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

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St. Peter has experienced Rosamond's extravagance on a vacation, his allusion to Greek tragedy suggests a world view on Cather's part that the seeds of family tragedy are contained in family meanness: "I was thinking," he answered absently, "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer, at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observes women so closely all his life" (156). Apart from the tragic allusion, of course, is the resemblance that Euripides' withdrawal from society has to the Professor's unwillingness to enter into a new society. As his experience of the society of his family broadens and he notices its authentic nature, he, too, begins a process of withdrawal that culminates, first, in his refusal to accompany the others on a European trip, and secondly, in his experience of an epiphany of emotional withdrawal when he learns that they are to soon return. Semiconscious, in fact recovering from nearsuffocation in the precious sewingstudy that he must abandon to new tenants, he realizes that he may achieve the kind of isolation in his new house, without a study, that

Category: Literature - F