horses

Horses play a central role in the canon of William Faulkner. The figure of the horse can be rhetorically traced throughout the various interwoven narratives that constitute Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Several critics have argued that Faulkner’s literary fascination with horses is influenced by his upbringing. Frank P. Fury notes, “Faulkner grew up around horses—his father owned a livery stable for a period during his youth—and witnessed firsthand the declining status of the horse in the increasingly industrialized South” (436).

Yet the integration of horses into Faulkner’s work extends beyond childhood memories of horses at his father’s livery. In fact, in Faulkner’s work horses often register in excess of the animal itself - the horse is never simply a horse. As Kristen Fujie notes “horses in Faulkner’s fiction are avatars of self-sufficiency, embodying a freedom of movement about which his protagonists can only dream” (Langdon 31). Towards the end of The Sound and the Fury, Luster agrees to drive Benjy to the boneyard in the surry, a route the two have taken many times before. Yet as Luster takes hold of Queenie’s reins he undergoes an abrupt transformation in physical and emotional demeanor. Emboldened, Luster mounts the surry and “Queenie lowered her head and fell to crop-up and harried her into motion again, then he squared his elbows and with the switch and the reins held high he assumed a swaggering attitude” (TSAF 319).

As the two approach the town square, Luster hits Queenie and swings her abruptly to the left, a stark deviation from the route usually taken. Though Benjy begins to yelp, Luster briefly revels in his moment of glorious self-sufficiency before Jason appears, deals him a blow, and corrects his deviant switch to the left. While short-lived, Luster’s guidance over Queenie reflects his desire to guide his own path, to rail against the violent psyche of the southern male Jason represents. Luster guides Queenie at the same time Queenie leads Luster; together they forge a horizon for future mobility and travel against the grain of an arrested and violent Southern culture.

Horses also operate as a figure for grasping the tension between Southern sluggishness and Northern modernity in Faulkner. In The Unvanquished, Ringo makes an assessment that maps the difference between Southern and Northern horses onto the lack of cultural and human recognition between Confederates and Yankees. “I knowed Yankees wasn’t folks but I never knowed before they horses aint horses” (U 63). Bayard’s descriptions of the obstacles the “borrowed” Southern horses they use to hunt for a group of Yankees who attacked them and cut their mules loose works to flesh out these differences. Bayard notes, “When we reached the woods there was no sign of them and we couldn’t hear anything either but the old horse’s insides. We went on slower then because the old horse wouldn’t go fast again” (U 59). While the Yankees make a swift escape, Ringo and Bayard are left to contemplate the slow and deliberate innards of a horse that simply cannot keep time with the Yankees they pursue. In this way, horses, specifically those affiliated with Southern culture, function metonymically for the rapidly declining South.

-Cara Fitzgerald

Works Cited

Langdon, Lance. "Commodifying Freedom: Horses in The Hamlet." Faulkner Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012, pp. 31-49.

Fury, Frank P. "Snaffles and Derbies: Horseracing and Southern Folk Culture in William Faulkner's The Reivers." Mississippi Quarterly: the journal of Southern cultures, vol. 59, no. 3/4, 2006, pp. 435-462.