"Two rotten tricks": War and Sex in Soldiers' Pay

Abstract

"Two rotten tricks":War and Sex in Soldiers' Pay Kristin Fujie With officers gone and officers' wivesHaving the grand old time of their lives— —Soldiers' Pay (21) Published in 1926, the same year as Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay, has never featured prominently in accounts of American modernism or the author's own canon. In her pioneering study of Faulkner's work, Olga Vickery writes that its author "appears to be one of those bitter young men who brooded over their pain and frustration in print, thereby contributing to the ever–increasing mass of undistinguished post-war fiction" (2), an opinion echoed a decade later by Irving Howe, who compared Soldiers' Pay to Hemingway's early writings only to observe that Faulkner's book exhibited "hardly a grain of their fierce authority" (17). Both critics identify within the novel hints of the writer to come, but as Vickery makes explicit when she points to "interests more germane to his later work" that lie "Beneath" the theme of "post-war disillusionment" (1), neither of them sees the war or Faulkner's treatment of it as essential to the author's developing vision. They thus lay the foundation for what continues to be the standard reading of Soldiers' Payas an interesting but minor work of Faulkner's "apprenticeship period," when, in Michael Millgate's words, Faulkner "had already been seized by the literary ambition, the need to write, but when he had not yet found his proper material" (75). For most readers, that "proper material" arrived in Flags in the Dust, which has the dual distinction of being, as James G. Watson observes, "both the first novel set in [Yoknapatawpha] and the last in which the Great War significantly figures until A Fable (1954)" (29)—a curious fact that puts the first world war at the most crucial turning point of Faulkner's career, even as it suggests, in Jay Watson's words, that once Faulkner "had Yoknapatawpha," he "simply [End Page 35] no longer needed the war" (28). Written during the period when Faulkner clearly still needed the war, and didn't yet have Yoknapatawpha, Soldiers' Pay has thus been viewed as "little more than a museum-piece in which Faulkner tried to master the war imaginatively and then enroll 'himself among the wastelanders'" (Minter 53). This essay argues that Soldiers' Pay is a less derivative war novel than its reputation suggests, and that the text's primary innovations are its treatment of war trauma and postwar disillusionment as experienced by women. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick has recently argued for a more capacious definition of war writing that "takes into account women's responses to war and women's suffering," and though she has in mind here works by women writers who depict "marginalized aspects of war experience" (1) and "rewrite generic patriarchal war narratives in an experimental and feminist fashion" (7), Soldiers' Paymeets many of her criteria. For while the war is writ large on the central figure of Donald Mahon and his "dreadful scar" (21, 25), Faulkner's treatment of combat trauma in Soldiers' Pay leads curiously into explorations of sexual trauma experienced not by soldiers but noncombatants, not by the men who went to war but the women who stayed home. In a striking complication of Sandra Gilbert's suggestion that men and women experienced the war in fundamentally different and even oppositional ways, the novel creates affinities between the disillusionments suffered on the battlefield and in bed, what the war widow Margaret Powers refers to as the "two rotten tricks" of war and sex (232). As I shall indicate briefly at the end of this essay, Faulkner's interweaving of war and sex in Soldiers' Pay persists into the heart of the Yoknapatawpha fiction, where, even as the war recedes as an explicit subject, it continues to haunt the fraught sexual encounters of characters such as Caddy Compson, Addie Bundren, and Temple Drake. Critics have long recognized the central importance of Donald Mahon's war injuries and the paradoxes they create at the structural and thematic center of Soldiers' Pay. Even as Mahon's...