Faulkner's Sexualities

Popeye’s Impersonal Temple

148 Popeye’s Impersonal Temple Michael Wainwright Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.1 The setting is a basement nightclub in Liverpool, England. A giant glitter ball throws down spasmodic motes of light across a litter-strewn dance floor. Prospective dancers search for partners as “The Look of Love” begins to play from the sound system him:[shyly]You dancin’? her:[guardedly]I’m dancin’. You askin’? him:[just as shyly]I’m askin’. Courtship, as the opening credits to the popular British television sitcom The Liver Birds indicates, can be awkward. Broadly speaking, this difficulty is transhistorical and transcultural, as prevalent in twentiethcentury America as in twenty-first-century Britain. For, ninety years ago, the young William Faulkner (1897–1962) experienced this common difficulty in courting (Lida) Estelle Oldham (1896–1972). His initial approach, sealed when Estelle married Cornell Franklin (1892–1959) on 18 April 1918, failed.2 Nevertheless, a second opportunity arose with the breakdown of the Franklins’ marriage and their subsequent divorce. Faulkner seized his chance and within less than two months—on 20 June 1929, to be precise—he and Estelle married. Even so, believes Louis Daniel Brodsky, “the humiliation of having to accept his formerly pedestalled lady, a divorcee now with two children, tainted whatever passion and exuberance he might have had for the presumably virginal Estelle.”3 Did Faulkner harbor any bitterness alongside this supposed chagrin? His earliest publications offer an insight in this regard. His first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), closes with the awkwardness and disappointment of a defeated courtship. Joe Gilligan has helped Margaret Powers to marry the ailing Donald Mahon. Then, soon after Donald’s death, Joe proposes to Margaret. “I couldn’t marry a man named Gilligan,” she replies. Having inherited the powers (“Powers”) of man (“Mahon”), now embodying each side of the sexual divide, Margaret knows that she must never become a Gilligan—or girl again.4 Faulkner’s second novel, 149 Popeye’s Impersonal Temple Mosquitoes (1927), adds resentment in victory to the maladroit aspects of courtship. Dawson Fairchild is undoubtedly a caricature of Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), but is there also a touch of Faulkner himself in Fairchild’s attitude to the mating game? Courtship, Fairchild lectures the sexually incompetent (but ardent) Ernest Talliaferro, is less a matter of tactics and more the “illusion that you can seduce women. Which you can’t,” he declaims, because “[t]hey just elect you.”5 Fairchild’s vision of contemporary women is shattering. He sees them as “merely articulated genital organs with a kind of aptitude for spending whatever money you have” (201). They are synecdochic animations of valued parts that cost men dear. The sheer unpleasantness of Fairchild’s remark has had serious critical repercussions. Two responses are illustrative: Gail Mortimer rebukes the author for his oblivion to the female sex except as gestational carriers;6 Frederick C. Crews concludes that Faulkner retained a “saturnine resentment of women.”7 A cursory reading of the sexual politics—defined herein as sexuality, secondary selection, and sex within a sociobiological context—in Faulkner’s sixth novel, Sanctuary (1931), would appear to confirm such accusations. This validation, however, would be a mistake because Mortimer and Crews typify a selective criticism that fails to appreciate Faulkner’s rapid maturation not only as a man but also as an artist. In marrying Estelle, an event in the interstice between Mosquitoes and Sanctuary, Faulkner willingly became a stepfather . This act was nothing less than a form of altruism. As evolutionary critic Joseph Carroll insists, adoption is often symbolic of the ability “to abstract from one’s reproductive interests and to devote oneself to some disinterested social good,” and this impersonal sensibility soon began to enhance Faulkner’s literary output too.8 An authorial disinterest would hereon distinguish his literature. Hence, not a personal expression of virulence or indifference toward the sexual status of women, Sanctuary rather illustrates how sexual politics is conditioned by, and mediates between, the biological base of human nature and the cultural superstructure of society. If heated criticism continues to surround the novel, then this contentiousness emanates from Faulkner’s prescience concerning sexual politics rather than from his personal feelings. Heretofore the plantation belles of John Pendleton Kennedy (1795– 1870) and associated authors had haunted American literature. Nineteenth -century artistic representations of female behavior in deference to male proprieties of race (European American), class (patrician), and upbringing (exclusive) fulfilled a phallocentric standard. Furthermore, modest females selecting their desired mate for a life of...