Class and Character in Faulkner's South by Myra Jehlen (review)

114Reviews Jehlen, Myra. Class and Character in Faulkner's South. Columbia Univ. Press, 1976. 181 pp. Cloth: $10.00. Myra Jehlen's argument is critically provocative and sharply defined: while most American writers have accepted the myth of classlessness and evoke society as a neutral universal setting, Faulkner—through his singular recognition of class distinctions—has grasped its tangible context. "His people are made of the stuff of class distinctions: they are planter or poor-white (some few in between and defined by that too) and become individual by being a variant of their type. Moreover their motivations and the plots of their stories most often have to do with maintaining, resenting, or refurbishing a social situation which is first of all class defined and only then regional or racial" (p. 10). From both the untamed woods and the family ledgers, Ike McCaslin learns that he is a member of a class which has reduced Sam Fathers from Indian chief to servant and black people to animals, sexual objects, and symbols on a tally. Ike rejects his heritage; but the moral imperative arises here and throughout Faulkner's novels to accept responsibility , to accept one's position in the governing class—which is to accept the class structure. What emerges from Jehlen's study, then, is the political conservatism of an author deeply sensitive to the system's excesses and injustices, a conservatism manifest in plot, structure, and style. The three-dimensional characterization of Bayard Sartoris as opposed to the allegorical flatness of Flem Snopes is a stylistic choice and social judgment. The imagery of birth and rebirth that follows the killing of Joe Christmas leaves Jefferson as morally viable, its social structure unchallenged. The extravagant style of Absalom, Absalom \ and the narrative sobriety of The Unvanquished (written at the same time) both validate cavalier values—the first by implying the accuracy of its extraordinary myth, the second by translating a fairy tale into reasonable adult language. Go Down, Moses demonstrates that the real problem of the South is not slavery's injustice but the impact of slavery on the structure of white society. And the invasion of the Snopeses does not reflect what actually happened in Mississippi but Faulkner's acceptance of the old Whig view of the poor-white class's predatory impulse. I do not mean to imply that Jehlen turns Faulkner into a reactionary propagandist, for she shows how his grasp of class distinctions also leads to insights that are radically critical. Right after young Sutpen is told to go around to the planter's back door, he sees his sister scrubbing clothes in a shapeless calico dress, looking like a cow, and thinks how her labor is all out of proportion to its reward. Seizing on his much overlooked passage, Jehlen points out that Sutpen's outrage springs not just from the planter's inexplicable power but from his denial of real value to the very labor which gave the poor-white his identity. She also illuminates the distinction between Faulkner's early and later black women: between Dilsey's celebration of the white man's savior and Molly's stubborn indictment of the white ruling class, as she continues to cry that they sold her son in Egypt—"Sold him to the Pharoah. And now he dead." Still, Jehlen's book has serious limitations that derive less from the narrowing of her thesis than from the narrowness of its literary and sociological foundations. She is certainly right to insist that formalist criticism has kept us from grasping Faulkner's tangible social context. But to ignore formalist contributions which have expanded our perceptions and understanding is to diminish our experience of the fiction and weaken her argument. Can a contemporary critic deal with the conclusion of Light in August as though it belongs to a traditional linear structure rather than one composed of discontinuities and juxtaposition? Can she treat Absalom, Absaloml as though the legend were finally pieced together rather than remaining beyond the reach of shifting perspectives? Does Henry's appearance to Studies in American Fiction115 Quentin ground the myth in reality when their meeting is so briefly and ritualistically presented? When in fact...