Social injustice is not the only context in which the bleakness of nagging despair may be experienced. One can despair or feel something very like it in the privacy of one's home, and one can feel excluded or alienated within one's own family. In William Faulkner's The_Sound and_the_Fury and Willa Cather's The_Professor's_House, the disintegration of family life and the despair that it suggests may be seen as a frame for movement of the narrative. In each book, a family is shown in conflict, with fundamental structures of kinship either in a precarious position, realigned, or out of balance. Alienated as individuals from one another or from the world at large, the families created by Faulkner and by Cather act on one hand with reference to the patterns of kinship in which they find themselves and in a perpetual tension against such patterns on the other. Both Cather and Faulkner also frame their novels in a situation of more generalized tension, alienation, and anxiety as regards the world outside the family, as the characters confront the increasing pace, complexity, and bleakness of their lives.
Keeping the structure of kinship in balance is significant to anyone who assumes that human beings are fundamentally social animals and that it is within the family that an individual makes a connection with his or her position in the universe. As one's experience of the complex modern world enlarges, one may value family higher or lower, but the individual's family as principal frame of reference remains. In The_Sound_and_the_Fury and The_Professor's House, the family is as it were out of frame, and each novel explores the misalignment.
In The_Sound_and_the_Fury, the characters confront a changing world and in particular a changing South, which is emerging from its rural, post Reconstruction environment to take a place in the modern world. Meanwhile, the Compson family, partly because of Jason Compson's control over its material fortu...