| From the very beginning of his literary career, William Faulkner has been the focus of criticism for the anti-feminine sentiments that pervade much of his fiction. Hence he was charged as either a misogynist or a male chauvinist by a number of critics. Maxwell Geismar (1909-1979), a noted literary critic and biographer, was the first to raise the specter of misogyny that haunted Faulkner criticism until correctives began to appear in the late 1960s. Next came Irving Howe (1920-1993), a commanding figure in American intellectual life, who charged Faulkner as a male chauvinist by saying that Faulkner's inability to achieve moral depth in his portraiture of young women clearly indicated a major failing as a novelist. Critic Leslie Fiedler (1917-) was the best-known exponent of this critical view. In his famous work Love and Death in the American Novel, he concluded that "/?the work of William Faulkner , the fear of the castrating woman and the disease sexuality present in the novels of his contemporaries , Fitzgerald and Hemingway , attain their fullest and shrillest expressions . Not content with merely projecting images of the anti-virgin , he insists upon editorializing against the women he travesties in character and situation... [he] reminds us (again and again) that [females] possess neither morality nor honor; that they are capable therefore, of betrayal without qualm or quiver of guilt but also of inexplicable loyalty......"(Leslie Fiedler, 1966:320)Is Faulkner really a woman hater? Based on my own studies, I believe that Faulkner isn't a woman hater. On the contrary, he is a humanist writer who respects women and admires them. On at least two occasions, Faulkner himself warnedreaders not to confuse his male characters' opinions of women with his own , yet a. number of misogynist readings did accept the characters who make negative comments as "Faulknerian spokesman." In fact, Faulkner's works keep on revealing the devastating effect on the Southern women by the myth of the Southern womanhood and the Southern society.Among them, The Sound and the Fury is one of the masterpieces, and the women characters in it are typical in the South. Since its publication in 1929,77ze Sound and the Fury has gradually become one of the most widely read novels in the English language, and one of the prescribed "classics" in the universities. Scholars and readers in the world have shown an ever-increasing interest in it and it has received more critical attention than any other Faulkner's writings. In this thesis, the writer tries to examine thoroughly Faulkner's portrayal in this individual work of the way women are constricted or used by males and by the Southern social system. The Sound and the Fury tells the decline and fall into social and moral decay of one of the Southern aristocratic families, the Compsons. The women characters in it are really memorable: Mrs. Compson, the inadequate mother; Caddy Compson is the only Compson child who is capable of loving, but she loses her virginity; Miss Quentin, the unfortunate illegitimate child; Dilsey, the loyal black servant. As the weak of the Southern society, most of them are twisted, degraded and even destroyed by the Southern society. Faulkner treats them with great sympathy. While he tries to condemn the cruelty and brutality of the Southern tradition to the Southern woman, he also expresses his great admiration to the women for their "endurance, honesty, sacrifice, compassion and generosity.
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