Brothers in Arms William Faulkner's Southern Family and the Fraternal Struggle for Progress

Drew Geer

Date of Award

2003

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Dimino, Andrea

Keywords

Faulkner, William, Brothers, Family

Area of Concentration

History

Abstract

This thesis examines both biological and symbolic fraternal relationships within the familial communities of William FauUmer's fictional world. The families and family-like communities play a foremost problematic role in Faulkner's fraternal relations. Inevitably, these brothers are individually locked in a self-enclosed circle of the family. Each brother struggles to separate himself from the burdensome family. The problematic presence of the family represents the legacy of a racist patriarchal southern culture. Faulkner's brothers struggle to escape their fathers, who either commit incest or miscegenation -- which is culturally unacceptable in this racist system -- or are incompetent fathers. This emphasis on the paternal presence reveals the dominant role of the patriarch in the ideology of Faulkner's world. The brothers attempt to free themselves from the patriarch in order to come to terms with their own sociohistorical place within the South, which Faulkner situates between 1830 and 1940, a time period that envelops the plantation slavery system and its similarly divisive segregated aftermath. Faulkner's brothers attempt to achieve progress in this divided world. In the case of the Bundren and the Compson brothers in As I Lay Dying (1930), Flags in the Dust (1927), and The Sound and the Fury (1929), separated, biological brothers are not able to make any significant progress and fail to produce any historically effective change. In The Unvanquished (1938), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Intruder in the Dust (1948), symbolic brothers collaborate in order to challenge the patriarchal heritage. In Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses (1942), the fraternal relationships create twinships through narrative collaboration, which begins a gradual process of historically effective change by the inclusion of multiple narrative voices.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS