poised on the nose of a trained seal” (411). Such a description not only establishes that the touted Compson honor rests on Caddy's virginity, but also makes a joke out of virginity and by extension the family honor that rests on it. Also key to this description is the sense that Caddy's maidenhead inevitably will fail, as it is “precarious,” “temporary,” “minute,” “fragile,” and analogous to a farcical display like a seal trying to balance a ball on its nose. By claiming that virginity will inevitably fail, Faulkner critiques the way in which Southern society views the fallen woman. The reader is meant to ask: If the fallen woman is destined to fail, and her family to fall with her, then what responsibility does she really hold? Nevertheless, the need to maintain virginity is evident, especially as it corresponds to a family's image. Even in families of lesser means, such as Lena Grove's family and the Bundren family, this need to maintain appearances is evident. We can see this when Lena Grove’s aforementioned brother discovers that she is pregnant with the child of some “sawdust Casanova,” and he reacts by calling her “whore”

(“Light” 6). Someone like Lena's brother, motivated only by what remains of his “bloodpride,” sees her actions as an attack against that pride, and reacts accordingly. The Bundren family, mostly owing to its patriarch Anse, is about as low in the eyes of the surrounding community as it could be. People are known to talk about Darl Bundren behind his back, and Anse constantly requires aid from others, something the local doctor Peabody remarks on, saying: “Of course he’d have to borrow a spade to bury his wife with. Unless he could borrow a hole in the ground”

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(“Dying” 230). Yet, Dewey Dell Bundren still feels enormous shame when she discovers she is pregnant with the child of the field hand Lafe. She searches desperately for a way to hide her pregnancy, fearing the consequences to her father should he find out, and should word get out about her. Even in the case of the evidently lower-class family, or the family whose reputation is in the dirt already, sexual promiscuity is a severe stain on reputation, to be avoided at all costs.

At all levels of caste and class, it appears that the foundational institutions of a patriarchal South rise and fall on the sexual behaviors of women.

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Disruptive Sexuality and Female Agency

Faulkner's fallen women are at least as divergent as they are similar, and each novel's description of its fallen woman's sexuality is different. As Charbrier writes, “in the South... a woman is described to a greater degree through her sexuality while a man is defined through his profession” (60). One can easily see this paradigm at play in Faulkner's work, in which many of the female characters are defined through their roles as mothers, wives, widows, fallen women, or virgins. In some sense, there is a fundamental assumption that something is threatening about female sexuality in Faulkner's fiction, as one can see by looking at Benjy Compson. While Benjy cannot be said to have any understanding of his family's legacy or the importance thereof, he still instinctively reacts to Caddy's sexuality, crying when she puts on perfume and consistently remarking on her smell. Benjy, while having an evident mental handicap, appears to have some sense of what is “in its ordered place,” so it seems his reaction reflects on an inherent subversive quality in female sexuality, Caddy's in particular (“Sound” 401). Therefore, in looking to the ways in which Faulkner describes female sexuality, one of the important aspects to examine is their disruption of the norms, mores, and institutions around them.

The cultural icon of the “Southern belle” plays an important role in the background of many of Faulkner’s stories. It is the ideal that many of Faulkner’s women, particularly his fallen women, fail to live up to. While the name “belle” comes from the French word for “beautiful,” the title of Southern belle implies other virtuous characteristics, most prominently “devotion to her family and husband, modesty, respect of ancestors, fragility and tenderness” (Klancar 47).

14 Southern ladies, despite their subordinate position, are trusted with upholding many of the pillars of Southern life. According to Anne Goodwyn Jones in The Encyclopedia of Southern Life, a

Southern lady is charged with “satisfying her husband, raising the children, meeting the demands of the family’s social position, and sustaining the ideals of the South. Her strength in manners and morals is contingent, however, upon her submission to the source – God, the patriarchal church and her husband” (Klancar 47-8). A Southern lady in such an environment is put in the difficult position of being strong in upholding good morals, taking care of children, and maintaining the household, but also submissive to her husband and the kinds of institutions and mores that repress her and others like her. Comparatively, the Southern belle is in an even more contentious position, stuck in a transitional stage: not quite a daughter and not quite a wife, and thus she has to embody various contradictory qualities. A Southern belle is, in Natasa Klancar’s words, “the fragile, dewy, just-opened bloom of the southern female: flirtatious but sexually innocent, bright but not deep, beautiful as a statue or painting or porcelain but like each risky to touch” (48). It is a difficult balancing act, like that of Faulkner’s metaphorical trained seal with the ball perched on its nose. The belle must be beautiful and flirtatious, but runs the risk of falling off by giving in to the same sexual temptations she is meant to excite. She must be vivacious and quick-witted, but not so intelligent that she poses a threat of being too smart for her station. She must be a beautiful icon, but her beauty is contingent on following many very specific rules. Among other similarities, the Southern belle character tends to meet the age group that many of Faulkner’s fallen women fall into: Caddy when she has her liaison with Dalton

Ames, Miss Quentin during the events of Jason’s section, Lena Grove, Temple Drake, and Eula

Varner. All of these women are in their late teen years, not quite girls but not quite women. With

15 a nigh-impossible and often self-contradictory ideal like this to follow, Faulkner’s characters fail the test, and thus subvert their supposed place in southern society.

One of the subversive qualities of Faulkner's women is their sheer variety, which makes any sweeping statement about “Faulkner's women” as a group difficult to defend. By nature, they resist being typed in any particular way. “If there is a pattern in Faulkner's characterization of women,” writes Linda Wagner, “it is that women are never to be stereotyped,” and the one sure thing about them is that they are “uniformly unpredictable” (131). Fallen women in particular, although their circumstances are often similar in some respects, are all seen from an angle unique to the particular novel they exist in, and the major themes of that novel. Characters like Caddy

Compson both shape, and are shaped by, the narratives to which they belong.

One characteristic of fallen female sexuality particularly in The Sound and the Fury is the image of filth. A scene in Benjy's section in which Benjy, T.P. Jason, and Versh stare up at

Caddy climbing a tree and “watched the muddy bottom of her drawers” as she disappeared into the tree (“Sound” 47). This is also the precursor to Benjy's recurring comment that Caddy

“smelled like trees,” a scent that Benjy enjoys, while the smell of perfume, emblematic of female sexuality, disgusts him (51). Benjy's reaction shows that distaste for female sexuality in Faulkner is expressed at a deeper, more basic level than just in its relationship to family legacy and society. The muddy drawers come back through references to Caddy's menstruation, an

“intimation of her sexuality” and a sign of her sexual maturity (Medoro 96). Quentin in particular seems sickened at the idea of menstruation, an attitude inherited from his father who told him

“women so delicate so mysterious... Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced” (“Sound” 159). For Quentin, the onset of menstruation is a defining characteristic of women, supporting Chabrier's contention that, in Faulkner as in the South, sexuality defines

16 women. In one of Quentin's most evocative images, he describes Caddy's sexuality in mythic terms: “running the beast with two backs and she blurred in the winking oars running the swine of Euboeleus running coupled within” (184). Quentin's image of “the swine of Euboeleus” connected with “the beast with two backs,” a euphemism for sex, suggests that Caddy's sexual identity is enough to drag her down to Hades as the Greek goddess Persephone was. Such metaphor exaggerates Quentin’s disgust with female sexual maturity, construing it not only as physically repulsive but as morally repugnant as well. As these examples suggest, it is not merely the act of sex, even specifically that outside of the institution of marriage, that disturbs

Caddy's brothers and Southern society more generally, but female sexuality itself. Thus

Faulkner's fallen women, who have been cast out due to their expressions of sexuality, are hated as part of the hatred for female sexuality more generally.

Given the misfortunes Caddy suffers at the hands of her brother Jason, her mother

Caroline, and the restrictive chauvinism of her society, it is tempting to consider Caddy a victim of her family's machinations rather than one of the key characters who drive the plot of The

Sound and the Fury. As Gary Storhoff points out, this conclusion oversimplifies Caddy as a character and as an agent in the novel; on his reading she is “the noble Compson” (1-2). Caddy avoids the nihilism of her father, the obsessive traditionalism of Quentin, and the narcissism of

Jason and Caroline, making her perhaps the most admirable of the Compsons. Linda Wagner in her essay “Faulkner and (Southern) Women” describes Caddy's nurturing nature effectively: “As a child, Caddy provides the only real love Benjy is ever to know, as an adolescent she understands Quentin's anguish better than he does himself, as an adult she is motivated solely by her love for her daughter” (134). Faulkner presents an alternative view of women through Caddy, emphasizing not the “filth” of her sexuality but the warmth of her caring nature, providing an

17 alternative explanation for why the Compson family finally fell apart. Without the caring of

Caddy, the motherly compassion that Caroline so clearly lacks, “the Compson family completes its final somersault to damnation” (Wagner 134). Faulkner reinforces the image of Caddy as the loving, caring member of the family when he writes in the Appendix to The Sound and the Fury that Caddy “Loved her brother despite him, loved not only him but loved in him that bitter prophet and inflexible corruptless judge of what he considered the family’s honor and its doom”

(412). Fallen women like Caddy, who play a vital part in the maintenance of the Southern family and, by extension, its society as well, are both defined and condemned by their sexuality. As such, by exercising that sexuality, the fallen woman claims an agency that the society she lives in would not grant her.

In a South with societal and familial structures that are so heavily based on restricting female sexual agency, acting outside of that restriction is an act of rebellion. In Faulkner's stories, the fallen woman reacts “to the constraints imposed upon them through an act of sedition” (Chabrier 69). Chabrier cites numerous examples in which this rejection of sexual morality coincides with rejection of the familial, caste, and class systems that are based on that morality. Caddy, for example, first marries a man from Indiana, then according to the Index moves on to marry a movie director from Hollywood, and later a German general, while her daughter Quentin IV (henceforth Miss Quentin) elopes with a traveling pitchman (Chabrier 71).

These chosen husbands and lovers cross a further taboo because they are outside of the caste and class of their brides, separated either geographically or financially. Dewey Dell Bundren is in a similar position. Though her family is generally looked down upon among their peers, her lover

Lafe, who works for the property-owning Bundren family, is still below her in status and thus fits this pattern. While not enough information is provided regarding the relative social statuses of

18 Lena Grove and her lover Lucas Burch to speak definitively, Lena's action still asserts agency. In

Light in August, the reader learns early about how Lena left through her window when she visited her lover Lucas Burch in the night. Lena also takes action for herself and leaves to seek

Lucas in the faraway town of Jefferson, and how she leaves is also important, since the narrator mentions that “she climbed again through the window” when she left (“Light” 6, emphasis mine). Moreover, “She could have departed by the door, by daylight. Nobody would have stopped her. Perhaps she knew that” (“Light” 6). Leaving through the window rather than the front door is clandestine, as was the earlier meeting with Lucas Burch that resulted in her pregnancy, and it is also done without regard to her brother's wishes or approval. In this way,

Lena's flight from her brother's house parallels Miss Quentin's escape from the Compson house in The Sound and the Fury, with her brother's ill-gotten fortune in tow. Both choosing to visit

Lucas Burch and choosing to leave through the window to go after him, are acts of agency, done in defiance of the restrictive society represented by her brother. Further, up to the very end of

Light in August, Lena rebuffs Byron Bunch’s advances, suggesting perhaps that she is unwilling to implicitly submit to his authority and eventually marry him, thereby giving up the power to act that she seized for herself by going to Jefferson.

Temple Drake, by contrast to Lena, uses her sexuality as a hedonistic pleasure rather than in such a tempered manner as Lena. Temple models the Southern belle image herself, in

Faulkner’s descriptions of her. When the narrator introduces Temple in Sanctuary, we see a balance between signs of vulnerability and youth, and signs of power and maturity. She has a

“high delicate head,” and “soft chin” with “eyes blankly right and left looking,” but at the same time she has a “bold painted mouth” and her eyes are “cool, predatory, and discreet”

(“Sanctuary” 32). All the more explicitly, Temple is described as “Long legged, thin armed, with

19 high small buttocks – a small childish figure no longer quite a child, not yet quite a woman”

(“Sanctuary” 106). In college, on the cusp of being a full-grown woman, Temple is both sly and naïve. Both her youth and the sheltered nature of her life growing up as the daughter of a judge make her unprepared for the situation she finds herself in. Temple’s promiscuity is also well- noted, a significant difference from examples like Caddy who have had a few partners, and Lena or Dewey Dell who had only one that we know of. Temple is unique, in that she not only is

“fallen” in the sense of having had sex, she is violently raped by the criminal Popeye. Her circumstances are particularly interesting among Faulkner’s fallen women, because she is both the victim of a more heinous violation, and the perpetrator of more ethically questionable actions than most other fallen women. Among these, she attempts to manipulate Popeye’s Memphis associate Red into killing Popeye. “He came here to kill you,” says Temple to Red, “but I said I gave him his chance. It wasn’t my fault. And now it’ll be just us” (“Sanctuary” 288). In the act of seducing Red, she hopes to enlist her help at getting away from Popeye, as earlier she was unable to take his gun from him. Yet, when she might be finally able to see Popeye punished for her own rape and for Tommy’s murder, Temple testifies instead against Goodwin.

Temple's condemnation of Goodwin is a condemnation of Horace Benbow and by extension the men who have repeatedly failed to protect her. Her companion Gowan Stevens,

Tommy, a member of Goodwin’s crew, and Red, a Memphis criminal, all attempted to protect her from Popeye. Temple also invokes the law as a defense when she is first introduced in

Sanctuary. One of the three college boys who see her walking past with Gowan says mockingly

“My father's a judge” in his “bitter, lilting falsetto,” suggesting that Temple often says this

(“Sanctuary” 33). Temple repeats this herself to Ruby Goodwin, as she holds Ruby's child

(“Sanctuary” 64). Even in the presence of those who fall outside of the law, Temple trusts that

20 her status as a judge's daughter will protect her. By turning the legal system away from Popeye, the one who has caused her most harm, Temple is symbolically rejecting the authority of that system and its ability to protect her. It can also be seen as a way to get back at Ruby Goodwin for having insulted her before. Temple represents a complex case: a victim of a horrible crime, but a sinister, manipulative figure. Moreover, though she is powerless for most of the story, held prisoner by Popeye, she asserts her own agency by defying those who would judge her. It is questionable, however, whether anyone in Faulkner’s fiction has an ability to change their fate, or make any meaningful decisions about their lives.

Even those fallen women who appear to be acting knowingly. Caddy, for instance, was

“Doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeing or fleeing it” (“Sound” 413).

Caddy exercises her sexuality and is able to obtain a lot of money despite societal norms. On the other hand, however, instead of rebelling against the norms and standards that put her in her position, she leaves her daughter Quentin to suffer in the same doomed home that she languished in. Similarly, the young Miss Quentin is “The last. Candace’s daughter. Fatherless nine months before her birth, nameless at birth and already doomed to be unwed from the instant the dividing egg determined its sex” (“Sound” 424). Fallen women like Miss Quentin and her mother

Candace may not even be acting against the traditions of their families, but instead repeating the inevitable course of fate set out for them by their parents and grandparents. John Irwin’s observation regarding this course of fate is that it takes the form of the “feeling that an ancestor’s actions can determine the actions of his descendants of generations to come by compelling them periodically to repeat his deeds” (61). Although the individual actions of each fallen woman is against what society expects and purports to want, in some way Faulkner’s work implies that these acts were still pre-ordained, part of the inevitable decline of their families and societies.

21 Determinism, and the question of whether Faulkner’s characters really can escape the fate preordained from them by their society and family history. Various cases of family history preordaining current behavior occur in both The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. As mentioned earlier, the Reverend Hightower in Light in August feels compelled to go to Jefferson because his grandfather had once ridden into the town in his cavalry regiment. Likewise, one of the novel’s most central characters, Joe Christmas, is also trapped by the actions of his own grandfather. In his grandfather’s own words, “Aint I made evil to get up and walk God’s world?

A waking pollution of God’s own face I made it” (128). Sitting and watching the grandson he knew to have mixed blood, Christmas’ grandfather eventually gets him placed out of the orphanage and into the McEachern family, something that sets him up for his eventual ruination.

When Christmas is in jail for killing Ms. Burden, his grandfather yells, “preaching lynching, telling the people how he had grandfathered the devil’s spawn and had kept it in trust for this day” (447). In the end, the Harvard professor talking to Gavin Stevens attributes Christmas’ death to the interplay between the black and white blood inside him, which prevents him from belonging with either race. “It was not alone all those thirty years which she did not know, but all those successions of thirty years before that which had put that stain either on his white blood or his black blood, whichever you will, and which killed him…. It would not be either one or the other and let his body save itself” (449). Christmas gets dragged down by his blood, both by the mistakes of his parents that led to the “stain” on that blood, and by the machinations of his grandfather who wants to see him lynched for his crimes as a spawn of the devil.

The Sound and the Fury contains a similar story with the descent from Jason Lycurgus II, to Jason III, to Quentin. Known for being a Brigadier General in the Confederate army in 1861,

Jason Lycurgus II was known as the beginning of a tradition in which each Compson thereafter

22 would “fail at everything he touched save longevity or suicide” (408). General Compson did poorly in battle, and had to keep selling off more and more of the precious Compson Domain to pay the mortgage on the whole of it. Jason III fell into drink, sold off the last of the Compson land with the exception of the house, and developed an entirely cynical and deterministic view of the world that he eventually passed onto Quentin. By bequeathing to Quentin his own father’s watch, Jason III symbolically predisposes his son to the same kind of failure as his father, saying

“Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s…. Because no battle is ever won, he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools” (93). Quentin twists the hands off the watch, but he cannot stop its incessant tick, or “the transmission of General Copson’s failure and defeatism and the burden of remembering a past that paralyzes the present” (Irwin 64). Faulkner’s pattern of trapping characters in the endless web of events passed and the machinations of cruel fate, as seen in Hightower, Joe Christmas, and Quentin Compson alike, can be applied equally to the fallen woman. In one sense, their actions can be viewed as a defiance of circumstance, despite being born into a harsh, oppressive environment. When, for example, Miss Quentin steals back the money that is rightfully hers from Jason, it seems like a victory. Initially it seems as though the fallen woman fights back against her society and successfully causes the downfall of the family that has hurt her so much. Faulkner's references to doom and family-ordained failure, however, suggest that the fallen woman may be trapped just as her male counterparts are, in a cycle of failure that eventually brings down the Southern aristocratic legacies Faulkner establishes.

23 A second pattern in the realm of Faulkner’s fallen women are those who seem to be entirely victims of circumstance, either unable to understand or unable to do anything about their circumstances. Dewey Dell Bundren, in particular, disavows her own agency in her sexual relations with Lafe, insisting that it all depends on whether her cotton-picking sack is full when they reach an area called the “secret shade”: “I said if it don't mean for me to do it the sack will be full and I will turn up the next row but if the sack is full, I cannot help it” (“Dying” 26).

Dewey Dell constructs herself as an object rather than an agent of her sexuality, controlled by an undefined “it” which “meant” for her to exercise that sexuality. In As I Lay Dying, the narrator constructs her sexual identity differently from the way The Sound and the Fury's narrator constructs Caddy's before her. Instead of images of filth and degeneration, Dewey Dell is accompanied by images of warmth, bounty, and animals.

Numerous descriptions in Dewey Dell's sections give a distinctly bovine character to her sexuality, as evidenced when she describes a cow in the stable. “She nuzzles at me, snuffing,”

Dewey Dell describes, “blowing her breath in a sweet, hot blast, through my dress, against my hot nakedness, moaning” (59). The cow's breath is described continually throughout Dewey

Dell's section as “moaning,” “sweet,” and “warm, sweet, stertorous, moaning” (59-61). The cow's image suggests corpulence, fertility, warmth, a description that makes its way into The

Sound and the Fury as well when Quentin associates Caddy's “periodical filth” with “Moons... full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs” (159). Faulkner refers to a tradition that views female sexuality as fertile, bountiful, in the sense of tribal fertility goddesses. Eula Varner

Snopes, of The Hamlet, serves as one of the clearest examples of this burgeoning fertility. From the beginning of her section of the novel, the narrator makes a point to describe her premature development, as “though not yet thirteen years old, she was already bigger than most grown

24 women and even her breasts were no longer the little, hard, fiercely-pointed cones of puberty or even maidenhood (95). This accelerated development “suggested some symbology out of the old

Dionysic times – honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof” (“The Hamlet” 95). Faulkner calls back to the same Greek mythology that tied Caddy's sexuality with filth and damnation to tie Eula's to fertility and divinity. Eula also demonstrates a curious commentary on female agency by her marked indolence, refusing to walk to school, do housework, or even move at all unless she needs to. On the one hand she is defying the expectations of the restrictive society she lives in, but on the other her refusal to move is the exact opposite of a character like Lena taking action on behalf of her agency. Eula's defiance makes her father think that “All we want anyway is to keep her out of trouble until she gets old enough to sleep with a man without getting me and him both arrested. Then you can marry her off” (“The Hamlet” 98). In this sense, Eula's sexuality represents an important pattern in Faulkner. Being completely passive and immobile herself,

Eula displays no sexual desire at the beginning of the novel. Instead, her sexuality is constructed by men, including her father, her husband, and even her school teacher Labove.

One of Faulkner's early female characters, Margaret Powers of Soldiers' Pay, establishes the relation of women to men's construction of them in much of Faulkner’s oeuvre. Linda

Wagner points out how one of Margaret's conversations “foreshadows the attitudes of Jenny Du

Pre, Addie Bundren, Lena Grove, Eula Snopes, and many other of Faulkner's women” when she says “Men are the ones who worry about our good names, because they gave them to us.... What you mean by a good name is like a dress that's too flimsy to wear comfortably” (130). Women's purity in Faulkner is a male invention, a contrivance that Caddy's father Jason reveals to Quentin in The Sound and the Fury. “Women are never virgins,” Quentin recalls his father saying,

25 “Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. It’s nature is hurting you not Caddy” (

“Sound” 143). Mr. Jason's deeply skeptical attitude critiques the Southern society that punishes young women for exercising their sexuality. His son Jason, however, has the exact opposite attitude, and represents many of the ways in which sexual transgressions gain meaning in

Faulkner's South.

Opening his section “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say,” Jason spends most of his time obsessing about Miss Quentin's misadventures, which include wearing makeup, revealing attire (by Jason's standard anyway), and meeting out-of-town musicians presumably for sexual purposes (“Sound” 223). In keeping with aforementioned patterns regarding family legacy, Jason is particularly sensitive to, and yet delusional about, how the world sees him and his family, and sees Miss Quentin's sexual transgressions as affronts to his image in the community. To hear him say it, despite the fact that he merely works at a hardware store, “I've got a position in this town, and I'm not going to have any member of my family going on like a nigger wench” (“Sound”

234). Jason's sense of pride is key to his preoccupation with Miss Quentin's sexuality, as well as the town's awareness of it. One facet of this is racial pride, shown by Jason's referring to “a nigger wench.” Jason's narrative reveals an evident dislike for black people, and he evokes the

Southern stereotype of the promiscuous Negro woman, in contrast to the model of the virtuous

Southern Belle that Miss Quentin is expected to follow. Stuck in a typical Southern working- class life, Jason takes every opportunity to safeguard his own pride, just as when Lena Grove's brother in Light in August clings desperately to his own “bloodpride” (6). Race, like sexuality, is another way Jason can prop up his own ego, setting himself above other people. This can also be seen in his frequent anti-Semitic paranoia regarding shifting stock prices in the cotton market.

26 Although Jason's accomplishments are not significant, he keeps his pride at any cost, including blaming Caddy for his position. In his dealings with Caddy, Jason blackmails her, steals from her, and cheats her at every possible opportunity. When Caddy offers money for one look at Miss Quentin, Jason lets her see her daughter only once, passing by in a carriage. His response justifies this cruelty on the grounds that Caddy's failed marriage cost Jason a position at

Herbert's bank: “I didn't feel so bad. I says I reckon that'll show you. I reckon you'll know now that you cant beat me out of a job and get away with it” (255). Jason's indignation may come partly from her damaging the family name, but it appears to be due to his own personal pride. “I don't have much pride,” he says, but that little he has comes from his family: “Blood, I says, governors and generals. It's a damn good thing we never had any kings and presidents; we'd all be down there at Jackson” (286). Jason ties insanity directly to how far the current Compson family is from its legacy, and in his view Miss Quentin's sexual reputation is catalyzing that fall.

Her misadventures with musicians in particular will result in “them telling the new ones up and down the road where to pick up a hot one when they made Jefferson” (286). Doubtless Jason's obsession with Miss Quentin's sexual behavior is not all related to his pride. Reputation-related concerns aside, something is inherently creepy about Jason's thought that “I'm afraid all the time

I'll run into them right in the middle of the street or under a wagon on the square, like a couple of dogs” (299). The very visual way Jason imagines Miss Quentin's sexuality suggests that his obsession with her is similar to Quentin's with Caddy: not quite incestuous, but certainly beyond the scope of familial reputation and legacy. Yet all of Jason's concerns have one common source: his mother.

Caroline Compson, the matron of the Compson family, serves as a counter-example to the notion that men construct the mores around female sexuality. Hyper-conscious of her

27 Bascomb roots, Caroline’s self-pitying hypochondria embodies the kind of self-centered pride her favored son Jason exhibits in his narration. Her refusal, influenced by Jason’s need to hide his embezzlement, to burn the checks Caddy is sending is also a show of pride. According to

Caroline, the family needs “no charity, especially that of a fallen woman” (“Sound” 273).

Moreover, she is one of the primary enforcers of sexual mores in the Compson household. While her husband would have preferred to allow Caddy to return to the family home, Caroline keeps her out. As soon as Caddy began to show signs of sexual interest, specifically in this case kissing a boy, Caroline put on funeral attire and repeatedly said that her daughter was dead. Even though

Mr. Jason asserts that virginity “means less to women” and “it was men invented virginity not women,” Caroline serves as an example to the contrary: a woman who is more concerned with virginity than her husband (“Sound” 96). Faulkner’s construction of the Southern patriarchal concept of virginity thus becomes more complex and multifaceted than it first appears. Instead of men creating standards for women to live up to, both men and women enforce standards for roles that both genders can fail to uphold. For each Southern belle who does not live up to the standard of virginity, there is a male relative who does not live up to society’s standards of masculinity, and each side heavily influences the other.

One characteristic of the Southern belle, for example, is that she has a strong male figure beside her to defend her purity. As a figure of fragile beauty, she had to be protected by men, particularly from the sexual desires of other men (Klancar 48). Just as the figure of a helpless, innocent Southern belle requires a strong man to provide the defense she cannot have herself, the strong man needs to be able to defend a young woman’s purity. By her fragility and helplessness, the Southern belle serves “to empower the man’s feeling of confidence, strength and domination” (Klancar 48). Bother genders’ roles necessarily entail the other, and both serve

28 mutually to reinforce the other. Thus, a fallen woman means a sort of fallen man as well. Quentin

Compson serves as one example of a character failing to fulfill his male role. Quentin fails to show strength in defending his sister’s purity, and fails to show his own masculine virility at the same time.

Quentin’s attempts to fight Dalton Ames, once by a bridge, and once subconsciously during an outing with his classmate Gerald, serve as clear examples of his lack of masculine strength. Shreve reports that Gerald was discussing the various girls he had bedded, in a disparaging fashion, when Quentin flew into a rage and attacked him, suggesting that Gerald's disrespect for women, or his willingness to “corrupt” them through sexuality is what brought on

Quentin's blind rage. Spoade sarcastically mocks Quentin as “the champion of dames. Bud, you excite not only admiration, but horror” (“Sound” 207). Quentin wants to be such a champion, but fails to be, being physically inferior to the men he attacks. Quentin’s challenge to Dalton Ames in flashback is similarly embarrassing for Quentin, but is also fraught with symbolic meaning regarding masculinity. Dalton Ames demonstrates his prowess with a pistol, hitting a very small target floating in the water beneath the bridge, and then offers the pistol to Quentin, who refuses.

Quentin is attempting to fulfill what John Irwin calls his role of “avenging brother,” avenging his sister’s lost virginity by killing her seducer (25). Irwin describes the significance of this episode, and the pistol, thusly: “Quentin, by rejecting the use of the pistol with its phallic significance and thus avoiding the necessity of risking his life to back up his words, relinquishes the masculine role of avenging brother and finds suddenly that in relation to the seducer he has shifted to a feminine role” (39). On the continuum of masculinity, Quentin is lesser compared to Dalton

Ames, and thus assumes the feminine in that relationship.

29 Quentin’s connections to femininity, even as expressed by his own words, do not end there. When Quentin attempts to hit Dalton Ames, Quentin’s hands are restrained and he eventually passes out with no blows being traded at all. Ames claims the opposite, and Quentin thinks “I knew that he hadn’t hit me that he had lied about that for her sake too and that I had just passed out like a girl” (“Sound” 201). Quentin takes identifying himself as “like a girl” a step farther when he imagines taking his revenge against Dalton Ames. “Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames.

Dalton Ames. If I could have been his mother lying with open body lifted laughing, holding his father with my hand refraining, seeing, watching him die before he lived” (“Sound” 98). Not only does Quentin imagine taking on the role of a female as a method of taking revenge on

Dalton Ames, but he also uses the very female purity that Dalton Ames had allegedly destroyed as a weapon against him. Thus, Quentin turns his virginity from something he regrets and vociferously denies, into something that gives him power.

Quentin is also emasculated by his virginity, his impotent inability to exercise the same sexuality he fears in his sister. Quentin recalls that his father Jason had discovered this problem in him during his narration in The Sound and the Fury. “In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin,” he says. “Boys. Men. They lie about it” (96). And Quentin does lie about it in one of his flashback conversations with Caddy:

“poor Quentin… you’ve never done that have you

what done what

that what I have what I did

yes yes lots of times with lots of girls” (188).

Quentin cries in Caddy’s embrace, and recalls the time he saw her muddy drawers on the day of Damuddy’s funeral. Quentin’s next actions in this scene are also telling, when he holds a

30 knife to Caddy’s throat. As Irwin points out, the knife is a phallic symbol just as the gun that

Quentin refused to use, and his conversation with Caddy at various points “parodies that of sexual intercourse” (46). Not only are some of the statements Irwin points out potential double entendres (e.g. “no like this youll have to push it harder” “push it are you going to” “touch your hand to it”), his conversations with Caddy contain what seems similar to sexual moaning. As

Quentin forcibly holds Caddy, he asserts his masculinity both through a show of physical strength beyond Caddy’s, and through suggestions of an incestuous sexual encounter:

“Oh

I used to hold you like this you thought I wasnt strong enough didnt you

Oh Oh Oh Oh

I hold to use like this I mean did you hear what I said I said

oh oh oh oh” (“Sound” 168).

In this light the statement Faulkner gave in the Index to The Sound and the Fury that

Quentin “loved not his sister’s body” looks more ironic, as a way to call attention to the mock- sexual nature of their relationship rather than to disavow it entirely (411). Just as Jason seems to have an unhealthy obsession with Miss Quentin’s sexual behavior, Quentin has a need to understand Caddy’s sexuality and to confront her about it that borders on incestuous lust.

Quentin’s inability to fulfil those desires is a further sign of his impotence, and a lack of masculinity. When Quentin holds a knife to Caddy’s throat, this serves as an example of a mock- sexual encounter that Quentin is unable to go through with. “When Candace tells him to go ahead and use the knife, his fear unmans him; he drops the phallic knife and loses it, and when he tells Candace that he will find it in a moment, she asks, ‘Are you afraid to?’” (Irwin 47).

Quentin’s emasculation at the hands of both his sister and Dalton Ames provide examples of a

31 certain “psychological impotence,” as John Irwin puts it. Such impotence extends both to the sexual and the act of revenge, something Quentin realizes.

When Quentin plans to go in front of his father and claim “Father I have committed…” with the obvious connection being incest with Caddy, he is demonstrating both his inability to safeguard her sexuality from those who would violate it, and his inability to seduce Caddy himself. By admitting incest to his father Quentin attempts to bring on himself the appropriate retribution for having “corrupted” Caddy, because he was unable to enact that punishment on

Dalton Ames. At the same time, this lie would establish Quentin as a sexual being, capable of having committed such a taboo. However, his father does not even think to believe his claim. In their conversation, Mr. Jason discovers what Quentin’s motivation is for claiming to have committed incest:

“you could not be in earnest

and i you dont believe i am serious

and he i think you are too serious to give me cause for alarm you wouldnt have

felt driven to the expedient of telling me you have committed incest otherwise

and i i wasn’t lying

and he you wanted to sublimate a natural piece of human folly into a horror and to

exorcise it with truth” (219-220).

Mr. Jason’s denial that Quentin had committed incest is an implicit statement that Quentin is not sexually potent enough to have carried out the taboo, and an implicit refusal to act out the role that Quentin could not, avenger of Caddy’s sexuality.

Caddy, with respect to Quentin, seems to occupy a more masculine role. She is the one with the active sexuality, and the one who seems unafraid when Quentin threatens her. In a way

32 Caddy undermines the entire male structure of the Compson family, revealing to Quentin his own lack of potency and strength, and at the same time revealing that her brother Jason is unable to provide the basic function of the patriarchal head of the household: providing for the family.

In a larger sense, the fallen woman figure thus serves the purpose of showing the inadequacy of the masculine members of her family, and of the Southern family system itself.

Temple Drake, too, is constantly challenging the masculinity of men who purport to be her protectors. Gowan Stevens brings her into danger through the drunken carelessness that leads them both to Lee Goodwin's house. Once there, a frightened Temple pleads with Gowan to ask

Popeye for a ride out. Gowan proves afraid to face Popeye, refusing to ask him for a ride and failing to rebuke him when he calls Temple whore. Temple says to Gowan: “You're scared of him!” (“Sanctuary” 58). As her male companion, Gowan's responsibility should be to protect

Temple, but he is either too drunk or too cowardly to be able to fulfill that role. He also shows himself physically incapable when Van, a particularly threatening member of Goodwin’s crew, bloodies and scars him badly in a fight. He then flees Goodwin’s house alone, leaving Temple to be taken by Popeye. Tommy, another member of Goodwin’s crew, is the second to take to

Temple’s defense. As Temple sleeps, Tommy follows Popeye watchfully, yet he too is frightened. As he walks he begins to “writhe… in shocked indecision, his bare feet whispering on the floor with a faint, rocking movement as he swayed from side to side” (“Sanctuary” 91-

92). Tommy dies trying to defend Temple from Popeye, but ultimately fails to stop him from both violating and kidnapping her. Red also appears ready to fight with Popeye over Temple, who asks him the same question she asked Gowan “Are you afraid?” (“Sanctuary” 288). Yet,

Popeye kills Red as well. Throughout Sanctuary, Temple relies on various men to defend her,

33 but yet all of them fail, thereby showing that they are failing in the role that society has assigned for them as protectors of women.

Temple’s questioning of masculinity even goes as far as insulting Popeye, despite the fact that Temple knows he is willing to kill. She questions Popeye’s impotence, the reason he enlists

Red to have sex with Temple while he watches: “You, a man, a bold bad man, when you cant even– When you had to bring a real man in to– And you hanging over the bed, moaning and slobbering like a– You couldn’t fool me but once, could you?” (“Sanctuary” 278). Temple directly challenges the masculinity of various men throughout the course of Sanctuary, demonstrating their failure to live up to society’s standards in a similar way to herself. Running a range of physical and sexual impotence, the men of Sanctuary follow the same Faulknerian pattern as Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury.

Byron Bunch is another example of an ineffectual Faulknerian male, albeit one with a good heart. Byron is described as having “forgotten” love, if he had ever even experienced it before (“Light” 47). A mystery to his co-workers at the mill, Byron is the only one to work

Saturdays there, and spends every Sunday leading a church choir in a town thirty miles away from Jefferson. Against his “austere and jealous country raising which demands in the object physical inviolability,” Byron falls in love with Lena at first sight, and immediately begins following the same dual-role Quentin attempted with Caddy: simultaneously seducer and protector. Though not Lena’s brother, Byron seeks to protect what he sees as Lena’s innocence as much as he can. He does this by staying with her at night, offering her his cot, saying he

“didn’t dare leave her” lest she hear that the Lucas Burch she’s looking for has become a bootlegger and taken up with Joe Christmas (“Light” 88). Moreover, he attempts to arrange for her to be married, sparing her the embarrassment that would come from the town knowing she

34 was a fallen woman. Byron’s protectiveness extends to a desire to confront Lucas Burch, who had originally abandoned Lena.

Running away from town after hearing that Lena’s baby has been born, Lucas Burch waits to get on a train, having left behind the reward for helping the authorities track down

Christmas. Byron, resolved to defeat, attacks him: “’You’re bigger than me,’ Byron thought.

‘But I don’t care. You’ve had every other advantage of me. And I don’t care about that neither.

You’ve throwed away twice inside nine months what I aint had in thirtyfive years. And now I’m going to get the hell beat out of me and I don’t care about that, neither” (“Light” 439). Byron feels the obligation to fight Lucas Burch, even though he has no chance of winning. He strikes against Lucas Burch out of anger at his own impotence, at the fact that Lena does not desire him the same way she once did Lucas Burch. The anonymous furniture dealer who narrates the final chapter of Light in August mocks Byron, saying “I just couldn’t imagine anybody, any woman, knowing that they had ever slept with him, let alone having anything to show folks to prove it”

(“Light” 496). Lena rebuffs Byron’s attempted advances as they sleep by the furniture dealer’s wagon, further showing Byron’s impotence and her own self-determination. Byron follows the same pattern as Quentin, living up to neither the role of protector nor the role of seducer.

In this fashion, the fallen woman not only flouts the expectations of her society, she also actively reveals the failings of masculinity. How they reveal these deficiencies varies, but each fallen woman plays an instrumental part in the fall of her family and therefore the fall of the

Southern society built on the family unit.

35

Conclusion

Faulkner’s fallen women are among the most interesting, most central characters in his greatest works of fiction. Characters like Caddy, Lena Grove, Temple Drake, and Dewey Dell

Bundren defy and reveal the inadequacies of the repressive systems they inhabit by acting outside of Southern society’s expectations in ways that continue the slow decline of the Southern family dynamic into the economically-minded New South. First, they do this by implicitly showing that the expectations placed on them are unreasonable and unable to be met. The foundational double standards placed on male and female sexuality show themselves in them, as their sexual exercises are punished just as their brothers’ lack of sexual action is frowned upon.

Second, they show their own vital role in the systems they inhabit. By their “act of sedition,” they show that the families they were formerly apart of collapse without them, revealing that women as well as men are able to uproot the Southern patriarchal family structure by refusing to act out the roles they have been assigned. Third and finally, they reveal that their male counterparts who are expected to uphold the next generation of Southern society are inadequate to do so by the standards of that society. When Caddy reveals Quentin’s emasculation and inability to avenge her sexuality, Lena rebuffs Byron Bunch’s advances, or Temple questions the courage and fortitude of those who attempt to protect her, they show that their failure to live up to society’s standards is by no means unique. Overall, the fallen woman fulfils perhaps the most central role in all of Faulkner’s fiction: showing the failure and corruption inherent in the pre- and post-Civil War South.

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ACADEMIC VITA

Academic Vita of Jeffrey Romano

Education Major(s) and Minor(s): Major in English and Communication Arts and Sciences Honors: Schreyer Honors College

Thesis Title: William Faulkner and the Fallen Woman Thesis Supervisor: Michael Bérubé

Awards: Ann Good Moore and Howard R. Moore Jr. Undergraduate Scholarship English Internship Award in English, English Internship Award