The Marginalized And The Absent Mothers In William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Novels

As one of the most influential writers in American literature and the winner of Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949,William Faulkner depicted many different kinds of family life in his works.Faulkner wrote 19 novels and more than 120 short stories in his lifetime.Among them,15 novels and most short stories are set in the fictive Yoknapatawpha County.All of these novels are centered on family lives,and mothers are of course indispensable characters in such works.But Faulkner’s mothers are very unlike the mothers in traditional literary works.Faulkner reexamines mothers from a different perspective.They are not the great,selfless,caring mothers as the reading public expected;they are more often than not cruel,selfish,and ruthless.Falkner’s mothers are not positioned in the center of family lives as the source of love and warmth;they are more often than not marginalized or even absent.They are not the traditional characters of motherhood as the embodiment of love and sacrifice;they are portrayed as natural persons.Faulkner seems to show that such mothers the products of a certain social system and historical conditions.Caused by the double pressures of life and society,as well as material and spiritual deprivation,they manifest a psychopathic state of women in a patriarchal culture.Those ineffectual or even maleficent mothers are not born but made.The thesis is composed of seven chapters.Chapter One is a brief introduction of William Faulkner,the Yoknapatawpha Genealogy created by him,relevant studies of Faulkner and his works in the English-speaking world and China,and the focus and structure of this thesis.Chapter Two discusses two domineering mother characters--Mrs.Compson in the Sound and Fury and Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying,who are characteristic of selfishness and neglect of their children.Chapter Three analyzes two tragic young mothers--Mrs.Compson’s daughter Caddy and Addie Bundren’s daughter Dewey Dell Bundren,especially the continuation of tragedy from mothers to daughters.Chapter Four mainly examines two ineffectual mother characters--Mrs.McEachern in Light in August and Ellen Coldfield in Absalom,Absalom!,especially their weakness and dereliction of duty in their children’s education.In contrast,Chapter Five shows two ideal mother characters —— Lena Grove in Light in August and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury,who show the moral strength to adhere to themselves in face of the cruel social oppression at that time.After classifying these mother characters into four different categories,in Chapter Six,I will try to trace the reasons why Faulkner hold contradictory feelings about his mother characters,the personal emotional factors and the profound historical and cultural factors.The last chapter is the conclusion of the thesis.Through his portrayal of those different mother characters,their marginalized or even effaced roles in family life and their weakened relation to children,Faulkner shows how Southern women,especially mothers,underwent a loss of identity after the Civil War,and how the marginalization and absence of mothers in family life will lead to emotional disintegration and defects of personality in their children which have lasting profound impact on their children’s future life.