Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:43:05.387Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Precarious Pedestal: The Confederate Woman in Faulkner's Unvanquished

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Diane Roberts
Diane Roberts
Affiliation:
Diane Roberts is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama, P.O. Box 870244, Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0244, USA.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The Confederate Woman.… It took the civilization of an Old South to produce her — a civilization whose exquisite but fallen fabric now belongs to the Dust of Dreams. But we have not lost the blood royal of the ancient line; and in the veins of an infant Southland still ripples the heroic strain. The Confederate Woman, in her silent influence, in her eternal vigil, still bides.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , August 1992 , pp. 233 - 246
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See especially Jones, Anne Goodwyn, Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South 1859–1936, Ch. 1Google Scholar; Gwin, Minrose C., Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature, Chs. 1 and 2Google Scholar; Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Within the Plantation Household, Chs. 1, 2, 4 and 5Google Scholar; Westling, Louise, Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor, Ch. 1Google Scholar, and Seidel, Kathryn Lee, The Southern Belle in the American Novel, Ch. 1.Google Scholar

2 Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), 86.Google Scholar

3 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 202.Google Scholar

4 Gwin, Minrose C., The Peculiar Sisterhood: Black and White Women of the Old South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 4–5.Google Scholar

5 Page, Thomas Nelson, The Old South (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1892), 155.Google Scholar

6 See Kolodny, Annette, The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: 1982)Google Scholar, on the historical connection of the Southern land with the female body.

7 Jones, Anne Goodwyn, Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 26.Google Scholar

8 Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 21–22.Google Scholar

9 Faulkner, William, Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. Meriwether, James B. (New York: Random House, 1973), 15.Google Scholar

10 Faulkner, William, Uncollected Stories, ed. Blotner, Joseph (New York: Random House, 1988), 567.Google Scholar

11 See also Young, Stark, So Red the Rose (New York: 1934)Google Scholar; Mitchell, Margaret, Gone With the Wind (New York, 1936)Google Scholar; Gordon, Caroline, None Shall Look Back (New York: 1937)Google Scholar; and Tate, Allen, The Fathers (New York: 1938)Google Scholar – all novels which engage the Civil War past as both an object lesson and rebuke to the present.

12 Faulkner, William, The Unvanquished (New York: Random House, 1938), 120.Google Scholar Further references appear in the text.

13 Andrews, Matthew Page, ed. Women of the South in War Times (Baltimore: 1923), 205–06.Google ScholarLeConte, Emma, When the World Ended: The Diary of Emma LeConte, ed. Miers, E. S. (New York: 1957), 52.Google Scholar

14 See Rackin, Phyllis, “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage”, PMLA, 102.1 (01 1987), 29–41Google Scholar, and Howard, Jean E., “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly (09 1988), 418–40Google Scholar, for intriguing suggestions about cross-dressing heroines. Of course, on the Renaissance stage, the “heroines” were really boys, increasing the gender confusion.

15 Howard, , “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” 422.Google Scholar Later reference appears in the text.

16 For the usual antifeminist line on Drusilla, see Levins, Lynn, Faulkner's Heroic Design in the Yoknapatawpha Novels (Athens, Georgia: 1976), 120.Google ScholarBrooks, Cleanth, William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (New Haven: 1978), 335.Google Scholar

17 Faulkner, William, Flags in the Dust, ed. Day, Douglas (New York: Random House, 1973). 46.Google Scholar