Dangerous Quests: Transgressive Sexualities in William Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” and James Baldwin’s Another Country

Abstract

William Faulkner’s novels explore forms of social change and development from which the same author publically advocated retreating. James Baldwin praised Faulkner as one of a handful of writers who had begun to engage with race in American literature in a progressive fashion. However, in his essay “Faulkner and Desegregation,” Baldwin challenges Faulkner’s statement that the process of racial integration in the South should “go slow.” In a common focus on social progress, Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” and Baldwin’s Another Country explore sex and sexuality’s potential as a tool to create a new social order. In these texts, transgressive sexual and artistic practices are used to question social boundaries and limiting binaries of gender and race. These acts of transgression serve to critique the way power polices boundaries of social division, although Faulkner’s text does not share the gesture toward transcendence at the end of Baldwin’s novel.