Faulkner, Marcuse, and Erotic Power

Abstract

This chapter examines the political and economic dimensions of William Faulkner’s erotic desire. It suggests that Faulkner’s public discourses in the years following the publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946 might be read alongside the largely contemporaneous “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School, whose members included Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Like Marcuse, Faulkner believed that personal and political categories were closely intertwined and that, in the 1950s, the idea of sexual privacy was in danger of being eroded. The chapter looks at Faulkner’s speech to the cadets of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and his public admission about his imaginary desire to be a “beautiful woman.” It argues that the suggestion of a transgender desire at this time might be read not only as nonheteronormative, but dangerously un-American, and also contends that the sexuality of early Faulknerian characters is “polymorphous” and often “perverse.”