William Faulkner and the testing of aestheticism.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 203
Description: From the early stages of his career William Faulkner was intrigued by  fin de siecle aestheticism. Critics agree that central authors and texts of aestheticism inform his early poetry, prose, and drawings. However, the presence of aestheticism in the fiction of the late 1920s onward has for the most part been overlooked. Faulkner's mature fiction engages with aestheticist motifs more intensively, if less obviously, than his earlier work, and reflects a deep and abiding ambivalence. To an extent this ambivalence is in keeping with the debates aestheticism inspired in the literary culture of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American South and in the national culture wars of the 1920s. But, although it is marked by many different aspects of the literary debates of his day, Faulkner's own engagement is more complex than any of these. His treatment of aestheticism constitutes a career-long testing of its language and motifs. This testing manifests itself through his handling of three figures central to aestheticism, each of which is challenged to varying degrees: the dandy, the femme fatale, and the unnaturally beautiful boy. In Mosquitoes (1927) and The Sound and the Fury (1929) Faulkner inflicts increasingly harsh indignities upon the dandy even while he displays a growing interest in the potential of the pose. Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Flags in the Dust (1928) extend the interest in the femme fatale suggested in the poetry by alternately drawing upon the figure of the dangerous seductress and suggesting that it is a male projection. And in two later novels,  Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and A Fable (1954), Faulkner qualifies stylized stories about beautiful boys through the unreliability of the narrators who speak them. Faulkner's treatment of these figures is informed by a recurring dynamic of the artificial and stylized being forced to contend with inescapable realities of the body, desire, and history. He never resolves the tension between the escape into art offered by aestheticist motifs and the ugly realities that prevent such escape. This abiding ambivalence helps illuminate the complex relationship between modernism and the aestheticism from which it grew.
Notes: Adviser:  Greig Henderson.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1787.