"Will You Accuse a Lady to Her Face of Smelling Bad?", Women and the Trauma of the Civil War in Faulkner's Short Stories

My thesis examines the trauma of the Civil War in the South, in three of William Faulkner’s short stories. When they were published, less than a hundred years had passed since the former Confederate States lost the Civil War... [ view full abstract ]

My thesis examines the trauma of the Civil War in the South, in three of William Faulkner’s short stories. When they were published, less than a hundred years had passed since the former Confederate States lost the Civil War and had to reluctantly take on the political and economic model of the North. When this latter model was being challenged by the Great Depression, Southern writers started rewriting and idealizing the South’s antebellum history as a way to cope with the deadlock of the present society. In my thesis I look into the way women are put at the center of this rewriting. Faulkner uses this centrality to unravel the alienating reality of imposing a collective narrative upon such a tragedy. By showing the process of silencing women performed by white patriarchy in the South, the stories unravel the multiple repressed narratives that threaten the coherency of the constructed myth of the Lost Cause. In the context of our current debates regarding the suppression of expression by the accepted white hegemony in the United States, reading those canonical texts through the lenses of womanhood and feminist criticism is of help in understanding its processes, origins and mechanisms.