William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance by James G. Watson (review)

Abstract

MLRy 97.4, 2002 947 Carol Farley Kessler, and in a typically capacious piece of work, drawing on Gilman's letters,juvenilia, her novel Herland, and social treatises such as Concerning Children, she scrutinizes the means by which Gilman writes in order to 'compensate deficit', transforming personal disappointment into the refusal of constraint in her fiction and in her polemical writings. Frederick Wegener is given rather more space than any of the other contributors to set out his stall in 'Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, and the Divided Heritage ofAmerican Literary Feminism'. He charts their few contiguities and many disparities of opinion, ideology, and practice in the arenas of artistic endeavour, interior design, the education of girls, and the role and function of marriage, ending, however, with a discussionof a 'significant area of kinship', their consensus on the general intellectual and moral impoverishment that results from the economic dependence of women. Heather Kirk Thomas is also concerned with the contemporary context in her essay, ' "A kind of 'debased Romanesque' with delirium tremens": Late Victorian Wall Coveringsand Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"', and again links Gilman to Wharton in their common concern about the 'bric-a-brac habit' that dominates the American drawing room. Ann Heilmann extends the usual discussion of Gilman's disavowal of artistic ambition or achievement (as in the disclaimer written to W. D. Howells that The Yellow Wallpaper was not 'literature' because written 'with a purpose') to a broader base, in arguing that Gilman strategically 'distanced herself from the contemporary conception of "high" art because she associated it with specific movements and a specific gender, in other words, "masculine" art and an "androcentric" perspective', here, specifically, that of Oscar Wilde. Other essays of interest include Jill Rudd's discus? sion of Gilman's childhood writings as well as her writings for children and Gary Scharnhorst'sinformative'Historicizing Gilman: A Bibliographer's View', where he makes a timely plea for careful research into the extent of her role in the Nationalist movement in California, her writings for the Impress, the accounts of her lectures as reported in newspapers, and, most notably, a proper, rigorous examination of the all-pervasiveness of the 'assumption of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority' throughout her writing. As he shows, all too briefly,the more pernicious of her views cannot be explained away as aberrations: they inform all her work, including those writings normally considered as offeringenough radical content to redeem them, such as her arguments for professional childcare, the kitchenless home, and the economic independence of women. Scharnhorst sees her 'ethnocentrism and xenophobia' as 'key to many of her ideas about evolution and social motherhood' and asks, not unreasonably, that in examining the iegacy' we should look at the whole, not simply the part that can be used in the service of Gilman as feminist forerunner and role model. Manchester Metropolitan University Janet Beer William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance. By James G. Watson. (Liter? ary Modernism Series) Austin: University of Texas Press. 2000. xvi + 255 PP- ?26.95. Two photographs frame this study and define its field of vision. Both are of William Faulkner in uniform: the first,from 1918, of Royal Flying Cadet Faulkner, looking, as James Watson remarks, remarkably like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, but with none of Chaplin's jaunty irony, and the second, from the late i95?s, of 'Tally-ho, William Faulkner', posed in his Farmington Hunt Club pink, a magisterial crop replacing the cadet's limp cane. Both are portraits of an artist, the one hardly yet even an apprentice, the other the self-conscious elder statesman and Nobel Laureate. This book sets out to explore how the one emerged from the other. Surveying Faulkner's 948 Reviews entire career, through published and unpublished writings, photographs, dedications, drawings, and a range of documents from letters to wills, Watson speculates about Faulkner's self-fabrications, his self-authoring as man and as writer. This is, in many ways, familiar critical ground. Like David Minter, Michael Grimwood, Judith Wittenberg , Judith Sensibar, and others, Watson is fascinated by the fictionsof Faulkner's life,his serial role-play as dandy, military man, farmer,county gentleman; and equally by...