Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

Testing Masculinity in the Snopes Trilogy

44 Testing Masculinity in the Snopes Trilogy I ’ve argued elsewhere that race in Faulkner’s fiction often serves as a mask for gender. In fact, race occupied him in only four of his nineteen novels and in only one or two of nearly 140 short stories, so that race, statistically at any rate, is a very minor part of his concerns. Sexual and sexualized relationships, on the other hand, are everywhere, on nearly every page. Indeed, in Absalom race provides a narrative “out” for Quentin and Shreve’s otherwise failed attempts to explain why Henry Sutpen kills Charles Bon. After hundreds of pages of speculation, of convoluted and complex attempts to move their story to its narrative climax they finally, near the end of chapter 8, in a mutual wordless dream-vision, have Sutpen demand that Henry stop Bon from marrying his sister because Bon is his part-Negro son from his marriage in Haiti. From this point it takes just three pages to get Charles killed—no questions , no convoluted meditations: the race card settles it. This conclusion to the nineteenth-century portions of Absalom says much less about the Sutpen family’s dilemma than it does about the overwhelming power of the Grand Narrative about race in our culture, operative even in Faulkner criticism, which has taken it for granted for lo these seven decades since Absalom’s publication that Bon is unquestionably Sutpen’s part-black son and that that is unquestionably why Testing Masculinity in the Snopes Trilogy 45 Sutpen refuses to allow Judith to marry Bon, despite the fact that the novel provides no evidence that this is true while providing plenty to the contrary, and despite the fact that generations of critics have also taken it as gospel that the novel’s structural thematic is precisely its narrative indeterminacy—its guesswork, suppositions, postulations, assertions, and retractions—that renders highly suspect any claim on truth or even fact. For though the race card provides a neat solution to Quentin’s and Shreve’s narrative dilemma, it—more importantly in my judgment—allows the Harvard narrators, and the critics, to sidestep certain questions of more immediate, more intimate concern, questions having particularly to do with gender’s expectations of young men (Polk “Artist as Cuckold”). First, in their rush to conclusion the narrators never ask why Sutpen should require his son to stop Bon from marrying his own sister—why, especially if he is the powerful father the narrators depict him as, he should not just take care of it himself. Second, none of the narrators seems at all interested in Judith’s feelings in the matter of her own heart. Third, it has hardly occurred to anybody in or out of the novel to wonder whether perhaps Henry kills Bon for the same reason that Quentin in The Sound and the Fury wants to murder Dalton Ames: to save—i.e., control—his sister’s virginity. Finally, the two half- or completelynaked young men for some reason or other fail to pursue the possible homoerotic relationship between Henry and Bon that Mr. Compson so lasciviously points to as he describes the fey bon vivant from New Orleans who descends upon that provincial college in backwoods North Mississippi and changes Henry’s life. Perhaps the ruckus in the library on Christmas Eve, which servants hear through closed doors, is not at all about Bon and Judith but rather about Bon and Henry; perhaps Bon and Sutpen fail to come to terms over Judith’s dowry; perhaps Judith has herself rejected Bon and her father supports her wishes, to the dismay of both Bon and Henry who can, they believe, maintain a homoerotic relationship , what Mr. Compson calls “the perfect incest,” through Judith, only under the cover of a respectable heterosexual marriage. Race supplies Quentin and Shreve a way out of having to ask any of these questions which the narrative allows, even encourages, us to ask. Answers to these questions would take them directly in to murky Testing Masculinity in the Snopes Trilogy 46 areas of gender and sex roles, perhaps of their own relationship, that they are happy not to have to consider; they might indeed lead the boys to confront directly certain issues about the meaning of masculinity and to admit their own inability to perform masculinity in any of the terms that would be acceptable to their families and their...