Ties of Blood: Gender, Race and Faulkner By Kristin Kyoko Fujie A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Carolyn Porter, Chair Professor Elizabeth Abel Professor Judith Butler Fall 2010 Ties of Blood: Gender, Race and Faulkner © 2010 by Kristin Kyoko Fujie Abstract Ties of Blood: Gender, Race and Faulkner by Kristin Kyoko Fujie Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Carolyn Porter, Chair This dissertation proposes a new reading of William Faulkner’s career from his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), through The Sound and the Fury (1929). I argue that Faulkner’s probing of sexual relations in the 1920s provides the necessary context for understanding his treatment of race relations in the 1930s, and that his turn toward the issue of miscegenation should be read as a moment of crisis and transformation, in which racial anxiety explodes within an established landscape of sexual anxiety that takes the female body as its troubled matrix. Reading this crisis requires that we rethink the overall shape of Faulkner’s career, starting with the text widely regarded as his first “important” novel. By resituating The Sound and the Fury within the context of the earlier, under-appreciated writings—Soldiers’ Pay, Elmer, Mosquitoes, and Flags in the Dust—I argue that the novel is a pivotal rather than seminal text, one that newly articulates the psychosexual drama of the early career to the socio-historical problems that will increasingly occupy Faulkner in his subsequent work. Only when we see how the inward, psychological explorations of the early writings enable Faulkner’s engagement with the U.S. South, and how his turn toward his “native soil” expands and enriches the solipsistic landscapes of the previous novels, can we begin to understand the complex ways that gender and race, psychosexual trauma and historical injury, speak through, for and over one another in the author’s later work. 1 Table of Contents Introduction ii Part One: “All that inside” Preface 1 I. “The image within him”: Elmer (ca. 1925) 8 II. “Where do they carry so much blood?”: Mosquitoes (1927) 19 III. “Her blood or my blood”: The Sound and the Fury (1929) 28 Part Two: “Getting it all mixed up” Preface 44 IV. “Two rotten tricks”: Soldiers’ Pay (1926) 47 V. “The shadow of death and doom”: Flags in the Dust (ca. 1927) 66 VI. “Like sharp black trickles”: The Sound and the Fury (1929) 92 i Introduction This dissertation constitutes the first half of what I envision as a book length reevaluation of Faulkner's career as it addresses the issues of gender and race. Taking up Eric Sundquist’s claim that race is, for this author, “the issue that determines and defines all others” (8), I argue that Faulkner’s probing of sexual relations in the 1920s provides the necessary context for understanding his treatment of race relations in the 1930s, and that his turn toward the issue of miscegenation should be read not as a moment of division, as Sundquist suggests (ix), but of transformation, when racial anxiety explodes within an established landscape of sexual anxiety that takes the female body as its troubled matrix. In the pages that follow I endeavor to map that landscape as it emerges in the early and, with the exception of the last, under-appreciated novels of the 1920s—Soldiers’ Pay (1926), Elmer (ca. 1925), Mosquitoes (1927), and Flags in the Dust (ca. 1927)—only to collapse in on itself in The Sound and the Fury (1929). The central assertion that I advance here is that The Sound and the Fury should be read as a pivotal rather than a seminal text, one which brings to a crisis the problems of female sexuality and embodiment that are central to Faulkner’s earlier writings, even as it opens this complex to the issues of race relations and miscegenation that will increasingly occupy his mature work. Only when we recognize that race becomes, in this way, articulated as a subject for Faulkner from within a problematic of gender and sexuality, can we begin to understand how these issues become so intimately bound up with one another in novels such as Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!. While gender and race are the key terms of this study, in thinking between them I am also trying to reconcile two broader registers in Faulkner’s writings: on the one hand, the “psychosexual” orientation of his early novels, in which the author maps the white male psyche in relation to issues of sexual difference, female sexuality and the female body; and, on the other hand, the “historical” orientation of his later novels, in which he grapples much more directly with the U.S. South and the legacy of slavery. By exploring how Faulkner’s engagement with race relations in the novels of the 1930s is preceded and enabled by his earlier engagement with gender in the 1920s, my reading of the career both acknowledges and resists this distinction. I want to insist that Faulkner’s writing does move toward a more rigorous engagement with the U.S. south in all its socio-historical complexity, but that this trajectory need not be understood as a progression away from his earlier, psychosexual investments; rather, as I argue here, Faulkner’s turn toward history and the social can be read as a deepening of his commitment to the inner, private life of the subject in ways that are continuous with the insights of his earlier novels. Indeed, it is only when we recognize how Faulkner’s treatment of historical trauma is fundamentally shaped by his earlier mapping of psychosexual trauma, that we can appreciate how these two injuries remain intimately bound together, along with the correlated issues of gender and race, in Faulkner’s most powerful fiction. Although the later works that I have in mind—Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!—do not receive full ii readings in this dissertation, my understanding of their places within the career as a whole rests largely upon the foundation that I lay down here. I will therefore gesture forward to these novels at appropriate moments and conclude with a summary statement that indicates the difference that my reading of the early career makes for our understanding of the work to follow. There is a deeper proleptic dimension to the entirety of this project insofar as the original impetus for my reevaluation of Faulkner’s work lies not at its beginnings but rather in the novel that constitutes, in my view, its pinnacle: Absalom, Absalom!. In order to grasp the seed of my argument, we must therefore begin by looking forward, beyond the actual parameters of this study, to an often cited but little understood scene from that novel, which is emblematic in my view of how gender and race interact in Faulkner’s work of the 1930s. The scene in question is a memory, recounted by the novel’s sole female narrator, Rosa Coldfield, of her confrontation as a young, white woman with the young, black woman and slave, Clytie Sutpen. The encounter occupies only an instant, the time it takes Rosa to move from the hallway of Sutpen’s mansion to the foot of the stairs, and for the two women to struggle as Rosa attempts to mount the stairs and Clytie attempts to restrain her. Rosa’s memory, however, dilates the moment into five pages in which she and Clytie move inexorably toward one another, and into a culminating event that seems to absorb all of the passionate longing, frustration and grief at least of Rosa’s own youth and maybe even of the entire novel: Clytie’s touch. Here is the encounter, pared down to its essential moments: Then she touched me, and then I did stop dead. [...] [...] Yes, I stopped dead—no woman’s hand, no negro’s hand, but bitted bridle-curb to check and guide the furious and unbending will—I crying not to her, to it: speaking to it through the negro, the woman, only because of the shock which was not yet outrage because it would be terror soon, expecting and receiving no answer because we both knew it was not to her I spoke: ‘Take your hand off me, nigger!’ I got none. We just stood there—I motionless in the action of running, she rigid in that furious immobility, the two of us joined by that hand and arm which held us, like a fierce rigid umbilical cord, twin sistered to the fell darkness which had produced her. [...] We stood there so. And then suddenly it was not outrage that I waited for, out of which I had instinctively cried; it was not terror: it was some cumulative over-reach of despair itself. I remember how as we stood there joined by that volitionless (yes: it too sentient victim just as she and I were) hand, I cried—perhaps not aloud, not with words [...]—I cried ‘And you too, sister, sister?’ (111-113) That Clytie’s hand generates a personal crisis for Rosa is clear, but her touch also creates a broader, narrative crisis by binding the novel’s greatest discharge of emotional energy to an encounter that has no obvious bearing upon the Sutpen family drama that forms its central plot. Rosa’s command, “Take your hand off me, nigger!” is explosive enough, but it is the subsequent “cry,” made “perhaps not aloud, not with words,” that threatens to derail the story which Mr.