The Characters
Some of the characters of Mosquitoes are based upon members of the New Orleans artistic community whom Faulkner knew in 1925, while others are wholly imaginative constructs. The novelist Dawson Fairchild, for example, is Faulkner’s portrait of Sherwood Anderson, the “father” of Faulkner’s generation of American novelists. Though Anderson was an important early model for him, Faulkner soon began to look elsewhere, turning principally to such writers as Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and T. S. Eliot, who represented an international as opposed to a regional standard of literature. Faulkner’s portrayal of Anderson, consequently, is equivocal. On the one hand, Fairchild is credited with possessing an attractive, folksy humor revealed primarily by the Al Jackson tall tales; or he is shown to be master of narrative pathos as when he tells Theodore the story of his ill-fated attempt to gain entrance to a college fraternity (his effect is achieved, however, by casting himself as a fool: “You poor goof” is Theodore’s summation of the story). On the other hand, Fairchild is the recipient of the novel’s most serious and significant criticism, and as such, he is to be distinguished from the relatively flattened satirical stereotypes of Talliaferro and Mrs. Maurier. Fairchild’s principal critic is his friend Kauffman (referred to throughout as “the Semitic man”), who represents many of Faulkner’s own critical judgments in the novel. Kauffman considers Fairchild a talented but seriously flawed artist; as a man, Fairchild is a “poor emotional eunuch,” and as an artist, a “bewildered stenographer with a gift for people.” As the words “son” and “child” embedded in his name suggest, Dawson Fairchild is emotionally and artistically young, never having grown beyond a midwestern regionalism and a “hopeless sentimentality,” a fact which has prevented his art from achieving a fully mature and universal significance. Though endowed with moments of insight and poetic expression, Fairchild is ultimately drawn as the pathetic, older novelist, a “benevolent walrus” who is aware of his waning artistic power.
The other flawed artists aboard the Nausikaa receive considerably less serious treatment. Mark Frost, for example, is clearly a butt of relentless satire. A “ghostly,” “sepulchral,’ and morose young man with a “prehensile mouth,” the aptly named Frost continually reminds the company that he is “the best poet in New Orleans.” At best a minor regional poet, at worst a charlatan, Mark Frost is Faulkner’s caricature of the pretentious, clever, and constipated poet. Here is Faulkner’s cutting description: “Mark Frost, the ghostly young man, a poet who produced an occasional cerebral and obscure poem in four of seven lines reminding one somehow of the function of evacuation excruciatingly and incompletely performed.” Both Fairchild and Frost fall short of Faulkner’s conception of the dedicated artist, the quasi-mythical Gordon (he is described as possessing a silver faun’s face—like Donald Mahon of Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay, 1926—and a hawklike arrogance), who is characterized throughout as being hard, masculine, lonely, and silent.
Among the nonartists, Mrs. Maurier is treated initially as a creature of pure satire, but she undergoes a process of humanization over the course of the novel, as Faulkner’s conception of her matures. The principal agent of this humanizing process is Faulkner’s key self-projection, Gordon, whose sculpture of Mrs. Maurier’s head captures the suffering and despair of the human being behind the socialite’s mask. Though Talliaferro is less fully humanized (and his presence at the opening and closing of the novel signals its principally satiric intention), his loneliness and frustration is suggested, primarily in flashes of interior revelation which Faulkner affords the reader. In both Talliaferro and Mrs. Maurier, one sees Faulkner’s effort to transcend the...
(This entire section contains 956 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
reductiveness of satire, and through a growing realism of attitude, to humanize even disagreeable individual types.
Though Gordon represents Faulkner’s conception of the true artist, many other characters embody important aspects of Faulkner’s personality and art. For example, Faulkner attributes to Eva Wiseman some of his own poetry to be published in A Green Bough (1933); to Julius Kauffman, some of his own critical theories; to Dawson Fairchild, his definition of genius as a “Passion Week of the heart” along with the Al Jackson tall tales (he had coauthored these with Anderson); and to Talliaferro and Mark Frost, aspects of his own youthful pretentiousness and posturing. Faulkner appears most significantly as Gordon, the sculptor, but two other incarnations of Faulkner in the work should also be noted. There is the funny, shabbily dressed “little kind of black man” whom Jenny had met at Mandeville, and whose name she has difficulty recalling to Pat: “He said he was a liar by profession, and he made good money at it, enough to own a Ford as soon as he got it paid out. I think he was crazy. Not dangerous: just crazy.” When she does recall his name, “Faulkner,” Pat responds: “ Faulkner?’ . . . Never heard of him.” There is also the thunderous typist with the “sweating leonine head” whom Talliaferro interrupts twice near the close of the novel. Though he is described as being a large man (Faulkner was not), his is clearly a portrait of the intensely absorbed literary artist and as close a model as the text affords of Faulkner as a novelist. His devastating but comical dismissal of Talliaferro may be read as a final repudiation of both the New Orleans artistic milieu, and of the kind of smart, satirical writing in which Faulkner had indulged in this novel: “ And here I am, wasting my damn life trying to invent people by means of the written word!’ His face became suddenly suffused: he rose towering. Get to hell out of here,’ he roared. You have made me sick!’”
Characters Discussed
Dawson Fairchild
Dawson Fairchild, a successful novelist and the natural leader of a group of artists cruising aboard the yacht Nausikaa. He is from a provincial Midwestern lower-middle-class family and confronts life and art with burly optimism, though he finds the modern world peopled with “women too masculine to conceive, men too feminine to beget” great poetry. Having admittedly lost his own first sheer infatuation with words, he writes prose now instead of poetry and devoutly maintains that “art” is anything consciously well done. Calling himself “a purely lay brother to the human race,” Fairchild is the author’s portrait of Sherwood Anderson.
Mrs. Patricia Maurier
Mrs. Patricia Maurier, a wealthy widow and vivacious dilettante who brings artists and ordinary people together on her yacht for a weeklong party on Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans. Her usual pose of silly amazement turns to fright when Gordon feels her face with his hands and to disgust when her niece disappears for a day with the ship’s steward. Although she is intent on her project, she loses respect for some of her guests after the yacht runs aground and their attention turns from cards and dancing to drinking, idle talk, the young women on board, and complaints about all the grapefruit she serves them.
Gordon
Gordon, an impoverished sculptor, thirty-six years old. Tall, red-haired, and masculine, with a hawklike countenance and a wild, bitter heart, he personifies the novel’s ideal of the true artist. His imagination is dominated by the headless, armless, and legless torso that he has fashioned in his studio. He refuses to sell it to Pat, whose pouting moves him to give her a spanking instead. Once on shore, he surprises his friends by sculpting an uncanny likeness of Mrs. Maurier.
Patricia (Pat) Robyn
Patricia (Pat) Robyn, Mrs. Maurier’s eighteen-year-old niece and namesake, whose hard and sexless graveness epitomizes Gordon’s ideal of feminine beauty. She entices the ship’s steward away from the others for a treacherous daylong excursion to the mainland.
Jenny Steinbauer
Jenny Steinbauer, a voluptuous, unreflective blonde who is invited to the party after a moment’s acquaintance with Pat. She turns the gentlemen’s heads but keeps her virginity intact.
Ernest Talliaferro
Ernest Talliaferro, a balding, dapper, thirty-eight-year-old widower who wants to remarry but lacks the boldness to enthrall women. As a wholesaler of ladies’ undergarments, he thinks he understands women, yet he makes a fool of himself by chasing Jenny. He manages to steal a kiss from her, and he fancies that she will sneak away from the others with him and even accept his proposal of marriage. After he clumsily pushes her into the lake, however, she ignores his pursuit.
Julius Kauffman
Julius Kauffman, “the Semitic man,” Fairchild’s cynical companion who enjoys pricking the vanity of artists. Always the critic, he thinks that the defining characteristic of a poet is an ability to sustain an obliviousness to the world and its compulsions.
Eva Wiseman
Eva Wiseman, Kauffman’s sister, a poet who believes that love and death are the only subjects of writing worth the effort and despair. She finds the trivial artistic chatter at the party both silly and dull.
Mark Frost
Mark Frost, a ghostly young man who considers himself to be the best poet in New Orleans. Quite passive by nature, he has little to say.
Theodore Robyn
Theodore Robyn, often called Gus or Josh, Pat’s twin brother, who resents her intrusions. He occupies himself with whittling a wooden pipe.
Pete Ginotta
Pete Ginotta, Jenny’s Italian boyfriend, a gifted dancer whose humorless, reckless face is aptly set off by a stiff straw hat that he always wears.
Major Ayers
Major Ayers, a well-traveled Englishman whose bent is decidedly mercenary rather than artistic. Believing that all Americans are constipated, he is intent on making a fortune with his recipe for a new laxative.
David West
David West, the ship’s steward, a rough and inarticulate but modest man who indulges Pat’s appetites for swimming and hiking without taking advantage of her sexually. He soon leaves the ship for a better job.
