Faulkner, William - Barbara Monroe (essay date summer 1988)
Barbara Monroe (essay date summer 1988)
SOURCE: Monroe, Barbara. “Reading Faulknerian Comedy: Humor and Honor in The Hamlet.” Southern Quarterly 26, no. 4 (summer 1988): 33-56.
[In the following essay, Monroe contends that the characters in The Hamlet employ humor as a way to ward off modern capitalism and maintain their honor.]
Many studies have shown that Faulkner's comic achievement owes much to nineteenth-century frontier humor.1 In stressing the historical influences, however, scholars have often overlooked the social and political functions of Faulkner's humor within its cultural context, the New South of the early twentieth century.2 Both regional-specific and gender-marked, Faulknerian humor is honor-bound, for it both serves and services a residual honor-shame culture. In The Hamlet, we see a prelegalistic, agrarian community in initial conflict with modern legality and the...
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