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Open Romano Thesis Final2 4-13__1 .Pdf 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. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction……………………………………………………………………….…1 Family Legacy in the South…………………………………………………………3 Disruptive Sexuality and Female Agency…………………………………………..13 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..35 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………..36 1 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. 3 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 4 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.
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