The house that time built: Structuring history in Faulkner and Yeats

Abstract

This article recounts, briefly, the affinities that previous critics have drawn between William Faulkner and William Butler Yeats, and suggests their shared architectural sensibility as a new medium for assessing their individual literary consciousnesses in parallel. This sensibility finds play in the Big Houses of both of these authors' works: Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom, Absalom! and the marvelous empty sea-shell of the palatial manor in Yeats's Meditations in Time of Civil War. The anxiety surrounding these structures' potential destruction in both of these authors' works, I argue, is less directed towards the threat of their physical annihilation than towards the dialectic model of history itself: the threat of destroying the house becomes the threat of destroying the very notion of teleology, of effacing the structural sum of history. I perform separate studies of two Big Houses from which these authors drew their architectural inspiration: for Faulkner, Rowan Oak in Oxford, MS and for Yeats, Lissadell in County Sligo, Ireland. The manners in which these houses grant and restrict access to their occupants, I argue, suggest ideals that are more divergent than these authors' mutual anxieties, the mutual and manifold hybridities of their domestic spaces, might indicate.