The Analysis Of Destroyed-type Female Characters In William Faulkner's Representative Works

As a Nobel Prize winner in literature in1949, William Cuthbert Faulkner is one of the greatest writers in American literature in the20th century, and he is also a famous spokesman of American southern literature. During the whole life of William Faulkner, he creates almost twenty novels, six poetry volumes and over seventy short stories. During his whole writing career, he focuses on his stamp-size hometown—American south, which makes his system of Yoknapatapha famous in the field of literature. There are over six hundred characters with names that appear alternately in William Faulkner's long novels and short stories. Among these various characters, there is no doubt that female characters play an important role in William Faulkner's works. Women characters created by William Faulkner, especially the destroyed-type female character attracts attention of a lot of literary critics and researchers who has done plenty of researches on southern women characters.In the middle of the20th century, feminist theory as the extension of feminism movement in the rationale field develops gradually. Feminist theory mainly focuses on gender inequality and aims at promoting women's social rights and status. In1949. Simone? De Beauvoir starts a discussion of the image of women in The Second Sex (1949). In her book, she thinks that women are "otherness" in men's eyes and women are watched by men. During the late1960s to the early1970s in America, there appears Women Image Criticism, which aims at analyzing and deconstructing women image in male's texts from the perspective of gender discrimination and relation of gender.In William Faulkner's works, these women who live in the south, both the black and the white, all suffering unequal treatment from southern society, and no matter how they struggle and no matter how they try to cater to unreasonable requirements from southern society, they all can not find a road to happiness in the end of the novels. Through analyzing the destroyed-type female characters by William Faulkner in detail in this thesis, which reveals us that how southern Puritanism, traditional values and supremacy of men combined to destroy and oppress southern women. By creating the destroyed-female character, William Faulkner shows his deep sympathy for southern women and criticizes southern society violently.