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William faulkner the sound and the fury essay
William faulkner the sound and the fury essay
Structure the sound and fury by William Faulkner
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A Psychoanalytic Approach to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury
In Faulkner's work, The Sound and the Fury, Caddy is never given an interior monologue of her own; she is seen only through the gaze of her brothers, and even then only in retreat, standing in doorways, running, vanishing, forever elusive, forever just out of reach. Caddy seems, then, to be simultaneously absent and present; with her, Faulkner evokes an absent presence, or the absent center of the novel, as André Bleikasten and John T. Matthews have observed. The "absent center" is a key term in Lacanian theory, and in order to understand how Caddy's absence, or repression, supports the masculine identity, we'll have to review some Lacanian theory.
According to Lacan, at first all children are engaged in an imaginary dyadic relation with the mother in which they find themselves whole. During this period, no clear boundaries exist between the [male] child and the external world, and the child lacks any defined center of self. For the child to acquire language, to enter the realm of the symbolic, the child must become aware of difference. Identity comes about only as a result of difference, only by exclusion. The appearance of the father establishes sexual difference, signified by the phallus, the mark of the father's difference from the mother. The father creates difference by separating the child from the maternal body: He prohibits the merging of mother and child and denies the child the use of the phallus to recreate this union. (Nancy Chodorow says, a woman's entry into the symbolic is different from a man's. The daughter isn't threatened with castration, and identifies with the mother. Girl longs to recover the lost unity for the m ot...
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...ging a relationship outside the family. A "lack" exists and is exacerbated by the conscious and unconscious divisions between male characters, Jason and Quentin, and female characters, Caddy and Quentin. Faulkner does not offer an easy exit or resolution to the paradox. The "lack" existing within the psyches of Quentin and Jason gives rise to other forms of absence and means to attaining absence, culminating in violence, suicide, and solitude.
Works Cited and Consulted
Fowler, Doreen. "Little Sister Death: The Sound and the Fury and the Denied Unconscious,"
Faulkner and Psychology. Ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. UP Mississippi: Jackson 1994.
Porter, Carolyn. "Symbolic Fathers and Dead Mothers: A Feminist Approach to Faulkner."
Faulkner and Psychology. Ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. UP Mississippi: Jackson 1994.
The Cherokees were very civilized in dealing with the trails of removal. These people endured more than any other group of people throughout history. They played within the rules in their struggle. They did not want to start a war with the Americans. The Cherokees resisted removal and took it to court. Despite all of their tries to keep their land, they were removed.
The first psychological change Faulkner uses to show readers how he thinks of the human mind is through the sense of identity. Faulkner uses several
The Cherokee Indians, the most cooperative and accommodating to the political institutions of the united states, suffered the worst fate of all Native Americans when voluntarily or forcibly moved west. In 1827 the Cherokees attempted to claim themselves as an independent nation within the state of Georgia. When the legislature of the state extended jurisdiction over this ‘nation,’ the Cherokees sought legal actions, not subject to Georgia laws and petitioned the United States Supreme Court. The case became known as Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia in 1831. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall denied their claim as a republic within Georgia, he then deemed the Cherokee as a ‘domestic dependent nation’. One year later through the case of Worcester vs. Georgia, the Cherokee’s were granted federal protection from the molestation by the state of Georgia. Through the Indian Removal act in 1830 President Andrew Jackson appropriated planning and funding for the removal of Native Americans, Marshall’s rulings delayed this for the Cherokee Nation, and infuriated President Jackson. Marshall’s decision had little effect on Jackson and ignoring this action the president was anxious to see him enforce it.
Hewson, Marc. ""My children were of me alone": Maternal Influence in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying." Mississippi Quarterly 53.4 (2000): n. pag. Literature Resource Center. Web. 17 Apr 2011.
Bibliography 3rd edition Psychology (Bernstein-Stewart, Roy, Srull, & Wickens) Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, Massachusetts 1994
Natives were forcefully removed from their land in the 1800’s by America. In the 1820’s and 30’s Georgia issued a campaign to remove the Cherokees from their land. The Cherokee Indians were one of the largest tribes in America at the time. Originally the Cherokee’s were settled near the great lakes, but overtime they moved to the eastern portion of North America. After being threatened by American expansion, Cherokee leaders re-organized their government and adopted a constitution written by a convention, led by Chief John Ross (Cherokee Removal). In 1828 gold was discovered in their land. This made the Cherokee’s land even more desirable. During the spring and winter of 1838- 1839, 20,000 Cherokees were removed and began their journey to Oklahoma. Even if natives wished to assimilate into America, by law they were neither citizens nor could they hold property in the state they were in. Principal Chief, John Ross and Major Ridge were leaders of the Cherokee Nation. The Eastern band of Cherokee Indians lost many due to smallpox. It was a year later that a Treaty was signed for cession of Cherokee land in Texas. A small number of Cherokee Indians assimilated into Florida, in o...
The Late-Tsarist period in Russia is popular in the state’s history in that it was during this time that serfdom was abolished, that is around the early 1860s. Before this era, serfdom was legal and practiced in the traditional Russian systems. Serfdom was an ideology of the late 1640s which gave to landowners the power to override the lives of their peasant serfs (workers) as long as they lived on their land. Serfdom’s legal powers included denial of movement from the landlord’s place, and freedom in acquiring as much service as a landlord could demand. Thus defined, it can be concluded that it was a form of slavery. It is for these reasons that the following study text will evaluate the aftereffects of the 1861 emancipation, and what Russia became after it.
In the late 19th century Russia had been notably behind Europe economically, they weren’t in possession of the modern farming technologies that could efficiently provide for a large country. As a result 90% of the Russian population were peasants (Massey, 4). The serfs lived in deep poverty; they didn’t have the appropriate apparatus to produce enough crops and most of their landlords had unbelievably high demands. In an effort to reform the economy’s recession tsar Alexander II liberated the serfs. However this created more bad for both the serfs and the nobles. In the beginning the serfs saw this is a great victory and another reason to be thankful for their tsar. But as timed pass by the peasants saw this life of liberty and freedom to be increasingly difficult. The government directly compensated the nobles, while the less desirable land was sold to the peasants at a much higher price. They monthly rent they paid the nobles was replaced with paying the state (Massey, 5). And while the population nearly doubled between 1861-1917 poverty increased not only with the peasants but with the nobles as well. Nobles found it hard to assimilate them to a new life style where they would have to trade their lavish goods with farming tools and as result many of them acquired a large amount of debt. This period signifies a time where the people of Russia opened their eyes to the deep poverty and lives of oppression they were living. This is the point where the feelings of peasants who previously worshiped the tsar turned bitter. After consistent resistance to industrialization the tsar had finally given in, aggressive approaches were put in place and railroads grew more than 15,500 miles in 1880 (Massey,6). As the Industrial production con...
advantage of the rich black soil for farming. Corn was their main source of food,
Brooks, Cleanth. "William Faulkner: Visions of Good and Evil." Faulkner, New Perspectives. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1983.
Waiten,W., (2007) Seventh Edition Psychology Themes and Variations. University of Nevada, Las Vegas: Thomson Wadsworth.
The Cherokee people were a unique and strong community. They held the belief that they should never bow to any other creature. They held a high respect for one another. When they spoke, they spoke one at a time paying careful attention to listening to one another. The Cheroke...
Like many Native American Tribes, the Cherokee were systematically suppressed, robbed, dispossessed, and forced out of their ancestral homelands by Americans. This topic has become really difficult and uncomfortable to talk about for no reason other than embarrassment. We, as Americans, are mortified that our own country would partake in the act of forcibly removing a culture from it’s home. We are mortified that we let this become a socially acceptable way to treat Native Americans; but mostly, we are mortified that we conned the Cherokee Natives into signing an unlawful treaty that forced them to leave their Georgia homeland and move west via the Trail of Tears. The novel, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears, written by Theda Perdue
William Faulkner uses multiple narrators throughout The Sound and the Fury to depict the life of Caddy Compson without telling the story from her point-of-view. Benjy, a mentally disabled 33 year old, Quentin, a troubled and suicidal Harvard student, and Jason, a racist and greedy man, each give their drastically different sides of Caddy’s story to create an incomplete chronicle of her life. Faulkner’s first chapter explores Caddy’s life through the silent narrator Benjy. As a result of Benjy’s inability to talk, much of how he describes the world is through his heightened sensory awareness. Benjy constantly repeats the fact that, which, to Benjy, symbolizes Caddy’s innocence (Faulkner 6). Later in the novel when, Benjy realizes that Caddy has lost the innocence Benjy once idolized and loved (Faulkner 40).
Chekhov’s use of nature is evident in both “A Visit to Friends” and The Cherry Orchard. In The Cherry Orchard, the main focus of the play is the conflict over what to do with the orchard. On one hand there is Lopakhin who wants to change the orchard into a village of summer cottages. On the other hand is Lyubov Andreyevna who cannot bear to see the orchard cut down. Eventually, Lopakhin and his money win out over Andreyevna. In “A Visit to Friends,” Podgorin desires to be left alone, so he goes to the garden.