The 1920s, as Kimmel explains, put indeed severe stress on those who idealized the masculine past, the stillness and unchangeability of the human condition. In a decade marked by fears of national and masculine enfeeblement, by technological changes that had transformed the workplace, depersonalized it, and emasculated men by depriving them of their autonomy (Kimmel 83), many writers, as Duvall notes, and Faulkner among them, were working ―through a larger cultural pathology in male sexual self-identification‖ (49).168
Not surprisingly maybe, Friend sees in the flowering of literature in the 1920s and 1930s the ―search for another South,‖ one that would resist destruction by bringing with it ―a different approach to Southern masculinity, surprisingly resurrecting the old paradigm of honor and mastery‖ (xvii).169
Throughout his life, William Faulkner found himself embedded in conflicting models of manhood. Daniel Singal explains that ―[a]ll his life Faulkner would struggle to reconcile two divergent approaches to selfhood—the Victorian urge toward unity and stability he had inherited as a child of the Southern rural gentry, and the Modernist drive for multiplicity and change that he had absorbed very early in his career as a self-identifying member of the international artistic avant-garde‖ (15). Faulkner, he adds, ―was profoundly self-divided [. . .] [I]n his youth, he experimented with an extensive repertoire of trial identities, ranging from the battle-scarred 1st world war aviator to the bona fide Southern aristocrat to the bohemian
writer and small-town derelict‖ (15). By the late 1920s, however, a pattern of two central
168 John N. Duvall, "Faulkner's Crying Game: Male Homosexual Panic,‖ Faulkner and Gender: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1994, eds. Donald M. Kartiganer, and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996) 48- 72.
169
Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, eds., Southern Masculinity, Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).
selves—old-fashioned country gentleman and contemporary writer—became reasonably well- established. On occasion, these two Faulkners would appear in startling juxtaposition. ―You might see him riding a horse some day, all liveried up as they say—had on the dress like a colonel,‖ notes an old friend, ―Then, he‘d come out with long whiskers and look like a hippie‖ (15).170
To a startling degree, Faulkner's life suggests the flexible and performative nature of gender as articulated by theoreticians like Judith Butler, who observes in Gender Trouble that ―[g]ender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts‖ (140).171
Susan Donaldson remarks that William Faulkner, who, for all his protestations against public life and his insistence upon privacy, was photographed throughout his life striking multiple, and often contradictory, masculine attitudes: returning war veteran (albeit largely manufactured), bohemian artist, avid sailor, dashing aviator, family patriarch, rough-and-ready hunter, reluctant Hollywood screenwriter, and in his last years, elegant in full fox-hunting regalia. Behind the photographs, Faulkner's sense of self-fluidity and his ―vexed‖ masculinity underlined that ―constructing masculinity,‖ seemed to have become an integral part of his life (qtd. in Singal 114).
As Donaldson remarks, Faulkner himself was all too aware that he had an imposing ―heroic‖ legacy to live up to in the intimidating figure of his great-grandfather Colonel William C. Falkner—soldier, duelist, entrepreneur, and only incidentally, novelist. Indeed, Colonel William C. Falkner, had become enshrouded by legend, ―bestowing on him a kind of mythical status‖ (Singal 24). Faulkner, for instance, told Robert Cantwell that
170 Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999).
people at Ripley talk of him as if he were still alive, up in the hills some place, and might come in at any time [. . .] It‘s a strange thing; there are lots of people who knew him well, and yet no two of them remember him alike or describe him the same way. One will say he was [very short] like me, and another will swear he was 6 feet tall‖ (qtd. in Singal 36).172
William Faulkner, a young man with dreamy artistic ambitions and little inclination to work in a conventional job was not likely to measure up to this mythical ancestor. Rejected as unsuitable husband material by the family of his childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham and called ―Count No Count,‖ Faulkner may have been well aware that he served as an exemplar of ―unmanliness‖ in an era that was obsessed with defining and cataloguing the opposites of manliness. Indeed, it was easier, as Angus McLaren argues, to denounce what was seen as a lack of manliness ―than to agree on the specifics of true masculinity‖ and hence late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cultural commentators ―created a number of stock counterparts‖- pimps, Apaches in France, working-class criminals, vagrants, tramps, and homosexuals (27).173 The chronically unemployed and alternately dandyish and scruffy
young Faulkner filled the bill all too easily (Donaldson 55).174
Hence it comes as no surprise that Faulkner was given to making brief, cryptic comments throughout his career about the consequences of choosing an artistic vocation that, from the perspective of conventional white male heterosexuals, was to render his own sense of masculinity problematic at best and suspect at worst. When Faulkner was corresponding with Malcolm Cowley about the making of The Portable Faulkner, the author informed
172 In 1938, Robert Cantwell was assigned the task of writing a magazine article on Faulkner for Time magazine. His conversation with William Faulkner has been retranscribed in M. Thomas Inge, Conversations with William Faulkner (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999); Robert Cantwell, ―The Faulkners: Recollections of a Gifted Family,‖ William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, eds. Frederick J. Hoffmann and Olga Vickery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960) 58-59.
173
Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930 (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1997).
Cowley, with a touch of bitterness, that art in the South ―was really no manly business‖ (qtd. in Selected Letters 216).175 More than a decade before, he had even gone as far as to argue in
one of the aborted introductions to The Sound and the Fury that the male artist in the South was ―forced to choose, lady and tiger fashion, between being an artist and being a man‖ (―Introduction‖ 24).176
If Faulkner's own life resembles in some respects a series of such stylized acts of masculinity, so too do his narratives and his characters suggest meditations on masculine styles, from Bayard Sartoris‘ performance as a self-destructive world war veteran to Horace Benbow‘s aesthete to Flem Snopes‘s homemade persona as a man on the make. So markedly different and stylized are these poses—Bayard‘s violence, Horace‘s idealism, Flem‘s single- minded acquisitiveness—that Faulkner‘s fictional men sometimes appear to be weighing and measuring their sense of masculinity against one another, almost as though they and their creator feel the pressing need to ―prove‖ their differing versions of manhood over and over again.
In his treatment of women, also, ―to the end of his days, the 19th Century attitudes
toward sex and gender that [William Faulkner] had internalized as a child would remain to encounter him, rendering problematic his relationships with his wife and many of the other women with whom he interacted as an adult‖ (Singal 19). Faulkner‘s own approach to the Southern idea(l) of femininity was complex, for:
[l]ike so many men of his era, he would both idealize women as paragons of sexual purity and simultaneously resent them for the moral standard they seemed to enforce on him [. . .] He would commence with what might be called
174 Susan V. Donaldson, ―Introduction: Faulkner and Masculinity.‖ The Faulkner Journal 15.1-2 (Fall
1999/Spring 2000): 3-13.
an unveiling of the Southern lady, revealing her to be a person with the normal range of human passions and sexual drives behind her façade of absolute purity, and then proceed to create a number of female characters who broke decisively not only with the ―belle‖ identity but with the Victorian mores in general (Singal 19).
If Faulkner often defined himself as a ―modernist‖ who deeply admired liberated women, he was also, as Singal remarks, a ―Victorian.‖ This internal psychic imbalance may, in turn, explain why ―the narratives in which [these liberated women] appeared duly punish them for their sins, either through death or some form of mutilation‖ (19). In the Yoknapatawpha conference volume on Faulkner and Gender, Robert Dale Parker ventures to say that Faulkner actually ―feels queasier about the burdens on masculinity than about the more concretely threatening burdens of women‖ (4). ―For women,‖ Parker continues, Faulkner ―imagines or at least tries to imagine the dialectic between sex and gender in terms of individual women, whereas for men, he imagines sex and gender through a more frankly puzzled uneasiness about the broader possibilities for masculinity,‖ adding that Faulkner's fiction reveals far more worries about ―whether males are real men than about whether females are real women‖ (93). Almost as if to test that reality, Faulkner repeatedly returns, Parker adds, ―to the border regions of gender performance‖ (93), and the (re)configuration of gendered private and public spaces in his novels often reverberate with considerable masculine anxiety when faced with manifestations of gender resistance. 177
Whereas Parker (among other critics) promotes here a discussion of gender trying to uncover what Michael Kimmel has called ―invisible‖ or ―genderless‖ masculinity, and study
176 William Faulkner, "An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury," Faulkner: New Perspectives, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1983) 20-28; Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1997).
men ―as men,‖ gender identities do not develop in isolation but ―are produced together, in the process that makes a gender order‖ (40).178
Thus envisioned, masculinity refines, constructs and perfects itself through its encounter with the feminine. I will thus begin this chapter by discussing the portrayal of women as ―women‖ in The Sound and the Fury.