Saturday, March 12, 2011

The Sound, The Fury, and Freud

When reading Freud's theories on sexuality and all of that fun stuff, William Faulkner came to mind. In Faulkner's novel The Sound and The Fury, Faulkner includes a sexual fetish, castration, and an incestuous desire. The incestuous desire in this novel takes on something of a different form from Freud's Oedipus Complex, but I would argue it's still worth mentioning in a blog about Freud. In the novel, which is about the Compson family, the sister, Caddy, becomes pregnant. In reaction to this, her brother Quentin tells his father that he was the one who impregnated Caddy. While Freud argues that Oedipal desires can comes out in dreams, and "these dreams...are accompanied by feelings of repulsion," in Quentin's case, the incestuous desires are not the repulsive thing and serve as more of the "dream" symbols pointing to something else (817). That something else, the repulsive, happens to be Quentin's obsession with a black-and-white world and his struggles to accept that his sister can simultaneously be a good woman and a failed and fallen one. Quentin would rather that he had been the one to impregnate her, making them both irrevocably ruined both socially and morally, than have a world in which right and wrong can coexist and even create gray areas. Although Quentin's incestuous desires for Caddy work in something of the opposite manner of Freud in being for a sister and using incest as the symbol rather than the signified, I still would argue there's something of a Freudian mental complex here in which a desire that cannot be really acted on (in Quentin's case, a desire for a purely demarcated world) is repressed but manifests itself in other ways.
But the Freudian references don't stop there. All three of the Compson brothers show something of a fetish for Caddy's underwear, and Freud says that "pieces of underclothing...are so often chosen as a fetish" (843). In the novel, there is a scene in which Caddy is climbing a tree and her brothers all see her dirty underwear underneath her dress, and this scene becomes a key point in the different sections of the novel. For the Compson's, Caddy's underwear do not necessarily "crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic" but rather it signifies Caddy's coming loss of virginity, and in some ways this scene is the beginning of her loss of virginity and/or social respectability. And this scene and her underwear become a fetish for all her brothers, pointing to her sexuality.
As a final salute to Freud, I'll also mention the castration that takes place in the novel. Freud argues that the fear of castration is a key psychological focal point, and in The Sound and The Fury, this fear becomes a reality. The mentally disabled brother, Benji, is castrated on the orders of his brother Jason. And in some ways, the terror of castration almost mimics the terror of loss of virginity for a woman during this time and the reaction's to Caddy's promiscuity in the novel. If Freud's theories of castration come from a man's interactions and assumptions on his parents, what does Faulkner's novel add to this situation with bringing the entire family into the complex? Castration does not occur because the "father has castrated the woman" but rather the brother has does so to his brother (845). And incest is not between a son and his mother, but a brother and his sister. How does this all fit with Freud? Does it fit at all?

2 comments:

  1. Aubrey,
    I think Freud might say either that the brothers were agents of the mother. Does that make sense?

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  2. Either agents of the mother or of the father. That's what I meant to say.

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