Incarnation and intertextuality in Faulkner\u27s major novels

William Faulkner\u27s unorthodox use of Christian imagery in his major novels proved a stumbling-block to an earlier generation of readers and has escaped the attention of scholars who plot those novels on the axes of race and gender. Faulkner\u27s gallery of strange Christs, including women and putative mulattoes, invites an approach to Christian myth which replaces a soteriological interpretation of Jesus\u27s career with an interpretation of that career which will accommodate Addie Bundren and Joe Christmas as Christ-figures. Joseph Urgo has remarked the importance of the adjective apocryphal in Faulkner\u27s description of his work, and thus I treat the major novels as apocryphal gospels which reflect a non-traditional interpretation of Jesus as an individual who gets into trouble with the law. This construction of Christian myth provides a hermeneutic bridge between a formalist approach to the novels and an approach attentive to the fictional construction of race and gender. Thus Faulkner\u27s female Christ figures--Caddy Compson in The Sound and the Fury, Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, and Temple Drake in Sanctuary--suffer metaphorical crucifixion when they violate the written and unwritten laws of patriarchy, while his mulatto Christs--Joe Christmas in Light in August and Charles Bon in Absalom, Absalom!--suffer for circumventing the segregational practices codified in Jim Crow legislation. These novels may also be read as apocryphal renditions of non-biblical texts, and I explore the revisionary intertextual relationships between Sound and Emily Bronte\u27s Wuthering Heights, Dying and Hawthorne\u27s The Scarlet Letter, Sanctuary and Frazer\u27s The Golden Bough, Light and Keats\u27s Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Absalom and Charlotte Bronte\u27s Jane Eyre, correlating Faulkner\u27s biblical and secular revisions. Faulkner\u27s apocryphal novels cap a series of nineteenth-century American attempts to supplement or revise the Bible, and I discuss Joseph Smith\u27s Book of Mormon, Elizabeth Cady Stanton\u27s The Woman\u27s Bible, and a selection of Mark Twain\u27s works as attempts to address the status of native Americans, blacks, and women by reconfiguring biblical texts