[In the following essay, Clarke examines the way war is dealt with in The Unvanquished by women, children, and African Americans.]

I'd rather engage Forrest's whole brigade every morning for six months than spend that same length of time trying to protect United States property from defenseless Southern women and niggers and children. … Defenseless! God help the North if Davis and Lee had ever thought of the idea of forming a brigade of grandmothers and nigger orphans, and invading us with it¹

Are women defenseless damsels or consummate soldiers? The role of women in Faulkner's work is always problematic, but women's relation to war intensifies that situation in a particularly intricate and complex manner. As Susan Schweik has observed, “Wars have a way of revealing with special clarity how men as well as women are both intensely and uneasily gendered.”² War, which sets up a system characterized by bifurcation and polarization, seems to reorder the world through opposition. But war, in fact, is a cross-dresser's dream. Civilians cross-dress as soldiers; women cross-dress as men; boys cross-dress as men; scared men cross-dress as heroes; homosexuals, these days, must cross-dress as heterosexuals to maintain the Pentagon's misguided assumption that there are no gays in the military; enemies cross-dress as friends, infiltrating each other's turf; and, in possibly the most tragic feature of war, especially civil war, friends and even family cross-dress as enemies. Thus, despite imposing a binary framework war also—somewhat paradoxically—opens up possibilities of transcending it, of finding an alternative position, of mixing the categories.

Examining the binaries of race and gender, Faulkner reveals their vulnerability to the pressures of war. Women may be ostensibly silenced by the rhetoric of war which, like combat, is generally controlled by men, but male absence from the homefront can transform defenseless creatures into active speaking subjects. Yet finding a discourse is not easy, particularly for the women of The Unvanquished caught between supporting the system which subordinates them and breaking free of that subordination. Consequently, Granny Millard and Drusilla Hawk wage war against both the Yankees and their own lack of power within the chivalric order, a battle in which they are joined by Ringo, whose defense of a slave-owning culture defies the framework of slavery itself. Ostensibly one of Faulkner's most military novels, The Unvanquished primarily examines not Colonel Sartoris, who rides in and out on his stallion Jupiter, playing a relatively minor role in the various military and nonmilitary struggles, but the ways in which “defenseless Southern women and niggers and children” deal with the war and the chivalric tradition which it attempts to uphold.

War, of course, has largely been viewed as a particularly male stronghold. Anne Goodwyn Jones notes, “if anything in our ‘adult’ culture has a history of establishing manhood in opposition to the feminine, it is war: war makes men.”³ Men fight; women wait. War grants men an authority of experience—both of combat and of representation—denied to women. Men write; women stay silent. One need recall only some of the most famous war poetry to see the pattern.⁴ English Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace begins “To Lucasta” with the injunction to his mistress to be quiet: “Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind / That from the nunnery / Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind / To war and arms I fly.” Then he ends it by insisting that she approve of all this: “Yet this inconstancy is such / As you too shall adore; / I could not love thee, dear, so much, / Loved I not honor more.” Not only must she keep her mouth shut, she must love sitting there in silence or she loses everything. Several centuries later, Wilfred Owen, in a dedication—“To Jessie Pope”—often left off of many contemporary reprintings of his famous “Dulce et Decorum Est,” directs his poem at a woman poet who has had the temerity to write about war. Jessie Pope wrote patriotic verse, but Owen does more than simply contest her glorification of war; he implicitly denies her the right to speak, by pointing to her lack of experience.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The conditional “If” says it all: she was not there, so she has no authority to speak. Jones, drawing on Jean Bethke Elshtain's analysis of the war story, notes that such a story “self-deconstructs by insisting on the importance of the actual experience of war for the production of manhood: a story is never enough, it tells its reader; you had to [will have to] be there.”⁵ Thus women are doubly excluded: from the experience and from telling the story.

Gender, then, appears to divide the combatants from the noncombatants, experience from spectatorship, voice from silence. But what of Faulkner, who spent much of his life lying about his war experiences? Clearly, he felt that his lack of combat duty unmanned him to a certain extent, and may have worried about being linked with the Jessie Popes. His belief in both the authority of experience and the gender division it gives rise to are implicit in a 1947 interview, when he noted, “War is a dreadful price to pay for experience. The only good I know that comes from a war is that it allows men to be free of their womenfolks without being blacklisted by it.”⁶ While the price may be high, he upholds the experiential definition of war, an experience relegated primarily to men, who enjoy unrebuked freedom from women. Faulkner's responses in interviews are often suspect, and the blatant misogyny of this statement, particularly when combined with his own lack of military credentials, simply doesn't hold up in his fiction where war seems to allow women to be free of their menfolks, though it rarely protects them from being blacklisted for it. While Faulkner's statement reveals a wry yearning for socially acceptable freedom from women, his fiction more often examines the ways that war both genders and ungenders human beings, and raises questions about who is freed from whom. He may have been inexperienced in combat, but his novels overflow with battles between the sexes, an arena in which he did have some expertise.

Even when he turns directly to war, Faulkner generally places greater emphasis on the impact and aftermath of war than on the battlefield. Possibly due to the untenability of his claim to combat experience, he examines most directly the experience of noncombatants and the inadequacy of gender to define both one's position in war and one's voice in response to it. In thus elevating the claims of the spectator—generally women and children—it may be that he vindicates his own unacknowledged feminine position. In so doing, Faulkner breaks the pattern—as he so often does—of other male modernists. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claim that “inevitably, in the aftermath of the emasculating terrors of the war [i.e., WWI], many men insisted that the ultimate reality underlying history is and must be the truth of gender.”⁷ But despite his Nobel Prize speech, in which he insists that writing, in the aftermath of World War II, be comprised of “the old universal truths,”⁸ Faulkner's fiction rarely ascribes to any kind of absolute truth, particularly truth about the determinacy of gender. The stories of The Unvanquished, largely written some fifteen years after World War I, with World War II just beginning to hover on the horizon, rather reflect the ways that war strips away acknowledged truth about gender.

This is particularly true for the American Civil War, a war that, especially in the South, broke down the binaries of gendered experience. As Sarah Morgan of Baton Rouge wrote in her Civil War diary,

Oh! if I was only a man! Then I could don the breeches, and slay them with a will! If some few Southern women were in the ranks they could set the men an example they would not blush to follow. Pshaw! there are no women here! We are all men!⁹

Morgan moves from desiring men's opportunities to denying female identity, revealing the extent to which gender is deconstructed during wartime. And yet, it is women who are sacrificed: “there are no women here.” However, this annihilation occurs only if one equates sex with gender—only if donning breeches and slaying the enemy necessarily entails a sexchange operation. Margaret R. Higonnet observes, “Wars may awaken our awareness of the ways sexual territory is mapped because they disrupt the normal division of labor by gender.” Not only do women move into men's vacated peacetime occupations, they may also intrude into the ranks of the battle itself. Higonnet goes on to assert that “civil wars, which take place on ‘home’ territory, have more potential than other wars to transform women's expectations.”¹⁰ In the Civil War South, where the front lines often corresponded with the homefront, Southern women and children experienced war first hand, a situation which sometimes allowed women greater freedom to take on masculine roles and masculine language. Drew Gilpin Faust has noted women's expressed desires to participate in the war and concluded, “Without directly acknowledging such frustrations, Confederate public discussion of women's roles sought to deal with incipient dissatisfaction by specifying active contributions women might make to the Southern Cause and by valorizing their passive waiting and sacrifice as highly purposeful.”¹¹ But Drusilla Hawk and Granny Millard content themselves neither with “passive waiting and sacrifice” nor with the specified contributions allotted to women, which rarely included mule-trading or cross-dressing. Aunt Louisa's horror that Drusilla has “unsex[ed] herself” (189) by fighting thus reflects Southern wartime ideology, and applies equally well to Granny Millard, a more formidable opponent than General Forrest.

In The Unvanquished Faulkner interrogates the conventional expectations of women's place in war. Women in the novel take two different approaches to war, yet each one adopts a kind of male persona. Granny Millard, in her vanquishing of the Yankee army, relies on—and manipulates—written texts and Biblical authority, while Drusilla reacts more with her body; she cuts her hair short, dresses as a man, and joins Colonel Sartoris's troop. In these varying responses, Faulkner tests the limits of gender and gendered discourse, examining the efficacy of men's texts and women's bodies in the war against a patriarchal system. While both women fight to uphold Southern chivalry, their modes of discourse seriously undermine the very system they set out to defend.

On the surface, Drusilla's cross-dressing marks her as male identified, unsexed, while Granny behaves more like a lady. Yet Granny's reliance on textuality reveals her dependence on what has often been identified as a particularly masculine form of discourse. Western tradition aligns women more closely with their bodies than with language. Women are physical, men figurative, creators. As so many feminist theorists have postulated, women's language tends to be tactile and literal, focused on the body. Margaret Homans observes, “For the same reason that women are identified with nature and matter in any traditional thematics of gender … women are also identified with the literal, the absent referent in our predominant myth of language.”¹² Faulkner, however, is a prime example of a man who questions such paradigms. His male characters flounder amid the wreck of symbolic discourse, desperately trying to make words replace reality. Thus Quentin Compson kills himself because among other reasons virginity is not just a word; thus Harry Wilbourne finds his language inadequate next to Charlotte's drawings; and thus Reverend Whitfield can only “frame,” not speak, the words of his confession, while Addie Bundren knows that words are no good. Faulkner both reproduces and challenges this gendered linguistic split, and one often finds that women's silence and women's bodies hold greater sway than men's language.

The Unvanquished mixes these categories in curious and interesting ways. Granny, an avid supporter of the patriarchal system, relies on written texts to vanquish the Yankee army. While the misunderstandings behind her note from Colonel Dick provide an almost slapstick tone to her mule-trading—she demands the return of a chest of silver, her mules named Old Hundred and Tinney, and two slaves, which gets transcribed by the Yankee orderly as ten chests of silver, 110 mules and slaves (that equation is surely no accident)—Granny's participation in the procedure marks her reverence for justice and textual authority. Her note from Colonel Dick is legal; as she herself quickly points out, she “tried to tell them better. … It's the hand of God” (112). Associating the hand of God with the written hand of man firmly ensconces textual authenticity as akin to divine authority, and both are further affiliated with masculine power. But the Yankee orderly's comic mistake and the consequent blind obedience by the rest of the army to this text illustrate both the power of textual legality and its limitations. With nothing more than a “handful of durn printed letterheads” (122), Granny routs the Yankees so thoroughly that Ab Snopes wonders “if somebody hadn't better tell Abe Lincoln to look out for General Grant against Miz Rosa Millard” (123). The unquestioned authority of the masculine text can be effectively subverted by a woman who recognizes that fixed meaning can be manipulated, particularly in a system which does not question a lady's—or a Colonel's—word. Granny's appropriation of textual authority, for the sake of the Southern patriarchal system, places her in precisely the position which that system has denied her: in control of military men and military language.

But it is Ringo, an even more problematic supporter of Southern patriarchy, who first recognizes the full potential of the note, that it is a text with multiple applications. He, like Granny, claims only to be fulfilling the letter of the law: “I never [said] nothing the paper never said” (114). His reliance on what the paper said—or never said—illustrates his understanding of the cultural reliance on textual legality, which he then goes on to exploit. Yet his dedication to the cause which has declared him legally nonhuman demands attention. Certainly his loyalties are less to the South than to the Sartorises; he has, in a sense, cross-dressed as a white Southerner. He looks at the pathetic band of escaped slaves who have just been handed over to them and remarks, “The main thing now is, whut we gonter do with all these niggers” (114). His inability to recognize his own affiliation to these slaves may result from his youth and the decent treatment he has apparently received from the Sartorises, but it also reflects a lack of self-awareness striking in one so intelligent. Ringo's racial identification is as unfixed as his legal racial status is fixed, creating the “third term” which Marjorie Garber, in her book on cross-dressing, identifies as a challenge to “binary thinking, whether particularized as male and female, black and white, yes and no, Republican and Democrat, self and other, or in any other way.”¹³ It is a fitting description of Ringo who, as Bayard says, has grown up in the family so that “maybe he wasn't a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn't a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer: the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane” (7). But this is the Civil War South; the possibility of there being a third term is denied by the very terminology of the dichotomy: nigger vs. white boy. In fact, the possibility of transcending race also indicates that to deny race is to deny human identity; once Bayard admits the possibility of their being neither nigger nor white boy, he realizes that the next stage is “not even people any longer.” Judith Butler has suggested that naming and labeling can constitute gendering of the individual self. “Such attributions or interpellations contribute to that field of discourse and power that orchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies as ‘the human.’ We see this most clearly in the examples of those abjected beings who do not appear properly gendered; it is their very humanness that comes into question.”¹⁴ In Faulkner's work, indeterminacy in either race or gender can question human identity; just as Drusilla's ungendering undermines her humanity, so here does the unracing of Ringo and Bayard challenge their existence as people. However, the power of the names, nigger and white boy, destroys the possibility implied in the “maybe” clause of Bayard's formulation; once those terms are employed, it is no longer possible to say, “maybe he wasn't,” for in these circumstances Ringo is a “nigger” and Bayard is a white boy, labels which the South is fighting a war, in part, to preserve.

Yet just as the war reinforces the binary, it also challenges it both in the opportunities it provides Ringo to assert his intelligence and resourcefulness and in the ways that it explodes the binary system of slave and free, putting Ringo on a par with Granny. In fact, he one-ups Granny by not merely accepting the note but enforcing it to the letter, and then turns to her and very adroitly challenges her language. “Hah … Whose hand was that?” (114). If Granny's manipulation of the text can be ascribed to the hand of the Almighty, then Ringo's action is similarly inspired. But his comment reflects more than an attempt to escape punishment; it asserts an equality to Granny in its tacit acknowledgment that the hand in question is, in fact, Ringo's.

By placing himself within the divine scheme of things, Ringo breaks down the dichotomy of slave vs. free which has hitherto defined his life. He does, I would argue, set up a third term as an African American subject, living the identity which Loosh has movingly but less successfully asserted: “I done been freed; God's own angel proclamated me free and gonter general me to Jordan. I don't belong to John Sartoris now; I belongs to me and God” (75). Like Ringo (and Granny), Loosh redefines the binary of honesty vs. theft, replying to Granny's condemnation of his violation of private property when he betrays to the Yankees the location of the silver, “Let God ax John Sartoris who the man name that give me to him. Let the man that buried me in the black dark ax that of the man what dug me free” (75). This unanswered demand that the legality and authority of slavery be named questions the very notion of such authority, a challenge which Ringo duplicates in his subversion of the legal text; his actions on behalf of those who have enslaved him may mark the degree to which he has been co-opted by the system, yet also illustrate the system's failure in that he has the ability to exploit it. His manipulation of written texts, which he goes on to produce himself—“by now Ringo had learned to copy it so that I don't believe Colonel Dick himself could have told the difference” (127)—grants him a kind of subversive power, as he undermines the very discourse which defines his status. Still it seems poor compensation: discourse is one thing; slavery is another. As Audre Lorde has pointed out, it is difficult to dismantle the master's house by means of the master's tools.

While one might claim that Ringo's appropriation of the master's tools—writing and legality—reveals him as incapable of imagining any alternative, we can also read Ringo's active participation in this attack against the army which will liberate him as his claim to personal worth. The boys grow up playing together almost as equals, though Bayard notes that their arrangement is that “I would be General Pemberton twice in succession and Ringo would be Grant, then I would have to be Grant once so Ringo could be General Pemberton or he wouldn't play anymore.” Despite the seeming equality of two boys who have “both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together,” they both realize that “Ringo was a nigger too” (7), and thus lesser than Bayard. In this war against the Yankees, however, Ringo plays the starring role. His superior intelligence (“Father was right; he was smarter than me” [125]) finally places him, if only briefly, ahead of Bayard. In fact, as Bayard rather resentfully notes, “he had got to treating me like Granny did—like he and Granny were the same age instead of him and me” (126).

Yet once the peculiar institution has been overthrown, Ringo loses position. As he himself announces, “I ain't a nigger anymore. I done been abolished” (199). He speaks more truly than he probably realizes. With the war now over, his lead over Bayard vanishes. In fact, by the time of John Sartoris's murder, Ringo has been reduced, even in Bayard's language, to “my boy” (213). He now, however, seems more attuned to racial difference and what it means, for after suggesting that they bushwhack Redmund, he continues, “But I reckon that wouldn't suit that white skin you walks around in” (218). By suggesting that Bayard's whiteness is merely a covering, something “you walks around in,” Ringo again associates racial identity with a kind of cross-dressing. In this wonderfully subtle turn of phrase, Ringo aligns aberrance with whiteness and further suggests that this whiteness has been recently attained, something which desecrates Bayard's sense of self for, unlike Ringo's black skin, Bayard's white skin has gotten in the way of his family identity. “I remember how I thought then that no matter what might happen to either of us, I would never be The Sartoris to him” (215). Ringo, who has “changed even less than I had since that day when we nailed Grumby's body to the door of the old compress,” is still caught in Colonel Sartoris's era. His unique individuality can only be asserted in the upheaval of war, which may explain his reluctance to accept the changing postwar standards, a change recognized even by Colonel Sartoris, who tells his son, “But now the land and the time too are changing; what will follow will be a matter of consolidation, of pettifogging and doubtless chicanery in which I would be a babe in arms but in which you, trained in the law, can hold your own—our own” (231). Postwar law, a different type of textuality from the divine authority which Granny and Ringo play at so deftly, demands different talents: formal study, an opportunity denied to Ringo. It is only during war that he can define himself as outside the binary. In fighting, he can find his way to a third term; in voting, there is no third term—nor even a second. Wash Jones's words in Absalom [Absalom, Absalom!] resonate here with an eerie force: “[T]hey mought have whupped us, but they aint kilt us yit.”¹⁵ As long as that “us” defines a white culture, with its attention now turned back to governing itself, there is no place within it for Ringo.

Rosa Millard's world, while closer to the border of the white male hegemony than Ringo's, nonetheless also has some nebulous boundaries in times of war. Like Ringo, Granny struggles to maintain a world order based upon the very dualities which she destroys through her behavior. Trying desperately to retain her sense of good and evil, she discovers that war not only provides the opportunity to transgress the boundaries of being a lady, but it also enables her to cheat in her Christian beliefs. In fact, her usurpation of masculine power is tied to her challenge to divine authority. It is not surprising that Granny should find herself caught in a Christian vacuum, for war, of course, violates the central tenets of Christianity. All may be fair in war, but little is Christian in war. Her struggles are revealed in the ways that she tries to manipulate her Christian beliefs by making what even she admits is a sin acceptable due to extenuating circumstances: the horrors of war. Her attempt to justify the means by the end offers a further implicit criticism of patriarchal authority, in its open challenge to God the Father.

I did not sin for revenge; I defy You or anyone to say I did. I sinned first for justice. And after that first time, I sinned for more than justice: I sinned for the sake of food and clothes for Your own creatures who could not help themselves—for children who had given their fathers, for wives who had given their husbands, for old people who had given their sons, to a holy cause, even though You have seen fit to make it a lost cause.

(147)

Granny's complaint that God has “seen fit” to make a holy cause a lost cause suggests that God is not quite with it. The greater sin rests not with her but with God's inefficiency. Yet even in her concern for her lost cause, Granny focuses not on the men who died but on those who remain behind. She seems to be outraged not so much at defeat as at God's willingness to sacrifice the lives of “creatures who could not help themselves”—women, children, and the aged. God has been a bad Father in that He has ignored His obligations to the helpless. Thus war reveals the tenuous hold which God has upon the world, the limitations of patriarchy itself. Granny's complaint echoes the lamentations raised by many Confederate women, as Drew Faust has demonstrated. Yet there are some significant differences. Faust cites Almira Acors's letter to Jefferson Davis: “I do not see how God can give the South a victory when the cries of so many suffering mothers and little children are constantly ascending up to him. … [I]f I and my little children … die while there [sic] Father is in service I invoke God Almighty that our blood rest upon the South.”¹⁶

For Acors, the responsibility lies not with God but with the South, a charge which Granny Millard never quite recognizes. In her anger at this failure of patriarchal authority, Granny fails to see the implicit indictment of the Southern culture in which she is firmly entrenched. Interestingly, she omits any mention of the other “creatures who could not help themselves”: slaves. When saddled with 110 former slaves, she sends them back to their masters with the injunction, “if I ever hear of any of you straggling off like this again, I'll see to it” (115). Regardless of whether she could or would make good her threat, she still refuses to acknowledge that slavery itself is at least as great a betrayal of Christianity as war. She retains the position of mistress, arbiter of justice, and ultimate authority. Thus her critique of God the Father suggests that the system would be improved by bringing in God the Mother, someone more attuned to the problems of women and children, but who still knows how to keep the slaves in line. And, not surprisingly, Granny herself seems the perfect candidate for the job. Yet shifting from a patriarchal to a matriarchal God does little to undermine the system. Granny may challenge the efficiency of Christian patriarchy, but she seeks to improve it, not overthrow it. Again, the structure of the binary—patriarchy versus matriarchy—leaves no space for a third term.

This Christian order is held in place largely by language, a power Granny clearly recognizes, as Bayard and Ringo get their mouths washed out with soap for swearing, for desecrating the sanctity of the word. However her assumption that she can knowingly sin and then attain forgiveness on the grounds that God has fallen short on the job marks a far greater challenge to the sanctity of the word and the text than the boys' curses. Her adherence to divine authority is tenuous at best; as Ringo says, “She cide what she want and then she kneel down about ten seconds and tell God what she aim to do, and then she git up and do hit” (93). Then, if what she does is a sin, she dares God to damn her for it. In qualifying the Biblical injunctions against lying and stealing, she challenges both Biblical authority and the fixity of linguistic meaning, particularly in the face of war. Yet even this potentially subversive response to Biblical textuality is based upon her belief in another patriarchal system: Southern chivalry, which should defend women and children. In being unable to imagine an alternative to chivalry, even though she herself lives one, she reveals the degree to which she remains firmly grounded in the patriarchal order. We need that third term to destroy the binary which, as Hélène Cixous would point out, is inevitably hierarchic. One of the elements in such standard oppositions as male/female or black/white is always more powerful. Thus, if we cannot break down the dichotomy we have not a binary but a unitary ordering.

In fact, Granny's dedication to chivalry and the binaries of gender it inscribes, literally kills her. While even the Yankee Colonel Dick is willing to protect Southern women and children, the outlaw Grumby is not. Granny's involvement in patriarchy has blinded her to its limitations. Living in a world highlighted by war's oppositions of north and south, black and white, she takes for granted another hierarchical system: class. Diane Roberts notes that Granny's “guerilla cunning fails to take into account the way the war itself has destroyed old verities of class.”¹⁷ The polarization of war causes her to idealize one side. If “Even the Yankees do not harm old women” (153), then she is surely in no danger from Southern men. She “still believed that what side of a war a man fought on made him what he is” (149), and so fails to realize that the same war which allows her not to be a lady also allows men not to be gentlemen. Once the laws of chivalry break down, women and children need to fend for themselves, yet the system which has placed them on pedestals has also denied them the means to do so. Granny, who wants to correct and perpetuate rather than overthrow the system, is ultimately victimized by it. As Mr. Compson says in Absalom, “we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts.”¹⁸ War destroys the lady, and in so doing, betrays the woman behind the lady.

Drusilla Hawk, on the other hand, vehemently rejects the lady's role. Though her mother believes she has achieved the perfect destiny when her fiancé dies in battle, “to be the bride-widow of a lost cause” (191), and thus chosen but sexually pure, Drusilla has other ideas.

Living used to be dull, you see. Stupid. You lived in the same house your father was born in … and then you grew up and you fell in love with your acceptable young man. … But now you … don't have to worry now about the house and the silver because they get burned up and carried away, and you don't have to worry about the negroes … and you don't even have to sleep alone, you dont even have to sleep at all.

(100-101)

Drusilla sees the war as liberation from domesticity and marriage, yet she fights to support the system which has imposed that domesticity upon her. Apparently unable to see beyond her immediate situation, she tries to become a man in order to preserve the man's world against which she rebels. Drusilla later claims that her aim was simply “to hurt Yankees” (191), but this brief statement lacks the power of her passionate condemnation of conventional female domesticity. While many Confederate women, in fact, expressed similar sentiments, and some few did fight, they were viewed, Catherine Clinton argues, as “gender traitors, impermissible patriots. Women dressing as men to serve as soldiers betrayed a fundamental tenet of Confederate faith.”¹⁹ To fight not only like a man but as a man defies the system which the men fought to uphold, to “protect,” as Aunt Louisa puts it, “the heritage of courageous men and spotless women” (190). Drusilla's cross-dressing violates this binary of “courageous men and spotless women,” illustrating Judith Butler's observation that drag may illuminate “the exposure or the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals.”²⁰ Cross-dressing exposes the ideals for which the South is fighting—stable racial and gender hierarchies—as a sham.

Not surprisingly, then, Drusilla's ostensible support of Southern patriarchy through her “manly” behavior in fact constitutes a more serious challenge to it than Granny's usurpation of divine patriarchal authority. Granny, who operates on the assumption that being a lady will protect her, does not seek to get beyond conventional gender roles; she is forced into action because of God's inattention to the situation, not through any apparent dissatisfaction with her sex. However, Drusilla's manliness does, indeed, radically “unsex” her, for her emphasis on her body suggests a more feminized kind of discourse than Granny's textuality. Women stand outside the realm of symbolic discourse as formulated by Lacan, who associates language with the child's move from a presymbolic union with the mother into the realm of the father. Thus Drusilla's use of a kind of bodily discourse represents a particularly feminine response despite its apparent masculinity. Having been objectified by a system which places women on pedestals, Drusilla then transforms that object into a subject by essentially speaking with her body. Her masculine attire speaks what she can barely articulate in language—her dissatisfaction with her gender. Drusilla, like Ringo and, to a lesser extent, Granny, also seeks a third position, one beyond the binaries of race and gender.

But only war offers such possibilities, as by intensifying binaries it also seems to circumvent them. Once the war ends, and the men reestablish control, women must fall back to their gendered positions. More thoroughly defeated than Granny, who at least gets a heroine's funeral and inspires a particularly gruesome form of vengeance, Drusilla ends up back in dresses and marriage. While ostensibly it is the women of community who impose this order, before condemning them too harshly we must remember that the male populace has no intentions of admitting women into its bastion of power; indeed, Drusilla's marriage is delayed while John Sartoris ensures that former slaves are denied their voting rights. Drusilla is tolerated only because she is one, not many, for the lone exceptions do not threaten male dominance. With both men and women trying to reconstruct as much of the antebellum white hegemony as possible, Drusilla stands no chance. Neither man nor lady, she discovers there is no acceptable third position for the likes of her, and must forgo even the costumes through which she had attempted to establish one. Bayard realizes, “But she was beaten, like as soon as she let them put the dress on her she was whipped; like in the dress she could neither fight back nor run away” (201). While this defeat by skirts may seem surprising, given Drusilla's strength of character, it fits with studies of the importance of dress, particularly in defining and protecting femininity for Southern women. In an examination of Southern women's diaries regarding Sherman's march to the sea, Jane E. Shultz remarks that large numbers of women express fear of taking off their clothes, even to sleep, and many more report wearing many layers of garments, both to protect the clothes from theft and to shield their bodies from violation. “Implicitly,” says Shultz, “the writers were donning clothing as armor.”²¹ Drusilla discovers that this armor does more than protect one's body; it determines one's identity. Or rather, it purports to do so, for Drusilla's behavior is not entirely dependent on her attire. After all, she successfully defended her horse against the Yankees while wearing her “Sunday dress” (90). Consequently, once “safely” married and in skirts, Drusilla becomes more threatening and mysterious than she was dressed as a man. She seems to become a femme fatale, sexually tempting her stepson and urging him to murder his father's murderer.

Her body speaks now not visually but sensually, through the verbena which she wears, “the only scent you could smell above the smell of horses and courage” (220), a smell which transcends war. In fact, it speaks even when she is absent. As Bayard walks to confront Redmond, he moves “in a cloud of verbena” (246). And not only does she speak her own body, she also reads other bodies, knowing the moment she kisses his hand that Bayard has eschewed violence. “Because they are wise, women are—a touch, lips or fingers, and the knowledge, even clairvoyance, goes straight to the heart without bothering the laggard brain at all” (238). This body language offers women participation in a discourse based on the literal rather than the figurative and thus a different kind of voice. Drusilla thus rewrites gender divisions, giving women bodies with voices.

Although this “voice” too is silenced, it clearly presents a far greater threat. As an ersatz man Drusilla can be dismissed as a freak, but as a sexually charged woman she is firmly ensconced within the system. As Bayard remarks, “I thought how the War had tried to stamp all the women of her generation and class in the South into a type and how it had failed” (228-29). But Bayard is wrong, as Faulkner's narrators so often are. The war had not tried to stamp all women into a type; if anything, war has opened up the possibilities for femininity by its defeat of masculinity. “And so now Father's troop and all the other men in Jefferson, and Aunt Louisa and Mrs Habersham and all the women in Jefferson were actually enemies for the reason that the men had given in and admitted that they belonged to the United States but the women had never surrendered” (188).²² Neither has Drusilla; she has simply shifted the terms of battle from clothing to what lurks beneath it, causing consternation not only for Bayard but for many readers as well. Even the more sympathetic critics of Faulkner's women have had some harsh things to say about her. Winifred L. Frazier identifies her as a “moon-cycled, bloody priestess … a symbol of destruction,” and David Williams calls her “a vessel of vengeance.”²³ While it is certainly the case that Drusilla urges Bayard to violence, at other points in the novel violence is not treated with the same moral outrage. When Bayard not only murders Grumby but, in a particularly grisly scene, pegs his corpse to the door, cuts off the hand, and lays it on Granny's grave, he meets not shocked horror but communal approbation. It seems apparent, then, that Drusilla's quest for violence is only condemned because of her gender. By using her femininity to urge men to fight, Drusilla seems to violate gender boundaries in an even more deadly way than by riding with the troops.

Why? What makes a womanly woman more threatening than a manly woman? Joan Riviere has suggested that women who wish for masculinity may “put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.”²⁴ Thus, Drusilla's seemingly “put on” femininity may be perfectly consistent with her cross-dressing. Yet whether or not Drusilla seeks masculinity, Faulkner, I would argue, seeks to uncover the precariousness of both masculinity and femininity. In a much glossed passage, Luce Irigaray claims that to find a feminine voice, women must “play with mimesis.”

One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it.

To play with mimesis … means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the “perceptible,” of “matter”—to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language.²⁵

Drusilla certainly makes visible the feminine by her not-so-playful acting out of female sexuality. Having had her gender reimposed upon her, she plays the role with a vengeance, and so uncovers the power of the feminine in language, particularly when juxtaposed to masculine discourse. “I thought then,” says Bayard, “of the woman of thirty, the symbol of the ancient and eternal Snake and of the men who have written of her, and I realised then the immitigable chasm between all life and all print—that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they cant, write about it” (228). Writing is reduced to mere compensation for lack of experience in a striking reversal of the experience of writing about war, where women are condemned to silence due to lack of firsthand knowledge. But somehow, in sexual matters, one's lack of combat credentials becomes an asset in representation. Yet even this linguistic power falls short, for all the words in the world cannot bridge the “immitagable chasm between all life and all print.” At Granny's funeral, Brother Fortinbride preaches, “‘Words are fine in peacetime, when everybody is comfortable and easy. But now I think we can be excused’” (137). War and sex leave words behind. So, in her deadly play with mimesis, Drusilla becomes a far more potent force than through her cross-dressing, revealing the inadequacy of the language with which men attempt to control the world.

In fact, in some ways it seems to me that she is now cross-dressing as a woman, and thus revealing how thin the veneer of femininity can be, as she becomes so powerfully feminine as to seem masculine, urging vengeance and fondling the pistols whose phallic symbolism she understands perfectly. “‘Do you feel them? the long true barrels true as justice, the triggers … quick as retribution, the two of them slender and invincible and fatal as the physical shape of love?’” (237). Sherrill Harbison argues that Bayard and Drusilla reverse gender roles here, and that Bayard's appropriation of the feminine succeeds where Drusilla's masculinity fails. “For Bayard, adopting the more ‘womanly’ attitude toward violence and retribution served to restore his family to good graces with the community. For Drusilla, adopting the masculine, chivalric code of honor, demanding satisfaction for injuries by retaliation, led to the loss of all she had.”²⁶ While these reversals may implicitly privilege the feminine mode by Bayard's triumph, it is the type of triumph Elaine Showalter describes in her famous critique of Tootsie: men teaching women how to be better women.²⁷ Gender has been reconfigured as men now colonize the feminine and incorporate it into a new masculinity, one from which women are as fully excluded as they were from the old one.

Yet a disquieting issue remains: that female sexuality may lead to phallic power. Though Faulkner backs away from this possibility and sends Drusilla packing, he does not erase it altogether. In transferring her power into a phallic gun, a weapon of war, Drusilla also opens up the possibility that war may not be the manly realm it has been assumed to be. As even the Yankees recognize, not only are Southern women not defenseless, they are not even defeated. By shifting the arena of war from the battlefield to the noncombatants, Faulkner privileges a different kind of battle, a more frightening spectacle than bullets and cannons. In fact, the combination of female sexuality and violence proves so threatening that it must be immediately exorcised by Bayard's commitment to nonviolence. For when women play with mimesis to the extent that they uncover a potential phallic power, they also open up the possibility that gender, as Butler argues, can be “performative—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be.”²⁸ This possibility is beyond even the power of the Civil War to provide. Miriam Cooke has suggested that only postmodern wars successfully challenge gender codes.

Whereas wars previously codified the binary structure of the world by designating gender-specific tasks and gender-specific areas where these tasks might be executed, today's wars are represented as doing the opposite. Postmodern wars highlight and then parody those very binaries—war/peace, good/evil, front/home front, combatant/noncombatant, friend/foe, victory/defeat, patriotism/pacifism—which war had originally inspired.²⁹

I'm not sure she's entirely accurate here, for Faulkner's Civil War literature opens up these possibilities, even if it does not sustain them. Gender may be performative, may be parodied during war, but as Garber points out, “Those who problematize the binary are those who have a great deal invested in it.”³⁰ This is, I would say, as true for Faulkner as it is for Drusilla. Thus, as Roberts says, the “collapsing of hierarchies is intolerable in a cultural narrative that demands [Drusilla's] subordination as feminine, as a lady.”³¹ This cultural—and Faulknerian—narrative, I would argue, demands more than her subordination as feminine; it demands her subordination as female.

Ultimately in this novel gender gives way to sex: if you are a woman, it doesn't matter if your behavior is masculine or feminine; eventually your body will catch up to you and neither great Neptune's ocean nor all the verbena in the world will wash it clean of female sexuality and thus subordination. Granting that gender is performative, what does that matter in a novel that keeps coming back to the body itself? And Faulkner, by setting this as a war story, drives home this point all the more forcefully. All the cross-dressing, all the captured uniforms (which Colonel Sartoris seems to specialize in), and all the captured stock will not substitute for human bodies. Victory generally goes to whichever side has the most people alive at the end, regardless of what they're wearing and what gender role they may be enacting. Wars open up all sorts of performative potential, but ultimately the body count determines the outcome. So it is for race and gender. Neither African American nor white women's bodies can long be ignored or masked. Granny is murdered, Ringo abolished, and Drusilla banished as the binaries—in which so much has been invested—are reinscribed. Yet something does remain. Though Drusilla may retire defeated, she leaves behind a sprig of verbena, “filling the room, the dusk, the evening with that odor which she said you could smell alone above the smell of horses” (254). That the odor remains, even after the body has gone, may offer a lingering hope for a system of identity both grounded in the body and independent of it, a system which can operate beyond the upheaval of war, even as the verbena can be smelled “above the smell of horses.” A smell, after all, cannot be cross-dressed and may thus offer a fourth term, a term which depends neither on binary logic nor its dissolution.

Notes

1. William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 143-44. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be noted parenthetically within the text.

2. Susan Schweik, A Gulf So Deeply Cut (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 3.

3. Anne Goodwyn Jones, “Male Fantasies?: Faulkner's War Stories and the Construction of Gender,” Faulkner and Psychology, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 24.

4. I am indebted to Susan Schweik for drawing my attention to the following examples.

5. Jones, 28.

6. Lion in the Garden, ed. James Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random House, 1966), 57-58.

7. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 343.

8. Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1966), 120.

9. Quoted in Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press), 265.

10. Margaret R. Higonnet, “Civil Wars and Sexual Territories,” Arms and the Woman, ed. Helen Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, Susan Merrill Squier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 80.

11. Drew Gilpin Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 176.

12. Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 4.

13. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 10-11.

14. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8.

15. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 349.

16. Faust, 194.

17. Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 16.

18. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, 10.

19. Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995), 98.

20. Butler, Bodies, 237.

21. Jane E. Schultz, “Mute Fury: Southern Women's Diaries of Sherman's March to the Sea,” in Arms and the Woman, 64.

22. Drew Faust suggests that, in fact, the Confederacy failed, in part, because women resisted the roles allotted to them and so refused to offer their full support to the war. Faulkner, on the other hand, seems to be indulging in the postbellum rewriting of the myths of the South, including that of the Southern women's unwavering support for the cause. Yet the nature of that support, particularly as demonstrated through Drusilla and Granny, suggests that they were not upholding the Confederacy as much as they were fighting for female power and expression.

23. Winifred L. Frazier, “Faulkner and Womankind—‘No Bloody Moon,’” in Faulkner and Women, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 169; David Williams, Faulkner's Women: The Myth and the Muse (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1977), 211.

24. Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen, 1986), 35.

25. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 76.

26. Sherrill Harbison, “Two Sartoris Women: Faulkner, Femininity, and Changing Times,” in Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The Sartoris Family, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 292.

27. See Elaine Showalter, “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and The Woman of the Year,” Raritan 2 (Fall, 1983).

28. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 25.

29. Miriam Cooke, “WO-man Retelling the War Myth,” in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 182.

30. Garber, 110.

31. Roberts, 24.