Before we start looking at characters in the novel, we might reflect on the gender of the author. Who wrote this book? Obviously someone named William Faulkner. Would this book be any different had someone named Wilhemina Faulkner written it? This may be a silly question, but let's bear with it for the moment. William, not Wilhemina wrote the book. At first blush, I think, Faulkner seems genuinely sympathetic to women; he seems to understand the difficulties they face, especially in the context of poverty and isolation in a rural community. Addie comes across as something of a tragedy: an intellectually capable woman whose life falls into ruin when she marries Anse or maybe even earlier when she takes to heart her father's (I wonder what advice her mother might have had) wisdom about living being a getting ready for dying. Clearly women are domestic drudges; they keep the home fires burning, as it were. This means they serve their husbands' (or non husbands' if we remember Lafe and MacGowan) desires; these desires are mostly physical: food and sex. I think we can see this with Cora, Addie, and Dewey Dell. But what's going on here? Are these women presented to us as examples of exploited womanhood in order that Faulkner can criticize patriarchy? Or does Faulkner fall into the usual male trap of seeing women as either angel or whore? Before answering this question, some consideration of "angel" and "whore" is in order. These words are, of course, metaphors, ways of categorizing women. The angel refers to a woman who has a spiritual quality. But wait, "spiritual" here means "docile," "pliant," "nurturing," "domestic." The angel combines qualities associated with mother and daughter; she accedes to a man's wishes and keeps him comfortable. In other words, the notion of "spirituality" is somewhat specious here because clearly this angel has a physical function in her duty to comfort man. In this the angel is little different from the whore. The whore is the angel upside down, as it were. She both attracts and repels man. Her physicality is open, candid, above board. Because of this, she is both attractive and frightening. In any case, what I want to point to here is the idea that both angel and whore are really "of the earth." The woman, whatever the metaphor we use to describe her, is under patriarchy asssociated with mother nature.
I suspect Dewey Dell is important here. Her name is redolent of the earth. Once we see this, we might note how the women in the book are associated with the earth. They are the earth; they are that which man plants and from which he gains satisfaction and nourishment. Dewey Dell has associations with the cow, the dark, the breeze. She remarks that she feels "like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth." She will be a mother. I guess what I'm driving at here is the suggestion that Faulkner perceives women as earth mothers--nothing more, nothing less. They may be hard put upon in this terrible world, but they are nonetheless to be perceived as important because of their fecundity, their nurturing qualities, their passivity, their sort-of cow-like acceptance of their lot. You might demur and say, but Addie is different, she has a voice. True Addie has a voice. But I'd prefer to put it this way: Faulkner allows Addie to speak, but only after she is dead. The only woman capable of speech is the dead woman whose words do not reach the living (at least within the novel). Even Rachael, who confirms the male attidtude to women, that they are intractable and fundamentally myterious and irrational, is not allowed to speak for herself. Her words come to us through her husband.
What I'm trying to articulate here is Faulkner's patriarchal view of women. Women are domestic, passive, inarticulate, and irrational creatures. They are associated with the body. They sacrifice for their men and for their families. Is this Faulkner's view and can we deconstruct this view?
What about Cora Tull who does seem to have a voice? She is something of a foil to Addie: pious where Addie is something of a libertine (at least inwardly); a gossip, self-centered and proud, nosy. She is practical and religious. She is also dominated by her husband; she is a good wife. She accepts what the partriarchy tells her; this is evident in the section on pp. 166-167 where she admonishes Addie for being proud and not adhering to the tenets of the church. I'm not certain what to conclude here except to say that Cora exhibits hypocrisy and self-concern just as many of the characters do. She offers the reader little in the way of a critique of patriarchy unless we see her as a representative of what patriarchy produces. She herself has internalized the patriarchal norms. She is, in effect, a spokesperson for patriarchy.
Next came Anse. Here's a buzzard. Anse suppresses women, but then Anse Bundren will suppress anyone he comes in contact with. He must be just about the most no-account character in fiction. He is long suffering. He lets others do for him. He allows Addie to work like a horse. (Jewel's mother is a horse.) He parades his manliness as stoicism when it is really laziness and self-interest. Anse is like Cora in that he spouts the Protestant ethic: "Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit" and "I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth" (pp. 110-111). It's true that Faulkner can't have a lot of sympathy for Anse, although I suspect he has some. Anse Bundren is a type of character fondly paraded before the reader in American culture: the lovable scoundrel, the confidence man. He's Huck Finn's father, Charlie Chaplin, W. C. Fields, the Wizard of Oz, Ralph Cramden, Archie Bunker, Al Bundy, and so on. He is, in short, a survivor. A feminist spin on Anse could not be kind, but I doubt that this is what we have in the novel. Anse is either a misogynistic pig that the reader is supposed to reject, or he is someone who confirms Faulkner's own deeply misogynistic feeling. Note that Anse gets the girl as well as the new teeth as well as the graphophone. One out, one in for Anse Bundren.
Back to Dewey Dell and her "female trouble." Dewey Dell strikes me as important to Faulkner's sense of value. She reminds me of Eula Varner from The Hamlet and Lena Grove from Light in August. These are women who are similar in that they are redolent of the earth and its connections with sex and fertility. Dewey Dell is a sex object. She raises every man's libido into action, even her brother Darl's. Remember when Dewey describes Darl's eyes passing over her body: "They begin at my feet and rise along my body to my face, and then my dress is gone: I sit naked on the seat above the unhurrying mules, above the travail" (121). She is like a tableaux--an earth goddess oozing the attractions of the body. Lady Gadiva. I think Faulkner constructs woman as a sex object or a domestic drudge. As domestic, the woman becomes something of a harridan, as we see in the example of Rachael, wife of Samson. Angela pointed out that everyone uses Addie; the same might be said of Dewey Dell. Even her name smacks of the misogynist's sneer.
Whatever else we might say about these characters, we can't say that any of them would remain unnoticed at Old Miss or better yet at Princeton or Harvard. In other words, they are not the brightest people in the world. Yet they have wisdom of some kind. Even if you don't accept this, you might accept that they grapple with serious and even deep problems. They think. Funny as it might be, and I confess that I find it very funny, the scene in which Dewey struggles with her desire for Lafe in the cotton field presents us with Faulkner's attitude to women. Perhaps we might remember the first page of the novel on which Darl mentions "laidby cotton." We might say the same of Dewey Dell: laid by cotton, so to speak. Anyhow, Dewey seems to me genuinely conflicted as to whether to accede to Lafe's advances. She tries to make a plan, a plan which Lafe foils by picking into her sack. He picks into her sack all right. And the fact that I can make these wry nudge-nudge jokes at Dewey's expense strikes me as an indication of Faulkner's use of Dewey. He sets her up, just as Lafe does, just as I'm doing in the male's inveterate game to one-upmanship the female. When Dewey says, "I could not help it," I think we are to see this as a confession of weakness on her part, but from a feminist perspective I suspect that what we have here is a simple statement of fact. Women in Dewey's world can't help doing what importunate and opportunistic men want.
The rest of the passage is also interesting from a feminist perspective. Dewey goes on to say that an understanding exists between her and Darl: "then I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without words" (27). The passage goes on with more about this unspoken communication between Darl and Dewey. We know from Addie's section that words are "just a shape to fill a lack" 172). Men use words to attempt to repair the gap that opens up between their desire and its satisfaction after the Oedipal stage of development. They also use words as weapons--weapons to attain that which they desire. Women, on the other hand, have less need of language because of their closeness to the mother. We've seen all this before. Communication for a woman is more immediate, more direct, more literal, more honest than for a man. At first this might seem to place Dewey in a position of privilege or to suggest that she has a wisdom not open to men. But we might remember the long-standing connection between women and fools. Darl is this book's fool. Women and fools might have wisdom, but they cannot function adequately in the patriarchal world in which they find themselves. Fools end up in institutions and women end up victimised in one way or another. However we read section I've been looking at we can't but conclude that Dewey gets a raw deal. She may have wisdom, but what good does it do her? Her wisdom is the wisdom of the earth, according to Faulkner, and as noble and sanctified (I'm using Faulknerisms here) as this may be, it doesn't cut much ice in the world Dewey has to deal with. She remains an object in the eyes of men.
Before I leave Dewey, I must mention Dewey's masculine language when she describes a woman's situation. I refer to her remark to the two druggists that she has the "female trouble." I ought to note that Dewey does not report these trips to the druggist; we receive this information from the two men: Moseley and MacGowan. In effect, men speak for Dewey here; she is silenced. The first of these men is a self-righteous prig and a hypocrite. He's willing to judge Dewey: "it's a crime and a shame" (201). Note that he says this before he knows what she means by the "female trouble." For him, the very fact that women have the "female trouble," that is their monthly cycle, is a crime and a shame. The very fact that Dewey is a woman is enough for Moseley to judge her a criminal and a shameful person. He means "crime" literally; Dewey has contravened God's law by being a woman because she is a daughter of Eve who first contravened God's law. Moseley is like many of the characters in the novel in that he spouts Protestant pieties thoughtlessly and self-righteously. He also means "shame" in a similarly literal way; Dewey has shamed herself, that is put herself beyond the pale of respectable and decent people by having the "female trouble." She is marked with sin, set apart, outside community. She is, in effect, cursed. Yet he's also willing to take advantage of her: "but after all, they'll buy it from somebody." Once he learns the truth, that Dewey is pregnant, he assumes a paternal position towards her, advising her to go home and get her father to force Lafe into marriage. For him, marriage is the only answer to Dewey's trouble, and she needs to have recourse to her father to set things right.
The second druggist, MacGowan, is even worse. He sees Dewey only as an opportunity to satisfy his libido. He treats her with no respect, no feeling, no honesty, no humanity, no fairness. He tricks her. He takes advantage of her. And I could go on. The question is: what are we to make of this? Clearly, Faulkner cannot have sympathy for these men, especially the second. On the other hand, giving us the narrative from their point of view allows Dewey no voice here. We are allowed to think of her as Moseley and MacGowan do: a simple gullible, even ignorant, country girl easily dubed, stupid when it comes to dealing with men. We have little or no idea what goes on in her head during these encounters. Can we even imagine what she is thinking here? Anyhow, Dewey's world is a masculine world. She has few female role models. Is she an example of a woman who has internalized the values and language of patriarchy?
Perhaps the most spectacular instance of male appropriation of the female occurs right at the end when Anse returns to the wagon and ends the novel with the words: "Meet Mrs. Bundren." Who is this person? What is her name? What does she think? For Anse, she's just another acquisition, like his new teeth. Hey, look what I've got, a new wife. When did they get married? Faulkner's point here tells us a lot about Anse; it confirms his selfishness and his devious ways. but might it not also tell us a lot about Faulkner? To make this comic point about Anse's hangdog will to conquer, Faulkner uses a woman. And I say "uses" deliberately. The woman has no voice, no history, no identity. She's a mere object, chattel. Women, children, black people--these are the disenfranchised in Faulkner's world and we might argue of these three groups women are the most disenfranchised.
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