William Faulkner and the Mithraic Midwife

Abstract The two parts of William Faulkner's If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem--"The Wild Palms" and "Old Man"--mirror one another; the second story reflects a more familiar way of illustrating the same theme as the first. Each story emphasizes the other, building the shared theme subversive of traditional gender roles. It is also my feeling that Faulkner inverts Arthurian motifs to tell both stories (especially "The Wild Palms," though most assume "Old Man" to be the more romantically accessible tale) exactly as Nathaniel Hawthorne did to tell The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne's bifurcating of the Grail legend in order to reclaim feminine principles and so regenerate his community (and/or his inherited guilt) must have seemed ideal to Faulkner in his own cause to do the same for the South and his own Sins of the Father. Keywords. William Faulkner, American South, gender relations ********** "Who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?"--Job 38:8 After reconstructing his own self-deconstruction in Absalom, Absalom! by resurrecting Quentin Compson and putting him to work re-telling the South's tangled past, William Faulkner set out to accomplish the same regeneration with one of the American South's specific and divided selves: the rationalized walls built between society and the Feminine ethic; without an open border or at least a fertile limen between the base pair out of which all human community radiates, the community stagnates and falls into barrenness--social Waste Land, so to speak. In the book that resulted from Faulkner's goal, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, a representative of the Thin Male Line, Harry Wilboume, must be subverted and brought into the service of Woman, much as Mithra had to wield the knife and Pilate pass the sentence; without these acts, their aims could not be achieved. Charlotte Rittenmeyer is the subverter here, an artist of the grotesque on the margins of society in every way: a Modernist Hester Prynne. She draws Harry out to her across the demarcation, inundating his already unstable socialization. (2) Together they are spun from the Garden of Respectability by reverse whirlpool where they whirl "in sin," unmarried and in orbit of the Center at the margins and unable to escape the negative gravity. But something is brought back to Center to destabilize that gravity: a space for Woman will be cut out of it. (3) Many readers of Faulkner's Jerusalem tend to overlook the book's primary story, "The Wild Palms," in favor of the friendlier, "Old Man," probably because--if the criticism out there is any indication as to the cause for its neglect--most would rather avoid having to think about the controversy (unless controversy was their goal) of what has been seen as the central issue in the story: a botched abortion. But it is my view that this is a misdiagnosis of the central action of story; rather, the "abortion" seems to me a successful birth, midwifed by Harry Wilbourne, the "father" and wielder of the knife, but mothered of Charlotte Rittenmeyer's will--she of the free, creative will who bears up Harry's hand like Christ bore the necessary burden of Calvary. Like Calvary, there is death, certainly, but also the birth of something: the re-genesis of the will of Woman in a Southern culture that has marginalized feminine principles and female individuals since the institution of slavery. From this perspective, "The Wild Palms" is a gender-subversive Mithraic myth and so not easily identifiable as the Christian analogue it is. The spread northward of the patriarchal (4) Waste Land of the early Roman Church into the European lands of the Celto-Germanic tribes resulted in the sixth-century beginnings of the still current male/female binary in Western culture. By the Middle Ages, although the Church still feared the goddess image, all outward manifestations of her had been vilified or destroyed. Her archetype remained, however, buried inside popular myth--most significantly in the Arthurian material. …