A Study On Faulkner's Views On Southern Women As Reflected In The Sound And The Fury

William Faulkner is one of the greatest modern writers of the twentieth century in American literature. In his Yoknapatawpha sagas, Faulkner looks back on the history of the South, probes into the root of the destruction of Southern America and explores the spiritual crisis of the southerners and modern men.In the 1960s, with the development of female liberation movement, the literary criticism of Feminism flourished. From then on, Faulkner's novels attracted the critics and became the objects of their research because of his reappearance of the myth of the South and the myth of Southern ladyhood in his novels. In his works, Faulkner renders all kinds of women. But the readers usually are impressed with negative woman figures, such as the cruel mothers, depraved daughters, the evil-minded cats, the abnormal virgins and the women with necrophilia like Emily so on. Coincidentally, the male characters in Faulkner's novel also attack and impute the women. All these make the readers, especially the feminism critics, be on the thorns. To what extent, do these female characters and words of the male characters reveal Faulkner's views on the women? It's natural that as early as 1940s, the American scholar Maxwell Geismar tagged misogynist on Faulkner. This kind of views developed with the best-known exponent Leslie Fiedler.The specter of misogyny had haunted Faulkner criticism until the late 1960s when a series of critical correctives began to appear. Many woman scholars of Faulkner defend his rendering of women, maintaining that he depicts a wide range of female characters in ways that reflect his admirations and sympathy for them. In the following years feminism assessments on Faulkner have dramatically increased in variety and sophistication. Their voice of Faulkner's sympathetic description of females might well represent a commonsense evaluation within Faulkner studies.In fact, women in Faulkner's literary world are too complicated, too contradictory, and too much the product of the troubled times in Southern history and culture. Thus, it is problematic, from the mere feminism perspective, to generalize about Faulkner's women and Faulkner's representation of gender-based issues. The either-or evaluation of Faulkner as a misogynist or a gyneolatrist does no good to Faulkner studies in relation to women.From the point of view of the history and culture, with the Foucault's analysis of power relations and Lacan's psychoanalysis as the theory basis, this study begins with Faulkner's representation of female characters in the novel The Sound and the Fury (in this masterpiece, Faulkner concentrates on the expression of the repression on the female from the myth of the ladyhood and the serious result of it.) under scrutiny to decipher how the Southern women have been subjected to contending historical, social, and cultural forces to maintain the man-dominated society as the tool to serve the South and meet its political needs. By the fashioning of the rebellious women figures, Faulkner expresses his negative attitude to the myth of Southern ladyhood and his complex feelings of sympathy and perplexity, understanding and contradiction, and sustaining and reservation. From these woman characters, we can know Faulkner's keen desire on the Southern history and tradition, reconsideration of the Southern moral and the quest on the art.Structurally, this essay is classified into five sections.In Chapter One, the author briefly introduces William Faulkner, and then shows the previous study of the feminism critics on Faulkner's views on the Southern women and the perspective adopted and the issues approached in this thesis.In Chapter Two, the author attempts to set up the historical and cultural framework for the demystification of the myth of the South and the myth of Southern ladyhood in the special historical context, by the use of two influential theoretical terms in contemporary cultural studies, the concepts of myth in modern sense and Foucault's power relation. It is in this cultural setting that the Southern mothers and daughters are analyzed as a historically and culturally produced category that is situated within specific material conditions of the Southern context and is interactive with the complicated Southern myth.Chapter Three devotes to the investigation of Faulkner's most ambitious negotiation of the sacred Southern motherhood and his most attitudes to the mothers. Through the detailed analysis of Caroline Compson in The Sound and the Fury as a failing mother, it is attempted to argue that the mothers are the victims of the myth of the Southern ladyhood and lose all the feelings as women and the mothers. Their aloofness and inability harm their children and cause the families'disintegration.Chapter Four takes as its object for discussion of how Faulkner inquires about and responds to what has happened to the Southern daughters, the descendants of the Southern mothers, in the transitional age from the Old South to the New South. Through the exploration of the tragic fate of Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury, it is intended to claim that Faulkner's images of New Women are suffused with awakening and rebellion, contradiction and perplexity, despairs and failures, exposing Faulkner's own gendered subject position as he responds to the ongoing reformulations of gender roles in the culture at large. Finally, in Chapter Five, by taking the history and culture of the South into account, the thesis points out the relationship between the women in the literary world of Faulkner and the myth of the South and the myth of Southern ladyhood. It makes it clear how Faulkner acquired the power to represent women in the bond of social and cultural forces and how he exerts his own power as a writer to write the historical progress of the South.