From Ivory to Foolscap: Faulkner's Romance of Writing Materials

In William Faulkner's novel The Mansion (1959), Linda Snopes Kohl returns to her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi, as a wounded veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Fighting for the loyalists alongside her husband, the Jewish sculptor-turned-pilot Barton Kohl, Linda loses her hearing from the explosion that fells Kohl's plane and kills him. When she first returns to Jefferson, Linda brings with her a notepad and pencil so that others can write to communicate with her. Her friend Gavin Stevens, however, gives her as a present the more elegant writing device of an ivory tablet, which Gavin's nephew Chick describes as "a little pad of thin ivory leaves just about big enough to hold three words at a time, with gold corners, on little gold rings to turn the pages, with a little gold stylus thing to match" (872). Sometimes called "table[s], tablet[s], writing-tablet[s] or writing tables," these devices "were fairly common objects" from the sixteenth to the early-twentieth century when they were largely replaced by "paper notebook[s]," H. R. Woudhuysen explains (5), noting that "Perhaps the essential feature of these writing-tables [is] that they could be wiped clean and reused" (7). Thomas Jefferson employed an ivory notebook in which he "inscribed notes, expenditures, and other quotidian details" (Hayes 99). Benjamin Franklin owned one, as did Jane Austen (Stallybrass 1350). In his comedic poem "Verses Written in a Lady's Ivory Table-Book," Jonathan Swift describes a woman who makes notes to herself regarding such items as a "receipt for paint." and "a safe way to use perfume." Her "coxcomb[]" lovers, however, "blot … out" these practicalities of eighteenth-century feminine life and replace them with romantic conceits so clichéd they do nothing to move her—"lovely nymph, pronounce my doom." and "Madam, I die without your grace." (68). The poem concludes by depicting these "wealthy" but "fool[ish]" suitors as "gold pencil[s] tipp'd with lead" (69).

This description of an inept courtier is not far removed from many critics' estimation of Gavin Stevens, whose relationship with Linda was decidedly non-sexual. "For reasons that two readings of the novel do not yield to me," Irving Howe lamented in his review of The Mansion for The New Republic, Gavin and Linda "fail to marry or do anything else that might reasonably be expected from a man and a woman in love" (506). In his 1963 study, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks describes Gavin as a "romantic idealist," who "establish[es]" with Linda a "Platonic relationship" (203). More recent critics have tended to agree with this assessment, albeit with a wide degree of variance as to what this kind of relationship entails. For Linda Westervelt, "Gavin is unable to respond to [Linda] with more than platonic friendship," her reluctant acceptance of which "emphasizes her generosity and courage" (80). For Hee Kang, though, Gavin's offer of "Platonic love" represents an attempt to ensnare Linda within "men's ideological and linguistic dominance" that she must resist (26, 39). The Oxford English Dictionary defines Platonic in the sense of interpersonal relations as "spiritual rather than physical … love, affection, or friendship" (OED.). I argue, however, that understanding Linda and Gavin's relationship in this manner obscures the way in which their romance indeed becomes physically embodied. In what is perhaps the emotional climax of the novel, Gavin journeys to Pascagoula, Mississippi, to visit Linda where she works during the Second World War as a shipyard riveter. Linda arranges two rooms for them at a hotel and has the beds arranged "with just the wall between" them so that "any time during the night I can knock on the wall and you can hear it and if I hold my hand against the wall I can feel you answer" (902). Before they go to bed, Linda tells Gavin she loves him; Gavin says he loves her. Linda tells him she can lip-read those words but asks him to "write it on the [ivory] tablet anyway [so] I...