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The Conflict Between Woman and Community in Two Short Stories by William Faulkner

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The Conflict Between Woman and Community in Two Short Stories by William Faulkner THE CONFLICT BETWEEN WOMAN AND COMMLNITY IN TWO SHORT STORIES BY WILLIAM FAULKNER ' CRISTINA BLANCO OUTÓN Universidad de Santiago (Resumen) En este trabajo nos disponemos a estudiar dos ejemplos paradigmáticos del choque entre sujeto femenino e imposición social característico de la narrativa de William Faulkner. Pese a que en numerosas ocasiones este autor fue tachado de misógino, intentaremos demostrar que sus escritos evidencian un profundo conocimiento y comprensión de la problemática posición de la mujer en la sociedad patriarcal del Sur de los Estados Unidos de la primera mitad de este siglo. Los relatos elegidos para probar tal tesis, "A Rose for Emily" y "Dry September", tienen como protagonistas a dos figuras femeninas que, consciente o inconscientemente, retan a la comunidad a la que pertenecen no sometiéndose a los roles de esposas fieles y madres abnegadas que les están reservados y provocan el desconcierto de un colectivo que se erigirá en guardián, juez y carcelero de las existencias de ambos personajes. "A Rose for Emily" and "Dry September" are two paradigmatic examples of the clash between women and the impositions of society in William Faulkner's narrative. In spite of the fact that Faulkner was oñen accused of being a misogynist, I shall attempt to show that his work evinces of a deep understanding and comprehension of the problematic role of women in the patriarchal society of the early twentieth century South, as the following quotation suggests: The women that have been unpleasant characters in my books were not created to be unpleasant characters, let alone to be unpleasant women. They were used as ' implements, Instruments, to tell a story, which I was trying to tell, which 1 hoped showed that injustice must exist and you cant just accept it, you got to do something about it. I. The research that is here reported on has been fiínded by the Galician Government through its Conselleria de Educación y Ordenación Universitaria, grant number PROY93- 082. This grant is hereby gratefully acknowledged. 2.. See Albert J. Guerard, "Faulkner's Misogyny," in William Faulkner: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1977): 143-70. 3.. "Interviews in Japan," in Lion in the Carden: Interviews with William Faulkner ¡926- ¡962, eds. James B. Meriwether & Michael Millgate (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1980, Ist edition 1968), 125. Elizabeth M. Kerr emphasizes this with respect to women in the South and points out that Faulkner's attitude to them, as seen in his various female characters, has not been interpreted correctly on many occasions: "The Southern ideal sets the pattem from 40 Cristina Blanco Outón The protagonists of the stories "A Rose for Etnily" and "Dry September", are two women who, consciously or unconsciously, challenge the community to which they belong by not adopting the roles of static icons, faithftil wives and self-sacrificing mothers. Thus they disconcert the most outstanding males in their town, who have set themselves up as the guardians, judges and jailers of these two women's existences. As Elizabeth M. Kerr points out, in this aspect of his work, Faulkner is being very faithful to the histórica! realities of his time in which For white gentlewomen, free, spontaneous emotion was damned up, often without any outlet, legitímate or otherwise: the result was, at best, hypocrisy, at worst perversión of some kind. 1. "A ROSE FOR EMILY" This story has as its subject the vicissitudes of a spinster belonging to an aristocratic family whose fortunes are now declining. This lonely woman described by Faulkner as "the indomitable and undefeated maiden",' is motherless and grows up under the stifling influence of her father, who does not allow her to mix with other men. Once her father dies, Miss Emily tries to keep his corpse with her which leads the chief members of the town to break into her home to prevent this breach of decorum, convention and good sense. Some time later, to the horror of her neighbours, she begins to go out with a worker from the North, who then suddenly disappears. Once again she ñnds herself isolated in the middle of a hostile community who once more break into her mansión to discover why it is emanating such a bad smell. After the death of the protagonist the town discovers, to its terror, that Miss Emily has been living with the corpse of her former suitor, Homer Barron, who, according to local legend, had left her in the lurch. "A Rose for Emily" is very clearly located in Jeñerson, a fictional versión of Faulkner's birthplace, Oxford, Mississippi. If we take into account the criterium of Geene M. Moore, we could say that the story begins in 1888 with the death of the heroine's father and brings US up to 1930, the death of Miss Grierson and its publication.* The wide span of time covered by the tale justifies as much the longevity of the protagonist as the fact that she has been able to witness the transition from a traditional to a more modem society in the South. During all this time Miss Emily lives shut up in her mansión and surrounded by a which Faulkner's characters tend to deviate. Consideration of the causes and consequences of Southern gyneolatry suggests why Faulkner rejects the ideal and why, in so doing, he may be revealing sympathy rather than scom for some of his women characters whose deeds cannot be praised." ("William Faulkner and the Southern Concept of Woman," Mississippi Quarterly\5[\96\-62]:2). 4. "Faulkner and the Concept of Woman," 5. 5. See: Stephen M. Ross, Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner (Athens: Georgia UP, 1989), 264 (n. 27). 6. See: Moore, Gene M. "Of Time and Its Mathematical Progression: Problems of Chronology in Faulkner's k Rose for Emily.'" Studies in Short Fiction 29 (1992): 202-203. The Conflict between Woman anJ Community... 41 own that consider her, just like her house, to be "an eyesore among eyesores" (p. 119).' The narrator who describes her so is a first person representative of this community, someone who, from beginning to end, spies on the last member of the Grierson family in an attempt to discover and reveal "that touch of earthiness" (p.l25) of this member of the aristocracy. This narrator, when he gives his opinions and judgements (which are almost always incorrect), joins the reactionary group in the town by using the pronoun "we", a "we" in direct opposition to Miss Emily. The story opens with this opposition: "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral" (p.l 19, my italics). If the narrator of the story believes that his town is not incomplete because of Miss Emily's death, this is due to the fact that he never considered her an integral part of a community whose only unifying factor is the envy that its members feel towards the position of superiority that the protagonist occupies. A complex mixture'of admiration and hate joins them against Miss Emily, who insists on protecting her privacy in spite of the curiosity that surrounds her. It is precisely this lack of information about a person who does not accept the submissive posture that is expected of her that so intrigues and provokes the town. To summarize what Nietzsche has said in The Twilight of Idols, reducing something unknown to something (supposedly) known relieves, soothes, satisfies, and, moreover, gives a feeling of power. with the unknown come danger, uneasiness, worries, the primary instinct is to try to elimínate these painñil states. So, the neighbours of the last of the Griersons feel a satisíying sense of power over the isolated Miss Emily when they invent a soothing set of suppositions about her, which are no more than what Judith Fetterley defines as "the grotesqueness that results when stereotypes are imposed upon reality".' Indeed, 1 agree with this critic when she says that one of the reasons for the isolation of this character is the fact that the men who make up her community insist on shutting Miss Grierson up in what they believe to be the definition of a lady. Such restrictions, mentioned explicitly by the author ("But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige..." [p. 124]), deny the protagonist her right to individuality. As the author says in another work, Absalom, Absalom!: "... years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the war carne and we made the ladies into ghosts" (p. 9). 7. The Collected Stories ofWilliam faulkner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, Ist edition 1950). From this point onwards all references made to the stories will be taken fi-om this edition. 8. See Judith Fetterley, "A Rose for A Rose for Emily'," in her The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978), 43. Tony J. Owens adopts almost the same point of view when studying the male attitudes towards the protagonist in another of Faulkner's short stories, "Artist at Home": "The attempt to explain from an egotistical, imperceptive masculine viewpoint the feelings and actions of a woman is an important device in Faulkner's work, and it occurs in many of the early stories. The attempt is futile when it depends upon an abstract categorization of women, and its failure accompanies a narrow, distorted, or perverse viewpoint." ("Faulkner, Anderson, and "Artist at Home,'" Mississippi Quarterly 32 [1979]: 397). 9. For a study of the figure of ghost as a type of female character in Faulkner (including both Miss Rosa Coldfield and Miss Emily Grierson) see: David M.
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