townspeople elected themselves wardens and interfered in her privet life. The belief that this is the precise way to live is forced on Emily from early childhood to ...
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Johannes Gutenberg University – Mainz Obama Institute: American Studies Department Advanced Academic Writing I Dr. James Travis Rozier Maram Makkieh
From the Myth into Reality: South American White Womanhood in William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” and Eudora Welty's “The Petrified Man”
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Comparing the past and present of all nations, one can notice the huge steps every one of them has taken, the big decisions they've made to cope with new circumstances and defeat dire obstacles preventing their development. The American South is not different from any of those nations. It has always seen itself different from the industrial North, setting for itself separate social norms to go with its agrarian nature (King 21). The story of the old South is a romantic one, told on the porches of big Plantation houses by its elite patriarchs. “Until very recently . . . [most] historians of the American South . . . operated on the unexamined assumption that “history” is about what men do. Most have written as if the word Southerner was a masculine noun” (Scott, Unheard Voices 1). This male domination and monopolization obscured the “otherness” of the story, the different “sense of Southern place” told by Southern highly educated white women, whose narratives were, according to the Southern man, too nostalgic, naive and feminine (Ewell 174). Such narratives contained deep political, economical and social connotations not all male story tellers were able to convey. What caught my attention while discovering the sense of otherness of the South is the way women like Leota or Mrs. Pike conquer the white male hierarchy in a society where “master and slave, rich and poor, male and female, knew their place before man and before God” (King 21). While Emily, can't free herself from the system of patriarchy and myth of white womanhood and get married even after her father died, especially when the old townspeople elected themselves wardens and interfered in her privet life. The belief that this is the precise way to live is forced on Emily from early childhood to death. Poor Emily mistakingly believes that she is “impervious” to old people's judgments in these times of change. Mrs. Pike on the other hand, indifferent to that myth and to people's opinion of her, exposes Mr. Petrie who “is wanted for five hundred dollars cash, for rapin' four women in California.” (Welty 1974). Mr. Pertie in the
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metaphor stands for all patriarchs who deprived Emily her rights of free will and choice in life for centuries. Both William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” and Eudora Welty's “The Petrified Man” demonstrate the Southern white woman's ability to disrupt the forts of sexism and submission despite the traditional and ritual heritage, using the drastic political shifts in society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to emancipate herself from the Southern white male domination and gain her right of equality. Faulkner in “A Rose for Emily” used the “otherness” technique, as Barbara Ewell calls it in her essay “Changing Places”, introducing Emily as an example of white womanhood living the predetermined course of confining life under the eye of her conservative father and then her supposedly modern society. While Welty's women in “The Petrified Man,” are no more submissive and asexual, but strong, hard working and independent. “The Petrified Man” portrayed the new Southern woman, who's not afraid or ashamed of exploiting the false doctrines of the out dated male-centered past. Comparing the antebellum white woman and her place in the patriarchal society to her strong, wage earning counterpart, clarifies the shift in gender roles that reshaped the new American South as narrated in these stories. To understand the old South we have to keep in mind where every member of that society stands on the social pyramid. So, if we paint a picture of the society, The Grierson's “big, squarish frame [plantation] house that had once been white . . . of the seventies” would form a small replica of it (Faulkner 9). Emily representing the white Southern female is the “slender figure in white in the background,” although born white and free she is considered a property of her father Mr. Grierson, the “spraddled silhoutte in the foreground . . . clutching a horsewhip,” who stands for all white male supremacy and power of the South (Faulkner 13). Emily of the upper class lived according to a specific frame of strict traditions. Her purpose of
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living was—like all other white women in old times—to be docile, religious, virtuous, innocent, charming and efficient at running the house (Poppendorf 1, McMillen 195, Scott, The Southern Lady 4). The submissiveness of elite white women was the main reason behind elite white men's supremacy, making it important to those men to keep their women that way. Some used “pseudo-science” and even wrote “scientific” articles about the inferiority, physical weakness and dependency of women who needed male protection, while others found biblical justifications to force their superiority. Education was another efficient approach to tighten the shackles up on women. “From earliest childhood girls were trained to the ideals of perfection and submission” (The Southern Lady 7). Their education differed from that of boys to accommodate these presumed heritages of inferiority. It mainly aimed at graduating: (1) the perfect submissive housekeeper by teaching girls sewing, cooking and organizing the domestic sphere; (2) the talented, well versed companion who's charming, delightful and well versed; (3) most importantly moral, pious and following the bible to the word. This kind of education kept women in need of man's financial support. Higher education like Medicine was considered masculine, so women were not suppose to expose themselves to such disciplines because it could be physically dangerous, and too much development of the brain “would cause women's uteruses to atrophy!” (Ehrenreich 115). It is hard then for Emily, “a tradition, a duty and a care” to achieve her independence from her society under such circumstances (Faulkner 9). The new current of modernity had its negative impact on Emily's later life. Before the Civil War remodeled the society, women were busied with domestic duties being the leaders and guides of a very big family. The pressure of recurring pregnancy and child raring, took up all their time. Finding suitable husbands for
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them was not about fulfilling their sexual desires since they supposedly had none, and were not allowed to even think about such immoral issues (Falk 38). They were expected to “cultivate [their] mind by reading history and not corrupt it with [evil] novels” that would provoke feelings (The Southern Lady 6). When expecting a child, showing pregnancy was not so “virtuous” because of the connotation of having been physically and sexually active, which completely opposed the Gothic angelic picture of Southern white women. For that among other reasons Mrs. Fletcher, who is very invested in her womanhood 1, trys her best not to let anyone know about her pregnancy to keep her virtue and innocence. Marriage, in a nut shell, was about financial support and reproduction; it was a contract between the father and his daughter's fiancé, who is chosen of the same class. With this elite aristocratic class destroyed after the war, “[n]one of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily” any more as her over protective father decides (Faulkner 13). The Civil War didn't just destroy the material structure and change “what had once been [the] most selected street[s]” of upper class Southerners to an industrial province (Faulkner 9). It also shacked if not dismantled the Southern society. The elite Grierson aristocrats lost their status. People “believed that [they] held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner 13). William E. B. Du Bois once said in a shrewd observation “The South is not “solid”; it is a land in ferment of social change, wherein forces of all kinds are fighting for supremacy 2” (Du Bois 56). Hints of this economic and social change is very present in Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily”, which is, in my opinion, a kind of eulogy to the sad life Emily lived under the burden of traditional confinement. The death of her father in late 1
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It is worth mentioning here that another reason why Mrs. Fletcher tries to hide her pregnancy is because she's not that much fond of children. She cares about her good looks more than reproducing—which contradicts the true concept of Womanhood. Mrs. Fletcher hinges on the superficial concept of womanhood that suited her time and new way of thinking, ignoring the essence of it. Supremacy here is a loaded term. Although they fought the white supremacy of the Souther man, women's fight—like that of Black people—in the early twentieth century was rather for equality and full rights in voting, equality in employment and owning property as citizens of the United States.
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nineteenth century marks a very important point in her financial life. Colonel Sartoris, plays the last of his patriarchal role as white male in supporting and protecting Emily, to which effect he invents a story remitting her taxes, a story “[o]nly a man of [his] generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it” (Faulkner 10). Just one decade later, such doctrines are invalidated. Calling for equality the Board of Aldermen “with its more modern ideas . . . [were] dissatisfied” with this arrangement, hereby throwing away the traditions of the previous obsolete generation (Ibid). Unlike Mrs. Pike or Leota the beautician, Emily has no profession in hand that could be of help except for the notany-more-popular “China-painting”. She is deeply deprived because of her very limited education. On the social scale, her relationship with Mr. Barren, the Northerner day-laborer, was seen by the older generation as breaking the “noblesse oblige” (Faulkner 14). Emily knows that this relation is not even close to suit her as the last Grierson. In a way, committing a crime killing Barren and keeping his body to herself was easier than marrying him and degrading her status in the eye of old people, who are ready to “repudiat[e] Emily when she refuses to play the part of the Confederate lady in the Old South” as Jean O'Bryan-Knight's argued in her essay “From the Spinster to the Eunuch” saying, This scene is atrocious to be sure, but more intriguing than the disgusting details is the dramatic tension of the moment. What the narrator is totally oblivious to, and the sensitive reader is well aware of, is that Emily was, to a certain extent, forced to the desperate measure she took. Cut off from a community that had judged and condemned her, a community that viewed her misfortune as a source of entertainment, a community that required standards of
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behavior to which she neither could nor would conform, Emily was driven to madness and murder. Thus, in a sense, all of Jefferson had a hand in administering the arsenic. (p 342) Poor Emily got stuck in the loop of change, not able to go with the new current of life neither live up to the rituals of a lost age. Modernity effectively erased the agrarian class based system presided by aristocratic “patriarchal hierarchical” “planter elite”, and replaced it with egalitarian one where government law and order prevailed (King 21). Norms began to lose its importance especially in a time when America lived its golden age. The roaring twenties, or “the jazz age” as Fitzgerald called it, was a period of sustained economic prosperity where automobiles, electricity and refrigerating, motion pictures and radio were wildly available and affordable. New social, cultural and industrial order exploded in the North and found its way into the heart of the South. The Great War took a toll on the new post-war generation after experiencing its horrors and facing death in battles, add to that the sense of freedom young men and women felt in France away from the supervision of their patrons. Coming back home they valued their lives more and reevaluated the rituals of their forefathers. They noticed that life is too short to spend in such uptight strangling traditions, where young people were “expected to settle into the humdrum routine of American life as if nothing had happened, to accept the moral dicta of elders who seemed to them still to be living in a Pollyanna land of rosy ideals which the war has killed for them. They couldn't do it and they disrespectfully said so” (Allen 82). Day to day “the sons and daughters of well-to-do American families” started experimenting with new things defying their more conservative parents. Women no longer wore big long dresses, but rather thinner ones revealing to the shocked eyes of virtue some
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parts of their bodies opposing the old notion of innocent white woman, “the guardian of morality.” They started to attend bars, smoke and drink in public with men. New dances to the new public music invaded South America. Young boys and girls foxtrotted to the jazz tunes of the saxophone with their bodies so close to each other one may think they were glued. Young women were more free to practice their sexuality and discuss it in public. Other political factors participated in making this revolution on rituals inevitable. Winning the suffrage in 1920 put women on a legally equal scale to men. The sense of independence American women felt in the political sphere extended to the household. Urbanizing the South meant moving into smaller apartments, which in turn meant less duties and smaller number of members to attend to, therefore more time to take paid jobs. Men of course observed this outrageous change in horror, especially when all the glamor of the golden age subsided in the Great Depression in the thirties. The need for jobs rose, but men found it very much demeaning to occupy “feminine” jobs in nursing or teaching, pushing the unemployment rates higher up (Barker-Devine 46). Men refused to let their wives work, they were too proud to abandon their position as patriarchs. Yet at the same time, huge percentage of them abandoned their families in such a hard time, making it difficult for these poor women to hold them as superiors. “One unemployed husband believed so strongly that women should not work, he said, “I would rather turn on the gas and put an end to the whole family than let my wife support me” (Barker-Devine 54). So petrified was that man just as Mr. Petrie the rapist is in Welty's “The Petrified Man”. Welty's choice of her title is clever and holds a powerful meaning in itself. Her women, unlike Emily, avenged their long lost freedom, and took hold of their lives. The years of depression uncovered the true face of men who are ready to leave
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their hungry children and patient wives just like that. Men turned into the pygmies of the freak show, “the teeniniest men in the universe” Mrs. Pike is “just wild about” (Welty 1970). Women in Antebellum society used to measure their status by who's more docile and pious. Welty's women, Mrs. Pike and Mrs. Fletcher “measure their status with each other by the power they have over men” (Caldwell 175). It is not just a matter of providing for the family, it's a matter of power, since men are obviously not anymore fit for the responsibility. The winner in this match is for sure Mrs. Pike. Mrs. Fletcher recognizes how far Mrs. Pike out played her, when Leota tells her the story of Mrs. Pike exploiting Mr. Petry. Being more old fashioned, Mrs. Fletcher contradicts herself in every remark she makes. It's hard for her to still adopt the notion of patriarchy strong Mr. Fletcher should have, while playing games to keep him under her control. Her contradiction appears clearly in her comment on Mrs. Montjoy taking a permanent while in labor, “[h]er husband ought to make her behave . . . he ought to put his foot down” (Welty 1973). But when Leota mentions how Mr. Fletcher would “beat [her] on the head if [she] didn't have [the baby] now,” Mrs. Fletcher protests “Mr. Fletcher can't do a thing with me. . . . If he so much as raises his voice against me, . . . I'll have one of my sick headaches, and then I'm not fit to live with” (Welty 1969). Obviously, Mrs. Fletcher doesn't prefer weak and limp men like Mr. Montjoy, or even her own husband. Mrs. Pike, on the other hand, is not a hypocrite when it comes to her relation to men. Her idea of a husband doesn't entirely depend on money and of course power, but on sexual affection as well, a thing she's not afraid to express the way she does bragging about the “three men who was a very large part of making her trip what it was” (Welty 1972). She is more independent and confident than Mrs. Fletcher, a thing that the latter is well aware of. Welty ignored men in her story, not because it's a story happening in a beauty parlor, but because men lost their patriarchy over women and lost the right in
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exercising it. Billy boy's last words in the story “if you're so smart, why ain't you rich” is actually the last nail in the coffin of the Southern submissive white womanhood myth, since his mother triumphantly sells the Southern manhood for 500$ after enjoying it first. Comparing the social surrounding of Mrs. Pike to that of Ms. Emily, one can clearly understand the drastic transformation of the American South from a male-centered to a more equal society. As we've seen earlier in the discussion, Southern women throughout the nineteenths and twenties centuries went through many difficulties to prove themselves better than what men decided. The Civil War was the first step in clearing the mist hovering on women's vision in life. Even though they were successful in running the household and business of their late husbands or fathers who died in the war, gender roles didn't change. Not until modernity started crawling into the South, refitting its social hierarchy. In late 19 th century technological advancements affected the Southern society so deeply changing it from rural into more industrial and urbanized place. Patriarchs tried their best to keep women restricted to the house and family. Rewarding their submissiveness, asexuality and religiousness, taking them as a kind of commodity one puts up on the pedestal only for show, and by doing so they deprived them their humanity. Emily in Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” was their victim. The cruelty of her father and then her townspeople, justifies fighting such male-centered rituals of old times. Young generations, by mid-twentieth century, after the Great War, noticed how enjoyable life can be when freed from all these nonsensical rituals. Their view of life was more realistic, and they were more open to change than their conservative fathers. The prosperous roaring twenties in America meant much more than just technological and economic flourish. It was the light at the end of the dark tunnel of confining rituals and double standard doctrines. The Depression era then following,
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proved the empty myth of white womanhood men were forcing on women. This era determined the weakness of men abandoning their poor wives and hungry children. This era affirmed that the Southern white woman can rule societies if giving the chance. It is about “the struggles of [these women] who spoke publicly in their roles as mothers, workers and wives of unemployed men during the Depression era” (Triece 1). It is about the Southern independent white woman, who is not in need of false patriarchal support, for she is the patriarch in herself, just like Mrs. Pike in Welty's “The Petrified Man”.
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Works Cited Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily” These Thirteen. London: Chatto & Windus, 1963. Print. Welty, Eudora. “The Petrified Man” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc, 2003. Print. Bibliography Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: an Informal History of the 1920s. New York, NY: Perennial, 2000. Print. Barker-Devine, Jennifer. “Make Do or Do Without”: Women during the Great Depression” Great Depression: People and Perspectives. Ed. Cravens, Hamilton, and Peter C. Mancall. California: Santa Barbara, 2009. 45-63. Print. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls Of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. New York: Allograph Press Corporation, 1969. Print. Caldwell, Price. “Sexual Politics in Welty's “Moon lake” and “The Petrified Man” Studies in American Fiction. 18.2 (1990): 171 - 181. Jstor. 08.06.2016. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirde English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1978. Print. Ewell, Barbara C. “Changing Places: Women, The Old South; or, What Happens When Local Color Becomes Regionalism” American Studies. 42.2 (1997): 159 - 179. Jstor. 3.05.2016. Falk, Gerhard. Women and Social Change in America: A Survey of a Century of Progress. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009. Print. King, Richard H. A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Print. McMillen, Sally G. “Women in the Old South” A Companion to the American South. Ed. John Boles. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002.
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Print. O'Bryan-Knight, Jean. “From the Spinster to the Eunuch: William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” and Mario Vargas Llosa's Los cachorros” Comparative Literature Studies. 34.4 (1997):328-347. Penn State University Press. Jstor. 30.05.2016. Poppendorf, Alexandria. “Women and Gender Roles in the Antebellum South” ThetaDelta History Journal. 4.4 (2014):18-28. Web. 24.05.2016. Scott, Anne Firor. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930. The University of Virginia Press, 1995. Print. ---, ed. Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women. Charlottesville: the University of Virginia Press, 1993. Print. Triece, Mary E. On The Picket Line: Strategies of Working-Class Women during the Depression. University of Illinois Press, 2007. Print.
