Faulkner's Women: The Myth and the Muse by David Williams (review)

Reviews Williams, David. Faulkner's Women: The Myth and the Muse. Montreal : McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1977. 268 pp. Cloth: $16.00. In the guise of a treatment of Faulkner's women, this book is actually a myth study, an attempt to interpret Faulkner's fiction in terms of one Jungian archetype. Drawing upon such historians of primitive religion as Mircea Eliade, Walter F. Otto, and James Baird, who find archaic symbols to be recreated in contemporary literature, Williams sees Faulkner as fulfilling the role of shaman or "psycho-pomp" (as he terms it) in his culture by giving creative embodiment to die mydi of die Great Mother. Several of Faulkner's women characters, Williams maintains, are authentic re-creations of the Sacred Being. His male characters, at the same time, often manifest an "anti-vital" consciousness which reflects the way that religious symbols have become debilitated in Protestant worship in the land of Faulkner's origin. The major section of this book, which unhappily conveys the impression of being a barely revised doctoral thesis, consists of a series of textual analyses of die oft-explicated major four: The Sound and the Fury, As 1 Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August. Williams views these novels as being "full and uniform . . . incarnations of the goddess" (p. xv). The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, which receive somewhat less attention , are viewed as belonging to a phase of "démythification," a descent by Faulkner from the creation of inspired, authentic myth to die depiction of merely individualized women within a particularized social context. The Reivers, incredibly, is seen as a return to a fullblown creation of the archetype, chiefly because the name of Everbe Corrie [italics mine] is thought to derive from that of the Goddess Kore. The events of Everbe's life, her violation , her period in a brothel, her marriage to Boon, and the birth of their son, are construed as "the re-emergence of the feminine archetype in a Memphis whorehouse" (p. 227). Mythic awareness permeates Faulkner's fiction. As a consequence, it is impossible to mine so rich a lode without unearthing matter which is full of bright glints. Various provocative associations are made in the course of explication, as, for example, that the atavistic myth of die mare-headed mother and of the fish-tailed goddess may figure in die animal-mother fantasies of Jewel and Vardaman in As I Lay Dying, or that die tree-like aroma of Caddy in The Sound and the Fury may link her dynamism to die vegetative vitality of die Earth Mother as she appears in various myths involving trees or wood: in the birth of Osiris out of a tree, in the wooden manger of the infant Jesus, in the Babylonian grain god, in the image of Yggdrasill, world tree of Norse myth. From the critical essays on the four major novels embodying the archetype, we derive a sense ofFaulkner's immersion in the stuff of myth and of his deployment of this resource to many artistic ends. For die most part, however, the treatment is uneven and often capricious. Williams argues, for instance, that EuIa Varner in The Hamlet is not an authentic incarnation of the archetype but merely thought to be so by the monkish Ratliff and the fantasy-ridden Labove, an assertion which requires more space than he allots it, especially since his view that Eula's sexuality is "qualified by an element of blatant whorishness" (p. 199) requires much explaining tobe fully intelligible in the context of primitive myth. He maintains that Faulkner revised Sanctuary primarily for the purpose of strengthening the image of Temple Drake as an Earth-Mother, using die revisions themselves as proof, without in- 110Reviews vestigating the revisions ofAs I Lay Dying and Light in August to determine whether they have a similar bearing on the Earth-mother theme. In the study as a whole, he says that he has chosen the works which he finds to be archetypal on the basis of their mythic vitality rather than on the grounds of literary excellence. Yet he rejects Pylon and The Wild Palms from consideration by employing purely esthetic criteria, preferring...