Celibates Of The South

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Bob Varghese

Dr. Joyce Karpay

AML 4261-001

Celibates of the South: Celibates of the South

Throughout many of Faulkner’s novels and short stories, the white South is depicted as declining and giving way in a new post-Reconstruction era. Faulkner depicts a shift from the pure aristocratic white nobility to the rise of a new order of people who are colored or mixed. There are a handful of his novels and short stories that show the South’s fall through the whites’ lack of procreation (bachelors or spinsters) and through the blacks’ ability to intermix and adapt to the changes in the South. Novels such as The Sound and The Fury and Absalom, Absalom! as well as the short stories found in Go Down Moses, show how the Southern culture declines specifically through Faulkner’s use of white bachelors and spinsters. Faulkner also shows how a new racially integrated South emerges through the virility of black or mixed characters.

Before we can explore how specific works and their characters depict white Southern decline, we must understand the historical setting that Faulkner uses to critique white nobility and aristocracy. Even though Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman’s article, "White Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement, And The Homoerotic In William Faulkner's Light In August," concerns itself with Joe Christmas, it brings some interesting ideas to the forefront using "the historical fact of miscegenation and the perceived failure of white masculinity" (2). Abdur-Rahman states that whiteness, at that time, "was not simply white skin but access to the vote, access to the bodies of women, the right to defend one's country in war, the right to hold arms or property, the right to acquire capital, and, especially, the right and ability to dominate black people" (3). "Blackness," on the other hand, was defined as a propensity toward violence, an inability to control urges, and a claim to no rights or privileges. But many black men fought in the Civil War and after the war, they were given rights, education, and were able to gain wealth. Black families were able "to fare better than some of their white neighbors…Racial blackness in the U.S. itself underwent a cultural miscegenation: it became infused with some of the rights and properties of white manhood" (3). Because of the enfranchisement of the blacks after the Civil War, the "white neighbors," specifically the Southern white aristocracy, and their notions of Southern genteel culture were threatened. The very definitions of whiteness and blackness were questioned, blurred, and even redefined. Faulkner wrote many of his novels with race identity in mind and showed how white characters through their sexuality (or lack of sexuality in the case of bachelors and spinsters) attempted to uphold and exemplify unbending white aristocratic notions. On the other hand, black\mixed characters survived and increased in number and were able to adapt (by not being celibate but by bearing more members of their own race) in the new South. Inevitability, a bachelor or sprinter’s family line must come to an end and Faulkner shows through these characters how the old Southern notions also die out or at least live on in a new form among other survivors.

Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and The Fury, shows the Southern cultures of family and honor declining through the bachelors (Quentin, Jason, Benjamin) but adjusts and lives on in a new form through the black caretakers of the Compsons. Faulkner also plays with the notion of racial tensions mixed with sexuality in this novel. The article "All Mixed Up: Female Sexuality And Race In The Sound And The Fury" by Kristin Fujie states that "emergent racial discomfort can only be approached, however, in relation to the atmosphere of extreme sexual anxiety that not only precedes and surrounds, but seems to actually precipitate racial anxiety’s materialization at the novel’s center. Race in this way acquires its powerful charge…by becoming ‘all mixed up’ with female sexuality" (120). This is evident in the scene where Versh, Dilsey’s son, is asked to unbutton Caddy’s dress after she plays in the river. There is an implication of sexual and racial tension between Versh, a black child, and Caddy, a little white girl, which is initiated by Caddy herself. "‘Unbutton it, Versh.’ she said. ‘Dont you do it, Versh.’ Quentin said. ‘Taint none of my dress.’ Versh said. ‘You unbutton it, Versh.’ Caddy said. ‘Or I'll tell Dilsey what you did yesterday.’ So Versh unbuttoned it" (The Sound and The Fury 12). Here, Versh unbuttoning Caddy’s dress creates a racial\sexual tension for her brothers, specifically for Quentin. The racial\sexual tension goes against all his ideals of Southern culture. This tension occurs again when Caddy wants to climb the tree to see what’s going on inside the house. "‘Push me up, Versh.’ Caddy said. ‘All right.’ Versh said…He went and pushed Caddy up into the tree to the first limb. We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn't see her. We could hear the tree thrashing" (The Sound and The Fury 25). The last thing the brothers see is Caddy’s muddy drawers and then she disappears into the tree. The muddy drawers represent the future loss of Caddy’s virginity which was only fully visible once Versh pushed her up in the tree. The image of a black male holding\pushing a white female as well as the image of the muddy drawers create an indescribable loss for her brothers. Versh and Caddy’s actions (a mix of racial and sexual tension) encroach on the brother’s whiteness and throughout the novel, her brothers try to deal with the encroachment and the loss. Much like how the South felt an indescribable loss after the Civil War and struggled to recover its culture, the brothers struggle to come to terms with the loss but ultimately stay as bachelors. A closer examination of the brothers may reveal why they individually failed to procreate and failed to pass down their culture to a new generation.

Quentin, who appears again in Absalom, Absalom!, upholds the Southern notions of family, honor, womanhood, and chivalry, but cannot fully come to terms with Caddy’s promiscuity as well as his desires for his sister. Her behavior is contrary to his ideals of how a woman should act. In his final moments, Quentin states, "I put my vest on….I put on my coat…and got a fresh handkerchief...Then I remembered I hadn't brushed my teeth, so I…went out and brushed my teeth… then I saw that I had forgotten my hat" (The Sound and The Fury 113). Quentin’s final actions (dressing as a southern gentleman) imply his desires to preserve his ideals before he commits suicide. He cannot adapt and in his mind he believes that this is his only means of keeping the Southern code in a changing culture.

Benjamin, the mentally challenged son, is incapable of continuing the family line. In Taylor Hagood’s article "The Secret Machinery of Textuality, or, What Is Benjy Compson Really Thinking?" Hagood explores that marginalization of Benjy. Hagood states that there is a case where Benjy can be described as "too white: with ‘dead looking and hairless’ skin, ‘pale and fine’ hair, and eyes ‘of the pale sweet blue of cornflowers,’ Benjy seems conspicuous for his paleness" (93). Benjy’s disability "emasculates him practically (he does not possess the power of other white men) and literally (by way of his castration)" (94). Because Benjy is forced into bachelorhood through his disability and castration, Faulkner may be commenting on the dangers of being too white in upholding Southern values during the Reconstruction. Adaptability and acceptance of the new black\mixed race is necessary in order to survive, otherwise like Benjy, the ability to reproduce and increase will be removed.

Jason, the only viable male to continue the Compson name, remains a bachelor bringing the Compson family (masculine line) to an end. Jason, unlike Quentin, embodies greed and insatiable hatred for Caddy who had cost him his promised job. Jason ends up in financial ruin when Quentin, Caddy’s illegitimate daughter, steals his laundered money. Jason is incapable of adapting to the changes in his environment by failing at the stock market and by failing to be sympathetic to his black caretakers. Jason’s cruel treatment of Luster shows his attitude of racial superiority and his unwillingness to accept the black family as the torchbearers of the Compson ideals ("Abe Lincoln freed the niggers from the Compsons. In 1933, Jason Compson freed the Compsons from the niggers" (The Sound and The Fury 213).)

Since all the brothers where bachelors and did not procreate, the masculine line of the Compson family comes to an end. But Faulkner shows how Dilsey and her family not only carry the story of the Compsons, but also carry the Compsons’ values of family and honor mixed in with their own into a new era. Faulkner describes Dilsey as almost heroic "as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark" (The Sound and The Fury 165). Dilsey stood in for Mrs. Compson as the mother to the Compson children on top of caring for her own children and was the glue that held the family together when both Mr. and Mrs. Compson declined in health. In the appendix, Faulkner writes of Dilsey and her family, "these others were not Compsons. They were black" (The Sound and The Fury 215). At first reading, it may seem that there is a marginalizing tone, but all the text preceding it discusses the decline and failures of the Compson family to adapt and to survive. Faulkner was separating them with a tone of admiration; these were not Compsons (failures), they were the survivors. Faulkner writes little for each survivor since their story is not finished and there is still more to write because "they endured."

The novel Absalom, Absalom! is another example of a story of the decline of a family because of bachelors and spinsters. The trigger that started Thomas Sutpen on his quest to create his own dynasty occurred when Sutpen was a child. Little Sutpen tries to deliver a message from his father to a plantation owner. When Sutpen reaches the front, he is told by a black servant "never to come to that front door again but to go around to the back" (Absalom, Absalom! 237). Sutpen was innocent and this was his first experience with the distinction and subjugation of a lower class. Sutpen was determined to fix things for "not only the old dead ones but all the living ones that would come after him" (Absalom, Absalom! 224) so that:

He would take that boy in where he would never again need to stand on the outside of a white door and knock at it…[the boy] could shut that door himself forever behind him on all that he had ever known, and look ahead along the still undivulged light rays in which his descendants who might not even ever hear his (the boy's) name, waited to be born without even having to know that they had once been riven forever free from brutehood. (Absalom, Absalom! 266)

Sutpen’s ideal goal was to create a life\place for his descendants where they will be free from the trappings of lower class. He wants to be part of the white aristocracy. But Sutpen’s ideal dynasty fails because of two critical decisions he made. First, Sutpen rejects his first wife and child (Charles Bon) when he learns that she had black blood. He believes that he must reject them otherwise he will never be able to create his ideal dynasty. Second, when he learns that Henry, his white son, has befriended, Charles Bon, he uses his own son against his other mixed son. Like Jason Compson, who could not sympathize with Dilsey’s family, Sutpen fails to sympathize with his own mixed family which results in Judith becoming a spinster and Henry becoming a bachelor (after killing Charles Bon). The Sutpen family line should have come to an end, but it is through Judith’s actions that she redeems her family and is able to have an heir.

When Sutpen goes to war and Rosa comes to live with Judith and Clytie, Judith recreates Sutpen’s Hundred into a space that should have been Thomas Sutpen’s ideal dynasty. In "‘And You Too, Sister, Sister?': Lesbian Sexuality, Absalom, Absalom!, And The Reconstruction Of The Southern Family," Jaime Harker shows that Judith understands that white aristocracy is declining and that a new order of people are emerging in the South:

Judith constructs a space in which everyone does her share to survive—no one passes the burden onto others. In other words, Judith establishes a household in which the exploitive racial and gender hierarchies of the plantation South, which Rosa saw as her birthright, are completely undone. They are not black, or white, or women—they are creatures, equal and unprivileged. (48)

Judith creates a space where no class\color is subjugated and where no one has to go to the back door. Rosa, another spinster, sees the emergence of a mixed South when she touches Clytie; "but let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too" (Absalom, Absalom! 143). But instead of embracing it, she rejects it and upholds white aristocracy by running away from the space Judith created. She dies a spinster and her family line comes to an end. Quentin also sees the coming of the mixed South and he realizes that the story of the Sutpens is a story of the decline of the South with all its notions of honor and chivalry that he still adheres too. He sees the decline as inevitable and tells Shreve that he doesn’t hate the South, but he echoes the words "I don’t hate it" over and over again as if he questions his love or hate for something that no longer exists as he once knew. Quentin’s inability to adapt and his desires to preserve his ideals contributed to his ending his life in The Sound and The Fury.

Even though Judith is a spinster, her actions redeem her family line by first creating a space where no race is subjugated and then by caring for Charles Bon’s son, Charles Etienne de Saint Velery Bon (the mother was Charles Bon’s octoroon mistress). Harker states that again Judith creates another space for all races. "And after the war, she adopted Charles Bon’s son, setting him up as the heir apparent, even inviting him to call her ‘aunt Judith.’ She attempted to create a space in which black and white were irrelevant" (49). Judith sheds her spinsterhood by caring for the boy like a mother. Judith raises him into adulthood, has a mulatto grandson (Jim Bond) through him that Clytie raises, and eventually dies with Charles Etienne when he contracts yellow fever. Even though Shreve and Quentin see the decline of the white South and fear that the "Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere" (Absalom, Absalom! 386), Judith sympathized and understood the "New South," the emerging order of mixed people, and gave her life for it.

The short stories in Go Down Moses are yet another example of how bachelors contribute to the decline of a family but in the case of the McCaslins, they are more sympathetic to their black brethrens than the Compsons or Thomas Sutpen. In "Was," Buck and Buddy are both slave owners and the story revolves around their attempts to retrieve what seems to be a runaway slave (Tomey’s Turl). But near the end of the story, the reader realizes that they are retrieving not just any slave, but their half brother (a child born of a slave woman and their father, Carothers McCaslin). Also, the brothers do not treat their slave half brother harshly for running away like slave owners usually do but go to the extent of winning his love (Tennie) from Hubert Beauchamp. It is also interesting to note that Tomey’s Turl, a black male, wants to marry Tennie while Buck, a white bachelor, wants to avoid getting hitched with Sophonsiba, Hubert Beauchamp’s sister. This may be Faulkner’s subtle attempt at showing how again, the white South declines through its lack of procreation while the black\mixed South increases.

Eventually, Buck no longer stays a bachelor but marries Sophonsiba and they have Isaac McCaslin, who becomes a bachelor as an adult. Isaac’s reasons for staying a bachelor are quite different than those of other characters found in The Sound and The Fury and Absalom, Absalom! In "Faulkner's Bachelors And Fertility," Mary K. Mumbach analyses bachelors in the Snopes family and raises some interesting points. "One has come to expect marriage to be the symbol of the continuation of life ‘in motion’, yet the Snopes novels are peopled with bachelor, characters who live a life without changing their state" (221-222). She suggests that the bachelor characters are "giving an account of the motion toward wholeness, which is the life of the human spirit revealed in its encounter with the world" (222) and that with regards to the Snopes, "the virgins and the bachelors devoted to them have renounced the world in some way, in order to witness to a life that is invisible to those who are caught up in purely domestic concerns. Their renunciation of ‘motion’ as it is ordinarily understood is paradoxically a recognition of the spiritual motion which is its source" (224). The article continues looking at celibates on a spiritual level, but what is interesting is that they trade a natural motion (marriage) for a spiritual one (nature). This is the case with Isaac McCaslin who renounces his inheritance, the McCaslin plantation, and gives it to his cousin, McCaslin Edmonds. Isaac instead believes that the land cannot be owned and moves toward a more spiritual view of land and nature (like the native Indians). Isaac remained connected to the wilderness (the hunting grounds of his formative years) and renounces his domestication and responsibilities for the plantation which he believes McCaslin Edmonds is more suited for. Though Isaac does get married, he still remains a bachelor in a sense that he does not have any children and that he returns to the wilderness, after his wife dies. Seemly, the white McCaslin’s masculine line will end with Isaac, but because of his white family’s sympathetic treatment of their black family line, Isaac will witness a new order of McCaslins.

Isaac’s grandfather, Carothers McCaslin created two lines of his family; a white line through his white wife (that bore Buck, Buddy, and Mary) and a black line through his slaves (through Eunice then Tomey that bore Tomey’s Turl). Through many years, as well as through most of the stories of Go Down Moses, the two family lines stay separate. But it is in "Delta Autumn" that old Isaac witnesses the new McCaslins. Carothers (Roth) Edmonds, grandson of McCaslin Edmonds (Isaac’s cousin), gives an envelope to Isaac to give to a visitor. They are camping at the old hunting grounds and Isaac feels that Roth is avoiding a lover. The visitor, a light-skinned girl, visits Isaac’s tent and tells him that she is the granddaughter of Tennie’s Jim, James Beauchamp. When Isaac realizes the girl is black and Roth’s lover, he thinks out of fear, "maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America…But not now! Not now!" (Go Down Moses 344). He feels that the world is not ready for such a mix, but then he comes to understand that this is the motion of life and that through her, his family’s bloodline will continue. The most endearing moment is when the girl takes the envelope and is about to leave the tent and Isaac calls out:

"Wait:" although she had not turned, still stooping, and he put out his hand. But, sitting, he could not complete the reach until she moved her hand, the single hand which held the money, until he touched it. He didn’t grasp it, he merely touched it—the gnarled, bloodless, bone-light bone-dry old man’s fingers touching for a second the smooth young flesh where the strong old blood ran after its long lost journey back to home. "Tennie’s Jim," he said. "Tennie’s Jim." (Go Down Moses 345)

Isaac touching the granddaughter of Tennie’s Jim evokes the image of Rosa touching Clytie in Absalom, Absalom! where "flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too" (Absalom, Absalom! 143). But unlike Rosa, who rejects "blackness" and upholds white aristocracy, Isaac understands that the girl is part of a new order of people who will emerge in the South. Through Roth and Tennie’s Jim’s granddaughter, the merging of the McCaslin lines is a symbol of a new order of people and the continuation of life "in motion."

Faulkner shows a declining white South through novels such as The Sound and The Fury and Absalom, Absalom! as well as the short stories found in Go Down Moses. Bachelors like Quentin, Jason, Benjamin, Henry and spinsters like Rosa represent a strict Southern white culture that must make way for a new culture of the post-Reconstruction era. Isaac and Judith, who remain sympathetic to their black brothers and sisters, are able to witness the shifting of racial currents. Through virile characters like Disley, Charles Bon, and the daughter of Tennie’s Jim, Faulkner is able to show the emergence of a racially mixed South and its ability to adapt in post-Civil War culture.