Jaime Harker
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604735604
- eISBN:
- 9781621033318
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604735604.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines whether there has ever been a lesbian William Faulkner by analyzing his novel Absalom, Absalom!, and by highlighting textual similarities between it and Southern lesbian ...
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This chapter examines whether there has ever been a lesbian William Faulkner by analyzing his novel Absalom, Absalom!, and by highlighting textual similarities between it and Southern lesbian literature. It argues that the novel is a “foremother” to contemporary lesbian writing in the South and places Faulkner into a trajectory of lesbian writing beginning with Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. The chapter also considers how characterization and space are mapped out in Absalom, Absalom! to correspond with novels that articulate lesbian desire such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. Drawing on scholarship by Frann Michel, who first posited “William Faulkner as a Lesbian Author” in 1989, it looks at the transformation of Supten’s Hundred into Judith’s Hundred, a “queer contact zone,” one both within and outside of Southern patriarchal structures.Less
This chapter examines whether there has ever been a lesbian William Faulkner by analyzing his novel Absalom, Absalom!, and by highlighting textual similarities between it and Southern lesbian literature. It argues that the novel is a “foremother” to contemporary lesbian writing in the South and places Faulkner into a trajectory of lesbian writing beginning with Florence King’s Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. The chapter also considers how characterization and space are mapped out in Absalom, Absalom! to correspond with novels that articulate lesbian desire such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina. Drawing on scholarship by Frann Michel, who first posited “William Faulkner as a Lesbian Author” in 1989, it looks at the transformation of Supten’s Hundred into Judith’s Hundred, a “queer contact zone,” one both within and outside of Southern patriarchal structures.
