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Jackson, Terri S.

English

2004

M.A.

In The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses, William Faulkner deals with two salient cultural aspects of the South: dominant and marginalized individuals. His fiction delineates the ways that social constructions shape subjectivity and subjugation within these socially divided cultural groups. In this thesis project, I discuss the representations of the voiceless object and patriarchal subject in Faulkner's literature and how the identity formation of both groups are bound by the same traditions and principles that characterized the South in the first half of the twentieth century. These individuals are always associated with race, class, and gender constructions and ideologies. My thesis on Faulkner's fiction explores the ways in which these elements serve to express and to critique historically Southern systems of race, class, and gender oppression. Through a close examination of Faulkner's depictions of male subjectivity and the subversive voices of the ostensibly voiceless women, blacks, and lower-class whites in The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses, I will demonstrate the ways in which Faulkner's marginalized characters emerge to subvert dominant ideologies and the ways in which "privileged" individuals are also bound by the expectations of the patriarchal societies in which they live.