Faulkners Portrayal Of Women

This study examines the vexed and contradictory responses of the South's most celebrated novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture. Tracing the ways in which William Faulkner characterized women in his fiction, Diane Roberts posits six familiar representations--the Confederate woman, the mammy, the tragic mulatta, the new belle, the spinster, and the mother--and through close feminist readings shows how the writer reactivated and reimagined them. "As a southerner," Roberts writes, "Faulkner inherited the images, icons, and demons of his culture. They are part of the matter of the region with which he engages, sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting." Drawing on extensive research into southern popular culture and the findings and interpretations of historians, Roberts demonstrates how Faulkner's greatest fiction, published during the 1920s and 1930s, grew out of his reactions to the South's extreme and sometimes violent attempts to redefine and solidify its hierarchical conceptions of race, gender, and class. Struggling to understand his region, Roberts says, Faulkner exposed the South's self-conceptions as quite precarious, with women slipping toward masculinity, men slipping toward femininity, and white identity slipping toward black. At their best, according to Roberts, Faulkner's novels reveal the South's failure to reassert the boundaries of race, gender, and class by which it has traditionally sustained itself.

William Faulkner claimed that it may be necessary for a writer to rob his mother, should the need arise. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies, he remarked.This study of Faulkner's paradoxical attitude toward women, particularly mothers, will stimulate debate and concern, for his novels are shown here to have presented them as both a source and a threat to being and to language.My reading of Faulkner, the author says, attempts more than an identification of female stereotypes and an examination of misogyny, for Faulkner, who almost certainly feared and mistrusted women, also sees in them a mysterious, often threatening power, which is often aligned with his own creativity and the grounds of his own fiction.Drawing on both American and French feminist criticism, Robbing the Mother explores Faulkner's artistic vision through the maternal influence in such works as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, Light in August, and The Wild Palms.

This Nobel Prize–winning author’s satirical Southern novel is “full of the kind of swift and lusty writing that comes from a healthy, fresh pen” (Lillian Hellman, New York Herald Tribune). If ever there was a William Faulkner novel that could be called a portrait of the artist as a young man, Mosquitoes is that book. Set on a yacht excursion on Lake Pontchartrain, Faulkner’s second novel introduces his readers to the artistic community of New Orleans, a vibrant band of aspiring artists, charismatic dilettantes and social butterflies. A satiric look at the world Faulkner himself inhabited in his early years as a writer, Mosquitoes is a high-spirted, engaging novel from the Nobel laureate–winning author known for his classic portrayals of the American South. “It approaches in the first half and reaches in the second half a brilliance that you can rightfully expect only in the writings of a few men.” —Lillian Hellman

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Light in August" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

"In Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, Diane Roberts examines the vexed and contradictory responses of the South's most celebrated novelist to the traditional representations of women that were bequeathed to him by his culture." "The very mention of "the South," Roberts observes, conjures up a crazy quilt of images - from the romantic to the violent, from the gracious and glamorous to the backward and racist. The phrase "southern woman" likewise evokes a whole range of stock characters and stereotypes. Tracing the ways in which William Faulkner characterized women in his fiction, Roberts posits six familiar representations - the Confederate woman, the mammy, the tragic mulatta, the new belle, the spinster, and the mother - and, through close feminist readings, shown how the writer reactivated and reimagined them. In so doing, Roberts sees Faulkner as both a product and a producer of that multi-faceted place - and metaphor - called the South. "As a southerner," she writes, "Faulkner inherited the images, icons, and demons of his culture. They are part of the matter of the region with which he engages, sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting."" "Drawing on extensive research into southern popular culture and the findings and interpretations of historians, Roberts demonstrates how Faulkner's greatest fiction, published during the 1920s and 1930s, grew out of his reactions to the South's attempts to redefine and solidify its hierarchical conceptions of race, gender, and class. During the era in which Faulkner's psyche was formed, the South's efforts to maintain its cultural stability included everything from lynching to erecting Confederate monuments and apotheosizing Gone with the Wind. Struggling to understand his region, Roberts says, Faulkner exposed the South's self-conceptions as quite precarious, with women slipping toward masculinity, men slipping toward femininity, and white identity slipping toward black. At their best, according to Roberts, Faulkner's novels reveal the South's failure to reassert the boundaries of race, gender, and class by which it traditionally sustained itself." "Earlier studies of female characters in Faulkner's novels have charged the writer with unrelenting misogyny or have read these characters as mythic embodiments of "the life force." Offering a richer view befitting the writer's complexities and contradictions, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood revises, reimagines, and reinvigorates our understanding of Faulkner the artist and Faulkner the southerner. It reveals, fully and contentiously, the challenge Faulkner poses to the South's most sacred icons."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

William Faulkner grew up and began his writing career during a time of great cultural upheaval, especially in the realm of sexuality, where every normative notion of identity and relationship was being re-examined. Not only does Faulkner explore multiple versions of sexuality throughout his work, but he also studies the sexual dimension of various social, economic, and aesthetic concerns. In Faulkner's Sexualities, contributors query Faulkner's life and fiction in terms of sexual identity, sexual politics, and the ways in which such concerns affect his aesthetics. Given the frequent play with sexual norms and practices, how does Faulkner's fiction constitute the sexual subject in relation to the dynamics of the body, language, and culture? In what ways does Faulkner participate in discourses of masculinity and femininity, desire and reproduction, heterosexuality and homosexuality? In what ways are these discourses bound up with representations of race and ethnicity, modernity and ideology, region and nation? In what ways do his texts touch on questions concerning the racialization of categories of gender within colonial and dominant metropolitan discourses and power relations? Is there a southern sexuality? This volume wrestles with these questions and relates them to theories of race, gender, and sexuality.