Faulkner’s literature, set in the American South, imagines a rich olfactory environment. The ways in which characters employ their sense of smell provide information regarding the gender and racial stereotypes portrayed and maintained within Faulkner’s fictional communities. In my texts of focus, these communities are often characterized by misogyny, conservatism, and Christian piety. Within these narrow minded communities, an exploration of Faulkner’s olfactory landscape is important in order to examine how olfactory stimuli are interpreted and applied to the marginalized female and racially coded body. In Faulkner’s literature, smells appear to trigger male anxieties concerning the female body, anxieties related to sexuality and racial misrecognition, and scent is largely correlated to the objectification of female characters in a manner comparable to the male gaze. Exploring the central role of scent in Faulkner’s work, this thesis uses Faulkner criticism and scholarship on sensory studies to examine three Faulkner novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Sanctuary (1931). To be more specific, this thesis examines olfaction as a mode of experience through which men interact and perceive women as either adhering to or deviating from old Southern categories of femininity, sexuality, motherhood, and race. Rather than exploring the ways in which male characters assess the female body through the visual senses, this thesis examines how olfactory stimuli are converted from a physical experience of the body and into an evaluation used to legitimize and reinforce a particular perception of womanhood. By examining how Faulkner’s characters interpret smell as a reflection of a body’s status, I seek to understand the role olfaction plays in Faulkner’s literary representation of the confinement of women to rigid social categories and stereotypes.

Olfaction in William Faulkner's fiction: exploring gender and race through the sense of smell

W faulkner’s novels are as famous for what they conceal as for what they reveal. Criticism brims with discussions of their withholding—of those critical narrative moments that, bewilderingly, remain unseen by, and inaccessible to, the reader. Many of the novels’ most significant events (Quentin Compson’s suicide, for example, or Temple Drake’s rape) pass undescribed; John Matthews claims that these “central moments . . . function more as absences in the story that surrounds them,” and that “the kernel of the story is precisely what vanishes into the words that describe it” (21). Robert Dale Parker agrees that while many of Faulkner’s novels are “told and twisted around a single event . . . that event, even as it determines nearly all we read, is defiantly withheld” (4). Thus Faulknerian interpretation demands that the reader decipher not only speeches and actions but also silences and absences—the novels’ narrative holes. Even then, Parker concludes, “the main thing we know reading Faulkner is that we don’t know the main thing”—especially, perhaps, when we can’t see the main thing (3). But there is on one hand the unseen, and then, on the other, there is the unscene. Readers of Shakespeare (whose work, Faulkner once commented, provides “a casebook on mankind” [Conversations 65]) also wrestle with questions of the unspoken and the unknown.1 In her seminal essay “‘The Rest is Silence’: Ineffability and the ‘Unscene’ in Shakespeare’s Plays,” Marjorie Garber observes an “inexpressibility topos” in Shakespearian drama, of which “perhaps the most remarkable” features are what she calls “unscenes”: “deflected or unseen scenes that take place offstage and are reported by an observer, usually an anonymous or disinterested ‘Gentleman’” (43).2 I wish to apply the

Sarah Mahurin

Papers

William Faulkner and the Seduction of the Unscene