Fake Cavaliers of Southern Women: Biblical Allusions in Faulkner’s works—Based on Dry September and The Sound and the Fury

Abstract

As a native of the South, Faulkner had a deep love of this land and was also deeply influenced by this land which known as the Biblical Belt. In his novel, The Sound and the Fury and short story Dry September, Faulkner looks back at the changing history of American South and takes an insightful stock of the impact that society had on people at that time. This paper intends to find the parallel correspondence between the Bible and the texts through the deep analysis of each plot, characters and narrative structure. This paper also creatively employs the story of the rape of Dinah in the Bible to analyze the purpose and deep meaning behind men's seemingly righteous revenge for the women of his family. The writer concludes that in patriarchal society, weather in the primitive period of Dinah, or in the modern era of Minnie and Caddy, the purpose of men’s fierce revenge for the contamination of female chastity was to preserve family honor and status, and as for the women’s situation and sufferings were of little importance to them.