Introduction to

Literature

Lesson twelve: Faulkner

Self-Identity
Margarette
Connor
 Contents

Faulkner biography
A Rose for Miss Emily
discussion
tableau
 Introduction

Today we are going to be looking at a very

famous story by one of Americas most
important writers, William Faulkner. And
while Faulker is most famous for his novels,
he was also a master craftsman when it
comes to short stories. One of the reasons
Faulkners stories keep showing up in
anthologies is their meticulous crafting.
Some of his major works

The Sound and the Fury,1929

As I Lay Dying,1930
Sanctuary,1931
Light in August,1932
The Wild Palms,1939
Absalom, Absalom!1936
The Hamlet,1940
A Fable,1954
Faulkner was especially
proud of his riding habit.
 Faulkner on the short
story form
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can
put more trash in [a novel] and be excused
for it. In a short story that's next to the
poem, almost every word has got to be
almost exactly right. In the novel you can
be careless but in the short story you can't.
I mean by that the good short stories like
Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that
second it's because it demands a nearer
absolute exactitude. You have less room to
be slovenly and careless. There's less room
in it for trash.
 What writers should
write about:
The problems of the human
heart in conflict with itself
alone can make good writing
because only that is worth
writing about, worth the agony
and the sweat.
Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize
Acceptance speech, 1950.
 A remarkable feat

It is one of the more remarkable feats of American

literature, how a young man who never graduated
from high school, never received a college degree,
living in a small town in the poorest state in the
nation, all the while balancing a growing family of
dependents and impending financial ruin, could during
the Great Depression write a series of novels all set in
the same small Southern county novels that include
As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and above all,
Absalom, Absalom! that would one day be
recognized as among the greatest novels ever written
by an American.
John B. Padgett
 Yoknapatawpha County

William Faulkner, Sole Owner &

Proprietor
Based on his own home county of
Lafayette, Mississippi.
Faulkner included a hand-drawn map
of the county as an appendix to
Absalom, Absalom!
 Writing honors, part one

Elected to the National Institute of Arts and

Letters, 1939
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1949
Awarded the Howells Medal for distinguished
work in American Fiction, 1950
National Book Award,1951
Awarded the French Legion of Honor, 1951
A Fable awarded the National Book Award for
Fiction and a Pulitzer Prize, 1955
 Writing honors, part two

Silver Medal of the Athens Academy as

one chosen by the Greek Academy to
represent the principle that man shall be
free, 1959
A Reminiscence, Pulitzer Prize,
posthumously awarded, 1962
Eudora Welty presented Faulkner with the
Gold Medal for Fiction awarded by the
American Academy of Arts and Letters,
1962, a month before his death
 Birth

William Cuthbert Falkner (as his

name was then spelled)
Born on September 25, 1897, in
New Albany, Mississippi
 Parents and family

Murry and Maud Butler Falkner

first of four sons. Father Murry

Named after his great-grandfather, William

Clark Falkner, the Old Colonel,
had been killed eight years earlier in a duel with
his former business partner in the streets of
Ripley, Mississippi.
A few days before Williams fifth birthday,
the Falkners moved to Oxford, Mississippi.
 Indifferent student

Demonstrated artistic talent at a

young age,
drawing and writing poetry.
Around the sixth grade he began to
grow increasingly bored with his
studies.
Finally, he dropped out of high
school in 1915.
 A broken heart

He lost his sweetheart,

Estelle Oldham, to
another man.
Her family pressured
her into marrying a
young lawyer.
Estelle Oldhams yearbook
photo, 1913
 Moves to New Haven

Faulkner went to stay with a friend

studying law at Yale in New Haven.
There Faulkner first took a job with the
Winchester Repeating Arms Company
for the first time, his name was
spelled Faulkner in employee
records, possibly the result of a
typing error.
 RAF Cadet

June 1918, became a cadet in training in the Royal

Air Force in Canada.
Earlier had tried to join the U.S. Army Air Force, but
turned down because of his height.
In his RAF application, he lied in an attempt to pass
himself off as British. Also spelled his name
Faulkner, believing it looked more British, and in
meeting with RAF officials he affected a British
accent.
Began training in Toronto, but before he finished
training, the war ended. He received an honorable
discharge.
 Mississippi and
university
Back in Oxford in 1919, enrolled at the
University of Mississippi in Oxford under a
special provision for war veterans, even
though he had never graduated from high
school.
In August, his first published poem,
LApres-Midi dun Faune [sic], appeared in
The New Republic.
After three semesters of study at Ole
Miss, he dropped out in November 1920.
 Not a very good worker!

His most notorious job during this period

was his stint as postmaster in the
university post office from the spring of
1922 to October 31, 1924. By all accounts,
he was a terrible postmaster, spending
much of his time reading or playing cards
with friends, misplacing or losing mail, and
failing to serve customers. When a postal
inspector came to investigate, he agreed
to resign.
 Literary friends

In January 1925, Faulkner moved

to New Orleans.
Group of friends there centered
around The Double Dealer,
literary magazine whose credits
include the first published works of
Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Robert
Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson.
 Estelle Faulkner

In April 1929, Estelle Oldham

divorced.
In June she and Faulkner were
married.
Estelle brought to the marriage
two children, Malcolm and
Victoria.
 As I Lay Dying

After his marriage, and his increased

needs for funds Faulkner works nights
at a power plant.
While there, wrote As I Lay Dying,
later claiming it was a tour de
force and that he had written it in
six weeks, without changing a word.
Published in October 1930.
 1930 a significant year

First, he bought a decrepit

antebellum house in Oxford.
Faulkner named the house
Rowan Oak, after a Scottish
legend alluding to the
protective powers of wood from
the rowan tree.
Also publishing success

First national publication of a

short story, A Rose for Emily,
in Forum magazine.
Followed that year by Honor
in American Mercury ,
Thrift, and Red Leaves, both
in the Saturday Evening Post.
 Survival strategies

Over the coming years, as sales of

his novels sagged, he would write
numerous short stories
for publication,
especially in the
Saturday Evening Post,
as a principal means of
financial support.
Faulkner, 1931
The bitter and the sweet

In January 1931, Estelle gave birth

to a daughter, Alabama.
The child, born prematurely, lived
only a few days.
Faulkners first collection of short
stories, These 13, would be
published in September and
dedicated to Estelle and Alabama.
 Hollywood

In 1932 Faulkner began his

association with Hollywood.
He would write
screenplays on and
off through the 1950s.
Most werent
memorable. In Hollywood mode.
The best Faulkner films

Hit his pinnacle in the mid-1940s

with:
The Big Sleep, based on Raymond
Chandlers detective novel,1944
To Have and Have Not, based on the
Ernest Hemingway novel,1945
The Southerner,1945.
 Daughter born

Jill Faulkner, his only surviving

child, was born in 1933.
The Faulkner family was
intensely private, so there are no
photos available of them.
It wasnt until after Faulkner won
the Nobel Prize that he
consented to do publicity tours.
 Wrights Sanatorium

January 1936, Faulkner spent what would

be the first of many stays at a nursing
home facility in Byhalia, Mississippi.
He would go to recover from his drinking
binges.
Not yet an alcoholic in a clinical sense,
would go on extended drinking binges,
oftentimes at the conclusion of a writing
project.
 Nobel Prize

His Nobel Prize

Acceptance speech
is today considered
one of the finest
ever made.

After the ceremony.

 Post-Nobel

In the last years of his life, Faulkner

often undertook good will tours
throughout the world at the request
of the US State department.
 Desegregation

He got involved, albeit rather

unwillingly, in the debate about
desegregation in the South.
He was morally against segregation,
but felt the government should not
get involved.
He was also against forced
integration.
 Writer-in-residence

From February to June 1957, Faulkner was

writer-in-residence at the University of
Virginia.
He agreed to a number of
question-and-answer
sessions with the
students, faculty, and
faculty spouses.
These were published as
Faulkner in the University.
 The End

On July 6, 1962 Faulkner died of

a heart attack.
He was 64.

The final formal portrait.

 A Rose for Emily

Faulkner's first short story published

in a national magazine
Originally published in Forum
Magazine, April 30, 1930.
Later reprinted in a revised version
in These 13.
Original version was reprinted in
Collected Stories.
 The germ of an idea

Where he got the idea:

That came from a picture of the strand of
hair on the pillow. It was a ghost story.
Simply a picture of a strand of
hair on the pillow in the
abandoned house.
Faulkner in the University
 Questions about the
story
What happened between Emily and
Homer Barron? Were they in love? Did
Homer get cold feet? Or did Emily just
take action to prevent him from doing
that?
Why did Homer pick up Emily, a
spinster?
Is Homer Gay?
 Images/themes

Decay and rot symbol of the South, of

the old ways, of the Griersons, of
Emilys mind, or that of Homers body?
Faulkner said he did not want to
present the decay of the South, but the
readers are free do make the
association.
 Images/themes

Time and the Past.flashbacks;

Actually the story is told in the order of
importance. Linear time is not important; the
past is always present.
e.g. Emily herself; the old soldiers remember
dancing with Emily, but actually they are not
old enough to do so.
See paragraph 55, to whom the past is not a diminishing road but,
instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided
from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of
years.
 Setting: Jefferson

A character with a voice: we the town,

its collective voice, speaking to us.
 Emily

A Faulknerian life-and-death figure,

physically alive but spiritually dead.
A defiant spirit representing the past against
the towns needs for progress. A voice of
the old triumphs over the new.
vanguish horse and foot her battle
Tableau vivant (
)
Her fathers portrait
A representation of a scene, picture, by
a person or group in costume, posing
silently without motion, an actual
stoppage of human action,
"a freezing of time and motion in order that
a certain quality of the human experience
may be held and contemplated"
 Miss Emilys tableau
vivant
"We had long thought of them as a
tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in
white in the background, her father a
spraddled silhouette in the foreground,
his back to her and clutching a
horsewhip, the two of them framed by
the backflung front door."
 Links to the tableau
vivant
Miss Emily, the idol in the window,
paragraph 24.
Followed immediately by the tableau
of she and her father, paragraph 25.
Resembles the angels in the church
windows, paragraph 29.
The carven torso of the idol in the
niche paragraph 51.
 The town Emily

Feels pity for her;

that she is falling but its not her fault;
Wants her to get married.
Emily is not to be looked down upon
her way of getting the poison; [the town
thought she was going to commit suicide.]
 Faulkner on Miss Emily

"She had been trained that you do not take a

lover. You marry, you dont take a lover. She
had broken all the laws of her tradition, her
background, and she had finally broken the
laws of God, too, which says you do not take
a human life. And she knew what she was
doing was wrong, and thats why her own life
was wrecked. Instead of murdering one lover,
and then to go and take another and when
she used him up murder him, she was
expatiating her crime."
 Emily in Old age

Is she in repentance?
Grey hair: Faulkners symbol of
determination
Final Image the town has of her: that of
a statue, a monument, idol she is
elevated above the town, apart from it,
but not a part of the town.
A fallen monument: antedated, or fallen
in sins.
 One Sentence
Paragraph
Very rare in Faulkner, who tends
to write in long paragraphs;
The most shocking thingone
long grey hair. Homer,
besides the housekeeper, was
her only connection to life. Now
after he dies, she still needs his
company.
Symbols: the rose in the
title
Rose -- or the funeral
Faulkner: I just want to give
her a rose.
In his later age, Faulkner
expresses a lot of pity and
sympathy for her.
 Symbols: her House &
the Tax
The house: Coquettish decay--
flirting with us but still a
eyesore
Tax: the exemption as an act of
courtesy of the older
generation.