This paper can be included as part of your research paper. 3-4 pages.
“Elly” and “Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner.
Quotes from Powers article on Faulkner.
It is hard to be sure what Faulkner is trying to understand, and hard to decide if he has understood it. (Powers, 2017. p.4)
…the great submerged obsessive guilty burden of slave times, when all whites knew but few said that slaves were not only unpaid laborers but unpaid sexual servants. (p.4)
Sexual connection between master and slave is a principal driver of Faulkner’s core novels, but it is never simple, never clearly told, and never without tragic consequence. (p.5)
What Faulkner contributes to this knotted history is the understanding that slavery’s grip on white masters was sexual, and that the coping mechanism of the white South was denial. (p. 6)
- Faulkner’s central obsession, which in one mood he called “the past” and in another “the South.” (p.4)
About the past he famously wrote in a late novel, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” He meant that the meaning and the burden of the past are inextricably laced within the present. “There is no such thing as was—only is….” (p.5)
How is Diaz’s experience of interracial dating affected by the past?
Compare Faulkner’s “Elly “to Diaz’s “How to date a Brown Girl…” In what ways is Diaz’s narrative an updating of the situation of “Elly”? How has the world changed such that Diaz can write about interracial dating with such a casual and matter of fact attitude, compared to the anxiety in Faulkner’s story, in which Elly must go to such great lengths to pursue her passion, even ending up killing her grandmother and Paul, her lover?
What are the serious aspects of Diaz’s narrative? What are the “comical” aspects of Diaz? What are the serious vs. the comical aspects in Faulkner’s “Elly?” For instance, how is she acting “stupidly?”
Include your personal reflection on interracial dating. What is the opposite of interracial dating and what are the desires inherent to that? Have your views on this ever changed? Do you think your views will change in the future?
- About the South Faulkner was ambivalent, especially with strangers. “Well, I love it and hate it,” he told reporters in Japan in 1955. “Some of the things there I don’t like at all, but I was born there, and that’s my home, and I will still defend it even if I hate it.”
           Faulkner’s love and his hate are knotted together most tightly in the five novels that are primarily about race, but it would be perverse to describe them as a defense of the South. Indictment is more like it. As the books appeared, Bleikasten writes, southerners, generally, starting in Faulkner’s home town of Oxford, detested them all after a page or two. (p.5)
How is “Elly” or “Rose for Emily” an indictment of the South? Is it the case that injustice is harmful, destructive, unhealthy even for the perpetrators or those who are favored by it? What is the author’s attitude toward Elly, the grandmother, Paul?
To what extent does Faulkner reveal the ugly truth behind the white myth of the South? Does the author think or suspect racism is unjust in the society he describes? What passages from “Elly” indicate this?
Is “white” a description or a social relation/category? Take for instance the following statement. “Paul de Montigny is white.” Is this a true statement? Is it “white” a description? Or is it a social relation? Or both? At what point does the statement cease to have meaning? In the case of Paul, how much of Faulkner’s story do we need to respond to this question?
Write a reflection on how this situation can be applied to your experience and observation of the world. Has our discussion of color words, description, social relations changed the way you use and interpret color words?
- Compare and contrast the following quote from Powers on Faulkner to Diaz’s partially satirical, partly serious “How to Date a Brown Girl,” and the use of color words as 1. Description and 2. Social relation. What color is an octoroon?
Write a reflection on how you use color words to place yourself and other people in social categories? Does this help or harm you? Is this a matter of choice, or is it imposed upon you by society?
To understand how these books fit into Faulkner’s grand design on the subject of the South, it helps to examine the chosen word in the South for the woman Faulkner’s grandfather ran off with in 1887, ten years before Faulkner was born. The word is “octoroon.” It means a person who is one-eighth African-American, or in polite usage in the nineteenth century, one-eighth Negro. A quadroon would have one Negro grandparent, and a mulatto would have one Negro parent. The three terms were coined in slave times and refer only to African-Americans; a person with one Chinese or one Pacific Islander or one Inuit great-grandparent would not be an octoroon.
The final point to understand is that “octoroon” neither says nor implies anything much about actual genetic makeup. The African-American great-grandparent is any person who was identified, accepted, and treated at the time as an African-American, whatever their actual genetic mix. Nothing about the physical appearance of an octoroon says “octoroon.” In the South of Faulkner’s childhood, somebody had to tell you who was or wasn’t an octoroon.
