Wash And His Raging Impotence

Wash blindly idolizes Colonel Sutpen, seeing him as the embodiment of what we assume to be the "Old South," an assumption drawn from the context of Reconstruction. For Wash, Colonel Sutpen stands for all that is Godly and righteous, a world in which the white man maintains his dominion:

Meanwhile on weekdays he would see the fine figure of the man [Sutpen]—they were the same age almost to a day, though neither of them (perhaps because Wash had a grandchild while Sutpen's son was a youth in school) ever thought of himself as being so—on the fine figure of the black stallion, galloping about the plantation. For that moment his heart would be quiet and proud. It would seem to him that that world in which Negroes, whom the Bible told him had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin, were better found and housed and even clothed than he and his; that world in which he sensed always about him mocking echoes of black laughter was but a dream and an illusion, and that the actual world was this one across which his own lonely apotheosis seemed to gallop on the black thoroughbred, thinking how the Book said also that all men were created in the image of God and hence all men made the same image in God's eyes at least; so that he could say, as though speaking of himself, "A fine proud man." If God Himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look (538).

Wash clings fervently to Colonel Sutpen, playing the role of sycophant to Sutpen's drunken ramblings of Confederate revival.

Sutpen would reach that stage of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging, and declare again that he would take his pistol and the black stallion and ride single-handed into Washington and kill Lincoln, dead now, and Sherman, now a private citizen."Kill them!" he would shout. "Shoot them down like the dogs they are—""Sho, Kernel; sho, Kernel," Wash would say, catching Sutpen as he fell (540).

Wash even goes so far as to appoint himself as groundskeeper to Sutpen's property in his absence, an illusion of grandeur which is met with skepticism and mockery, particularly by Sutpen's slaves: "The Sutpen slaves themselves heard of his statement. They laughed. It was not the first time they had laughed at him, calling him white trash behind his back" (536). Sutpen's slaves undermine Wash's concept of the subject-object relationship between the white man and his inferiors; he is subjugated by those whom he seeks to subjugate, leaving him "panting and impotent and raging (537)." Wash is disillusioned, knocked from his imagined pedestal, and unable to depart from the script which comprises his perceived social role.

Wash is further disempowered at the hands of Colonel Sutpen himself when Colonel Sutpen begins to court Wash's 15-year-old granddaughter behind his back. Wash believes the power struggle to be reversed when Colonel Sutpen is found to be the father of Wash's great-granddaughter: "Wash Jones has fixed old Sutpen at last. Hit taken him twenty years, but he has done hit at last (542)," speaking of Colonel Sutpen's obligations to "marry the gal or pay up (548)." However, after Wash's granddaughter gives birth to a daughter, Sutpen shrugs his obligations, again leaving Wash in an impotent rage. At this point, Wash's power has been challenged by all over whom Wash attempted to assert his dominance. The ideals which fueled Wash's self-identity and concept of world order have been debased, and Wash thus begins his violent and deranged decay, taking Colonel Sutpen, his own progeny, and anyone else who dare threaten his power down with him.

Discussion questions: In what ways are Wash's struggles mirrored by Colonel Sutpen? In what ways does Wash himself embody non-Southerners' concept of the "Old South?" Is Wash's Granddaughter somehow aware of her and Sutpen's eventual demise?

Clinging to That Which Robs Us

       When I read "A Rose for Emily" the first time I noted that Emily Grierson, like many characters in Southern literature, refuses to let go of the past. However, it seems too simple to place a blanket of mild nostalgia over every character with roots in the old South. To wave away their despair and be satisfied with the conclusion that they miss the old ways of the (in many ways imaginary) Southern aristocracy is to ignore the personal grievances, trials, regrets and hopes of each specific person that we read about. For this reason I decided to search more intently for an explanation behind Emily Grierson's actions.
       The quote that caught my attention is when the narrator admits that "we know that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will." Faulkner places this comment in reference to Emily's father, who had driven away many suitors who tried to court her, however after reading the entire piece the line seems to foreshadow Emily's need to keep Homer Barron even after his death. Homer, being not only a "day laborer" but a Northerner, steals the reputation that Emily spends her life trying to maintain. Her status as the untouchable Southern belle who was too good for any man while her father was alive is attacked by the people of Jefferson, who, though they seem to like Homer, still consider him a low-class Yankee with no business courting a Southern woman. After she and Homer are seen together, Emily is trapped in a corner. Without the image of his courtship, she is an old maid, but with it she is seen as having lowered her standards, a notion that does not go unnoticed, or unappreciated, for that matter, by the townspeople. The narrator even goes so far as to comment on Emily's purchase of a monogrammed toilet set and suit for Homer with the mysteriously simple words "We said 'They must be married'. We were really glad. We were glad because the two cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been." I am struck by the idea that many people in the town are either jealous of the Griersons or so tired of the Grierson family's pride that they find satisfaction in watching the last heiress fall. This instills in Emily the fervent need to prove herself as untouchable by their judgement, by the changing world and ultimately by Homer.
          I can only guess that it seems fitting in Emily's mind to purchase gifts that would suggest that she is marrying Homer, to prove that she can, in fact, find a husband (the narrator suggests that even after her father's death no one came to court Emily) but then to subsequently murder him so that, at least in her mind, she will not change. With nothing else left Emily clings to the memory of her father, who stole her potential love life as a young woman, then to Homer, who stole her reputation, not to mention his connection to the North, which, as must be noted, was blamed for "stealing" the Southerners' way of life. Despite what she knows they stole from her, Emily's pride does not allow her to acknowledge publicly that she has been wronged or to accept change, even in the form of death, but refuses to bury her father until she is forced to, and when no one forces their way into her affairs, she never buries Homer Barron at all.

Discussion question: Why don't any of the townspeople persist in asking questions about Homer's sudden disappearance? Do they actually respect Emily's pride enough not to ask, and if that is the case, to what extent does stereotypical "Southern pride" play a part in the events and narration of this story?

-Claire Peckham

The man himself lay in the bed.

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once laid in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.

Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strain of iron-gray hair.

*

Above is the strange and somewhat mysterious ending to A Rose For Emily. Although we now understand the smell, the buying of the arsenic and what happened to Homer Barron, we are left with the description of a room, arranged by who we can assume was Miss Emily, that is in likeness to an art exhibit dedicated to the metaphysics of love and death. The "long sleep that outlasts love," appears to have decomposed Miss Emily's sanity as well as the body of her former lover. The indentation of the head on the second pillow seems to say that she might of habitually lied by his corpse, pretending that everything hadn't gone so wrong in her life. She wanted to restore an idea of glory in the aristocracy of the south and the tomb she kept was a last ditch effort.

Emily's father would not have approved of her marrying a yankee, so she didn't, she killed one. The love, like Emily's hopes for a life fulfilling the expectations of her family, looks to have died with both of them. Barron's body was in the "attitude of an embrace," but now, like the house Emily lived in in, time has warped everything into the pose of decay itself. How does Faulkner describe the house, the town, the character Emily (her physical and mental manias), and what do you think it might mean in a more general argument? Do you think that the murder and exhibition of the body really has philosophical implications or is Faulkner not offering a symbolic representation of the South? Is the story purely aesthetic - or does Faulkner have more to say?

*

-grayson

Wash

Wash made little to no sense to me on the first reading. I suspected (and was later found right) that we were jumping into the middle of a longer tale and thus lacked helpful back-story. Although the ending of Wash could likely have stood as the ending of the entire work, titled Absalom, Absalom!, I later learned that the story stretched even beyond the slash and burn incident.

Both characteristically and metaphorically, Sutpen resembles the Emily of A Rose For Emily. In his action and by the significance Wash Jones (heretofore referred to as "Wash") attributes to it, Sutpen stands as an enduring memory of a proud and aristocratic South - a South that is increasingly historic and fading. Despite his central role in the story, Sutpen failed to motivate much interest in me. Instead, the character of Wash I found much more interesting. This passage - the bulk of which is one majestic 151-word sentence - is illuminative:

"Meanwhile on weekdays he would see the fine figure of the man...on the fine figure of the black stallion, galloping about the plantation. For that moment his heart would be quiet and proud. It would seem to him that that world in which Negroes, whom the Bible told him had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin, were better found and housed and even clothed than he and his; that world in which he sensed always about him mocking echoes of black laughter was but a dream and an illusion, and that the actual world was this one across which his own lonely apotheosis seemed to gallop on the black thoroughbred, thinking how the Book said also that all men were created in the image of God and hence all men made the same image in God's eyes at least; so that he could say, as though speaking of himself, 'A fine proud man. If God Himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that's what He would aim to look like.'"

This passage gets at the "point" while also raising some questions. Faulkner considered slavery an integral part of the story of the War and the South. Juxtaposing a poor white in the metamorphosing environment of the Civil War South provides an interesting contrast. Beyond the issue of race and supremacy lies the greater question of what Wash symbolizes in this story. If Sutpen himself fills the role of the grey-bearded Amish man trying to cross the street in Times Square, then what is Wash? Clearly Wash and Sutpen are too different degrees of Southern authenticity. We dare not forget that Sutpen has his letter from General Lee.

Where, then, do we place Wash in the Southern metaphorical landscape? Is he also an outdated extension of Southern aristocratic culture, him an envious immitation rather than an authentic, Lee-certified Southerner? What significance is it that, rather than reaching his own destruction in whatever way fate would have, he instead went mad and slaughtered and burned those around him?

More than anything I am driven to explore 1) the significance of Wash's idolization of Sutpen and 2) why Faulkner saw it fit to sadisticize Wash, and how that contributed to the larger message.

Old Ties and the Oratory of Decay

William Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily, a title which he says is an allegory on his sympathy for his constructed character in Introducción a la narrativa breve de William Faulkner, presents what was to me at first a strangely descriptive account of a physical entity and a physical space. 

The narrator in the fragmented, non-linear telling takes the role of one of the community members. His voice is at first questionably sexist,  favoring the view of the men in their reasons to attend her funeral "out of respectful affection for a fallen monument", while the women are presented as favoring the less important, "to see see the inside of the house". This was extremely impressive to me after a second read, when I (and perhaps the audience in general) sees that the women truly cared for what was important in the story (to find out what was in the house). 


The description of the house is gaudy, archaic with "cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies", all which seem to be in ugly contrast with one another. The description of the house also seems to fit the attitude of the community toward Emily herself, as the house holds "stubborn and coquettish decay". 

How I like to envision her house

I think the tension presented between men and women relates to the comparison of the two popular conceptions of Emily. She was a monument of the past, archaic and important, magnified, venerated, and important to the history of the city. This is also presented with Colonel Sartoris relieving her of her tax duties, seemingly because she was of his time, the old South, and his traditional disposition led him to feel an obligation toward helping this sympathetic character. Once again, in contrast, "Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it". This grouping, generalization, and mindset continues throughout the narrative and presents reactions to events in Emily's life. It is important to realize that this narrative view presents a subjective one, and thus may not characterize Emily as well as an omniscient point of view may have. It does, however, characterize the townspeople, and thus characterizes what Emily is for them. She is hardly a responder, and more of a statue, an idol, and a representation of the old. She allows the town to have a converstaion with itself upon her. She is the subject of their "porch conversation"

It seems as though Emily is clinging to something from the past, with her old house. We later learn that she is actually in poverty, and thus does not have the means to change her house to the new of the block. She also must remain due to the death of her former sweetheart. The aesthetic value assigned to her through this house, and through her china-painting lessons, are misconceptions. She taught the lessons to relatives of the Colonel, and once he dies, the lessons stop. He seemingly set this up for her to have financial help. 


Emily is also connected to an "invisible watch", where time is present, but has no continuation within the world of Emiliy. Her father's portrait remains visible in her home, linking her to tradition and the past. 

But why does Emily kill her sweetheart? Her kin comes to try to rid her of him, as the townsfolk called them for such a duty. He did not fit the framework in which the town pieced her in. She was poor, but marrying "a day laborer" was supposedly against "noblesse oblige", let alone the fact that he was "a Northerner". His appearance and mannerisms are quite southern to me, "with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove", but that isn't enough for the town. 


The fragmented time line aids Faulkner in disorienting the reader from the connection of events. It is difficult to connect the Arsenic purchase and the peak of the love affair as well as the relatives' visit. This adds to the surprise of the decaying body. But why does he have to die?

Discussion Question: What do you think is Faulkner's reason for killing of Homer Barron. What does he represent in Emily, in the townsfolk, and in terms of history? 


-Adam Amrani