The Mutual Relevance of Faulkner Studies and Women\u27s Studies

Women’s studies and Faulkner studies have seemed opposed in certain respects. Within the past few years, however, signs of reciprocity between the two fields are appearing. This paper discusses several reciprocities as they manifest themselves in different areas. In Faulkner criticism and feminist theory, it examines complementary thinking with productive implications for both fields in recent writings by the French critic André Bleikasten and the American feminist Myra Jehlen, focusing specifically on Bleikasten’s Fathers in Faulkner and For/Against an Ideological Reading of Faulkner\u27s Novels, in relation to Jehlen\u27s Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism and Class and Character in Faulkner\u27s South. In criticism grounded in a more traditionally historical approach, it considers the relevance for Faulkner studies of feminist-oriented works like Anne Goodwyn Jones\u27s Tomorrow Is Another Day. While Jones is here primarily concerned with Southern women authors, her observations about the relationship between literature and sexuality in Southern culture further illuminate the theme of conflicted sexual identity in Faulkner\u27s early poetry. In psychological theory applied to literature, it proposes consideration of the Freudian-revisionist theory of psycho-sexual development set forth by Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering as an adjunct to prevailing psychological approaches in Faulkner criticism, arguing that a Chodorowian reading of Faulkner\u27s fiction, speculatively entertained, promises to reveal Faulkner\u27s strong need to nurture and to mother, just as Lacanian interpretation expresses his obsessive preoccupation with the role of the father