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.
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