'Together in torment': Trauma as dream in Faulkner's post-Civil War South

My dissertation explores the trances or waking dreams of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! as symptoms of historical and cultural disorder in the modern South. Tracing the development of this dream-state through the early novels Mosquitos and Sartoris, in which Faulkner was beginning to define a distinctive nightmare version of the South, I find its culmination in the obsessive reveries and re-lived traumas that make up the novels of the Compson family and Thomas Sutpen. Quentin and his fellow narrators are possessed by their stories, doomed to re-experience and re-tell episodes of cultural and familial ruin which, in their intensity and unbidden recurrence, resemble the "traumatic neurosis" dream that Freud describes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.;Rather than a psychoanalytical reading, however, my study is an examination of the novels' dreams as a result of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the new industrialism--developments which caused an upheaval in Southern culture and made a vivid imprint on the Southern imagination. I am particularly interested in the disruption caused by the war to Southern notions of family, honor and sexuality, and I examine emasculation and female defilement in the context of Southern defeat and Northern invasion. The powerlessness and disorientation in the narratives are seen as corollaries to what occurred in the Southern economy and social structure in the half-century following the Confederate surrender.;I also examine questions of style and reader response in an attempt to help explain why the novels produce such an unsettling reading experience. Faulkner's representation of the "dream state" is a troubling and difficult sur-realism, but it earns legitimacy by its faithfulness to the cultural impetus that inspires it. Benjy's madness and hallucination are intimately linked to the decline of the Southern family and the Southern male, and the loss of balance and meaning that resulted, and Quentin's tragic visions stem from his inability to locate value in the Compson patriarchy and to preserve his notion of Southern honor in the person of his sister Caddy. The disjointed narration and the blurring of present events with an un-dimmed past echo the social, moral and psychological disturbance that the novels explore.