The Bear William Faulkner - Gloria R. Dussinger (essay date 1969)
Gloria R. Dussinger (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: "Faulkner's Isaac McCaslin as Romantic Hero Manqué," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 1, 1969, pp. 377-85.
[In the following essay, Dussinger perceives the structure and style of "The Bear" to be modeled on the Romantic quest story, which narrates the integration of private and public aspects of the hero's self-identity.]
I
Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1841 defined the transcendentalist by pointing to his peculiar affliction—double consciousness: the transcendentalist is aware of living two lives, of the understanding and of the soul; his anguish grows out of the fact that the two "show very little relation to each other." By 1852 Emerson had penetrated his own dual nature to its depths and there divined its value. In "Fate" he proposes double consciousness as the "one key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom,...
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