Hurt So Bad: The Crisis of Female Embodiment in William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes

Abstract

The Crisis of Female Embodiment in William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes W illiam Faulkner’s second novel Mosquitoes (1927) has long oc­ cupied a vexed position within critical accounts of his career.1 Set in and around New Orleans, where Faulkner lived and wrote for about six months in 1925, the novel takes a cross section of French Quarter artists, writers, and their hangers-on and strands them on four-day yachting party with little more than their own conversation to keep them occupied. Ihe heady atmosphere that results has proven too reified or just too dull for most readers. Dismissed as “a bad early novel” by Malcolm Cowley in his seminal The Portable Faulkner (ix), Mosquitoes has since main­ tained what is arguably the worst reputation of any Faulkner text. Indeed, as demonstrated in the title of Meryl Altmans essay, “Ihe Bug That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Sex, Art, Faulkners Worst Novel, and the Critics,” the books badness has become part of its identity, and it is now customary to acknowl­ edge this reputation in advance of making any arguments for why Mosquitoes is worthy of further scrutiny. Such arguments have never been abundant by Faulknerian standards, but much like its titular insects, the novel has proven either too provocative or too irritating to ignore. Ilse Dusoir Lind registered its unsettling effect in the early eighties when she observed that ‘Mosquitoes remains unknown in most respects, its coherence as a novel still not having been conceded, its place in Faulkner’s development still not having been determined” (l).* 2 That critics have found it both difficult and necessary to “place” Mosquitoes owes some­ thing to its status as the novel Faulkner wrote and published directly before Flags in the Dust (completed in 1927, published in abridged form as Sartoris ‘This essay has benefitted greatly from the keen insights and support of several readers, writing part­ ners, and friends. I am especially grateful to Chip Arnold, Kelvin Black, Rachel Cole, Karen Gross, Keigo Kiyohara, Michael Mirabile, Michael Zeitlin, and Rishona Zimring. I would also like to thank Carolyn Porter for helping me get started with this project years ago and the committee for the Graves Award in the Hu­ manities for helping me bring it to completion. “Critical interest in Mosquitoes increased in the years following Lind’s essay, reaching its height in the 1990s. Building upon earlier work, this compact but serious body ofcriticism has done much to establish the novel’s richness, ifnot its coherence, particularly where it touches upon the intersections of aesthetics, gen­ der, and sexuality (see especially Frann Michel, Karen Ramsay Johnson, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, Altman, Lisa Rado, Susan V. Donaldson, Candace Waid, and Minrose C. Gwin), as well as race and neocolonialism (John N. Duvall and John T. Matthews). 27 28 Kristin Fujie The Crisis ofFemale Embodiment in Mosquitoes in 1929) and The Sound and the Fury (1929), the two works most frequently cited as crucial turning points in the authors development and gateways to his major work. Considered within this context, Faulkners bad novel demands at­ tention simply by virtue of its status as the “last novel before the beginning of the Yoknapatawpha phase” (Carothers 66), and yet this proximity to greatness is precisely what has puzzled its critics. For what it has tended to throw into relief is the profound discontinuity between Mosquitoes and what immediately follows, not just in terms of quality, but also with respect to story, character, voice, technique, and setting—a radical difference at the level of substance and style that has led to the novel’s reputation not only as the “worst,” but also the “most ‘un-Faulknerian’ of his full-length works” (Arnold, Annotations). In this essay, I will argue that Mosquitoes is more Faulknerian than we have supposed, and that recognizing its place in the author’s development requires that we rethink how we read not only the novel, but also the pivotal “moment” of Faulkner’s career, when, as Andre Bleikasten famously put it, Faulkner be­ came “Faulkner” (3). Studies of the oeuvre have tended to place Mosquitoes by displacing it, whether by locating the text on the near side ofa “jump” or “leap...