Faulkner - The Return of the Repressed (Hardcover)

"This book is a sound and important contribution to Faulkner studies. Fowler's reading of the ways that Faulkner's major novels reflect the tensions of striving for both absence and presence, wholeness and autonomy, is deftly and persuasively portrayed. She displays impressive knowledge of Lacan, Lacanian analysis, and previous Faulkner scholarship". -- Deborah Clarke, Pennsylvania State University

There have been surprisingly few book-length psychoanalytic treatments of Faulkner's work and until now none that have employed the poststructuralist theory of Lacan, Kristeva, and Chodorow. In Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed. Doreen Fowler uses what she terms a feminist psychoanalytic methodology to assess the symbolic meanings of race and gender in five of his major novels: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. Focusing on black and female characters, she demonstrates how these figures represent psychic doubles for Faulkner's white male protagonists.

Fowler's reading identifies in these five texts a connection between cultural and psychic repression. She argues that this repression of the feminine and the racial other is motivated by the desire to shore up an ever-precarious ego identity that alternately desires and expels these "others". She in fact finds similarities between the writings of Faulkner and Lacan -- affinities not of approach or method, but of preoccupation. Her feminist reading attempts to reclaim what is often marginalized by Lacanian theorists: the important role of the mother, who is the first to become "other". She exposes the psychic conflicts that characterize Faulkner's fiction and posits from them anunderlying tension between desires for difference and wholeness, for the father and the mother, and for subjectivity and death.

Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed addresses the deep ambivalence toward women and blacks in Faulkner's fiction and offers a much-needed response to frequent allegations that Faulkner embraced white male supremacist values by demonstrating how his texts expose and critique patriarchal culture.