Meditations on the Other: Faulkner\u27s Rendering of Women

“I think women are marvelous, they\u27re wonderful, and I know very little about them,” Faulkner is reported to have said at the University of Virginia. Beginning with the conviction that no male writer could ever say this about men I take Faulkner at his word and explore what is “marvelous” in his narrative deployment of women. Drawing on four novels, this essay examines some of the ways in which Faulkner\u27s narrative treats his women differently from his men: how the women appear, through their “wonderful strangeness, as other. Faulkner\u27s women tend to be less verbal than his women, and when they are verbal―as Mrs. Compson and Rosa Coldfield are―no one pays much attention to them. They speak at rather than with their interlocutors; they are not granted the dialectic give-and-take of shared assumptions and a common vocabulary that characterize the discourse of Faulkner\u27s men. To be “marvelous” means to be unlike others to be deprived of a community of like-minded peers with common projects and a common language for pursuing those projects. The women often appear in the fiction as the intense projection of male brooding. How they move and speak, what kind of past can be attributed to them, in what company they find themselves: the disposition of each of these issues is shaped by the male lenses through which, recurrently, we have access to the women. Implicit within the hal1ucinatory stance of Quentin toward sister —isolated, all-important, scandalously implicated in his own psychic life yet unknowable, other—we may find the latent model for Faulkner\u27s narrative stance toward his marvelous women characters