In William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, a group of characters exists who possess three common characteristics--a closeness to mankind, a realization of the tragedy in life, and a positive response to this tragedy. The term beneficent is used to describe the twenty individuals who possess these traits. The characters are divided into two broad categories. The first includes the white and black primitives who innately possess beneficent qualities. The term primitive describes the individual who exhibits three additional traits--simplicity, nonintellectualism, and closeness to nature. The second group includes characters who must learn the attributes of beneficence in the course of the novel. All the beneficent characters serve as embodiments of the optimism found in Faulkner's fiction.

Originally presented as author's thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 199-225).

In 1931 William Faulkner introduced to the scrutiny of the public eye one of his most admirable and delightful characters, and for the following three decades the history of Yoknapatawpha County was enriched and deepened by the appearance of this gentleman and man of words--Gavin Stevens. There has been no lack of critical attention given to Gavin Stevens and his role in Faulkner's stories and novels, and that criticism encompasses a variety of opinions, ranging anywhere from intelligent and sympathetic interpretation to unsympathetic rejection. With such an abundance of critical opinions and evaluations, perhaps justification for another piece of criticism on Stevens might best be stated in negative terms, in pointing out limitations in the criticism that already centers on Stevens.

This study attempts to categorize the major women characters of Faulkner, and with a brief description of each, cast light upon the relationship of that character to Faulkner's other women and to the author's ultimate view of womankind.

This thesis attempts to answer the following questions: What is the relationship between the American social system and its depiction in American fiction, principally in Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom!? and How can one disentangle the workings of race, gender, and sexuality in the American social system, when such a knot depends upon queer desire for its strength and energy to an exaggerated degree? Ultimately, I argue that one way to pull these threads apart is to implement a queer deconstructive approach informed by narrative theories of desire, but to begin to answer this question, I contend that the Romantic version of Satan is inherently queer and that as Byronic heroes, Ahab and Sutpen’s queerness deconstructs the binaries that would ensure the “success” of their designs by magnifying and critiquing the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class are predicated on socially constructed and interlocking binaries to assure the supremacy of (those who at least appear to be) powerful white, wealthy, heterosexual, cisgender men like Ahab and Sutpen. In my analysis of the queer impulses of Ahab and Sutpen, I draw on Jaime Harker’s model of the Southern social system as predicated on an “unholy trinity” formed by the “whore,” “nigger,” and “queer” to advance a new approach to interpreting triangular relationships of power and desire in the in the American novel (Harker 112). In my analysis of Sutpen, I layer romantic triangles inspired by the work of René Girard in Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) over the triangle of the “whore,” “nigger,” and “queer” to explore the ways in which mediated desire between “whores,” “niggers,” and “queers” disrupts cultural hegemony. Queer erotic dynamics involving Ahab are more often bivalent than triangular, but both Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom! feature queer erotic desire across racial boundaries, that reveal deep racial fantasies. I maintain that both novels are palimpsests of queer desire and that as Byronic heroes Ahab and Sutpen, though not the characters most frequently discussed in queer readings of Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom!, produce, benefit from and blend back into the queer milieu of each text. I end by arguing that Sutpen’s Hundred metonymically stands in for the American South and that the Pequod represents The American Project in its entirety. It is my view that these novels model a hermeneutic (part: whole) relationship that makes them especially apt choices for probing this uniquely American matrix of social power and for highlighting the transformative potential of partially unearthed counter-narratives.

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-62). Also available via the World Wide Web.

No description available.

No description available.

Diss.--Fachbereich Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft--Mainz--Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, 1991.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1966. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 506-529).