Faulkner’s Women: The Myth and the Muse by David Williams

Abstract

The items that are indexed under the names of novelists give a rough indication of the attention given to the various novelists by “general critic­ ism,” distorted somewhat, perhaps, by such things as the increased attention that scholarly journals have given contemporary writers in recent years and the popular appeal of “the Angry Young Men” that, as the topical index illustrates, stimulated journalists. In that index “ the Angry Young Men” outdo “Bloomsbury,” for example, by 46 items to 14. James Joyce leads in the number of items in the novelists’ index, followed by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Graham Greene, John Galsworthy, E. M. Forster, Arnold Bennett, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, and George Orwell, in that order. Iris Murdoch, Dorothy Richardson (who fares better, one suspects, in this list than she would in a list that tabulated individual studies), Somerset Maugham, and Ford Madox Ford are well down the list, in that order. Jack Lindsay and Lewis Grassic Gibbon are near the bottom. Most of their entries are derived from journals published in eastern Europe, where they are apparently esteemed as leading British writers. Prejudice, no doubt, afflicts critics of both the east and the west. These two novelists may deserve more attention at home and less exaltation in eastern Europe. These are some of the observations that one may make while reading Cassis’s bibliography, but there are more substantial things to be gained from the book. It is a compendium that will suggest topics to researchers and that may save them some labour as they pursue their research. It is to be hoped that Cassis will add supplements to it. j . k . j o h n s t o n e / University of Saskatchewan David Williams, Faulkner’s Women: The Myth and the Muse (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977). xviii, 288. $16.00 Faulkner scholars attracted to the title of this thematic study by David Williams should be forewarned by him that, “Woman as such is evidently not the subject of this essay; woman as the living monument of the presence of deity, or as an expression of some great and inspiring power in the creative act, is nearer to what is meant by ‘the myth and the muse’ ” (p. xiv). Wil­ liams’s approach to his subject is Jungian and he makes frequent use of Jungian terminology. Although not a prerequisite, knowledge of and sym­ pathy with Carl Jung is an advantage in reading this criticism. An attempt to re-examine “Faulkner’s artistic view of human destiny” (p. 242), Williams’s book is a curiously selective one. Since he finds Faulkner’s work not equally motivated by the myth of woman, he concentrates on four 260 novels that he thinks so motivated-— The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August. Following a theoretical introduction that is rather excessive in length and cumbersome in style, is a cursory look at the myth of woman in Faulkner’s early works — Soldier’s Pay, Mosquitoes, and Sartoris. The last chapters of the book are devoted to the “progress of demythication” (p. xvi) in The Hamlet, The Unvanquished, The Town, The Mansion, and The Reivers. Since they do “ not figure in the mythology of woman” (p. xvi), major works such as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses are completely excluded. Of the four books given as Williams calls it “ full-dress analysis of the myth” (p. xvi), The Sound and The Fury is the most naked. Although the discussion of myths in the novel is often fascinating, it can also be of peripheral interest and of disproportionate length. It may be true, as Williams says, that the symbol of the tree in Caddy’s characterization has not been fully explored, but the pains he takes to redress the balance are surely unnecessary. The sundance mythology of the North American Indian, the tree burial of the Wagogo of Tanganyika, and Yggdrasill, the all-dominating world tree of Norse myth, seem far-fetched. On the other hand, a myth as central and as salient as that of Demeter and Persephone is completely ignored...