William Faulkner
(1897 - 1962)

(Born William Cuthbert Falkner; changed surname to Faulkner) American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and essayist.

A preeminent figure in twentieth-century American literature, Faulkner created a profound and complex body of work that examines exploitation and corruption in the American South. Many of Faulkner's novels and short stories are set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional area reflecting the geographical and cultural background of his native Mississippi. Faulkner's works frequently reflect the tumultuous history of the South while developing perceptive explorations of human character. His use of bizarre, grotesque, and violent imagery, melodrama, and sensationalism to depict the corruption and decay of the region make him one of the earliest practitioners of the subgenre known as Southern Gothic literature. Faulkner's works that are especially well known for their Gothic qualities include the novels Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936); the novella As I Lay Dying (1930); and the short story "A Rose for Emily" (1930). They combine burlesque and dark humor with realism and elements of the horrific and macabre to caricature a society that is unable to break from its past and look to the future. Faulkner employs gothicism, then, as a searing social critique, using it to paint a picture of a culture in ruins, populated by grotesques and living ghosts who refuse to recognize their alienation and defeat.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, into a genteel Southern family. When Faulkner was five, the family moved to the town of Oxford. He showed considerable artistic talent as a boy, drawing and writing poetry, but was an indifferent student. He dropped out of high school in 1915 to work as a clerk in his grandfather's bank, began writing poetry, and submitted drawings to the University of Mississippi's yearbook. During World War I, Faulkner tried to enlist in the U.S. army, but was rejected because of his small stature. Instead, he manipulated his acceptance into the Royal Canadian Air Force by affecting a British accent and forging letters of recommendation. The war ended before Faulkner experienced combat duty, however, and he returned to his hometown, where he intermittently attended the University of Mississippi as a special student. In August, 1919, his first poem, "L'Apres-midi d'un faune," was published in New Republic, and later that year the Mississippian published one of his short stories, "Landing in Luck." After a brief period of employment as a bookstore clerk in New York, Faulkner returned to Oxford, where he was hired as a university postmaster. He resigned, however, when the postal inspector noticed that Faulkner often brought his writing to the post office and became so immersed in what he was doing that he ignored patrons.

In 1924, with the help of his friend Phil Stone, Faulkner published The Marble Faun, a volume of poetry. The following year he moved to New Orleans, where he associated with other writers, including Sherwood Anderson, and wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), which was accepted for publication. He traveled in Europe for a few months and then returned to New Orleans and continued to write. His first notable success came in 1929 with Sartoris. Later that year, a few months after he married his childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham, Faulkner published what is regarded as his greatest work, The Sound and the Fury (1929). The following year his novella As I Lay Dying and "A Rose for Emily" were published, and in 1931 Sanctuary, which had been rejected by publishers two years earlier, appeared and became a best-seller. Light in August followed in 1932, the same year Faulkner began his career in Hollywood as a screenwriter. He traveled between Mississippi and Hollywood for several years, writing scripts when he was not working on his novels and short stories. Among his film credits were To Have and Have Not (1945), based on Ernest Hemingway's novel, and The Big Sleep (1946), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's detective thriller. Works that appeared during these years include Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942).

By the mid-1940s, most Americans had largely ceased to read Faulkner's works, although they were popular in Europe. This changed in 1946 with the publication The Portable Faulkner, which renewed critical and popular interest in Faulkner's works in his native country. His election in 1948 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters was followed by his receipt of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, making Faulkner one of the most respected living American writers. He continued to write novels and stories as well as essays and plays. Faulkner won the National Book Award for his Collected Stories, published in 1950, and was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for his novels A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962). In the 1950s Faulkner was a much-sought-after lecturer throughout the world. In 1957 he became writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, dividing his time between Virginia and Mississippi. In 1959 he suffered serious injuries in horse-riding accidents. Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962.

MAJOR WORKS

From the beginning of his career, Faulkner's writing showed the influence of the Gothic tradition. His first great work, The Sound and the Fury, contains elements typical of Southern Gothic literature: grotesque characters, violence, and a dilapidated, decaying setting. The novel chronicles the disintegration of members of the Compson family who are obsessed with and controlled by forces and events from their pasts. The siblings Quentin and Caddy fall from a state of innocence and succumb to the family pattern of incest, erotomania, and suicide. Faulkner called his next novel, Sanctuary, "the most horrific tale I could imagine." Containing graphic violence and extravagant depravity, the crime thriller about the coquettish Temple Drake is a study of human evil that includes a psychopathic bootlegger, corrupt local officials, the trial of an innocent man, and a public lynching. As I Lay Dying charts the journey of a poor family to bury their mother, Addie Bundren, in Jefferson. They make the coffin themselves and survive crossing the flooded Yoknapatawpha River, a fire, and other difficulties before reaching their destination. The novella, composed of fifty-nine interior monologues providing various perspectives through constantly shifting, contrasting points of view, including that of the dead mother, is humorous, tragic, and horrifying.

As I Lay Dying was followed by Faulkner's acclaimed horror story "A Rose for Emily," considered an exemplary work of Southern Gothic fiction. The tale begins with the announcement of the death of Miss Emily Grierson, an alienated spinster living in the South in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The narrator, who speaks in the "we" voice and appears to represent the people of the town, recounts the story of Emily's life as a lonely and impoverished woman left penniless by her father, who drove away suitors from his overprotected daughter. Emily was left when her father died with a large, dilapidated house, into which the townspeople have never been invited, and there is an almost lurid interest among them when they are finally able to enter the house upon Emily's death. At that point they discover the truth about the extent of Emily's problems: she has kept the body of her lover, a Northerner named Homer Barron, locked in a bedroom since she killed him years before, and she has continued to sleep with him. Some critics initially criticized Faulkner for writing what they saw as an exploitative horror story, but commentators since then have recognized the power of the work as a commentary on the South wrapped up in the past and unable to accept change.

Other notable works by Faulkner with Gothicinspired settings and themes include Light in August, which examines the origins of personal identity and the roots of racial conflicts, and Absalom, Absalom!, about Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man from the Virginia hills who marries an aristocratic Mississippi woman, inadvertently launching a three-generation family cycle of violence, degeneracy, and mental retardation.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Early criticism of Faulkner's fiction ranged from considering it hopelessly incoherent to the work of unparalleled genius. Since the mid-1940s, the latter opinion has prevailed, and critics have come to regard Faulkner as a singular talent and writer of extraordinary scope and power. Since Faulkner's death, his work has been extensively analyzed and critics have remarked that his writing, while distinctively American and Southern, reflects, on a grander scale, the universal values of human life. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner declared that the fundamental theme of his fiction is "the human heart in conflict with itself." One of the most notable ways in which he depicts this struggle is in his portrayal of the corruption and decay of the South, and he uses Gothic imagery and atmosphere in particular to highlight this idea. Gothicism is also used in Faulkner's work to emphasize distorted religious views, the clash between those with power and those without, the isolation of the individual, humans' powerlessness in an indifferent universe, the moral decay of the community, the burden of history, the horrors of humans' treatment of each other, and the problem of evil. The vast body of Faulkner criticism that has been generated since the 1960s has included discussions of the Gothic elements in his writing, which have focused on his particular brand of American Southern Gothic; the use of gothicism to portray Southern dislocation and decadence; the Gothic influences on his writing, including English novelists and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and his influence on younger writers of Southern Gothic such as Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Marble Faun (poetry) 1924
Soldiers' Pay (novel) 1926
Mosquitoes (novel) 1927
Sartoris (novel) 1929; also published as Flags in the Dust, 1973
The Sound and the Fury (novel) 1929
As I Lay Dying (novella) 1930
"A Rose for Emily" (short story) 1930; published in the journal Forum
Sanctuary (novel) 1931
∗These Thirteen (short stories) 1931
Light in August (novel) 1932
A Green Bough (poetry) 1933
Pylon (novel) 1935
Absalom, Absalom! (novel) 1936
The Unvanquished (short stories) 1938
The Wild Palms (novellas) 1939
The Hamlet (novel) 1940
Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (short stories) 1942
To Have and Have Not [with Jules Furthman] (screenplay) 1945
The Big Sleep [with Furthman and Leigh Brackett] (screenplay) 1946
The Portable Faulkner (novellas and short stories) 1946; revised as The Essential Faulkner, 1967
Intruder in the Dust (novel) 1948
Knight's Gambit (short stories) 1949
Collected Stories of William Faulkner (short stories) 1950
Requiem for a Nun (play) 1951
A Fable (novel) 1954
The Town (novel) 1957
Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia 1957–1958 (lectures) 1959
The Mansion (novel) 1959
The Reivers (novel) 1962
Essays, Speeches and Public Letters (essays, speeches, and letters) 1966
Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926–1962 (interviews) 1968

Selected Letters of William Faulkner (letters) 1976
Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (short stories) 1979

∗ This collection includes the stories "A Rose for Emily," "All the Dead Pilots," "Victory," and "Divorce in Naples."

PRIMARY SOURCES

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GENERAL COMMENTARY

ELIZABETH M. KERR (ESSAY DATE 1979)

SOURCE: Kerr, Elizabeth M. "From Otranto to Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner's Gothic Heritage." In William Faulkner's Gothic Domain, pp. 3-28. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979.

In the following excerpt, Kerr surveys the Gothic as it is exemplified in Faulkner's novels set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha.

The term "Gothic" unfortunately has pejorative connotations which we must recognize before giving it the comprehensive definition necessary to an examination of the pervasive Gothic elements in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels. In current literary criticism "Gothic" either refers in the historical sense to the Gothic novel as a subgenre, from Horace Walpole through his literary successors such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Charles Maturin, or is loosely applied to various aspects of serious modern novelists such as Faulkner and Carson McCullers. The modern popular "Gothic romance," so labeled and advertised on the covers of paperback editions by a picture of an archetypal castle with a girl in flight in the foreground, is scorned by critics as subliterary, sentimental "formula" fiction, easily recognized because, as Northrop Frye pointed out in The Secular Scripture, "the more undisplaced the story, the more sharply the design stands out," being undisguised by representational realism. Like melodrama, with which it has much in common, the popular Gothic romance arouses sham terror and has a reassuring happy ending. Because such romances tend to be fabricated of ordinary or cheap stuff, with slick or sloppy workmanship, the critical eye may not perceive that they are often copied from such original and superior designs as those of Ann Radcliffe or the Brontës. This polluted stream of Gothicism is but a shallow branch of the deep and dark waters which, if one accepts Leslie Fiedler's thesis in Love and Death in the American Novel, might be called the Father of Waters of American novels, the Mississippi to which Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha River is tributary. Fully to appreciate that tributary, we must return to its deep Gothic source, for, in Harry Levin's words, "When we come to appreciate the strategic part that convention is able to play, we shall be better equipped to discern the originality of individual writers."…

From its beginning Gothicism had embraced medievalism, fantasy, realism, and burlesque, categories of the roman noir listed by Montague Summers. Burlesque, with its kinship to caricature and parody, is of special interest in a modern context. In Love and Death Leslie Fiedler explained the "gothic mode" as "essentially a form of parody, a way of assailing clichés by exaggerating them to the limit of grotesqueness": in Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner mocked "the banal harsh taunt "Would you want a nigger to sleep with your sister!'" In "The Dream of the New" Fiedler explained further that for the American writer the only "fruitful relationship" to the past "compatible with the tradition of the New" is parody, "which simultaneously connects and rejects." Fiedler identified "conscious parody" ("one of the chief modes of our books"); "unconscious parody"; and "parody of parody"—illustrated by Mark Twain "consciously parodying Sir Walter Scott" and then being "inadvertently parodied by Ernest Hemingway." Self-parody is the fourth kind. Without reference to Gothicism, Fiedler cited Faulkner to exemplify all kinds of parody. Fiedler concluded that parody is "a kind of necessary final act of destroying the past, required of all who belong to the tradition of the New."

Exaggeration, one element in burlesque, is identified by Eric Bentley as a basic element in melodrama, which he defined as "the Naturalism of the dream life," akin to the exaggerated fantasies of childhood and adult dreams. Eric Newton credited "the romantic thirst for melodrama" with penetrating "so deeply into the common consciousness that excess had ceased to be ridiculous." Characteristics of melodrama given by James Smith sound much like white Gothic fiction: to provide what Michael Booth termed "'the fulfillment and satisfaction found only in dreams,'" melodrama presented stereotyped, unreal characters on a stage filled with "gigantic pictures" and "grandiose scenery," in which the hero is exposed to physical dangers. "Every act leads up to its 'tableau.'" The hero is finally rewarded by dream justice. Predictably, Smith cites among variations in melodrama the Gothic; in late Gothic the hero is sometimes "a poor man's Faust."

"Medievalism, fantasy, realism, and burlesque"—all but medievalism, in the literal sense, are found in modern American Gothic fiction. Ironic inversion, a strategy by which a kind of parody can be used seriously to convey values directly opposed to those ostensibly presented, may be used with any varieties of literary or black Gothic.

In Love and Death Leslie Fiedler stressed the absence in American fiction of eroticism based on adult, heterosexual love. The transformation of European Gothic themes to express the "obsessive concerns" of Americans identified by Fiedler (see p. 8 above) are all exemplified in William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, as are the general characteristics of Gothicism already dealt with. Romantic solitude sought by Old World characters was found in the New World in primeval forests or unbroken prairies, affording frontier freedom; as Fiedler said, "Scott's romantic North" became Cooper's "romantic West," and flight to escape oppressive society became flight from women and society to male companions in the wilderness. The bandits and outlaws of Europe—German freebooters and Italian banditti, according to Montague Summers—were replaced by Indians. The English gentleman-highwayman was brother under the skin to southern Civil War guerrillas. The iniquities of the Old World authoritarian church and state and corrupt social institutions were matched by New World exploitation of nature, by Negro slavery, and by frontier roughness and violence. Anti-Catholicism gave place to anti-Calvinism. The defiance of Faust, which Fiedler called "the diabolic bargain," became the center of the modern American Gothic novel, with the vast New World as the stage for the drama of superhuman ambition—a recurrent theme noted by Robert Hume in Dark Romantic writing. In a society founded by rebels, rebels and outcasts could be redeemed in the general Romantic revolt against the past and its values. Fiedler noted that the redeemed ones included Prometheus, Cain, Judas, the Wandering Jew, and even Lucifer. The use of superstition and the supernatural, made more plausible by a medieval setting, in the New World lost its power to produce Gothic mystery, awe, and shudders. Dream experience, Howard Lovecraft said, "helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world." In fiction the supernatural could be replaced by psychological phenomena which readers could accept with at least "a willing suspension of disbelief": common experiences such as dreams; rarer phenomena such as hallucination; special power such as telepathy, prescience, and clairvoyance; psychological abnormalities, including mental deficiency and paranoia. As Leslie Fiedler observed in Love and Death, rejection of superstition was succeeded by the realization that such belief, "far from being the fabrication of a Machiavellian priesthood, was a projection of a profound inner insecurity and guilt, a hidden world of nightmare not abolished by manifestos or restrained by barricades. The final horrors, as modern society has come to realize, are neither gods nor demons, but intimate aspects of our own minds."

With modifications and transformations noted above, the new American literary Gothic continues the Gothic tradition, chiefly the black Gothic, in character types and psychological concerns, in settings, and in thematic ideas and narrative patterns. The character types of the Gothic novel, described by Eino Railo, largely paralleled by those in poetry and drama of the Romantic decadence, discussed by Mario Praz, flourished in both European and American fiction. Parallels also to medieval romance are obvious in such characters as the chivalric hero and the persecuted maiden, the villain and the evil woman, and in the general polarity of good and evil. Here will be listed the chief types of characters from which Faulkner, in following the Gothic tradition, could make his choice. Prominent among leading male characters are the heroes or villain-heroes descended from Elizabethan drama and from Milton's Lucifer, culminating in the Faustian or Byronic hero—handsome, melancholy, mysterious, and passionate, with exceptional capacity for both good and evil. Byron inherited this hero from Gothic romance and the poems of Sir Walter Scott. Lovecraft said that the Gothic villain and the Byronic hero are "essentially cognate types." Eric Bentley stated that villains in melodrama "stem from the archvillain Lucifer." "The dark, rebellious Byronic hero," as Byron developed the type, was described by John Ehrstine as "a composite and evolutionary figure," relentlessly pursuing in isolation "the demonic root of all evil." The Don Juan type, of which Lovelace is the prime example in the novel, is less typical of American Gothic than is the Byronic or Faustian hero. The Romantic hero is descended from the virtuous chivalric heroes but is less interesting than the knights errant. The leading female characters offer parallels to the males; the persecuted maiden, rescued from the villain by the hero, is contrasted with the evil, strong woman, often dark and sometimes a prostitute.

The relationship between the Romantic decadence and the Gothic tradition is reflected by Addison Bross's study of the influence of Aubrey Beardsley on Faulkner in Soldiers' Pay. Bross concluded that Beardsley contributed to "Faulkner's inherent sense of the grotesque and absurd element in man" and to the contrast between Margaret, the evil dark beauty, and the girl Cecily. In the South the Dark Lady, termed by Fiedler in Love and Death the "sinister embodiment of the sexuality denied the snow maiden," might be expected to have Negro blood. Faulkner did not use this contrast, not even when a woman with Negro blood was the rival to a white heroine. In Absalom, Absalom! Charles Bon's octoroon mistress is Judith Sutpen's rival. She is even described with explicit reference to Beardsley, as Bross and Timothy Conley noted. This passage exemplifies Conley's point that in Faulkner's mature works "his own pictorial genius" carried Beardsley's art "to its fictional heights." The octoroon is a victim, not an evil woman, and Judith provides no blonde contrast to the "magnolia-faced woman" as they stand together at the grave of Charles Bon. The octoroon suggests the Suffering Wife of the Gothic tradition, created in Horace Walpole's Hippolita and found, as Eino Railo observed, "in every later romance in which an unhappy mother and child is needed."

Development of servants as distinctive characters, whether loyal and amusing or treacherous and disgusting, was a feature of The Castle of Otranto in which Walpole imitated Shakespeare's servants. Only in the southern Gothic is a servant likely to be a member of the family. Clytie, half-sister in Absalom, Absalom! to Judith and Henry Sutpen, combines the Dark Woman with the Loyal Servant.

Most typical of Gothic fiction and least common in other kinds of narrative are the grotesque characters which, in the Gothic tradition, reflected the acceptance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetic theory of the grotesque as an aspect of the sublime. The grotesque was one means of achieving the terror which, as Samuel Monk said, was the foundation of Edmund Burke's theory of sublimity. Ugliness could be "associated with sublimity if it is 'united with such qualities as excite strong terror.'" Maurice Lévy considered Burke's evidence valuable because "Burke formulated strictly what his epoch felt vaguely." Lévy regarded the Gothic as the product of a fantastic or grotesque imagination.

John Ruskin, however, was more influential than Burke in forming the tastes of readers and writers in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Ruskin's "Grotesque Renaissance" (chapter 3 in The Stones of Venice, volume 2) differentiates true or noble grotesque from false grotesque by the qualities of the spirit revealed in art. (In "The Grotesque in the Fiction of William Faulkner" Robert Ferguson applies Ruskin's categories to characters.) Howard Lovecraft referred to "the grotesque gargoyles," "the daemonic gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel," as gauges of "the prevalence and depth of the medieval horrorspirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence brought." The psychological justification for the grotesque in aesthetic theory and the arts is stated by Wolfgang Kayser in "a final interpretation of the grotesque: AN ATTEMPT TO INVOKE AND SUBDUE THE DEMONIC ASPECTS OF THE WORLD." In "The Victim" Ihab Hassan noted the ancient association between "evil and the ludicrous" and cited "the grotesque magnification of evil" by Dante as a religious act. Whether "grotesque" is limited to characters or is extended to imagery and to incongruities and distortions of all kinds, the grotesque is an integral part of the total pattern of Gothic fiction and usually combines the terrible and the ludicrous in some deformation of what is regarded as natural and pleasing, some nightmarish violation of the daylight world, some ominous disruption of order and harmony.

In substantial agreement with Leslie Fiedler's basic idea in Love and Death in the American Novel, Irving Malin said that the "New American Gothic is in the mainstream of American fiction." Malin found the source of the grotesque in Gothic fiction to be the breakdown of order into dream effects. Agreeing with William Van O'Connor that "the grotesque is produced by disintegration," Malin observed that this disintegration, evident in narcissism and the breakdown of the family, is reflected "by the technique of new American Gothic." In "Flannery O'Connor and the Grotesque," Irving Malin grouped her "grotesquerie" with that of "Capote, Hawkes, Carson McCullers, and Purdy," all new American Gothic novelists.

Although the grotesque extends beyond characters to structure and imagery, we are concerned here only with the kinds of grotesque characters, all being deviations from the normal in appearance, capacities, and actions. Defining the grotesque as "the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response; the ambivalently abnormal," Philip Thomson stated that "the grotesque has a strong affinity with the physically abnormal," to which our uncivilized response is "unholy glee and barbaric delight." Such grotesques include: sexual deviants who are visibly so, such as hermaphrodites, epicene persons, and transvestites; the blind, or dumb; characters whose appearance or manner shows mechanical rigidity or some other nonhuman quality; cripples; mentally deficient or insane persons. From the dwarves of medieval romance to the dwarf in Carson McCullers's The Ballad of the Sad Café, grotesques have been prominent in romances and novels. In modern Gothic, popular or literary, grotesque characters may even predominate, a tendency illustrated in the works of Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Flannery O'Connor, all southern followers of Faulkner. In The Mortgaged Heart, a miscellany of works by Carson McCullers, Margarita Smith, the editor and the sister of McCullers, ventured an explanation of Gothic fiction: "I wonder sometimes if what they call the 'Gothic' school of Southern writing, in which the grotesque is paralleled with the sublime, is not due largely to the cheapness of human life in the South."

A Season of Dreams by Alfred Appel deals with Eudora Welty. In the chapter "The Grotesque and the Gothic" Appel explains the relationship between his book and chapter titles:

The grotesque is characterized by a distortion of the external world, by the description of human beings in nonhuman terms, and by the displacement we associate with dreams. The infinite possibilities of the dream inform the grotesque at every turn, suspending the laws of proportion and symmetry: our deepest promptings are projected into the details of the scene—inscape as landscape. Because the grotesque replaces supernaturalism with hallucination, it expresses the reality of the unconscious life—the formative source which the Gothic writer, in his romantic flights, may never tap. The grotesque is a heightened realism, reminiscent of caricature, but going beyond it to create a fantastic realism or realistic fantasy that evokes pathos and terror.

Although Appel erroneously equates "grotesque" with "gothic" in his chapter title, instead of subordinating the grotesque to the encompassing Gothic configuration, his analysis sheds light on all the southern Gothic novelists.

In Radical Innocence, without reference to Gothicism, Ihab Hassan noted the prevalence of the grotesque in southern writers and explained the functions of grotesque characters in serious fiction.

The grotesque, as clown and scapegoat, is both comic and elegiac, revolting and pathetic. As hunchback or cripple, he is born an outsider, his very aspect an affront to appearances. His broken body testifies to the contradictions of the inner man, the impossible and infrangible dream, raging against his crooked frame and against the world in which flesh is housed.

The prominence of the grotesque in Faulkner's novels is a significant aspect of his Gothic world.

In this world "the obsessive images and recurring emblematic figures" constitute what G. R. Thompson termed "an 'iconography' of the Gothic": the recurring character types and edifices and landscapes serve as "some sort of objective correlative" of "the themes of physical terror, moral horror, and religious mystery." The most obvious single objective correlative is derived from The Castle of Otranto and is suggested by the term "Gothic": the medieval castle or ancient abbey, an image of somber ruin and mystery symbolizing the past. The haunted castle, one of the three images Irving Malin deals with in New American Gothic, is prevalent in popular Gothic romance which clings to the splendor that "falls on castle walls" remote in time and place; in literary Gothic, with an American setting, the "castle" must be less ancient and magnificent and may be merely a ruined mansion like Faulkner's Old Frenchman's place or the Sutpen mansion. The second of Malin's images, the voyage into the forest, also has characterized Gothic fiction since Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe: the unaxed forest, the prairie, a mighty river, and any other scene offering solitude, danger, and mystery represent aspects of the American experience in the New World and the American dream which dominate the transformation of the Gothic novel into an American genre. Jonathan Baumbach's title The Landscape of Nightmare might well suggest these two images, the castle and the forest, although Baumbach selected the novels he dealt with on the basis of their treatment of a typically Gothic theme, the "spiritual passage from innocence to guilt and redemption," without regard to other Gothic features. A third kind of setting adds another nightmare image: enclosed places representing retreat and asylum or imprisonment or both. Taking the phrase from the title of Truman Capote's most Gothic novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Irving Malin in New American Gothic refers to the "other room" in the haunted castle which is "'the final door' through which the ghost-like forces march." The other room is the transformation in new American Gothic of the haunted castle, "the metaphor of confining narcissism, the private world." Insane asylums like the one at Jackson where Benjy Compson and Darl Bundren were sent, the jail in Jefferson, Miss Reba's brothel in Memphis, the room in Sutpen's Hundred where Henry Sutpen ended his flight and exchanged freedom for safety and care—these are only a few of the many enclosed places where people of Yoknapatawpha were trapped or hid themselves.

In front of the castle on covers of popular Gothic paperbacks forever flees the girl who represents one of a small cluster of narrative patterns of dreamlike motion. In Love and Death Leslie Fiedler said that the Persecuted Maiden in flight, descended from Horace Walpole's Isabella or Richardson's Clarissa, may be fleeing "through a world of ancestral and infantile fears projected in dreams"; pursued by the villain and threatened with violation, she may be fleeing from her own darker impulses as well. But according to Fiedler the flight of "the typical male protagonist of our fiction" has been from "the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility." The hero may also be in flight from guilt, pursued by conscience and justice. The ultimate issue of any flight, if escape from a fate worse than death is impossible, is suicide.

In contrast to the flight-pursuit pattern but also involving recurrent or prolonged motion is the quest, the positive journey directed toward a goal, what Northrop Frye in The Secular Scripture called "the epic of the creature, man's vision of his own life as a quest." In New American Gothic Irving Malin viewed the journey or voyage as opposed to "the other room" but equally fraught with anxiety, the movement being usually "er-ratic, circular, violent, or distorted." The journey in the nouveau roman is envisioned by Enrico Garzilli "as an anonymous quest toward self-understanding," portrayed by "the metaphor of the labyrinth." The journey in a quest for self-understanding or self-realization may follow an initiation pattern. In The Quest Mircea Eliade linked the initiation with the quest, noting that most "scenarios in the Arthurian cycle have an initiatory structure" and that "the pattern of initiation persists in the imaginary universes of modern man—in literature, dreams, and day-dreams." Dealing in Radical Innocence with some of the writers that Malin discussed, Ihab Hassan saw their work as "a parody of man's quest for fulfillment," an ironic tragicomedy. A quest that resembles Hassan's parody quest was observed by Robert Phillips in the work of Carson McCullers: "the search for a sexless, dim ideal, a manifestation of the hero's avoidance and fear of reality." The quest may, however, be quite directly the equivalent of a common traditional theme, the search for identity which involves ascertaining the facts of one's parentage and finding one's father and family. In the old romances and in Gothic fiction, this search culminated in the recognition and acceptance of the hero and often in his claiming his rightful heritage. In new American Gothic the climax of the quest is more likely to be the rejection and destruction of the hero, as in Absalom, Absalom! The Faustian theme also usually involves a quest or purposeful journey in order to realize an ambition, such as Sutpen's design in Absalom, Absalom! The purpose of the quest may be evil, such as murderous revenge, or it may be a search for truth and justice involving the detective story pattern. But serious Gothic fiction is likely to have more than one pattern: the detection in Intruder in the Dust, for example, is subordinated to the story of Chick Mallison's successful initiation.

A third pattern of motion contrasts with both flight and quest: purposeless wandering. The stories of the Wandering Jew and of Cain have been absorbed into the Gothic tradition: wandering imposed as a doom casts a man out of human society into isolation, often literally into the wilderness. Geoffrey Hartman interprets the significance of this theme as one "which best expresses this perilous nature of consciousness":

Those solitaries are separated from life in the midst of life, yet cannot die. They are doomed to live a middle or purgatorial existence which is neither life nor death, and as their knowledge increases, so does their solitude. It is consciousness, ultimately, which alienates them from life and imposes the burden of a self which religion or death or a return to the state of nature might dissolve.

The wandering of Joe Christmas in Light in August combined the racial doom of alienation with a flight from both racial identities. The purgatorial life of Henry Sutpen, Faulkner's Cain, is left to our imagination until death rid him of "the burden of self."

Scenes of violence are so characteristic of Gothic themes and patterns that they are too diverse to allow specification. The effect of horror which distinguishes Gothic fiction may be secured by any and all means, realistic or fantastic, objective or psychological, but underlying all scenes of horror are the dream images and nightmare sensations in the thematic patterns noted above. Modern Gothic fiction not only makes frequent use of dreams but lends such subjective distortion to physical events that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the inner from the outer nightmare, as in the riot scenes in West's The Day of the Locust and in Ellison's Invisible Man.

The frequency with which the landscape of nightmare in recent Gothic fiction takes on distinctly southern features is due only in part to the pervasive influence of William Faulkner upon younger southern writers. The southern background and tradition which Faulkner shared with his successors accounts in large measure for their Gothic tendencies. In explaining the prevalence of Gothic fiction in the South, Leslie Fiedler, in The Return of the Vanishing American, contrasted the South with "the real West," which "contains no horrors which correspond to the Southerner's deep nightmare terrors." Robert Phillips noted the frequency of violent themes in southern fiction and the shift at times to the minds of tormented souls caught in a labyrinthine life. To Jacques Cabau, the South and the North join "in nostalgia for the West, the lost prairie." Phillips observed that the southern obsession with the problem of evil sprang from a sense of guilt. Referring specifically to Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty, Carter W. Martin's view confirms that of Phillips: "The themes that arise from their use of the Gothic mode are essentially spiritual ones, for they speak of matters of the soul and not matters of the glands or the nervous system."

Adaptation of Gothic patterns to existing social scenes has proved easier in the South than in most other regions of the United States. Indeed, some Gothic features which attract readers can be plausibly approximated in very few other American settings. Of genuine medieval ruins, of course, there is a complete lack in the United States; popular Gothic romances cherish the phony Gothic castles along the Palisades of the Hudson River. But the plantation world of antebellum days provided an analogy to feudal society and fostered chivalric ideals. The plantation aristocrat might see himself as like the lord of a manor, ruling over his serfs in a little world over which he held sovereign sway. This inclination toward medievalism accounted in part for the popularity in the South of Sir Walter Scott's novels and, in turn, strengthened by the influence of Scott, provided the foundation of the southern myth of the past, with its ideal of noblesse oblige and its devotion to a lost cause. Although, according to Fiedler, in Love and Death, Scott had retained Gothic devices without penetrating to the meanings of Gothic, his novels preserved and transmitted the Gothic tradition in the South. The plantation house which, in its prosperity, had stood for the orderly life of a semi-feudal society, in its ruin and decay resembled the ruined castle in Gothic novels, symbolizing the collapse of the old order. As Jacques Cabau said: "Only the South was material rich enough to express in artistic terms all the aspects—religious, social, political, psychological—of the reaction." The reaction was against liberalism and faith in human perfectibility: the most characteristic of the "artistic terms" chosen was Gothicism.

The influence of Scott strengthened also the southern white Protestant version of medieval courtly love, the cult of the White Goddess. In Love and Death, Fiedler cited Mark Twain's hatred of Scott as based on a conviction that Scott had "utterly corrupted the Southern imagination by dreams of chivalry and romance, which made it quite impossible for any Southern writer to face reality or describe an actual woman." In The Mind of the South W. J. Cash showed how southern gyneolatry developed as a consequence of cultural and literary influences and social circumstances. The sexless three decades described by Fiedler, the 1860s to the 1890s, contributed to the cult of the white virgin, which could evoke such fervid devotion only in a racially mixed society with aristocratic white leaders. Furthermore, Calvinistic repression of sex moved from New England to the South during the religious awakening of the early 1800s, with the consequent equating of sin and sex; the image of woman as temptress became the obverse of the image of woman as savior. Fiedler in Love and Death sums up this duality by saying that the underside of adoration was "fear and contempt": women were goddesses or bitches. The effect of the cult of the white virgin was to inhibit healthy sexuality in upper class white women and to make them frigid physically or psychologically. Mr. Compson in Absalom, Absalom! well described the white gentleman's attitude toward women and his solution of his sexual problems. There were "three sharp divisions" of women: "ladies, women, females—the virgins whom gentlemen someday married, the courtesans to whom they went while on sabbaticals to the cities, the slave girls and women upon whom that first caste rested and to whom in certain cases it doubtless owed the very fact of its virginity …" (p. 109). Mr. Compson continued to explain how a young man on a plantation, with the first two classes inaccessible psychologically and financially, would turn to the accessible slave girls, among whom he could freely choose. Hence, the most prevalent sexual offense was miscegenation, but it was also in principle the most abhorred; miscegenation between a white woman and a Negro man was regarded as sodomy, punishable by summary death.

The remoteness and exclusiveness of the plantation contributed to other sexual aberrations than miscegenation. In the absence of eligible companions of the opposite sex, narcissism, incest, or homosexuality might result from the aristocratic self-esteem and pride that sought the image of self in the loved one. The Gothic tradition had transmitted the theme of incest which Northrop Frye, in The Secular Scripture, showed to be recurrent in romance and which, according to J. M. S. Tompkins, pervaded the popular eighteenth-century novel. But the plantation society after the Civil War provided a scene in which "incest was a constant," according to Andrew Lytle, not merely a literary convention which by that time had come to be regarded with horror.

This was a defeated society, cherishing the myth of the past and fostering in the southern psyche elements characteristic of romance and the Gothic tradition, with their conservative and nostalgic attitude toward the past, to which Maurice Lévy's observation that "man dreams to the right" perfectly applies. The southern myth was more aristocratic and conservative, especially in the later-settled states like Mississippi, than the past had actually been. The Gothic delight in landscape was gratified by the picturesque landscape of the South, with its moss-and-vine-draped trees and flamboyant flowers and mysterious forests and swamps. This natural setting was conducive to the paranoid "melodramatic vision" described by Eric Bentley: "We are being persecuted, and we hold that all things, living and dead, are combining to persecute us." "The landscape in Light in August, " Francois Pitavy said, "is never immutable or dead: motion still inhabits it and is potentially present, as in the stilled characters. Indeed, as in a dream or nightmare, the shadows tremble and bulge monstrously, and the landscape slowly alters…." The landscape is "a projection or a reflection" of the characters. One is not surprised when Pitavy concludes: "The Faulknerian landscape in Light in August is above all the image of a state of mind." The reality, as seen by Doc Peabody, conditioned its inhabitants: rivers and land were "opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image" (As I Lay Dying, p. 44).

The South was an agrarian society, hostile to the urban North and to evil cities, the scenes of southerners' own premeditated sins—an attitude shared with southerners by Romanticism and the Romantic decadence. London, the sum of felicity to Dr. Samuel Johnson in the age of reason, was the City of Dreadful Night to James Thomson in the next century.

Most obviously and perhaps most significantly, only the South could provide writers with an emotionally satisfying parallel for the ruined castle which was virtually the protagonist of early Gothic fiction. But the mood of tender melancholy inspired by the southern ruin had a personal, family, and community significance lacking in most haunted castles in which Gothic heroines were immured. The paintless and dilapidated mansion, vacant or inhabited, is still a familiar sight in the South, a reminder of glory and suffering only a century past, rather than a bit of stage scenery in a tale about distant times. The ghosts which haunt these southern ruins may be the living, like Faulkner's Quentin Compson, who dwell in a past more real to them than the present and who have rejected the modern world which offers them no gratifications commensurate with those of the myth of the past. The cult of the past in the South, as symbolized in its ruins, its preserved glories displayed in spring pilgrimages, its monuments and graveyards, owes less to cultural climate and imagination than to remembered history. In the South new intensity reanimates the original Gothic feeling for ruins as described by Montague Summers: "The ruin was a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret." The southern ruin also is a symbol of a legendary Golden Age little more than a century past.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MAX PUTZEL ON FAULKNER'S GOTHIC

One effect of all the several Gothic revivals was to domesticate the past and make it uniquely our own—whatever ownership might claim it. In England and then in Germany that past was felt to be distinct from the mysterious lost perfection of Greece or Rome. Its crumbling, ivied ruins betokened authority overcome and mouldering decay, lost greatness and failing powers. I think that Faulkner's impression of his American past is an accelerated panorama of similar decay and decline. He sees Southern chivarly as a belated but genuine survival of medieval values and faith. It arose as the product of a noble dream and perished in the nightmare of civil war, victim of mercenary force and sterile philistinism. There is a dreamlike quality to the sequence of disclosure in Absalom. We perceive through the medium of Quentin's meandering, helpless search—the dreamer's agony in bondage to that with which he has no strength to cope.

SOURCE: Putzel, Max. "What Is Gothic About Absalom, Absalom!?" Southern Literary Journal 4, no. 1 (1971): 3-19.

In The Return of the Vanishing American Leslie Fiedler's summing up of the significance of the southern plantation setting, with references to southern writers from Poe through William Faulkner to Flannery O'Connor and Truman Capote, suggests why the Gothic mode was naturalized particularly and uniquely in the South and why Yoknapatawpha was conceived in the Gothic tradition:

… the Southern, as opposed to the Northern, does not avoid but seeks melodrama, a series of bloody events, sexual by implication at least, played out in the blood-heat of a "long hot summer" against a background of miasmal swamps, live oak, Spanish moss, and the decaying plantation house so dear to the hearts of moviemakers…. The mode of the Southern is Gothic, American Gothic, and the Gothic requires a haunted house at its center. It demands also a symbolic darkness to cloak its action….

Thus, the South provided William Faulkner and other southern writers with a reality which could be depicted with the strong contrasts of the Gothic genre to reveal social and psychological truths less accessible to purely objective and realistic treatment. Seldom, however, does modern southern Gothic play it straight and depict society and characters in terms of the myth and the tradition, as in the old-fashioned historical novel about the South or the modern popular Gothic romance. With a foundation of realistic displacement which conceals Gothic structure beneath the representation of modern society, all the strategies of point of view, discontinuity, ironic inversion, exaggeration, and parody are employed to give new meaning to old formulas, to "penetrate the instinctual reservoirs out of which terror arises," as Dr. Kubie said, or in Fiedler's words in The Vanishing American, to evoke "the nightmare terror," the "blackness of darkness."

To discern the new meaning in the old formulas, the reader must recognize what the writer could choose from in the Gothic tradition, what he did choose, and how he transformed a type of fiction originally distanced in time and space to deal with recent or present realities, often of universal urgency, the nightmares that do not vanish with the dawn. William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels cover the whole range of American Gothic; his original modifications and modulations of Gothic elements are uniquely combined with non-Gothic, daylight views of the same society, within individual works or in the extended scope of the Yoknapatawpha chronicles.

Bibliography

The following works of fiction and nonfiction by William Faulkner are published in New York by Random House.

Yoknapatawpha novels and stories:

Flags in the Dust, ed. Douglas Day. 1973.

Sartoris. © 1929, 1956.

The Sound and the Fury. Modern Library College ed., photographic reproduction of 1st printing, 7 October 1929.

Sanctuary. © 1931, 1958.

Light in August. Vintage ed., photographic reproduction of 1st printing, 6 October 1932.

Absalom, Absalom! Modern Library ed., facsimile of 1st ed., 1936.

The Unvanquished. Photographic reproduction of 1st printing, 15 February 1938.

Go Down, Moses. Modern Library ed., © 1942.

Intruder in the Dust. 12th printing, © 1948.

Knight's Gambit. 4th printing, © 1949.

Collected Stories of William Faulkner. N.d.

Requiem for a Nun. N.d.; © 1950, 1951.

Works Cited

KEY: Italicized numbers indicate pages of [William Faulkner's Gothic Domain] on which reference to cited work appears. Numbers following colon indicate the specific page reference in the cited work.

Appel, Alfred. "The Grotesque and the Gothic." A Season of Dreams: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969, pp. 73-103. [21: 74]

Baumbach, Jonathan. The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. New York: New York University Press, 1965. [22: 15]

Bentley, Eric. "Melodrama." Tragedy: Vision and Form. Ed. Robert W. Corrigan. San Francisco: Chandler, 1965, pp. 217-31. [17: 223, 222; 18: 221; 26: 221;]

Bross, Addison C. "Soldiers' Pay and the Art of Aubrey Beardsley." American Quarterly 19 (Spring 1967): 3-23. [19: 23, 6]

Cabau, Jacques. La Prairie perdue: histoire du roman américain. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. [24: 228; 25: 57]

Conley, Timothy K. "Beardsley and Faulkner." Journal of Modern Literature 5 (September 1976): 339-56. [19: 348]

Ehrstine, John. "Byron and the Metaphysic of Self-Destruction." The Gothic Imagination. Ed. G. R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1974, pp. 94-108. [18: 94, 95]

Eliade Mircea. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. [23: 121, 66]

Ferguson, Robert C. "The Grotesque in the Fiction of William Faulkner." Ph.D. dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1971. [20]

Fiedler, Leslie A. "The Dream of the New." American Dreams, American Nightmares. Ed. David Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970, pp. 19-28. [16: 24, 26, 27]

――――――. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed., New York: Dell, Delta Books, 1967. 16: 205, 369, 421 17: 179, 181 17: 134, 34 18: 38 19: 296 23: 128, 26 25: 172, 194 26: 259, 312

――――――. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day, 1969. [24: 134; 28: 18]

Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. 23: 15 26: 5

Hartman, Geoffrey H. "Romanticism and 'Anti-Self-Consciousness,'" Romanticism and Consciousness. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Norton, 1970, pp. 46-56. [24: 51]

Hassan, Ihab. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. [16: 24, 27]

――――――. "The Novel of Outrage: A Minority Voice in Postwar American Fiction." American Scholar 34 (Spring 1965): 239-53. [16: 252]

――――――. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. [21: 78; 23: 118]

――――――. "The Victim: Images of Evil in Recent American Fiction." College English 21 (December 1959): 140-46. [20: 145]

Hume, Robert D. "Exuberant Gloom, Existential Agony, and Heroic Despair: Three Varieties of Negative Romanticism." The Gothic Imagination. Ed. G. R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1974, pp. 109-27. [17: 112]

Kayser, Wolfgang. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. Trans. Ulrich Weisstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. [20: 188]

Kubie, Lawrence S., M.D. "William Faulkner's Sanctuary." Saturday Review of Literature (20 October 1934). Rpt. in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robert Penn Warren. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966, pp. 137-46. [28: 139]

Lévy, Maurice. Le Roman "Gothique" anglais, 1764–1824. Toulouse: Association des publications de la facultédes lettres et sciences humaines de Toulouse, 1968. [19: 71, 53; 26: 612]

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. Supernatural Horror in Literature, with a new introduction by E. F. Bleiler. Republication of 1945 ed., New York: Dover, 1973. [18: 13; 18: 37; 20: 19]

Lytle, Andrew. "The Working Novelist and the Mythmaking Process." Daedalus (Spring 1959), pp. 326-38. [26: 331]

Malin, Irvng. "Flannery O'Connor and the Grotesque." The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor. Eds. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson. New York: Fordham University Press, 1966, pp. 108-22. [20: 108]

――――――. New American Gothic. Crosscurrents: Modern Critiques. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. [20: 4, 9; 22: 11, 80; 23: 106]

Martin, Carter W. The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969. [24: 160]

Monk, Samuel. "The Sublime: Burke's Inquiry." Romanticism and Consciousness. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Norton, 1970, pp. 24-41. [19: 27, 39]

Newton, Eric. The Romantic Rebellion. New York: Schocken, 1964. [17: 130]

O'Connor, William Van. The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other Essays. Crosscurrents: Modern Critiques. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. [23: 19]

Phillips, Robert S. "The Gothic Architecture of The Member of the Wedding." Renascence 16 (Winter 1964): 59-72. [23: 60; 24: 63]

Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. Trans. Angus Davidson. 1933; rpt. New York: Meridian, 1951. [17]

Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. 1927; rpt. New York: Humanities Press, 1964. [18; 19: 49]

Smith, James L. Melodrama. The Critical Idiom, no. 28. London: Methuen, 1973. [17: 17, 26-27, 34, 39]

Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. 1938; rpt. New York: Russell, 1964. [17: 397]

Thompson, G. R., ed. The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1975. [22: 6]

Thomson, Philip. The Grotesque. The Critical Idiom, no. 24. London: Methuen, 1972. [20: 27]

Tompkins, J. M. S. The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800. 1932; rpt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. [26: 62]

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. New York: Collier Books, 1963. [22: 20]

TITLE COMMENTARY

"A Rose for Emily"

JAMES M. MELLARD (ESSAY DATE FALL 1986)

SOURCE: Mellard, James M. "Faulkner's Miss Emily and Blake's 'Sick Rose': 'Invisible Worm,' Nachträglichkeit, and Retrospective Gothic." Faulkner Journal 2, no. 1 (fall 1986): 37-45.

In the following essay, Mellard argues that in "A Rose for Emily" Faulkner utilizes William Blake's "The Sick Rose" as a source and inspiration for his Gothic narrative.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

                                     —Shakespeare

Perhaps the last thing the world needs just now is another study of Faulkner's macabre masterpiece, "A Rose for Emily." Least of all, perhaps, do we need another suggestion regarding the story's plot sources, titular allusions, or literary analogues. By now the most frequently anthologized and, therefore, the most frequently written about story in the Faulkner canon, Faulkner's "Rose" has been rooted in everything from the author's own verse to Browning's "Porphyria's Lover," from John Crowe Ransom's "Emily Hardcastle, Spinster," to Edgar Allan Poe's "Helen," from Hawthorne's "White Old Maid" to Dickens' Miss Havisham, to say nothing of Oxford's Captain Jack Hume and Miss Mary Louise Neilson.¹ The only question in the story as vexed as where Faulkner got it is that of chronology,² which also hinges on Miss Emily's origins, at least as far as her year of birth is concerned. But we live in a world of the superfluous, the gratuitous—whether of the word or of violence; so it will come as no surprise that I shall propose yet one more possible source, analogue, allusion—this one in William Blake's "The Sick Rose." I want to do so, however, in the context of a reading of the story as an innovative version of the Gothic. I believe that Faulkner's apparent allusion to Blake is a direct reflection of the retrospective Gothic form of the story, but the necessary retrospection, which causes readers to have missed the "sick rose" and the "invisible worm" lurking there, also reflects a psychoanalytic phenomenon called Nachtraglichkeit or "deferred action" that helps to account for the story's unsettling appeal.

I

Many different figures from literature have been suggested by scholars as Faulkner's "source" for the story's title. Moreover, Faulkner himself has contributed to the probable misunderstanding regarding the nature of the titular rose. He has either been rather vague about its significance—"It was just 'A Rose for Emily' —that's all" (Inge 22)—or has suggested that the idea for the story came from an entirely different image—"from a picture of the strand of hair on the pillow" (Inge 22). Thus, readers have tended to look for some salutary image of the rose, and have consequently thought in terms of Gertrude Stein's a "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," Robert Burns's "Oh, my luve is like a red, red rose," or Shakespeare's "That which we call a rose by an other name would smell as sweet" (Inge ix). Indeed, Faulkner did contribute to the notion that the titular gesture was an acknowledgement of triumph; he told a Japanese audience at Nagano that the title "was … allegorical; the meaning was, here was a woman who had had a tragedy, an irrevocable tragedy and nothing could be done about it, and I pitied her and this was a salute … To a woman you would hand a rose" (Inge 81). With Faulkner causing interference, it is no wonder that readers have not looked to the lines in Blake that virtually delineate the tale.

      O rose, thou art sick!
      The invisible worm
      That flies in the night,
      In the howling storm,
 
      Has found out thy bed
      Of crimson joy,
      And his dark secret love
      Does thy life destroy.

Anyone who knows Faulkner's story will see the Blakean parallels immediately. The "rose" that is taken by Miss Emily in tribute can be none other than Homer Barron, the lover she murdered, apparently by arsenic poisoning, and stashed in her bedroom for some forty years of nocturnal ministrations. In this context, we can say that Miss Emily has to be the "invisible worm" whose "dark secret love / Does thy life destroy"—that is, destroys the life of the Homeric rose, the romantic lover, or, shall we say, the Barronic hero. Or, on a more abstract level, we might say that the worm is merely Miss Emily's murderous love, for it is love that serves as the worm of destruction, finding Homer's bed and turning it into one "Of crimson joy." A reading of the story could turn on either interpretation, perhaps, but in fact Faulkner's text makes it rather dificult to deny that the conquering worm is in there somewhere. And, indeed, that worm, after years of battening upon the now blind Homer, would look a lot like Miss Emily herself.

Faulkner includes clear evidence in the story that Miss Emily has been transformed into the deadly, invisible worm. His precise pictures of her show the change. As a young woman, before Homer appears, she is seen as "a slender figure in white," cast into the background behind her father, "a spraddled silhouette in the foreground" (CS [Collected Stories of William Faulkner] 123). Still young, but following the much-mourned death of that spraddled-legged parent, she is seen with her hair "cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene" (CS 124). Pictured twice before Homer's demise, Miss Emily is pictured twice afterwards, too. Six months after Homer had last been seen in Jefferson, Miss Emily is seen again for the first time: "she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray." Here, Faulkner makes much of her graying locks: "During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt irongray, when it ceased turning." Moreover, Faulkner makes of the hair a metonym of Emily's now somewhat masculine vitality: "Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man" (CS 127-28). Later in her life, though the account comes earlier in the narration, Miss Emily is seen again. She is "a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough" (CS 121). Not a pretty sight, is she?

But would a nice Southern Belle like Miss Emily stoop to conquer a man like Homer—a Northerner and a day laborer, to boot—and in that ghoulish way? Faulkner's text suggests rather strongly that, indeed, she had done so. The townsfolk in Jefferson think that she is a bit crazy, perhaps inheriting insanity from her aunt on the Alabama side of her kin—from "old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman" (CS 125), over whose estate Emily's father had had a falling out with those relatives. Miss Emily does try, we know, to hold on to a body longer than the ordinary. When her father had died, Faulkner writes, she had put off the town's delegation of mourners, meeting "them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly" (CS 123-24). The story, thus, establishes that—given the opportunity—she would keep a body around just for moral support, if not an immoral rapport. "We did not say she was crazy then," says our narrator; "We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will" (CS 124).

But would she lie with the body? Again, the text makes it pretty clear that she had, though it does not make clear for just how many nights or for how many years after Homer's death. As all who know the story can say, the telltale bit of evidence is Miss Emily's hair. We have seen already the emphasis Faulkner places on its color—its graying over the years, becoming "that vigorous iron-gray" (CS 128). Thus, when, upon the opening up of the above stairs bedroom that had become Homer's mausoleum, "a long strand of iron-gray hair" (CS 130) was noticed on the second pillow, next to Homer's, it is as if Miss Emily has left her personal signature. Not only had she killed Homer and lain next to the corpse, she also had grown fat as a result. Faulkner makes that plain. In this case the sign lies in a difference: she is thin before Homer, and even "thinner than usual" (CS 125) when she buys the arsenic for doing him in. Within six months of his demise, she is the fat, pallid, bloated body one expects to turn out from under a log, or pull out of stagnant water, or find beneath the fleshless shell of a decomposed cadaver.

II

By now almost every detail of "A Rose for Emily" is familiar to most readers before they ever actually read the story. At least, readers now almost invariably know in advance what the townspeople will find when they break into that dusty bridal suite. From the beginning, readers have found the story's ending so shocking that very soon a sort of mythology arose around it as it took on a life of its own, particularly in the critical reactions to Faulkner's work. This reaction has meant that new readers of the story are seldom "innocent" any more. If they are truly innocent, they may well miss the point. Robert Crosman, in a recent article called "How Readers Make Meaning," recounts an experience he had teaching the story. He and the students were expected to keep journals of their reading responses. Crosman's own journal entry records the response one is more likely to find among sophisticated readers who nonetheless have not read it before: "This is a story I had never actually read," he says, "though I had heard of it, read something about it, and in particular knew its ending, which kept me from feeling the pure shock that the reader must feel who knows nothing of what is coming. Even so I felt a shock, and reacted with an audible cry of mingled loathing and pleasure at the final and most shocking discovery: that Emily has slept with this cadaver for forty years" (Crosman 207). His student named "Stacy," however, read entirely around the presumably crucial Gothic elements: "On questioning, she said that Emily's poisoning of Homer remained shadowy and hypothetical in her mind, and she had completely missed the implication of the strand of Emily's hair found on the pillow next to the corpse. Instead, Stacy had written a rather poetic reverie about her grandmother, of whom she was strongly reminded by Emily" (Crosman 209).

These rather different responses may simply represent different "styles of reading," as Norman Holland or George L. Dillon might suggest. Stacy would represent, for instance, what Dillon calls the "Character-Action Moral" (CAM) reader, Crosman the "Digger-for-Secrets."⁴ But to attribute readings of the story to personal styles of reading is to denigrate—if not deny—the role played by the form of the story itself in shaping readerly and, perhaps, informed critical responses. The same denial, perforce, would pertain to the role of the generic shape or tradition of the story. Do readers not respond to familiar genres? Once a story has been classified, most critics believe, generic classification not only will have a bearing on what we read and how we read, but also on when we read the generic signals into it. The instant mythologization of the ending of "A Rose for Emily," where its genre is concerned, has caused most readers to overlook one of Faulkner's innovations. As most critics, if not the more naive student-readers, recognize, the story belongs to the tradition of the literary Gothic. But not even the critics have recognized its innovation within the form of the Gothic: its being what can only be called retrospective Gothic. Unlike the Gothic stories and novels most of us know, "A Rose for Emily" is Gothic after the fact, not before. That is, we recognize the story's details as part of a total Gothic form only after we read through to the ending. Then, we look back over the story or our experience of the story and say, "Oh, that's what was going on." Our response, thus, is likely to be that of the person who has learned that the strange landscape she was just passing by is a graveyard, or it might be that of the person who has just realized he's missed being in a terrible accident, say, on a plane that later crashes. The chill of terror comes, yes, but it comes later, deferred, after the fact. That is the effect, I think, of the retrospective form of Gothic Faulkner has created in "A Rose for Emily."

The most extensive reading of the story as conventional Gothic is by Edward Stone.⁵ But Stone simply misses the way in which Faulkner modifies the genre. He notes the presence of the aging recluse in the "majestic stronghold" of a decaying mansion (Stone 86) in his comparison of Faulkner's to George Washington Cable's story, "Jeanah Poquelin" (1879). But the innovation he recognizes in both Cable and Faulkner is their emphasis on a particular "time and place" (Stone 86); of Faulkner, he says, "With 'A Rose for Emily' morbidity is domesticated in the American small town" (Stone 86). Stone, of course, is correct in these judgments, but he is quite wrong in most of his other claims because he does not pay attention to the effect of the retrospective form Faulkner creates. Stone calls Miss Emily a "pathetic yet sinister relic" (Stone 88), but in fact she is not sinister (as Crosman's "Stacy" illustrates) until one looks back over the story-as-narrated (its récit as opposed to its histoire). Stone is correct in claiming that the story does not maintain suspense, but he is wrong in his reason for making the claim. There is little or no suspense as such because the story does not engender in the reading process an anticipation of some particular type of event or climax.

The question that readers will have is much more primitive, almost like that of the auditor of a shaggy-dog story: what is the point of the tale or, even, is there a point to it? Stone claims, however, that "not only do we early anticipate the final outcome with a fair degree of accuracy: for this very reason we are imbued with the horror of the heroine's personality at every step throughout the story, and thus in her case the basic mystery outlives the working out of the plot" (Stone 95). In this respect, the story, says Stone, is comparable to Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado": "both stories have a total horror, rather than a climax of horror, for in both we are given at the start a distinct impression of the moral depravity of the central figure, and the following pages deliberately heighten that impression rather than merely solve for us a mystery that the opening pages have set forth" (Stone 95). But Stone is simply wrong inasmuch as he is speaking of the process of interpretation that goes on during the reading. Crosman's naive readers demonstrate that such claims about the story's "total horror" or Miss Emily's sinister depravity can only be made retrospectively; only from the end can the "precise prodigality" (Stone 95) of clues Faulkner indeed scatters throughout be put together to form a horrifying Gothic heroine of Miss Emily, "a necrophile or a veritable saprophytic organism" (Stone rightly notes) that grows fat from her ghoulish marriage (Stone 96-7). Faulkner's story is Gothic, but it is not common so much as retrospective Gothic.

III

In his own journal entries on "A Rose for Emily," Crosman points to another dimension of this story and the Gothic form generally. Crosman notes that "the whole feeling of the story is of a mystery, something to do with male-female relationships, as well as time, perhaps, but a mystery one doesn't entirely want solved" (Crosman 208). He goes on to say that his response is governed largely by a "considerable fear of the discovery I know is waiting, the sex-and-death thing, though there is a fascination, too" (Crosman 208). Crosman recognizes this combination of fear and fascination as Oedipal, likely to "give comfort to literary Freudians" (Crosman 208).

For what I saw in "A Rose for Emily" was pretty certainly a "primal scene." Both my fear and my interest, my loathing and pleasure, derived, at least in part, from remembered childish speculation as to what went on in the parental bedroom. The structure of the story's plot is to set up a dark and impenetrable mystery—what is troubling Emily?—and to penetrate deeper and deeper into her past in hopes of getting an answer. Formally the pleasure is derived from solving the mystery, but the solution is a shocking one.

                                     (Crosman 208)

What Crosman suggests here about the specific tale seems very accurate, but his perception also points to a dimension implicit in the genre of the Gothic. This dimension is certainly Freudian and Oedipal, but it also relates to the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit or "deferred action."

The concept of Nachträglichkeit is persistent in Freud's theories of repression, primal fantasies, and psychical cause and effect. According to Laplanche and Pontalis, the authors of the authoritative The Language of Psycho-Analysis, "The credit for drawing attention to the importance of this term must go to Jacques Lacan" (LP-A 111). The notion has become important today because it modifies somewhat the usual understanding that for Freud every neurosis was to be attributed to an actual event, one usually occurring in the early life of the subject. The concept of "deferred action" suggests, instead, that it is the reinterpretation of an earlier event or scene in light of a later one and within certain structures emanating from culture or language or the register that Lacan (not Freud) calls the Symbolic. Laplanche, for example, in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis shows how Freud's analysis of "Emma" in that famous case-history illustrates the way in which the subject's "primal" experience of seduction or sexual assault by an adult is neither remembered nor pathogenic until a second scene triggers the memory at a time when Emma is then sexually mature enough to attribute sexual motives to the original molestor. Emma's phobia is a fear of entering stores by herself. The onset of the fear at age twelve occurred upon her observing two store clerks laughing—she thinks at her clothes. Freud's analysis shows, however, that this scene is associated with another one that had occurred when Emma was about eight years old and her clothes were twice grabbed in her genital area by a shopkeeper. Laplanche's commentary on Freud's analysis points out that "the first scene does not penetrate into consciousness with its full meaning of assault but does so through an entirely extraneous [metonymic] element: the clothes" (LDP 41). Moreover—and this is particularly important to Lacan's rereading of Freud—"we try to track down the trauma, but the traumatic memory was only secondarily traumatic: we never manage to fix the traumatic event historically" (LDP 41), a situation Laplanche compares to Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy in physics: "in situating the trauma, one cannot appreciate its traumatic impact, and vice versa" (LDP 41).

I would argue that the normal or ordinary first reading of "A Rose for Emily" would illustrate this concept of "deferred action," which might better be called deferred interpretation. In effect, there are two crucial scenes represented in the tale. In temporal order, the first is the scene in which Miss Emily "seduces" Homer Barron in her upstairs bedroom: this is the scene of the "parental bedroom," as Crosman puts it, but it is also associated at the same time with other evidences of mysterious and potentially dangerous activity—the purchase of the arsenic and, later, the unexplained odor emanating from the mystified scene (the old house). The second scene in the temporal order is that of the discovery of the skeleton on the bed in the upstairs bedroom and the strand of gray hair on the pillow with the indentation of a person's head. The "deferred action" here is defined in the way in which the details of the second scene suddenly cause a reinterpretation of the details of the other, earlier scene. Now, Homer Barron's disappearance is explained as a function of the explanation of the purchase of the arsenic and the subsequent emanation of the foul odor from the old Grierson house. All at once, then, the earlier details of the story become Gothic—in the way that, within the boundaries of Nachträglichkeit, earlier scenes become "Oedipal" or scenes of seduction or sexual assault. In the reading of "A Rose for Emily," I suggest, one's sudden chill or thrill at the recognition of the sexual and thanatic significance of the earlier scene (or scenes, for the number is not so important as the deferred interpretation) is indeed—as Crosman suggests—related to the significance of sexuality and the vital order.

It is the combination of the sexual and the thanatic that makes Faulkner's story so effective as a Gothic tale, retrospective or otherwise. For the core of the Gothic is the fusion of the two elements of sex and death, especially forbidden or incestuous sex and the most heinous of mortal crimes—parricide and other versions of family murder such as matricide, fratricide, or infanticide. Incest and family murder underlie Poe's Gothic tales, for example, as they have underlain other classic Gothics since the first—Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). In Walpole, for instance, Manfred (the Gothic villain) intends to marry off his son to a young woman (Isabella), but when the son is killed beneath a mysterious gigantic helmet, Manfred decides he will marry Isabella himself. But when she comes under the protection of her father—so Freudianly named the Knight of the Gigantic Sabre—Manfred decides to trade his own daughter (Matilda) to the Knight, thus creating the possibility of two unnatural weddings. But the good Knight (upon dire warnings from the spirit world) chooses to give up Matilda, whom Manfred by mistake later murders, thinking to stab his betrothed Isabella instead. His crime leaves the true heir of the Castle—Theodore, son of good Father Jerome—to marry Isabella, daughter of the Knight who appears in the image of Alfonso the Good, original owner of the Castle whose ownership Manfred had usurped. Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a stripped down, highly condensed version of such Gothic goings on. In place of all the doubling of parents and children found in Walpole, Poe collapses all—parents and children—into just the two remaining Ushers—Roderick and Madeline. They have to stand for the paternal and the maternal forces and for the son and the daughter, but also for the groom and the bride, as well as for the murderer and his victim. Thus, Poe gives us the inevitable incest and the family murder, in addition to the thrill of the double discovery of eros and thanatos, in one dense, Narcissistic, mirror-laden tale. It is no wonder—from a psychoanalytic viewpoint—that "The Fall of the House of Usher" has been so persistent a reader's favorite over the years.

From a Freudian-cum-Lacanian perspective, the classic Gothic and, especially, its rather transparent symbols interpret some of the motivations underlying "A Rose for Emily." The classic question is simply, "What does Miss Emily want?" Walpole's answer (filtered through Freud) would be, she wants a night with a giant saber; a Lacanian answer would be that she wants the plenitude of power and knowledge associated with the place of the Father (in the structure of the unconscious) and symbolized in the Phallus. In the simplest psychoanalytic terms, she wants to hang on to the father himself, for he is of course the symbol of that Phallus. If she cannot have him in life, then she will keep the body as an object that stands for him, a desire expressed in her effort to keep his corpse from proper burial (a feat she does manage, Faulkner tells us, for three days, after which, were this a tale of the Christian scapegoat, instead of a phallic surrogate, she might have expected it to rise again). But if she cannot have the father, who loomed over her in life and then loomed over her in death, then she will have a substitute.

Enter Homer Barron. This time she will hang on to her symbol of phallic power in life and in death. But her behavior, finally, does make of Homer a ritually slain "god" whose powers can be claimed through contiguity—the transfer achieved by physical proximity or even ingestion. What makes the thought of Emily's sexual acts with Homer's corpse so repulsive to any reader is the evidence Faulkner gives us that it is oral, not genital; not merely necrophiliac, but also—as Stone astutely observes—saprophitic or, perhaps more accurately, saprophagous. The two signs that Faulkner gives us that link Emily, bodily, to Homer's cadaver are the gray strand of hair and the odious obesity that overtakes her after she has murdered the man. Faulkner's strategic emphasis on her repulsive shape—"bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue" (CS 121)—really makes absurd the interpretation of John V. Hagopian et al.—that the hair was placed beside Homer "as a gesture of grief and farewell" (Inge 79). Emily's gesture certainly has to do with grief and farewell, for it has indubitably to do with death. But the significance of the gesture, finally, is more properly associated not with some noble chivalric token, but with Blake's song of experience celebrating the penetration of the sick rose by the invisible worm of mortality. Thus, "A Rose for Emily" suggests the principle that Laplanche outlines in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis—that human sexuality, the sex drive, is less associated with life than, finally, with death. Such may be the reason Faulkner's story has aroused very intense reader-response and critical debate.

Notes

1. These different suggestions have been made, respectively, by Going (Faulkner), Edwards and Winchell (Browning), Barber and Levitt (Ransom), Stevens and Stronks (Poe), Barnes (Hawthorne), and Stewart (Dickens). I should add that Inge (ed.), William Faulkner: A Rose for Emily includes many of the most interesting essays written on the story, and I am very grateful to him for providing me with a copy of the out-of-print book.

2. See the essays by Going, McGlynn, Nebeker, Sullivan, Wilson, and Woodward.

3. See Bidney (278), who suggests an allusion to Blake's image of the "worm" in Faulkner's Light in August, but he does not refer to "A Rose for Emily." I am not aware that any other critic has made this suggestion about Blake and Faulkner. I have not been able to find evidence in Blotner or in Blotner's William Faulkner's Library: A Catalogue that Faulkner is likely to have read "The Sick Rose" in any volumes he owned by 1929 when he wrote the story.

4. A third readerly style, not illustrated here, is that of the "Anthropologist," who looks for cultural norms and values, and who would be represented by, say, Feminist or Marxist or other "ideological" critics (see Allen's essay as a recent example).

5. See Benton for a discussion of the central issues in the Gothic; see Carothers for discussions of Faulkner's habits of style, composition, and genre in his short fiction.

Works Cited

Allen, Dennis W. "Horror and Perverse Delight: Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily.'" Modern Fiction Studies 30.4 (Winter 1984): 685-96.

Barber, Marion. "The Two Emilys: A Ransom Suggestion to Faulkner?" Notes on Mississippi Writers 6 (Winter 1973): 103-05.

Barnes, Daniel R. "Faulkner's Miss Emily and Hawthorne's Old Maid." Studies in Short Fiction 9 (Fall 1972): 373-77.

Benton, Richard P. "The Problem of Literary Gothicism." ESQ 18 (1972): 1-5.

Bidney, Martin. "Faulkner's Variations on Romantic Themes: Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley in Light in August." Mississippi Quarterly 38.3 (Summer 1985): 277-86.

Blotner, Joseph. William Faulkner's Library: A Catalogue. Charlottesville: U. of Virginia Press, 1964.

Carothers, James B. William Faulkner's Short Stories. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985.

Crosman, Robert. "How Readers Make Meaning." College Literature 9.3 (1982): 207-15.

Cullen, John B., with Floyd C. Watkins. Old Times in the Faulkner Country. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1961.

Dillon, George L. "Styles of Reading." Poetics Today 3.2 (1982): 77-88.

Edwards, C.H., Jr. "Three Literary Parallels to Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily.'" Notes on Mississippi Writers 7 (Spring 1984): 21-5.

Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." In Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random, 1950: 119-30.

Going, William T. "Chronology in Teaching 'A Rose for Emily.'" Exercise Exchange 5 (February 1958): 8-11.

――――――. "Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily." Explicator 16 (February 1958): Item 27.

Hagopian, John V., and Martin Dolch. "A Rose for Emily." Insight I: Analyses of American Literature. Frankfurt am Main: Hirschgraben-Verlag, 1964: 43-50.

Holland, Norman N. "Fantasy and Defense in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily.'" Hartford Studies in Literature 4 (1972): 1-35.

――――――. 5 Readers Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale U. P., 1975.

Inge, M. Thomas, ed. William Faulkner: A Rose for Emily. Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1970.

Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1976.

――――――, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; Intro. Daniel Lagache. New York: Norton, 1973.

Levitt, Paul. "An Analogue for Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily.'" Papers on Language and Literature 9 (Winter 1973): 91-4.

McGlynn, Paul D. "The Chronology of 'A Rose for Emily.'" Studies in Short Fiction 6 (Summer 1969): 461-62.

Nebeker, Helen E. "Chronology Revised." Studies in Short Fiction 8 (Summer 1971): 471-73.

Stevens, Aretta J. "Faulkner and 'Helen': A Further Note." Poe Newsletter 1 (October 1968): 31.

Stewart, James Tate. "Miss Havisham and Miss Grierson" Furman Studies 6 (Fall 1958): 21-3.

Stone, Edward. A Certain Morbidness: A View of American Literature. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U. P., 1969: 85-100.

Stronks, James. "A Poe Source for Faulkner? 'To Helen' and 'A Rose for Emily.'" Poe Newsletter 1 (April 1968): 11.

Sullivan, Ruth. "The Narrator in 'A Rose for Emily.'" Journal of Narrative Technique 1 (September 1971): 159-78.

Wilson, G. R., Jr. "The Chronology of Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily' Again." Notes on Mississippi Writers 5 (Fall 1972): 44, 56, 58-62.

Winchell, Mark Royden. "'For All the Heart's Endeavor': Romantic Pathology in Browning and Faulkner." Notes on Mississippi Writers 15.2 (1983): 57-63.

Woodward, Robert H. "The Chronology of 'A Rose for Emily.'" Exercise Exchange 13 (March 1966): 17-19.

Sanctuary

TERRY HELLER (ESSAY DATE SUMMER 1989)

SOURCE: Heller, Terry. "Mirrored Worlds and the Gothic in Faulkner's Sanctuary." Mississippi Quarterly 42, no. 3 (summer 1989): 247-59.

In the following essay, Heller focuses on Faulkner's use of mirrors in Sanctuary as it relates to the convention of mirroring in Gothic fiction.

In Sanctuary Faulkner presents a mirror structure, the underworld of bootlegging and prostitution mirroring the respectable world of law and order. This mirroring is extended from the world to characters and to language. William Patrick Day's study of the Gothic tradition, In the Circles of Fear and Desire,¹ suggests a fruitful way of interpreting the meanings of this mirroring in relation to romantic definitions of sexual identity.

Interpreters of Sanctuary have noted the multiple appearances of mirrors, the first being Horace's discovery of Popeye mirrored in the spring from which Horace drinks. For each of the main characters in the respectable world, there is at least one mirrored opposite in the disreputable world. Opposed to Horace as a protector of innocence is Popeye, a violator of innocents. Opposed to Narcissa and her son are Ruby and her son. Also opposed to the ruthlessly respectable Narcissa and the Baptist ladies she manipulates are the ruthlessly respectable, but disreputable Reba and her retired prostitute friends. Opposed to Gowan, the Virginia gentleman, are Lee, Van, Tommy, and Red, who become or attempt to become Temple's "dates" in the underworld. Opposed to the respectable Temple, daughter of Judge Drake, is the sexually active Temple at the Grotto who calls Popeye "Daddy."

There is enough symmetry here to establish a mirror relationship between the two worlds, but not so much and so exact a symmetry as to suggest that the underworld is merely a fantasy projection of the respectable world. This rough and limited symmetry distinguishes Sanctuary from the central works of the Gothic tradition where it appears that "the Gothic world," as Day argues, is not a representation of the real world, but rather, a fantasy projection of the unconscious side of a romantic imagination (Day, pp. 27-42). Sanctuary 's underworld is pointedly not fantastic, though it is presented with techniques that make it seem alien and "unreal" to those respectable characters who come into contact with it.

Even though this underworld is not merely a fantastic projection of the unconscious of particular characters, it is a projection. The underworld of Sanctuary exists in part because respectable society needs it; it is a real projection of the respectable world. The underworld exists to provide alcohol to respectable Virginia gentlemen, to provide the services of prostitution to the "biggest" lawyers, politicians, and other civic leaders in the area, as Reba repeatedly reminds her visitors, and to cooperate with political powers such as Eustace Graham, to maintain the status quo. Reba's comments on the protection she enjoys in Memphis emphasize the degree to which her institution, illegal and disreputable, is nevertheless essential and valued.

The underworld mirrors the respectable world in a particular way; it reveals those parts of society that belong to its "unconscious," which are placed out of sight, repressed but not eliminated. The mirroring underworld points to the fictionality of respectable society, to its pretense that its ideology is comprehensive. Even though the underworld has a real existence and real functions in relation to the respectable world, there is a sense in which it is also a fantasy. For example, respectable characters often make use of the underworld to maintain fantasies of self and social relations.

The usefulness of the split worlds is obvious, for example, in the cases of Narcissa and Reba. Narcissa is a respectable widow with no apparent desire to marry. She has found a socially acceptable feminine identity in which she is completely independent of male domination. She has no desire to change, and she ruthlessly, even viciously, maintains her position. Reba occupies a similar position in the underworld, though she appears less ruthless, perhaps because her position depends less on appearances than Narcissa's does. Reba, too, will do whatever is necessary to protect her position from real threats, and she has no compunctions about helping Popeye to hold Temple prisoner. Narcissa's independence from male domination depends, at least in part, upon the services Reba's business provides, satisfying the sexual drives of respectable men so that they may do without the services of respectable women. Likewise, Reba's business depends to some extent upon the various reasons respectable women have for avoiding sex, one of which is to avoid submission to men. This convenient arrangement is one symptom of the social sickness of which the split in the world is a major sign. The arrangement suggests that unjust gender relations are somehow at the center of social illness. The extent and seriousness of the disease are indicated by a more sinister connection between Narcissa and Reba.

Narcissa maintains her social position by making indirect use of the underworld. To separate Horace from the Goodwin case, she goes to Eustace Graham with the information that Clarence Snopes has talked with Horace. Eustace, then, is able to muscle information from Snopes, to reach through Reba, presumably, and a Memphis "Jew lawyer," to Popeye in hiding with Temple after the murder of Red, and to bring Temple to the Jefferson courtroom where she cooperates in asserting Narcissa's view of the case. Narcissa's view is that Goodwin is a bootlegger and murderer, who lives with a whore and, therefore, deserves violent destruction; by threatening her social position, Goodwin is violating a lady, so it is appropriate that he also be a perverted rapist. Her view of the situation coincides almost perfectly with the view most advantageous to Popeye. Narcissa's portrayal of Horace and of the ideals of justice that he believes should underpin society is justified by the event, an event in which the underworld is preserved at the expense of a bootlegger who has become inconvenient to the respectable world, an "embarrassment" to the underworld, and a useful sacrifice for both worlds. Narcissa's identity is affirmed, the status quo is preserved, and Popeye evades charges of murder and rape.

Respectable society gives up the genuine truth, justice, and virtue that law, order, and morality should serve. The respectable world maintains the social order by using the underworld to help sustain false but desirable definitions of people and events. Such cooperation between the two worlds reveals that the split between them is a form of disease. This disease is manifested in virtually every choice and activity in the two worlds. For example, Faulkner introduces parodies of respectable activities that illustrate the disease. Red's funeral and the gathering afterwards at Reba's house parody grief and moral outrage by showing underworld characters acting out the external behavior of grief and outrage without the feeling that would make the actions sincere. Though some people at each event may have genuine feelings, the groups cannot sustain the behavior without sharing the feelings. In both cases the result is grotesque black humor: the corpse spilled from the casket in a riot about beer, the beer-stealing child punctuating with vomit the retired prostitutes' detailed condemnation of Popeye's voyeurism. Clarence's initiation of Virgil and Fonzo into bargain-basement sex parodies the processes of moral education that lead to the arrogance and mendacity of the college students Horace observes on the train to Oxford and that lead to Gowan's learning how to drink like a gentleman at Virginia. These people mask utterly self-indulgent and amoral behavior with grossly insufficient pieties. The grief of Red's drunken mourners and the outrage of the madames may seem more sincere and moral than the petty economies of Clarence, the wit and polish of the students, or Gowan's ridiculous idea that a gentleman is defined by the quantity of liquor he can consume while remaining conscious, but all are missing the necessary core of a deeply held belief about what is good for individuals and society. The self-indulgent amorality of the respectable world rests upon an almost universally shared fantasy that evil impulses remain confined to the underworld. Sustained by this belief, respectable people depend daily upon the existence of an underworld, yet manage through false pieties, both large and small, to remain blind to their dependence and to the horrors they commit in preserving it.

The split between these two worlds extends into language and character: words fragment into double meanings that reflect the two worlds; the main characters reveal internal divisions that also parallel their divided world.

Words repeatedly double their meanings in the novel, from Horace's and Popeye's transformations of bird in the opening chapters, through Horace's and Little Belle's unravelling of shrimp, the chaos unleashed at Red's funeral by blue and the confusion of bier with beer, to Popeye's and his associates' problems with jack, to Popeye's finally getting entangled in the meanings of fix. Horace needles Popeye about his ignorance of birds, except those he eats; then Popeye tells Ruby that there is a "bird" outside (meaning a man from the respectable world). Horace carries shrimp home, his life is measured in drops of shrimp juice on the sidewalk, his wife eats shrimp, and Little Belle, in calling him a shrimp, taunts him with his role as Belle's servant and suggests that Belle consumes him body and soul. Popeye calls all males "Jack" and spends his life dragging down jack until he is tired of it. When he asks the hangman (also Jack) to fix his disarranged hair, the hangman agrees and springs the trap. These are only a few examples of transforming puns in which significant words shift meanings between one situation and another in arbitrary and often highly dangerous ways. These point again to the way in which this culture is diseased, for they emphasize the degree to which people remain blind to the forces that manipulate them. These characters assume their control over language, only to find that it turns back upon them in surprising, usually violent ways, especially when the characters move outside their familiar social worlds. They remain unable to see the eddies and currents of the culture within which they are submerged, but this flow is revealed to us readers. We see how all are trapped in diseased cultural assumptions, the main sign of which is society's very split into two antithetical worlds.

One of the most terrifying of these revelations of blindness centering on a shifting word occurs when Temple stands before a mirror at the Grotto looking for marks on her face of Popeye's recent violence that she might use to incite Red to kill Popeye: "'Shucks,' she said, 'it didn't leave a mark even;' drawing the flesh this way and that. 'Little runt,' she said, peering at her reflection. She added a phrase, glibly obscene, with a detached parrot-like effect."² Though for the reader shucks is a heavily laden word by this point in the novel, associated with the corn cob, the mocking sounds of her bed at the Old Frenchman place, the laughing in the coffin in her death fantasy, and with Horace's nightmare rape vision after he interviews her, she is blind to these associations, just as she fails to see that she is utterly changed at this moment compared to her moral state when she pitied Ruby's baby. Even though he has left no visible mark, Popeye has helped transform her from a somewhat rebellious co-ed into a sexually active "moll" contemplating murder. Her failure to appreciate this transformation is a symptom of her society's failure to provide Temple with an inner, "spiritual" identity, a perspective like the reader's from which the transformation would be visible.

The split in Temple, which this unconscious pun emphasizes, is visible as well in Popeye and Horace. In Popeye, the split appears as a lack, indicated by his impotence. He reaches out blindly for self-realization by imitating others, having no inner understanding of the spiritual qualities beneath the surfaces he can observe. As a result, his behavior seems arbitrar y and self-contradictory. In Horace, as in Temple, the split is between two selves. The Old Frenchman place and Reba's present a surface where it becomes possible for people from the respectable world to view their mirrored images in the disreputable world. Horace meets his opposite, Popeye, at the Old Frenchman place, and he encounters another much more complex mirroring when he talks with Temple at Reba's. Temple comes from the respectable world to the Old Frenchman place, where she "passes through the looking-glass" to be seen on the other side of it when Horace talks with her.

Why Popeye approaches "the surface of the mirror" by spending time at the Old Frenchman place is essentially mysterious, but his behavior suggests at least one interesting possibility. Popeye talks more intimately with Ruby than with anyone else, trying to persuade her to come to Memphis with him. Ruby implies to Horace that she and Lee are living and working at the Old Frenchman place, despite its isolation and inconvenience, for the sake of their child. When Horace persists in asking why Ruby and Lee remain in such an out-of-the-way place, she shows him her child (pp. 17-20); and both Lee and Ruby see Popeye as an unwelcome intruder. That Popeye has joined them there, that he tries to obtain Ruby, and that he appropriates Temple, when she proves more attractive to the other men than Ruby, may indicate that he, like the Goodwins, is reaching toward a meaningful, fulfilling identity. Such an identity proves incomprehensible to him. Unable to love or to understand love, he can never escape the underworld to another world as Ruby and Lee have attempted, with limited success, to do. Instead, he grasps at the physical symbol of desire. Of course, Lee and Ruby have not attempted to enter the respectable world, but to separate themselves from the trap or disease of the entire mirroring structure of two worlds. Popeye's attempt is futile, then, not only because he cannot love, but also because passing through the mirror, as he might do by appropriating a woman and imitating a marriage, is not really a solution. Temple's fate makes this clear.

Temple's split is perhaps the clearest, for she tries life in both worlds. As a college freshman, Temple is a child moving into respectable woman-hood. Before her arrival at the Old Frenchman place she has mastered respectable courtship in which a woman depends upon the man to restrain his and her sexual desire by not forcing sex upon her. Therefore, she is always "safe," especially in the groups of men where she is usually found. At the Old Frenchman place she is forced into a new group of men, among whom this rule does not apply. Her split appears when she is simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the possibilities of this world. Temple at the Old Frenchman place looks and behaves as Day describes the typical Gothic heroine in her fantastic Gothic world. When Popeye rapes her with a corn cob and kidnaps her, he takes her through the mirror. At Reba's, Temple puts away her respectable self and enters fully into her dark, sexually aggressive side.

She finds that this life does not provide the gratification it promised, in part because it is based on a false opposition in which female sexual desire is evil. She expects to be free when she passes through to the dark side, but she finds that the underworld controls female sexuality as rigidly as does the respectable world. Popeye does not allow her to have sex except when he is present. When he sees that she is enjoying sex with Red, Popeye separates them. Because Popeye does not experience "normal" sexual desire, she cannot use her attractiveness to gain satisfaction by manipulating him. Her attempt to have Red kill Popeye fails. She is as powerless in the underworld as in the respectable world, and she is as ungratified, though she has experienced sexual desire and pleasure. She relives a version of Ruby's experience when Ruby's father killed her first lover. Wrested back through the mirror, Temple appears at Goodwin's trial, dressed in black, like Popeye, beneath her white coat, as Popeye's and Eustace's puppet. When her father and brothers take her away from court, she responds to the completion of her return to respectability with gestures reminiscent of her violation and abduction at the Old Frenchman place.³ Shifting from one group of men to another, from one "daddy" to another, changes nothing important for her. Her last gestures, a look into her mirror and, then, out at a Parisian "waste land," underline a discontent that borders upon despair.

Like Narcissa in her preservation of respectability, Temple, in her movement through the underworld, seems unconsciously concerned with a problem of feminine identity. While Narcissa ruthlessly preserves an identity she has achieved, Temple tries out and finds wanting two versions of feminine identity. Horace's split also concerns feminine identity. Indeed, an examination of Horace's divided self helps to open another perspective on these mirroring worlds.

Several critics, but most notably John T. Matthews (pp. 247-255), have noticed Horace's attraction to his step-daughter, Little Belle. This attraction takes the form of a concern for her respectability. When he becomes drunk at the Old Frenchman place, he expresses frustration at his inability to influence Little Belle's moral development. Her budding sexuality appears to him as a natural force that will bloom as it may; because she sees him as a sort of employee rather than as a fatherly moral guide, he cannot successfully direct her sexual life. Horace wants to exercise the traditional authority of the father who superintends his daughter's sexual behavior in order to guarantee her respectability and her entrance into the moral order he wishes to affirm. His narration of recent events shows that he has sublimated his response to her sexual attractiveness by recourse to the father's role. He leaves home in part because nothing there confirms him in that role. Indeed, when he sees in the double mirrors Little Belle's dissimulation of her affirmation of his role as father, he sees quite literally the split that troubles him. The mirrors show the lack of restraint beneath her pretense. If he accepts this lack of restraint, then his sublimation will be defeated; he will have to recognize the natural as fundamental. In his case, sexual attraction to this step-daughter is "natural." In the absence of social agreement that sublimation is valuable and necessary, Horace will have to know himself as split. He will be forced to acknowledge his desire for Little Belle, a fate that could be liberating, since it would tend to dissolve Horace's rigid separation of the split worlds.

Horace, like Narcissa, depends upon the existence of the two mirroring worlds. His desire to bring Popeye to justice is justified by the literal truth of Popeye's guilt, but it is also necessary to Horace's concept of himself. As Horace is forced to recognize when he interviews Temple (though he seems to repress it afterwards), Popeye has apparently had intercourse with Temple, thereby enacting the desire Horace tries so hard to repress, to have intercourse with Temple's double, Little Belle. When Horace vomits the coffee he drank in Memphis, he envisions that violation of Temple as his own desire to violate Little Belle, and he views the composite act as utter self-destruction, as his own rape by "the world."

Horace needs Popeye to stand for his repressed self. This need accounts for Horace's great mistake in attempting to save Lee by accusing Popeye. However, he cannot eliminate the "Popeye" in himself. Horace's attempt to create a scapegoat by accusing Popeye is no more successful than Temple's to eliminate Popeye as forbidding "father." Furthermore, Horace's attempt contributes to Lee's destruction just as surely as do Narcissa's betrayal and Temple's perjury.

Horace's split between a conscious desire to control his women for their own good and the good of society and his unconscious desire to possess them sexually is mirrored in his entire culture. This is especially apparent in the novel's many misogynist jokes. For example, the jokes of the college boys on the train to Oxford reduce sexual intercourse to the violent, mechanical punching of tickets, and their women to pieces of meat:

"I'm going to punch mine Friday night."

"Eeeeyow."

"Do you like liver?"

"I cant reach that far."

"Eeeeeyow."

                                    (pp. 178-179)

When the salesmen discuss Temple after the trial, one says, "She was some baby. Jeez. I wouldn't have used no cob" (p. 309). While condemning Lee as a pervert, they also identify with his desire to possess the violated woman. The Kinston cab driver who returns Horace home says, "We got to protect our girls. Might need them ourselves" (p. 313). These and several other similar jokes reveal the doubleness of all men's attitudes toward women. Protecting their violated respectability is a matter for "a bonfire of gasoline" because genitals are the most sacred parts of "that most sacred thing in life: womanhood" (p. 298). But every man secretly desires to do what these prohibitions and punishments are to prevent. Therefore, all such desires are projected onto the underworld, where one can go to indulge them, but of which one makes an example whenever the opportunity arises, thus reaffirming the repression.

The mirroring worlds of Sanctuary form a recognizable representation of Faulkner's contemporary, social world. The doubling of that split in Horace and in the general misogyny of his culture points toward one important aspect of the origin and meaning of this split. William Patrick Day provides a way of coming at the origin of the split that will help to explain its meaning.

Day argues that the Gothic tradition in fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is concerned with the psychological adjustments of the new middle class to an industrial capitalist society. Of primary concern to the consumers of Gothic novels were adjustments of family structure and gender role. Hence popular Gothic novels repeatedly deal with themes of the relationships between parents and children, between brothers and sisters, and between lovers. One of the functions of the Gothic novels was to parody the romantic conceptions of gender roles illustrated in Richardson's Pamela. In such novels, good females exhibit a will to virtue that tends to render them passive before male authority. Good males are characterized by a will to power consistent with their duty to dominate and to order life. Gothic novels parody these conceptions of gender roles by revealing their dark sides: the feminine desire to submit in order to partake of power and the masculine desire to ravish in order to possess the feminine without restraint. Day contends that human identity is artificially split by these conventional archetypes, that males find themselves cut off from aspects of themselves culturally defined as feminine and that females are cut off from aspects of themselves culturally defined as masculine. Gothic fiction shows such characters attempting to establish wholeness of identity in perverse ways, by projecting the forbidden self onto another, then attempting to appropriate the other. The other is often a family member, making the relationship incestuous. Incest conveys the tension between the two parts of the self that desire unity in identity, but which are forbidden it by a strongly internalized cultural ideology. The results of attempting to unify are usually terror and destruction (Day, Chapter 2).

Faulkner produces a more self-conscious and sophisticated text than is usual in the Gothic tradition. He brings the acts of fantasy and projection into the fiction, making them visible to rather than merely available to the reader. Sanctuary is not a reader's fantasy as are The Mysteries of Udolpho or Dracula. Instead, the reader observes the fantasy-making of characters and culture. Nevertheless, the characters of Sanctuary seem to be dealing with the same Gothic problems Day discusses, though at a later historical stage. Horace is closest to the tradition as described by Day, but the women and the male culture apart from Horace reveal changes in attitudes. At this historical stage, women show a strong discontent with their culturally defined roles, and male misogyny bubbles near the surface of the whole culture.

Horace really wants to fulfill the traditional father's role, seeing it as necessary to familial, social, and moral order. Beneath that desire is a repressed desire to claim "feminine" aspects of his self. This desire takes the form of sexual attraction to Little Belle. When he encounters an enactment of that desire in Popeye's violation of Temple, Horace contemplates the loss of his world and his self. Unable to bear this loss, he represses his vision of an androgynous, self-destroying monster and attempts a return to his mission of destroying Popeye. Seeing only the horror of Temple's violation, he is confirmed in his inability to see that in desiring Little Belle he is really trying to unify his self. Furthermore, Horace cannot repress his own desires by repressing their projections in the external world as do the protagonists of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Stoker's Dracula. Like those Gothic protagonists who attempt to achieve wholeness through the exercise of power, Horace destroys or, at least, maims himself; he is unable to achieve unity by asserting separation.

The women of Sanctuary are discontented with their socially defined roles, unlike the Gothic heroine Day describes, who wants most of all to live a conventional life (Day, p. 17). When Horace recounts his argument with Little Belle over how she should regulate her sex life, he reveals that Little Belle is asserting her right to choose her male friends without the intervention of fathers and brothers. When Ruby tells the story of how her father and brother killed her first lover, branding her a whore for loving in defiance of their choices, she asserts her freedom, a freedom she has subsequently exercised despite that early defeat. However, though Ruby's attempts come closest to success, she does not break away from the sickness of the split worlds. Neither do Narcissa and Temple.

Narcissa's role as virtuous widow makes her independent of the masculine; she need not submit. Of course, Narcissa's rebellion against male domination is self-defeating. In order to insulate herself from particular males and to assert power over them, she surrenders utterly to the cultural ideology that confines her to a narrow and grossly immoral life, which deprives her of spiritual being as the price of her independence. She becomes cold, soulless, and loveless. Temple's perpetual discontent, though it is terrifyingly childish in comparison with Ruby's pursuit of love, is yet another indicator of the failure of traditional female roles, whether respectable or disreputable, to provide fulfillment for women in Sanctuary 's world. She, too, surrenders her soul in order to experience freedom and power. Though the women of Sanctuary, unlike most women in earlier Gothic novels, actively, if not always consciously, oppose the roles imposed upon them by their culture, their opposition remains partial and unsuccessful, leading to stunning defeats and wrenching horrors. Only Ruby approaches a vision of her situation as inclusive as that granted the reader.

Males' protests against evisceration by their culture take the form of a violence that almost constantly boils near the surface of social behavior. They seem required to place respectable women on the pedestal of purity, and then to hate them for their unattainability. Their anger shows not only in their misogynous humor but also in the fury and perversity of their repression. While destroying Goodwin, Jefferson duplicates the crime of which it accuses him: "Do to the lawyer what we did to him. What he did to her. Only we never used a cob. We made him wish we had used a cob" (p. 311). They threaten Horace with his own nightmare vision of multiple, mutual, self-destructive rape, revealing how fully they violate themselves to preserve what their diseased ideology tells them are virtue and justice. In a terrifying reflection of Red's funeral that perverts the ritual it attempts, the town repeats and extends the crime it punishes. In earlier Gothic novels, aggression against women is usually confined to the male protagonists and their particular victims. In Sanctuary, the will to aggression against all females is general among the males, for all the men seem to sense that their cultural ideology, in effect, castrates them by forbidding them the unity with the other sex that they naturally desire, the unity of pleasure in the procreative act. This unity is only possible if, as Day argues, men and women can affirm and "identify with" the other sex in themselves (Day, p. 132), and the culture of this novel places such an ideal beyond anyone's reach.

In Sanctuary, the old moribund definitions of gender roles have become so restrictive that they inevitably lead to real, rather than fantasized, perversity and destruction in whatever direction one attempts to extend them. The only sane alternative suggested in the novel is to leave society behind, to found a family on mutual love and commitment as far away from contemporary social values as one can get. There, perhaps, conventional gender roles may be abandoned, and the "androgyny" of pleasure in reproduction may be realized (Day, pp. 146-149). Ruby and Lee seek sanctuary from the dangers of Memphis, Ruby sacrificing the comforts that Horace and Popeye believe she could easily have, were she willing to abandon Lee or let her child grow up the way Popeye did. Like many an escapee before them in American fiction—Ishmael, Huckleberry Finn, and Jake Barnes spring to mind—Ruby and Lee are drawn back into the corrupt and powerful social structure by their needs and desires, their weaknesses and errors, and the arbitrary disasters brought on by others such as Popeye, Temple, and Horace.

In Sanctuary, then, Faulkner continues the exploration of concerns that were central to the Gothic tradition as described by Day. By placing these concerns more explicitly in a social context than was often the case in earlier Gothic classics and by representing the characters and culture as fantasy-makers, Faulkner exposes the fictionality as well as the terrifying destructiveness of a decadent social ideology that has descended from the conventions of gender role parodied in the earlier Gothic tradition. Faulkner shows women making futile and destructive attempts to escape the conventional definitions of feminine and masculine identities, and he shows men in violent, unconscious protest against the psychologically castrating power of those same definitions.

Notes

1. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

2. William Faulkner, Sanctuary: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage, 1987), p. 245.

3. John T. Matthews, "The Elliptical Nature of Sanctuary," Novel, 17 (1984), 257-258.

A Selection of Other Sources Consulted

Adamowski, T. H. "Faulkner's Popeye: The 'Other' as Self." Canadian Review of American Studies, 8 (1977), 36-51.

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner. The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.

Broughton, Panthea R. William Faulkner: The Abstract and the Actual. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.

Canfield, J. C., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of "Sanctuary." Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1982. Reprints several authors on this list as well as other useful selections.

Cox, Dianne Luce. "A Measure of Innocence: Sanctuary's Temple Drake." Mississippi Quarterly, 39 (1986), 301-324.

Frazier, D. L. "Gothicism in Sanctuary: The Black Pall and the Crap Table." Modern Fiction Studies, 2 (1956), 109-113.

Heller, Terry. "Terror and Empathy in Faulkner's Sanctuary." Arizona Quarterly, 40 (1984), 344-364.

――――――. The Delights of Terror. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Kerr, Elizabeth. William Faulkner's Gothic Domain. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1979.

Mellard, James M. "Lacan and Faulkner: A Post-Freudian Analysis of Humor in the Fiction," in Faulkner and Humor: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1984, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

Muhlenfeld, Elisabeth. "Bewildered Witness: Temple Drake in Sanctuary." Faulkner Journal, 1 (1986), 43-55.

Page, Sally R. Faulkner's Women. Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, 1972.

Polk, Noel. "'The Dungeon was Mother Herself': William Faulkner: 1927–1931," in New Directions in Faulkner Studies: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1983, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984.

Rossky, William. "The Pattern of Nightmare in Sanctuary; or Miss Reba's Dogs." Modern Fiction Studies, 15 (1969–70), 503-515.

Seidel, Kathryn Lee. "From Narcissist to Masochist: A New Look at Temple Drake." Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 5 (1984), 27-35.

Vickery, Olga. The Novels of William Faulkner. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964.

Zink, Karl E. "Flux and Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkner's Prose." PMLA, 71 (1956), 285-301.

FURTHER READING

Biographies

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2005, 778 p.

Originally published in 1974, this is an updated version of what is considered by many to be the definitive Faulkner biography.

Parini, Jay. One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner. New York: Harper Collins, 2004, 512 p.

Biography that includes interviews with Faulkner's friends and family, and an examination of each of Faulkner's works.

Criticism

Burns, Margie. "A Good Rose Is Hard to Find: Southern Gothic as Signs of Social Dislocation in Faulkner and O'Connor." In Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse, pp. 105-23. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

Contends that Southern Gothic is a literary technique that both represents and hides the dehumanization of the South into perceived stereotypes; analyzes works by Flannery O'Connor and Faulkner as examples of this technique.

Donaldson, Susan V. "Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic." Mississippi Quarterly 50, no. 4 (fall 1997): 567-83.

Compares the portraits of women created by Faulkner and Eudora Welty, noting that while Faulkner's narratives reverberate with the effort to impose cultural ideas of femininity on his Southern characters, Welty's narratives present Gothic heroines that break out of the narrow confines of their worlds.

Jarraway, David R. "The Gothic Import of Faulkner's 'Black Son' in Light in August." In American Gothic: New Inventions in a National Narrative, edited and with an introduction by Robert K. Martin, pp. 57-74. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998.

Uses the critical theory of Julia Kristeva to explore Gothic identity in Light In August, focusing on the tragic career of Joe Christmas.

Machinek, Anna. "William Faulkner and the Gothic Tradition." Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny 36, no. 2 (1989): 105-14.

Traces the Gothic elements in Faulkner's fiction.

Martin, Robert K. "Haunted Jim Crow: Gothic Fictions by Hawthorne and Faulkner." In American Gothic: New Inventions in a National Narrative, edited and with an introduction by Robert K. Martin, pp. 129-42. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998.

Compares Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables with Absalom, Absalom! and argues that Faulkner's novel presents a more complicated picture of the world, as it replaces Hawthorne's happy ending with a vision that is ultimately nightmarish.

Perry, J. Douglas. "Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron." Modern Fiction Studies 19 (1973): 153-67.

Proposes that in addition to the commonality of theme and images, American Gothic fiction also uses traditional structures and techniques to create a concentric series of events, drawing the reader into an intense interaction between human communities that exist inside and outside the novel.

Stone, Edward. "Usher, Poquelin, and Miss Emily: The Progress of Southern Gothic." Georgia Review 14 (winter 1960): 433-43.

Considers "A Rose for Emily" in the tradition of Southern Gothic fiction.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Faulkner's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: American Writers; American Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 1; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 7; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 1; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vols. 5, 15; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography, 1929–1941; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 81-84; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 33; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 18, 28, 52, 68; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 9, 11, 44, 102; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 2; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1986, 1997; DISCovering Authors; DISCovering Authors: British; DISCovering Authors: Canadian; DISCovering Authors Modules: Most-studied Authors and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Novels; Exploring Short Stories; Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 2; Literature and Its Times Supplement, Vol. 1; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Novels for Students, Vols. 4, 8, 13; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 2, 5, 6, 12; Short Story Criticism, Vols. 1, 35, 42; Twayne's United States Authors; Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 141; and World Literature Criticism.