Faulkner and southern womanhood

Abstract

In and Southern Womanhood, Diane Roberts examines vexed and contradictory responses of South's most celebrated novelist to 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 romantic to violent, from gracious and glamorous to backward and racist. The phrase woman likewise evokes a whole range of stock characters and stereotypes. Tracing ways in which William characterized women in his fiction, Roberts posits six familiar representations - Confederate woman, mammy, tragic mulatta, new belle, spinster, and mother - and, through close feminist readings, shown how writer reactivated and reimagined them. In so doing, Roberts sees as both a product and a producer of that multi-faceted place - and metaphor - called South. As a southerner, she writes, Faulkner inherited images, icons, and demons of his culture. They are part of matter of region with which he engages, sometimes accepting, sometimes rejecting. Drawing on extensive research into southern popular culture and findings and interpretations of historians, Roberts demonstrates how Faulkner's greatest fiction, published during 1920s and 1930s, grew out of his reactions to South's attempts to redefine and solidify its hierarchical conceptions of race, gender, and class. During era in which Faulkner's psyche was formed, South's efforts to maintain its cultural stability included everything from lynching to erecting Confederate monuments and apotheosizing Gone with Wind.Struggling to understand his region, Roberts says, exposed 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 r