Richard Wright’s and William Faulkner’s work played on the cultural representations of the maternal figure and the determinism they play on the psychological, emotional, sexual and personality traits of their male protagonists.
A source I’ll refer to throughout this paper is based on an essay called “Construing Faulknerian Maternity” by Philip M. Weinstein. Though the essay deals primarily with Faulkner’s work The Sound and the Fury, I’ve found that the issues he addresses can be made in Wright’s work, as well.
When I say cultural representation of the maternal ideal, I’m dealing specifically in how mothers or maternity is represented in Western culture and we’ll see how both Wright and Faulkner addresses these representations in their work.
Two representations that I’ll address primarily are religious (i.e., the Virgin Mary) and psychoanalytical, as in Sigmund Freud’s work on the psyche, human behavior, and the role the mother plays specifically in childhood development.
The Virgin Mary is a well-known icongraphic figure in religion and Western culture, particularly in Catholicism. Her representation in literary or religious texts is often limited to her relationship within the male patriarchal system and certainly there have been many feminist studies that detail how her representation in Western culture is manifest. She is usually depicted as a non-sexual figure, someone who is self-sacrificial (placing the concerns on external rather than internal influences), and is, as Weinstein describes, a “sacred servant,” meaning that she serves as a “bodily carrier” or vessel in which the male identity/body/voice can be brought forth. In essence, the Word is manifest in a patriarchal worldview, denying an autonomous language in which she can express herself. Her role is to nurse and then to mourn the “son,” or in this case, Jesus Christ. But, as I said before, her limitation as a person becomes a symbolic relationship that upholds the patriarchal ideal.
Freud’s work in human behavior emerged at the same time modernism emerged as a literary construct. Many modernist writers, such as Virginia Woolf, were influenced heavily on his work, particularly in how they used language and style to depict the human psyche, behavior, and psychological development. Freud’s more well-known theories, the Oedipal Complex, is seen throughout the works of many modernist writers, and this is certainly true in Faulkner’s and Wright’s work. Freud’s theory posits that the male child goes through a process as he matures sexually in which his emotional attachment toward his mother morphs into sexual energy as he becomes an adolescent. The son eventually develops a competitive relationship with his father for his mother’s affections. It is through the father, then, that the male child develops a “healthy” maturation. Upon realizing his inadequacy in competing directing with his father, he imitates or models his masculine ideal after him, thus providing the male child with the opportunity to sever the emotional and sexual attachment he has toward the mother and redirecting his attention toward a male figure with which he can identify. Of course, this is a superficial reading of Freud’s work, but it does offer a construct in which we can see how Freud’s studies are demonstrated in both Faulkner’s and Wright’s representations of the maternal ideal and how it affects the psychological and emotional underpinnings of their male protagonists.
I’ve divided these representations in Faulkner’s and Wright’s work in two ways: mainly the negative, which I define as the absence of the maternal ideal, and the positive, which is the presence of that ideal.
The Absence of the Maternal Ideal in Faulkner’s work is represented in the characters of Mrs. Compson and Caddy in The Sound and the Fury and Mrs. McEachern and Mrs. Hines in Light in August.
Mrs. Compson’s emotional absence in her children’s lives conform the psychological output of their emotional development.
Her influence on her children’s lives is dysfunctional and domineering. She’s described as self-absorbed, singularly fixated on her own mental and physical fragility. This is the opposite of the self-sacrificing nature of the maternal ideal, someone who places the needs of her family above of her own.
She is never seen embracing or caressing her children physically, which is an exact opposite rendition of Lena Grove in Light in August, which I will deal with in more detail later on.
She’s also frozen sexually. Her sexual maturation as a women is frozen in what Weinstein called the “Virgin Mary phase.” This is revealed in how she is rarely shown having a relationship with her husband and refers nostalgically to her maiden name Bascomb. Therefore, she is stuck in time, in a sense, never maturing beyond the virginal state of her pre-marital relations–not unlike her own son Quentin whose obsession with time also forms the psychological crux in the novel. This is a perversion of the so-called “Virgin Mary” ideal, of course, because her non-sexual nature isn’t self-sacrificial in the maternal ideal, but rather is a vain attempt to retain the stereotypical role of pure Southern white maidenhood.
Her relationships with the other men in her life—Maury, her brother, and Jason, her son, who is ironically named after her husband— parallels the sexual obsessions Quentin has toward his sister, Caddy. Her insistence of claiming her son as a Bascomb, rather than a Compson, allows her the opportunity to remain in the virginal state, for it denies any role Jason Compson senior has in the sexual creation of their children. Whereas Quentin’s sexual obsessions with his sister and his impotent desires to have sex with her allows him to freeze him out of time and thus make him and his sister immortal, Mrs. Compson’s desires to freeze her husband out of any responsibility for the birth of their son likewise preserves her virginity and prevents any maturation on her part into becoming the maternal ideal that is required of her as the female head of the household. Thus, we are to believe that Jason was born of miraculous conception, again placing Mrs. Compson as a odd Virgin Mary figure with little of the self-sacrificial qualities that her iconographic figure entails in Western culture.
Mrs. Compson subverts her husband’s role in the sexual maturation of his sons, freezing them in perpetual adolescence in which their emotional and sexual attachment to their sister, Caddy, who is forced to play the maternal role, manifests itself.
Caddy’s role as the maternal ideal as a child is the singular focus of the novel, but it is the dislocation her sexual maturation, which is in opposition to Mrs. Compson’s sexual immaturity, causes the psychological dislocation of the male characters in the novel. The image of Caddy’s muddy underpants is a visual signifier for her emerging sexual identity, one in which Caddy embraces readily, but is the source of her brother’s dismay, for they know that her sexuality leaves them without the maternal ideal they desperately need. Quentin and Benjy’s allusions of their sister to Caddy also parallels this psychological awareness. The smell of honeysuckle and its allusion to Caddy’s sexuality (Quentin) or the scent of trees (Benjy) referring to her now-lost innocence provide the psychological allusions of the brother’s inability to address their sister’s maturation and their loss of her maternal presence in their lives. Caddy’s sexual experimentations presents a rebellious subtext against the maternal ideal she is forced to perform in the emotional absence of her mother. In so doing, Caddy’s resistence is also met with reprisal, both from her mother and Jason, who prevent her from performing the maternal role in her own daughter’s life, and her brother Quentin, who chooses suicide as an answer to Caddy’s and Mrs. Compson’s refusal to live up to the maternal ideal, reflected in Quentin’s refrain that if “I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother.”
Mrs. McEachern and Mrs. Hines, likewise, represent the absence of the maternal ideal in Light in August, though, unlike Mrs. Compson, there is an interest on their part to perform that role. But their ability to become the “sacred servants,” is compromised because they are also complicit in the pathology of the male voice, in this case, Mr. McEachern and Mr. Hines, who represent the violent and racist dislocation that prevents the maturation of Joe Christmas, as also defined in Freud’s studies of childhood development. Therefore, the “sacred” turns profane, as witnessed in Joe’s distrust of feminity and womanhood and his relationship with Joanna Burden. Joanna Burden also plays a maternal figure within Christmas’s life, as witnessed in her interested in feeding and sheltering the homeless Christmas. But her repressed sexual desires and her need to become a mother, complicated by the fact that she has experienced menopause, placing her value as a woman in jeopardy, sets the novel’s tragedy in motion. Christmas sees in Burden the same inefficient struggles of motherhood as he did in Mrs. McEachern and Mrs. Hines. As with Mr. McEachern and Mr. Hines, Christmas’s masculinity is a threat to the Freudian process of male maturation, and, therefore, like the elder men’s wives, Joanna Burden’s choice in Christmas as a potential husband and father is compromised. Christmas does more than run away from Burden, but murders her, thus cutting off any possibility of regeneration (on Christmas’s part since Burden is already barren) through an act that will have tragic consequences given Christmas’s ambiguous racial background.
In Richard Wright’s work, his protrayals of Mrs. Saunders in “The Man Who Was Almos’ A Man” and his autobiographical sketch of his mother in “The Ethics of Living Crow” in Uncle Tom’s Children, follow the pattern of these cultural representations. Here, Wright’s explorations of the maternal ideal is presented in the way in which Black women, at least from Wright’s thematic observations, either serve wittingly or unwittingly the racist system which devalues Black men. In the “Man Who Was Almos’ A Man,” Mrs. Saunders relationship with Dave poses the issues that the ideal maternal figure represented in literary outputs. The role she plays in Dave’s life, the sexual and emotional attachment she has with Dave is much more pronounced than the relationship with Dave’s father, who, although physically present, is generally limited in his role as a father figure to a punitive one. Mrs. Saunders’ relationship blurs the distinction in her role as the maternal figure, particularly as shown in the scene when Dave seduces his mother into buying a gun for him. The seduction play follows Freud’s model of the sexual and emotional attachment the male child has toward his mother, a fact of which Dave uses to his advantage. But, at the same time, Mrs. Saunders’ treatment of her son, denying his maturation into manhood, provides the continued and unbroken bond between mother and son that mitigates the healthy development needed in order for him to become a man.
Seen in a socio-political context, Mrs. Saunders, and Wright’s mother in his autobiographical sketch, provide the object lesson needed in order for the male protagonists to survive in a white racist system. In this sense, both women become complicit in maintaining and validating the inferiority of the Black male. Wright’s portrayal of Black women is not necessarily a poor one, but does present a worldview in which Black men are constantly at odds, both in the home and in the surrounding racist environment, in which their identity and masculinity is at threat. Wright’s work, unlike Faulkner’s, seeks to redress this paradigm by providing male protagonists who are constantly in resistance. Like Caddy, they become physically exiled from home and region in search of the masculine ideal that is denied them from the, according to Freud, masculine maturity needed in order for male children to take their place in the patriarchal role, whether societal or familial, that they perform. As Weinstein states “…Freud’s picture is of a man driven to outrun…identification with the body of his mother, the original unity of mother and infant.” Likewise, Faulkner’s characters try to outrun this identification, thus their anger, resentment, and, in Jason’s case against Caddy, vengeance toward their female counterparts, whose sexual maturation, displaced virginal status or complicity in the “pathological” male model denies them the platform in which this dislocation of the “mother and unity” can take place.
The representation of the maternal ideal in both Faulkner and Wright’s work provides a counterbalance in terms of what is expected of the maternal influence upon the masculine child’s healthy sexual and psychological development. They are as Weinstein also states “simultaneously sacred and subservient, the enabler but not the speaker of the word.” Therefore, Dilsey, in The Sound and the Fury, thus becomes the moral and maternal ideal. She is seen in contrast to Mrs. Compson. She is non-sexual, though not necessarily “stuck” in the virginal phase as Mrs. Compson, thus compromising that role; she is self-sacrificing, and she is the “sacred servant” as I mentioned before. Likewise, Lena Grove in Light in August, is the very essence of the virginal ideal. We last see her in the novel, suckling her infant son, which brings to mind Medaeval paintings of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus in her lap or suckling him on her breast. The importance of the physical contact between mother and child has been studied in many literary and psychological analyses. The child, provided with the material comfort and contact of the mother, develops a healthy psychological output. Lena is the direct opposite of Mrs. Compson, who has little to no physical contact with her children. Lena is also in direct contrast to Mrs. McEachern and Mrs. Hines in her rejection of Lucas Burch as a potential husband. Though the novel begins with her search of her lover and the father of her child, her ultimate emotional rejection after he runs away provides the narrative distinction between all three models of maternity in the novel. Less interested in tracking Burch down, Lena seems more concerned about the “journey,” both physical and emotional, that she and her son will undertake. Whereas Mrs. McEachern and Mrs. Hines are accomplices in their husbands’ pathology, thus providing poor father figure models for Joe Christmas, Lena rejects Lucas, who will provide an even more pathological model for her boy child. She also rejects Byron Bunch, which certainly implies that she is mature and capable enough top be concerned about finding and providing her son with the appropriate male figure who will provide the function of dislocating the physical and emotional bond between herself and her child, as described in Freud’s Oedipal process.
Aunt Sue, likewise, in Wright’s short story “Bright and Morning Star,” is an ironical counterpart to the Virginal ideal, since she becomes a mother figure not only to her two sons, Johnny-Boy and Sug, but to the masses, or in this case, the Marxist cause. Her ultimate self-sacrifice, as witnessed in the physical abuse she suffers at the hands of white sheriff, and her death, locates her significance in the text as being the “bodily carrier” for the male voice, both racial and political. Aunt Sue though is not perfect–this is seen in how she compromises the Marxist activists when she “mouths off” to the sheriff. But what compromises Aunt Sue’s role within a feminist context is that her “mouthing off,” her expression of her own voice, divorced from the patriarchal model, compromises the “cause” when it leaves her too weak to fend off Booker, who betrays her and the cause by attempting to name the men who were going to attend a Marxist meeting. As Aunt Sue mediates after she gives the names of the comrades to Booker, “…she put her finger upon that moment when she had shouted her defiance to the sheriff, when she had shouted to feel her strength. She had lost Sug to save others; she had let Johnny-Boy go to save others; and then in a moment of weakness that came from too much strength she had lost all” (Wright, 251) In other words, Aunt Sue’s strength, her voice, compromises her position as the “enabler, but not the speaker of the [male voice],” (Weinstein) or in this case Black and Marxist voice. And also notice how Aunt Sue “gives” up her sons, thus enabling the dislocation between the mother/child bond that defines the Oedipal attachment that inhibits the masculine maturation. Nonetheless, Aunt Sue redeems herself by performing the ultimate self-sacrifice by giving her life to save the cause, thus returning order to the disorder her “voice” created in placing herself above the needs and interests of the “cause,” or the “male patriarchal order” that is ultimately manifest within the Marxist ideology of the male characters.
Clearly, the renditions of the maternal figure in both Faulkner’s and Wright’s are not foundational within a feminist construct. The maternal representations are in essence meant to enable the patriarchal foundation in which the maturation of male children becomes the singular focus of their contributive output. When they do have voices that are autonomous from a patriarchal voice, such as Aunt Sue’s or Caddy’s, or if they are victims of a social order which demands a stereotypical compliance in a perversion of their femininity (Mrs. Compson, Joanna Burden) they compromise the dislocation that must take place between the “mother and infant unity.”
While a Freudian, religious, and feminist deconstruction of Wright and Faulkner’s works provide a subtextual understanding of the way in which maternity is represented in their work, this reading thus also provides a means in understanding how these representations are within the traditional models found in Western literature.
