Femininity and Southern Gothic Literature: William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying”

Abstract

William Faulkner’s identity, largely, entails a continuous re-reading of his past, the history of the antebellum South, and the period of the Reconstruction. This obsession with the past and the need to face and understand its conflicts and dislocation, often, form the moral and psychological standards of the characters. But William Faulkner is neither a historical novelist nor a factual reactionary of the Southern past, only commenting on its loss and moral decline recounted in the lives of the Compsons (“The Sound and the Fury,” 1929) and the Bundrens (“As I Lay Dying,” 1930). These Gothic elements: love and loss, declined values, moral degradation, brooding atmosphere of gloom, horror, abhorrent psychological states of the characters continued in the novels like “Sanctuary,” 1931, “Light in August,” 1932; and “Absalom, Absalom,” 1936. In these novels, however, the issues of race and gender have been mingled with the Southern history of America. The research quest of this present paper is to explore the relationship between the femininity and the Southern Gothic literature. The broader concentration on the women characters in the novels of William Faulkner will provide the readers’ larger space to think- Is the femininity a tool that Faulkner has used to create the Gothic atmosphere as incest, rape, adultery, suspense, feminine eccentricity, often, form the featured Gothic elements; or is the Gothic a tool that he has used to focus on the gender issues and problems prevalent in twentieth-century America?