| When Random House decided in 1946 to combine The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying in a single volume, the motive had nothing to do with any formal relationship between the two novels. William Faulkner said, however, his publishers wanted to prove he could "write in the same stream of consciousness style about princes and then peasants" (Blontner, 1976, 228). The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner's favorite one, is a novel about a Southern family of descending social position, and it describes the rich family's decline as "symptoms of a tragic Fall of Southern Princes" (Kartiganer, 1979, 3-4). It falls into four parts in each of which one narrator is trying to tell "the history and meaning of four children growing up in the South". As I Lay Dying, which Faulkner called "a tour de force", divides into fifty-nine segments told by fifteen narrators. It portrays a hardly unbearable journey to bury the mother's body in a family burial place forty miles away and tells: "a comic tale of perseverance at a price" (Kartiganer, 1979, 3). We can watch this through the eyes of seven numbers of the family and eight numbers of the town. One theme, however, connect The Sound and the Fury with As I Lay Dying. In these two novels exists one central family situation: brothers with "a weak father" reacting to "the loss of mother" and acting brutally or self-destructively in an attempt to possess "the mother-substitute" (Bassett, 1989, 79). Sons are more easily conscious of the loss of mother than daughters. Nancy Chodorow Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: First Encounters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 78.argues: "that a woman's entry into the symbolic is different from a man's and that, for a number of reasons, the daughter does not enter the symbolic as wholeheartedly or as exclusively as does the son" (Fowler, 1997, 51). A daughter may become a mother herself and recreate the lost relation with her child. The focus is the mother-son relationship that Faulkner reveals through his keen insight and appealing narrative. This relationship is the author's continuing concern in his many novels, especially in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Ding. The decay of the white southern mother greatly influences the child's psychological development. Although the mother's decay results from many reasons, it surely destroys the natural relationship of mother and son. It is very difficult for the child to establish his perfect self in life so the children of two families all have psychic wounds to various degrees.The loss of maternal love is the main reason of the situation in which the child shows the miserable reality of imperfect humanity including isolation, narcissistic self-absorption, conflict, cruelty, and poor communication. Therefore, Faulkner's conception of character provides us with insight into the way his fictional personages take shape from a psychoanalytical perspective.Chapter One contains the discussion of the status and the decay of the white southern mother. The South creates the white women have different social purposes. The white women, whether they are in high or low class, are excluded from power in the patriarchy. They are the tools used to fortify the patriarchal structure of the plantation of the South. At the same time, they are alienated by their own bodies and couldn't lead an earthly life as the black women do because they are the symbol of the patriarchal society. Therefore, they have to live in the very narrow expanse of the society. Such a situation must lead to their strongly psychological and biological reaction with a great influence on their children who have some deep psychic wound. The white mother in Faulkner's fiction shows much anxiety about the place of childbearing and childrearing in the modern woman's life. The southern culture and history encouraged her to be fragile, chaste, the guardian of family status and the fruitful vessel for the production of family heirs. Therefore, she is the statue on the pedestal that is the sy... |
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