Virginity+-+Long+Wiki

=** Virginity **= In Faulkner’s attempt to make sense of the political and social structures of the South he turns to the form of the allegory – he populates his Yoknapatawpha County with characters who represent or are mouthpieces for differing ideas about political and historical situations. Observing this allegorical style reveals the ways in which conceptions of Virginity and sexuality are informed by race, class, and gender.

Virginity is a prominent theme in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County; its normative standard is penetrated by race and gender and takes on a different meaning for characters. The social creation of Virginity is used as a means to reinforce and maintain the power structure, which places white men at the top and black women on the bottom.
 * The following codes of behavior dominated the standards of Southern life and culture: **
 * White men had the greatest latitude in fulfilling their sexual desires.
 * White women were expected not to have sexual desires and to stand as asexual paragons of virtue, whose sole responsibility is to bear a male heir.
 * Black men's sexuality was viewed as threatening and was tightly controlled.
 * Black women were expected to be sexually accessible, and more sexually expressive than white women.

** Normative standards of virginity for white men: **
While Faulkner uses Thomas Sutpen and Jason Compson Junior to reinforce the power structures of Virginity in Yoknapatawpha, other white male characters like Jason Compson Senior and Quentin Compson question the shaky, varying, oppressive nature of the concept.

In //Absalom, Absalom!,// upon his arrival to town, Thomas Sutpen is determined to “find a wife exactly as he would have gone to the Memphis market to buy livestock or slaves.” He goes into a church to select this wife that shall bring him respectability in town. His decision to enter a church reveals how the respectability of a man is equated with the virginal status of his wife – despite his lack of religious beliefs; Sutpen realizes he must comply with this Christian notion in order to obtain the utmost powerful status of a white man. Sutpen continues to reinforce the normative standards throughout the rest of his life in Yoknapatawpha.

After the death of his wife Ellen and the victory of the North in the Civil War, and on the same day that Sutpen learns he will be able to keep a portion of his land, he devises a plan to grant Rosa Coldfield a marriage to him, on the condition that she first bear him a male heir. The implications of this condition reveal the aforementioned normative standard for white women -- their sole responsibility and reason for participating in society is to bear a male heir. When she refuses, Sutpen forces the agreement on Milly Jones, the granddaughter of Wash Jones, a poor white man that is described as a “squatter, hanger-on of Sutpen.” The fact that Rosa Coldfield can walk away from the agreement whereas Milly has no choice but to comply shows the crucial role that class plays in applying these normative standards of sexuality generally and virginity specifically.

Similar to Sutpen, Jason Compson Junior in //The Sound and the Fury// reinforces normative standards of virginity and attempts to tightly control his niece, Quentin, by denying her her sexuality. Jason’s narrative of the novel starts with the declarative judgment: “Once a bitch always a bitch…you’re lucky if her playing our of school is all that worries you...she ought to be down there in the kitchen right now, instead of up there in her room, gobbing paint on her face.” While he is able to indulge in his sexual desires by having regular sex with a prostitute, he expects Quentin to follow the codes of behavior and preserve her virginity.

While Sutpen and Jason Compson Junior uphold the normative standards of virginity, Jason Compson Senior questions the concept of virginity and the precarious grounds of its principles through an examination of the language that is associated with it. Through his discussions, Jason influences his son, Quentin who is trying to make sense of these societal structures.

In //The Sound and the Fury//, Quentin muses on the different implications of virginity for women and men. While virginity connotes passivity on the part of women, “in the South, [boys] are ashamed to be virgin[s]. Boys. Men. They lie about it.” (TSAF, 78) Quentin remembers his father’s own theories of virginity, that “it was men who invented virginity, not women. Father said its like death: only a state in which the others are left.” (TSAF, 78) According to Jason Compson Senior, Virginity is a man-made concept, intended as a type of competition, a survival of the fittest, in which women are mere objects to be had, as a placemat for the bodies to be marked and virginities to be taken. While it gives a man credibility to lose his virginity, the loss of a woman's virginity signifies the loss of her worth, value, and contribution to the society. Furthermore, Jason Compson’s association of virginity with death shows how it is a coercive concept in which white men have power over other bodies.

In //Absalom, Absalom!,// Jason Compson Senior continues to contemplate the precarious nature of virginity. Jason tries to make sense of the murder of Charles Bon by his fiancée’s brother, Henry – he speculates that Henry’s “fierce provincial’s pride in his sister’s virginity was a false quantity which must incorporate in itself an inability to endure in order to be precious, to exist, and so must depend upon its loss, absence, to have existed at all.” (AA, 77) Jason in his ability to question the existence or tangibility of virginity is what makes him one of the most feminist, albeit passive, characters of Yoknapatawpha County.

=
Jason Compson’s inference of Judith and Henry’s relationship as a pure and perfect incest is reminiscent of Quentin’s fantasy of a pure and perfect incest relationship with his sister Caddy. In //The Sound and the Fury//, his beloved sister falls from grace as she becomes pregnant, revealing her loss of virginity out of wedlock. Quentin fantasizes about an incest relationship with his sister as in his mind; it would result in not only the loss of his own virginity but also the saving of his sister’s. By keeping the loss of virginity within the family, he is saving his sister and his family’s honor. =====

** Normative standards of virginity for white women: **
Faulkner represents a multitude of white women and their struggles with the normative standards of virginity that they must obey. While characters like Dewey Dell and Lena Grove attempt to save themselves from the fall from grace of losing their virginities, other characters like Joanna Burden, Addie Bundren, and Quentin Compson rebel against these structures and refuse to reckon with what is expected of white women as “paragons of virtue with no sexual desires.” Dewey Dell of //As I Lay Dying// is perhaps, the most representative character of one who desperately attempts to uphold the normative standards of white women and the role in preserving her virginity. The Encyclopedia of Southern culture defines the role of a Southern belle as “a privileged white girl at the glamorous and exciting period between being a daughter and becoming a wife. She is the fragile, dewy, just-opened bloom of the southern female: flirtatious but sexually innocent, bright but not deep, beautiful as a statue or porcelain but, like each, risky to touch. A form of popular art, she entertains but does not challenge her audience.” (Wilson,1528) Despite the fact that Dewey Dell does not come from a wealthy nor glamorous family, she embodies the characteristics of being flirtatious yet sexually innocent, and bright but not deep, and not a challenge to her audience (though proves to be a great challenge to her readership). Furthermore, one of the characteristics listed is even personified in her name.

Dewey Dell embodies this sexually innocent ideal even in the way she loses her virginity. When she is “pick[ing] on down the row” with Lafe, she contemplates to herself, “because I said will I or wont I when the sack was half full because I said if the sack is full when we get to the woods it wont be me. I said if it don’t mean for me to do it the sack will not be full and I will turn up the next row but if the sack is full, I cannot help it.” Though this dialogue is taking place in the privacy of her mind, Lafe curiously catches onto her logic and starts picking into her sack, so that her sack is full by the time they have reached the end of the row. Thus, Lafe is the one who makes the decision that Dewey Dell will lose her virginity, and yet Dewey Dell is the only one who faces the social implications of this act.

Upon realizing she is pregnant, Dewey Dell becomes frantically anxious in attempting to keep her pregnancy, and moreover, her loss of virginity, a secret. She is driven so far by this need to uphold the normative standard of white women being asexual paragons of virtue that she is relieved when she learns her brother Darl, the only one who has found out her secret, has been sent away. Furthermore, Anse’s inadvertent confiscation of Dewey Dell’s only financial means to keeping her loss of virginity a secret, shows the white man’s omnipresent power in controlling the bodies of women.

Lena Grove in //Light in August// portrays a similar role in her attempt to maintain the normative standard of virginity. She embarks on a journey to find Lucas Burch, also known as Joe Brown, the father of her baby, before it is born, in order to maintain respectability and not be outcast as a whore by society. Lena reveals her naivety or perhaps just her attempt to maintain the codes of virginity and to make sense of it in her head in the face of Lucas Burch’s abandonment. Lena tries to convince herself and Mrs. Armstid that “his plans just never worked out right for him to come back for me like he aimed to…when he found the night that he would have to go.” The wise Mrs. Armstid guesses, “found out about what? The night you told him about that chap?” (LIA, 18) Lena makes no response; instead her face is described as being “calm as stone, but not hard.” Perhaps she is trying to deny this fact that Lucas Burch has run away from the responsibility of impregnating a woman, but moreover, this conversation depicts the societal norm that white Southern women were supposed to be “bright, but not deep.”

Throughout the remainder of the novel, Lena Grove maintains her plan to find the father of her baby. Byron Bunch notes, that though in one part she knows that Burch is a scoundrel, the part of her believes that “when a man and a woman are going to have a child, that the Lord will see that they are all together when the right time comes.” Lena refuses to understand the implications of breaking the normative standards of virginity, that as soon as she loses her virginity, she also loses the protection of the Lord.

Where Lena Grove is accepting the normative standard that the sole responsibility of a woman besides preserving her virginity, is to bear a child and support the husband, Addie Bundren in //As I Lay Dying//, offers a stark, radical countering notion of virginity. Addie’s narrative opens with a memory of the end of a school day, where she as a teacher “would go down the hill to the spring where [she] could be quiet and hate them.” (AILD, 169) In the first paragraph alone, she shatters the expectation and stereotype that women are supposed to be motherly, caring, and a lover of children.

Continuing to defy normative standards, Addie describes her marriage to her husband, “and so I took Anse,” by the active stance wherein she is the subject and the male is the object, which is never the case in a patriarchal structure. Furthermore, she describes pregnancy and motherhood as a violation of her aloneness, a loss of her private self. Much like Jason Compson Senior, Addie speculates on the intangible, subjective concept of virginity. After giving birth to her first son, Addie “knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not.” (AILD, 172) She realizes the patriarchal nature of the concept and becomes even more infuriated when she becomes pregnant with her second child. She feels as if her husband had tricked her, then says realizes she’s been “tricked by words older than Anse of love, and that the same word had tricked Anse too.” (AILD, 172)

But though Addie is radical in the way she challenges the language and notions of virginity and motherhood, she, in her own unique and defeated way, still attempts to comply with the standards, as she continues to see herself as fulfilling a duty to him. She admits, “I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them. I did not even ask him for what he could have given her: not-Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled.” (AILD, 172) She is furious of having had these two children, Cash and Darl. She refuses sex to Anse for two years begins to have an affair with the town minister in order to rid herself mentally from the identity of motherhood. The fact that she is having an affair with the minister, the central reinforcer of the normative standards of virginity, sexuality, and purity, shows the corruption of the concept. This affair results in the birth of Jewel - in order to rid herself of this child, she devises a plan to resume having sex with Anse and "birthing herself back to zero." (Allred) Addie hauntingly says, "I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him Vardaman to replace the child I had robbed him of. And now he has three children that are his and not mind. and then I could get ready to die." (LIA, 176) Once she has completed to task, she is ready to die as she, as a woman who has no love for children, sees no point or space for her to live without ascribing to the normative standards applied to white women.

The character of Joanna Burden in //Light in August// greatly entangles the power dynamics of race and gender in her relationship with Joe Christmas, a self-identified black man. She does what is unthinkable to the reinforcers of the white supremacist, patriarchal society, that a white woman would voluntarily and take pleasure in having sex with a black man. Joanna Burden, is the first of her family to be born in the South. She is the daughter of an abolitionist who got a commission from the government to “come down here, to help with the freed negroes.” (LIA, 251) Prior to her birth, her brother Calvin and grandfather are murdered by white supremacists for betraying the white race. On a visit to their graves, Joanna’s father tells her, “your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race…a race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever part of the white race’s doom and curse for its sins.” (LIA, 252) Joanna is mesmerized by this, and has terrible nightmares of helpless white babies who are struggling to escape from a rising black shadow. Her father make sense of this dream by telling her she must “struggle, rise…escape it you can not. The curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God’s chosen own because He once cursed him.” (LIA, 253)

Most interestingly, when Christmas questions as to why her father did not seek revenge on the murderer, Colonel Sartoris, Joanna speculates that the French blood of her father is probably what made him “understand that a man would have to act as the land where he was born had trained him to act.” (LIA, 255) Here, she not only states how laws and normative standards of race are constructed and taught by society, but also brings up the concept of blood, a hereditary trait and infers that it carries emotional characteristics.

Christmas intends to rape Joanna, but is startled by her “hard, untearful and unselfpiting and almost manlike yielding of that surrender” of her virginity. (LIA, 234) This willingness makes him uneasy and makes him haunted by the thought that he “had never had and never would” fully steal her virginity. (LIA, 234) Christmas’ description of Joanna Burden of having “no feminine vacillation, no coyness of obvious desire and intention to succumb” we see her defiance of the normative standards of virginity for white women. (LIA, 235) She takes this defiance to the extreme, when she has sex with Christmas she is described as being wild, “her wild hands and her breathing: ‘Negro! Negro! Negro!” (LIA, 260) She longs to be impregnated by Christmas, a black man, her “instinct assured her that [the pregnancy] would not harm her; that it would overtake and betray her completely, but she would not be harmed: that on the contrary, she would be saved.” (LIA, 264) Her loss of virginity to a black man is an offering to God to save her from the white curse that her father had warned her of.

** Normative standards of virginity for black men: **
Joe Christmas, in //Light in August,// represents the ways in which race informs and even creates the normative standards of sexuality for men. As an orphan, his racial identity remains unclear and the only trait the characters can base their assumptions on is his “parchment” colored skin. Under the guardianship of the McEacherns, Christmas is identified as white by his foster parents, neighbors, and friends. The notion of virginity as a reinforcement of the white patriarchal power structure is shown in the passage when Christmas is partaking in a plan with three white males, to have sex with a “negro girl.” The narrator notes that perhaps Christmas “did not even think of it as a sin … since to fourteen [year old white males] the paramount sin would be to be publicly convicted of virginity.” (LIA, 156) The normative standards of white man having the greatest latitude in fulfilling their sexual desires, and the pressure for white men to assert their sexual desires are manifested by this scene. Interestingly, Christmas becomes overwhelmed with abjection from “smelling the woman smelling the negro all at once” and instead of sexually penetrating her, he starts kicking and beating her ferociously. (LIA, 156) Christmas, who at this point of the narrative is identified as a white man, denies this normative standard of virginity and does not indulge in his sexual desires.

The transition of Christmas’ identity from a white man to a black man is made evident through how he complies with the normative standards of virginity. He, who as a white man denies his sexual desires, becomes representative of the threatening black man’s sexuality when he begins to identify himself as a black man. Christmas’ sexual relationship with Joanna Burden, a white woman, is predicated on his desire to take her virginity over and over again. When Christmas first enters the house at night to have sex with Joanna Burden, he feels like “a thief, a robber” and desires to rape her, to “despoil her virginity.” (LIA, 234) He tears at her clothes, and talks in a “tense, hard low voice: ‘I’ll show you! I’ll show the bitch!’” (LIA, 236) He desires to assert his assumed black identity and attempts to embody these stereotypes and normative standards of being a sexually threatening, dangerous black man. After he has sex with her, he thinks to himself, “at least I have made a woman of her at last, now she hates me. I have taught that at last.” (LIA, 236) The day after, he expects her to run him out of the house, and tells himself he will leave before giving a white woman the chance to taint his pride.

** Normative standards of virginity for black women: **
The political structure of the South that Faulkner writes of completely polarized the representation of black and white women. While law and public opinion idealized the white woman’s body and enforced the protection of it for the sake of motherhood, the opposite held true for black women. Elizabeth Higginbotham, a scholar of African American women’s history, references Sojourner Truth’s famous and haunting question, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” that details the “racial configuration of gender under a system of class rule that compelled and expropriated women’s physical labor and denied them legal right to their own bodies and sexuality, much less to the bodies to which they gave birth.” (Higginbotham, 7) The children of black women are not valued, and thus the bodies of black women are not valued to the extent that of the bodies of white women. We see through Thomas Sutpen and McCaslin that it was common for a white man to have sex with a black woman with no repercussions from society, though a black man would not be able to do the same with a white woman. Furthermore, the children would be deemed illegitimate and abandoned by the white father, further devaluing the body of black women.

Readers are only introduced to four black women characters in Yoknapatawpha County – Dilsey, the girl who Christmas’ friends have sex with in //Light in August//, Clytie, the unnamed “octoroon” mother of Charles Bon, and the unnamed mistress of Charles E. St. V. Bon. The very fact that the two black women who are not immediately associated with white characters are not given names, and are thereby stripped of identity, humanity, and any power in a white male supremacist.

Furthermore, the fact that there are so few black female characters in a county that is populated by more black people than white (9318 to 6298) reveals the problem of invisibility, and the lack of representation of oppressed people. Readers do not gain a sense of how the most oppressed group of society was affected by the normative standards of virginity and its relation to controlling the human body. Much is lost by this partial account of a complex, all encompassing era in the history of the South.

** Political commentary of the contraceptive movement: **
Dewey Dell represents, as Heather E. Holcolmbe suggests, the failures of the contemporary birth control movement led by Margaret Sanger. Holcombe provides a study, published a decade after //As I Lay Dying// and two years after the AMA’s endorsement of newly legalized prescription contraception. Hagood’s “Mothers of the South Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman” documents women who “remained socially isolated, emotionally exhausted, financially stressed, and physically marred from repeated pregnancy and childbirth.” **(Holcolmbe, 23)** Hagood’s interviews with women on tenant tobacco farms in North Carolina, state: "Insufficient knowledge of contraceptive methods, the effective devices, where they can be obtained, and too much embarrassment over a taboo subject to seek intelligently for such knowledge—this augmented by her physician's practice of giving no contraceptive information even when health needs dictate it." The interviews clearly show the lack of information that was available to country folks.

This real-life predicament is much like that of Dewey Dell’s, who is a socially isolated, pregnant girl out of wedlock. Dewey Dell goes into a drug store in town to purchase contraception. She has a very awkward encounter with the owner, Moseley. She does not know how to verbally express her problem and what she needs, she can only utter that the issue pertains to the “the female trouble.” Moseley asks her, “Have you got female troubles or do you want female troubles?” Dewey Dell’s response of “no” reflects the instability of this term. **(AILD ,)** By saying no, she not only means that she does not have any female troubles in the traditional sense of an irregularity in the menstrual cycle, but also no, she does not want any female troubles meaning a pregnancy. Halcolmbe notes that “Faulkner's depiction of the barriers she faces in making her request; it is the euphemized language of contraception that is unintelligible, not she.” **(Halcolmbe, 20)**

Works Cited

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Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “African-American Women’s History and Metalanguage of Race.” //Chicago Journals// 17.2 (1992): 251-274. Web.

Holcombe, Heather E. “Faulkner on Feminine Hygiene, or, How Margaret Sanger Sold Dewey Dell a Bad Abortion.” //MFS// // Modern Fiction Studies // 57.2 (2011): 203-29. Web.

Johnson, Carol Ann. “Sex and the Southern girl: Eudora Welty’s critical legacy.” //The Mississippi Quarterly// 56.2 (2003): 269+. Web.

Johnson, Karen Ramsay. “Gender, Sexuality, and the Artist in Faulkner’s Novels.” //American Literature// 61.1 (1989): 1-15. Web.

Jones, Anne Goodwyn. "Faulkner and Southern Womanhood." //The Mississippi Quarterly// 47.3 (1994): 521+. Web.

Lilly, Paul R. “Caddy and Addie: Speakers of Faulkner’s Impeccable Language.” // The Journal of Narrative Technique // 3.3 (1973): 170-82. Web.

Mortimer, Gail L. “Significant Absences: Faulkner’s Rhetoric of Loss.” // NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction // 14.3 (1981): 232-50. Web.

Oklopcic, Biljana. “Redefining Stereotypes: Joanna Burden and Southern Womanhood in William Faulkner’s //Light in August//.” //Interactions// 18.2 (2009): 85+. Web.

Charles Reagan Wilson & William Ferris, __Roles of Women__ in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, The University of North Carolina Press (1989).

Waldron, Karen E. "Recovering Eve's consciousness from 'The Sound and the Fury.'" //Women's Studies// 22.4 (1993): 469+. Web.