'Just words': Reading Faulkner writing women

William Faulkner's representations of women are some of the most complex and intriguing representations of women written by a twentieth-century American male author. This dissertation focuses on four of Faulkner's women characters: Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom!, Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury, "That Evening Sun," and "Appendix: The Compsons," Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, and Linda Snopes Kohl in The Town and The Mansion. Viewed through a feminist lens, these representations of women can be seen to disrupt the masculine texts and contexts that surround them. The argument of this dissertation is that these disruptive female voices as represented in their speech, their transcribed and untranscribed writing, their silences, and their refusal, at times, to conform to cultural expectations of gender can be read to create a sense of agency for each representation of woman, however limited that agency may be perceived to be. The historical and cultural significance of gender roles assigned to women in the American South is represented by Faulkner through his women characters. Thus, chapter five also discusses the lived experience of southern women from roughly 1850 through 1950 in addition to Faulkner's fictional representations of them during the same historical time frame. This dissertation adds to the growing body of feminist criticism about the fiction of William Faulkner in its reading of Faulkner's writing of women.