Reproduction

Brainstorm

I plan to focus on reproduction in the novels we’ve read this semester, especially in TSAF and AA. We have explored the theme of arrest in a number of different ways in each novel and the lack of heirs in both the Compson and Sutpen families is yet another form of that motif.

Both Jason Compson, Sr. and Thomas Sutpen produce families who do not carry on the family name. While the appendix to TSAF emphasizes a detailed historical lineage and rise of the Compsons, Benji’s castration, Quentin’s suicide and Jason’s refusal to marry contrasts the family’s established history with a seemingly non-existent future and rapidly dwindling wealth and influence. Juxtaposed to the rise and fall of a Southern owning class family centered upon inherited wealth, Sutpen single-handedly pulls himself out of his poverty stricken origins by establishing himself as a plantation owner only to destroy his own accomplishments by trying to uphold the very system he defied.

The conclusion of both the Compson and Sutpen lines could be interpreted as a symptom of the failure of the family as an ideological apparatus in the postwar south resulting in the destabilization of traditional class boundaries. Without slavery, many owning class families are not able to maintain their plantations, as illustrated in AA when Sutpen returns home to a decaying Sutpen’s Hundred with only the poor white Wash Jones to help him rebuild.

Richard Godden argues that Faulkner’s work in the 1930’s “addresses a traumatic secret” that “white depends on black” because the “white owned world is made by black work” and that the secret “seeps” because “the patterns of labor that cast the white master as the person black people made (while requiring that both parties keep the secret) were themselves being recast” (Godden 7).

I would like to argue the seepage of this “secret” is manifested in the conclusion of both the Compson and Sutpen families. The ideology of the southern owning class fails, leaving no legacy to be inherited by the future Compson and Sutpen sons, so none are created.

Brooks, Peter. “Incredible Narration: Absalom, Absalom!,” in Bloom, Harold (ed.), //Modern Critical Interpretations: William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!// (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 105-37.

Cunningham, J. Christopher. "Sutpen's Designs: Masculine Reproduction and the Unmaking of the Self-Made Man in Absalom, Absalom." //Mississippi Quarterly// L (1997): 563-89. Print.

Godden, Richard. //Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution//. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1997. Print.

Saunders, Rebecca. "On Lamentation and the Redistribution of Possessions: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and the New South." //MFS Modern Fiction Studies// 42.4 (1996): 730-62. Print.

Roland Vegso. ""Let Me Play a While Now": The Hermeneutics of Heritage and William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!"" //Amerikastudien/American Studies// 42.4 (1997): 625-36. Print.

Good start. Going forward, I think you’ll need to use the secondary material to help link and/or distinguish biological reproduction with “social reproduction,” the work that goes into reproducing society’s productivity at a given historical moment: education, nurturing, the transmission of cultural values, etc. These are linked, especially in ways you index here, via race in Yoknapatawpha, as blacks are a site of anxiety as contaminators of white reproduction (and vice versa) and destabilizers of white claims to mastery insofar as they do the actual work. So keep this up and remember that you will have to keep pruning the focus down and using particular novels/moments of novels to do the “heavy lifting” for broader arguments.