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Family Conflict in Faulkner and Cather

The purpose of this research is to examine the way the theme of family conflict emerges in the work of William Faulkner and Willa Cather, chiefly in The_Sound_and_the_Fury and The_Professor's_House. The plan of the research will be to set forth the principal elements of family conflict as a literary theme, to discuss the means by which this theme is developed by Faulkner and Cather, and to compare, as appropriate, how Faulkner and Cather view this theme as a fundamental commentary on emotional and psychosocial life. Throughout, reference will be made to family conflict as an expression of psychological and emotional imbalance; on this view, families are in conflict because they cannot maintain structures of kinship. Alienated as individuals from one another and as a unit from the world at large, members of the families created by Faulkner and by Cather act and function 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. In this regard, the present research seeks to suggest which family, Faulkner's Compsons or Cather's St. Peters, better keeps (or more exactly better tries to keep) the structure of kinship in balance.

The strong sense of disintegration that permeates The_Sound and_the_Fury argues wonder that the Compson family could ever have been constituted in the first place. So hectic is the movement toward chaos in the novel, deriving as it does from the complex of influences on the Compsons, that to suggest that it describes something so tame as a family in conflict seems a vastly disingenuous understatement. By contrast, the movement of family life in The Professor's_House is almost placid. Cather's view of family decline is less one of abrupt disintegration than of gradual dissociation, which is nonetheless (or for that very reason) final and definite. Professor St. Peter's method of growing away from his family is eminently civili...

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Family Conflict in Faulkner and Cather. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 12:08, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707556.html