SOURCE: Duvall, John N. “Androgyny in The Wild Palms: Variations on Light in August.” In Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities, pp. 37-56. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Duvall examines constructions of gender in The Wild Palms and Light in August.]

“What?” the plump convict said. “Hemophilic? You know what that means? … That's a calf that's a bull and a cow at the same time.”

—William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

When François Pitavy claims that Light in August begins “a search for a new form—a contrapuntal structure—which reaches an extreme development … in The Wild Palms,” he makes a promising move to connect Faulkner's seventh and eleventh novels (7-8). But this link may be elaborated. The Wild Palms, in fact, repeats not only the narrative structure of Light in August but also the earlier novel's delineation of the structures of community. Moreover, an Agrarian voice speaks through the criticism on The Wild Palms, just as it does on Light in August, inviting the reader to accept the values of the novel's textual communities.¹ Perhaps out of its concern for maintaining the sexual code comes Agrarianism's condemnation of Charlotte Rittenmeyer that also implicitly judges female sexuality; this judgment often sounds like the voice of Harry Wilbourne's “They,” the forces of respectability and conventionality.² Read with Light in August as an intertext, however, The Wild Palms more clearly questions our culture's binary construction of gender. This intertextual relation recalls the self-reflexive cohesion of “Wild Palms” and “Old Man,” another two narratives that publishers and readers initially had trouble connecting.

Both Malcolm Cowley's extraction of “Old Man” from The Wild Palms for The Portable Faulkner and the New American Library's decision to print the two narratives as discrete units rather than alternating chapters, it is now generally agreed, showed a misunderstanding of a profoundly and playfully unified text.³ Responding to Saxe Commins' news of the New American Library's plan, Faulkner wrote in a letter of August 3, 1953: “Dismembering THE WILD PALMS will in my opinion destroy the overall impact which I intended” (Brodsky and Hamblin, 117). Cowley's decision is perhaps more understandable if we recall how the openings of the two narratives stress their difference.⁴ “Wild Palms” immediately establishes a contract with the reader that promises conventional realism: “The knocking sounded again, at once discreet and peremptory, while the doctor was descending the stairs, the flashlight's beam lancing on before him down the brown-stained stairwell and into the brown-stained tongue-and-groove box of the lower hall” (WP [The Wild Palms], 3); “Old Man,” however, offers a fairy/tall tale: “Once (it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood year 1927) there were two convicts” (WP, 23). The endings of the two stories—the one a tragic indictment of the race of man, the other a comic indictment of the race of women—again signal difference. Harry Wilbourne still affirms the value of his love for Charlotte: “between grief and nothing I will take grief” (WP, 324). And the tall convict provides the punch line to his narrative's misogynistic joke: “Women _____t!” (WP, 339). Thomas L. McHaney assures us that “Faulkner's manuscripts and typescripts and his public statements about the writing of The Wild Palms reveal unmistakably that he conceived and executed ‘Old Man’ as a chapter-by-chapter counterpoint to” the other narrative, “Wild Palms” (WFWP, xv). An interesting contradiction, however, occurs in two of Faulkner's statements about the novel. “The story I was trying to tell,” Faulkner confided to a first-year English class in 1957, “was the story of Charlotte and Harry Wilbourne. I decided that it needed a contrapuntal quality like music. And so I wrote the other story simply to underline the story of Charlotte and Harry” (Gwynn and Blotner, 171, emphasis added). The hierarchy of the two narratives seems clear: “Wild Palms” is serious, realistic, tragic, and primary while “Old Man” is nonserious, imaginary, comic, and secondary. Yet Faulkner's 1955 claim about this novel works in a different direction:

I did not know it would be two separate stories until after I had started the book. When I reached the end of the first section of The Wild Palms, I realized suddenly that something was missing, it needed emphasis, something to lift it like counterpoint in music. So I wrote the “Old Man” story until the “Wild Palms” story rose back to pitch. Then I stopped the “Old Man” story at what is now its first section, and took up the “Wild Palms” story until it began to sag. Then I raised it to pitch again with another section of its antithesis, which is the story of a man who got his love and spent the rest of the book fleeing from it, even to the extent of voluntarily going back to jail where he would be safe. They are only two stories by chance, perhaps necessity.

(Meriwether and Millgate, 247-248, emphasis added)

“Old Man” in this version becomes necessary, something that makes possible both “Wild Palms” and The Wild Palms. This discrepancy in Faulkner's two descriptions of his novel embodies Derrida's twin logics of the supplement (Of Grammatology, 144-145). “Old Man” is at one and the same time the supplement as surplus, underscoring something already present in “Wild Palms,” and the supplement as a completion, filling a lack in “Wild Palms.” Thus are the two narratives doubly intimate.

The relation between The Wild Palms and Light in August, while not something Faulkner claimed to intend, also partakes of chance and necessity, suggesting another moment of supplementarity. Some traditional Faulknerians who see the Yoknapatawpha county line as the boundary of Faulkner's “genius” may resist my turn into non-Yoknapatawpha regions. Such critics do well to stay within the county borders, since the foregrounded androgyny of the characters outside Yoknapatawpha returns to problematize Agrarian assumptions about gender within Jefferson and makes the non-Yoknapatawpha a dangerous supplement indeed.⁵ In both novels two sets of women and men form unlikely unions that do not escape, but that do call into question the values of the larger community. The tragic lovers Harry Wilbourne and Charlotte Rittenmeyer are to Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden what the tall convict and the hill woman are to Byron Bunch and Lena Grove. Like Joanna, who orchestrated the early part of her relationship with Joe after the fashion of romantic love, complete with notes in the hollow of a tree, Charlotte has notions of romantic love largely determined by literary convention. Harry, though dissimilar to Joe in most respects, remains the passive partner in the relationship. Both males kill with a blade the women they love in response to a struggle over how the couple will live their future lives together. In both cases, the struggle originates as a reaction to the news of the woman's pregnancy. The tall convict and the hill woman, on the other hand, are almost a parodic inversion of Byron Bunch and Lena Grove—a story of a man's hatred, rather than love, at first sight.

Over and above these larger structural parallels between The Wild Palms and Light in August, the implicit and explicit contracts that delineate characters and define character relations in the opening chapters of the two novels prove quite similar. In “Wild Palms,” the conversations between the doctor and his rental agent, Cofer, and then between the doctor and his wife serve much the same function as Armstid's conversations first with Winterbottom and later with his wife. Just as the appearance of Lena Grove, a stranger, becomes the occasion for community values to reveal themselves, so too does the arrival of Harry and Charlotte, who are strangers in the small gulf coast town in which they find themselves. Although The Wild Palms takes place outside Yoknapatawpha County, the agrarian community is never far away and remains a site of exclusion, a place that marginalizes difference.

Winterbottom and Armstid, as I pointed out in chapter 2, ostensibly discuss the price of a cultivator while speculating on Lena Grove. The conversation between the doctor and Cofer also has an economic reality; we discover that the doctor is the lessor and Harry and Charlotte are the lessees.⁶ This conversation, more than setting out the terms of the rental agreement, allows the larger community (represented in its minimal structure of two people talking) to classify the strangers. Cofer, in commenting on Harry and Charlotte, focuses on differences. He notices that Harry has little money but that he is unconcerned about it “like he was Vanderbilt or somebody” (WP, 7). In describing Charlotte, Cofer provides the first clue to Charlotte's sensual androgyny: “She's got on pants … I mean, not these ladies' slacks but pants, man's pants” (WP, 6). Because Charlotte wears pants that are “just exactly too little for her in just exactly the right places” (WP, 7), Cofer concludes that Harry and Charlotte aren't married: “Oh, he says they are and I don't think he is lying about her and maybe he aint even lying about himself. The trouble is, they aint married to each other, she aint married to him” (WP, 8). In Cofer's risible silence lurks the judgment of patriarchy—female sexuality, manifesting itself through tight jeans, is a dangerous surplus. In this one small piece of character delineation—Charlotte's jeans and Cofer's reading of Charlotte's jeans—we find a microcosm of conventional society's relation to the lovers.

The doctor's wife, like Cofer, notices difference, especially a confusion of gender roles in the new couple: “She told the doctor about [Harry's] cleaning (or trying to clean) a mess of fish at the kitchen steps, told the doctor about it with bitter and outraged conviction” (WP, 9). She is also disturbed that Harry rather than Charlotte does their cooking. In a number of ways, the doctor's wife, Martha, is a reincarnation of Light in August's Martha Armstid. Mrs. Armstid is a “gray woman not plump and not thin, manhard, workhard, in a serviceable gray garment” (LA [Light in August], 17) “with a savage screw of gray hair at the base of her skull” (LA, 19). The other Martha “with her gray hair screwed into papers” (WP, 10) is “a shapeless woman yet not fat … who had begun to turn gray all over about ten years ago, as if hair and complexion both were being subtly altered, along with the shade of her eyes, by the color of the house dresses which she apparently chose to match them” (WP, 9). More importantly, Martha Armstid's charity, both the food she cooks and the money she gives Lena, is performed with the same “grim Samaritan husbandry of good women” (WP, 10) the doctor's Martha exhibits in preparing gumbo for Charlotte and Harry. Such acts of “charity” (“uncompromising Christian deed[s] performed not with sincerity or pity but through duty” [WP, 10]), often pointed at as signs of the health of the small Southern community, are anything but altruistic gestures. In accepting charity the recipient acknowledges the giver's right to judge; it is an implicit contract in which food is exchanged for an affirmation of the hegemonic value system.

Martha Armstid's desire to be quickly rid of the socially stigmatized Lena (“come sunup you hitch up the team and take her away from here. Take her all the way to Jefferson, if you want” [LA, 24]) again points to the hollowness of her charity and anticipates a similar moment in The Wild Palms; trying to rid her property of another socially stigmatized entity, the unmarried couple, Martha ignores the seriousness of Charlotte's condition and tells her husband, who is bent on bringing Harry to justice: “Put that [gun] down and give [Charlotte] whatever it is so she can get out of that bed. Then give them some money and call a taxi-cab, not an ambulance. Give him some of my money if you wont your own” (WP, 290).⁷ Martha's pronouncement on men that follows points out the complicity of men, specifically the doctor and Wilbourne, in acting out male justice: “I never yet saw one man fail to back up another, provided what they wanted to do was just foolish enough” (WP, 290). Martha Armstid is more succinct, but the sentiment is the same: “You durn men” (LA, 18).

A more significant parallel between Light in August and The Wild Palms is the recurrence of the father figure as destinator or quest giver. This ideological destinator first appears in the opening pages of “Wild Palms” through the delineation of the doctor. The doctor “married the wife his father had picked out for him and within four years owned the house which his father had built and assumed the practice which his father had created …” (WP, 4). The father even forms his son's beliefs about sleepwear and tobacco. The opening of the second chapter of “Wild Palms” focuses on Harry's relation to his father's “will” and creates distinct parallels between the doctor of the first section and Harry.⁸ Harry's father is also a doctor who plans his son's future. Although leaving the boy an orphan at age two, Harry's father is clearly a destinator, his desire made law through the word; Harry literally is subject to the will of the father as his father's legal will provides a small sum of money for Harry to use to pursue a medical career: “To my son, Henry Wilbourne. … I hereby bequeath and set aside the sum of two thousand dollars, to be used for the furthering and completing of his college course and the acquiring of his degree and license to practice in Surgery and Medicine, believing that the aforesaid sum will be amply sufficient for that purpose” (WP, 31-32).

The sum of money proves woefully inadequate, leaving Harry in poverty, yet we can see the extent to which he has internalized the father voice of the patriarchal destinator when a fellow intern, Flint, invites Harry on his twenty-seventh birthday to a party in the Vieux Carre. Faulkner's italics represent the dialogue of internal voices: “Now he did begin to think [about the invitation], Why not? Why really not? and now he could almost see the guardian of the old trained peace and resignation rise to arms, the grim Moses, not alarmed, impervious to alarm, just gauntly and fanatically interdicting: No. You will not go. Let well enough alone. You have peace now; you want no more” (WP, 35). The literal will, the physical document that is the law of and from Harry's father, becomes internalized as the voice of Freud's founder of monotheism, the lawgiver Moses. That the portion of the will pertaining to Harry is actually represented in the novel reminds us that the tall convict's desire, like consciousness itself, is an effect of writing. Just as Harry Wilbourne, whose direction in life is born in the will, lets the words of a text play themselves out through him in the first twenty-six years of his life, so does the tall convict allow pulp Western-detective fiction to author him.

The tall convict, whose outrage in prison is “directed not at the men who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and judges who had sent him [to Parchman], but at the writers” (WP, 23, emphasis added), proves an unsophisticated theorist of fiction, expecting in good faith that fiction should provide one with useful, accurate models for living one's life. His belief explains why, when he made his plan to rob a train, he read and reread his paperbacks, “comparing and weighing story and method against story and method, taking the good from each” (WP, 24).

Harry also momentarily reflects on fiction's relation to reality. After he has found the wallet full of money, he tries to figure out how to kill time until he goes on duty. His thoughts speak almost directly to the issue of the subject's creation through ideology: “Maybe I can read. … That's it. It's all exactly backward. It should be the books, the people in the books inventing and reading about us—the Does and Roes and Wilbournes and Smiths—males and females but without pricks or cunts” (WP, 52). Harry, in a moment of frustrated desire (caused by his inability to consummate his love with Charlotte), makes a teasingly ambiguous statement about the way characters in books produce the desire of readers. The confusion turns on whether the two concluding phrases (“the Does and Roes and Wilbournes and Smiths” and “males and females but without pricks and cunts”) refer to “us” (“real” people) or “the people in books” (not people at all but characters). A strictly grammatical reading would insist that both phrases modify “us,” leaving us with the odd sense that real people do not have genitals but that characters do. But as this moment represents a character's thought, we perhaps should not expect the sentence rigorously to follow the rules of grammar. (Thus, both phrases could refer to “people in books” or the first phrase could modify “us” and the second might modify “people in books.”) At any rate, Harry's list of generic names, whether of generic readers who should be characters or of generic characters who should be readers, is startling because he interrupts the series “Doe, Roe, Smith” with his own name, Wilbourne, making this a densely self-reflexive passage, one that traverses the line between subject and object. The reader reads of a character in a novel who distinguishes between real people and characters in novels but who blurs that very distinction in the moment he makes it by naming himself as a fictional character-reader.

Unlike the literalist tall convict, Harry correctly senses that fictional characters do influence the behavior of real people; novels may not be the best way to learn to rob a train, but they do provide models of how men and women can interact. In fact, Harry need look no further than to his own lover for proof of this. Charlotte's conception of love has a textual base; she tells Harry: “The second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself” (WP, 48, emphasis added). So in a strange way one of Charlotte's patriarchal destinators might be Papa Hemingway, since her lesson on love corresponds to Jake Barnes' “fine philosophy” of values in The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway, 148).⁹

In their attempts to avoid life's troubles by immersing themselves in exclusively male worlds, both Harry and the tall convict reveal themselves as literary cousins of Byron Bunch. Byron's escape from life in the all-male world of the planing mill is but a modified version of Harry's intern's dorm or the tall convict's prison. All three have their homosocial worlds shattered by sudden, unexpected encounters with strangers who are women. Both Byron and Harry immediately fall in love; but the tall convict's instant hatred of the hill woman does not negate his relation to Byron. Rather, the tall convict's story parodies Byron's. The tall convict, like Byron, has in his male world a special friend with whom he is particularly intimate, even to the point of being manacled together; the plump convict is, then, the tall convict's Hightower. Like Hightower, the plump convict, who has failed at all the manly occupations at Parchman State Farm, is delineated effeminately: “In a long apron like a woman, he cooked and swept and dusted in the deputy warden's barracks” (WP, 27). Similar to Byron's encounter with Lena, which causes him to end his communion with Hightower, the tall convict's rescue of the hill woman signals an end to the relationship with the plump convict. The parodic twist in the tall convict's story is that the similar exchange—a replacement of the male companion with a female—is unwilled and unwanted.

The Hightower-Byron relationship involves deep emotional commitment and is especially poignant when Byron chooses to reject his old friend. In “Old Man” the exchange occurs simply as the result of circumstance—the plump convict sees a chance to save himself from drowning and escapes the rowboat by grabbing onto a tree branch. The flood's current then takes the tall convict to another tree where the hill woman awaits him. The hill woman, like so many of the characters in The Wild Palms, is androgynously marked; when we first see her, she is wearing “a calico wrapper and an army private's tunic and a sunbonnet … her stockingless feet in a pair of man's unlaced brogans” (WP, 148), a description that recalls Lena Grove, who “wears no stockings” with her “dusty, heavy, manlooking shoes” (LA, 12).

Although the tall convict plays a similar role to Byron's, acting as a surrogate for the absent father, protecting and aiding the hill woman before, during, and after the birth of her child, the tall convict's relationship with the woman is certainly not based on love. Byron falls in love with Lena at first sight, but the tall convict's “first startled glance” merely reveals a pregnant woman “who could have been his sister if he had a sister, his wife if he had not entered the penitentiary at an age scarcely out of adolescence” (WP, 148, emphasis added). This last detail is telling for surely the tall convict is a case of arrested development, a man still psychologically a teenage boy. Here also the tall convict's putative destinator, pulp fiction, is recalled. We learn that he continued, after his incarceration, “to consume the impossible pulp-printed fables … carefully smuggled into the penitentiary” (WP, 149) even though these are the very texts that had “outraged” his eyes and robbed him “of liberty and honor and pride” (WP, 23-24). Hence the tall convict's disappointment that the hill woman is not the “Helen … [or] living Garbo” (WP, 149) he had hoped to rescue can be read as a male adolescent's idealization of woman and corresponding fear of actual women. Harry Wilbourne—another case of arrested sociosexual development, we should remember—writes pulp fiction and, although writing in a different subgenre of pulp fiction, Harry is metaphorically linked to the tall convict in a relationship of production and consumption of adolescent sexual fantasy.

The tall convict's goal, then, which is to get rid of the hill woman and “turn his back … on all pregnant and female life forever and return to that monastic existence of shotguns and shackles” (WP, 153), is primarily derived from his reading. It might be argued that the tall convict's first sweetheart, “a girl a year or so younger than he, short-legged, with ripe breasts and a heavy mouth and dull eyes like ripe muscadines” (WP, 338) is his legitimate destinator, since “the thought occurred to him that possibly if it had not been for her he would not actually have attempted” the train robbery (WP, 338). And yet the tall convict has already read his sweetheart into a pulp fiction plot; that is, as subject (which is ideologically produced by pulp fiction), the tall convict subjectifies the woman, postulating for her some “Capone's uncandled bridehood” as “her destiny and fate” complete with a “fast car filled with authentic colored glass and machine guns, running traffic lights” (WP, 338). The tall convict, who like Byron Bunch is described as steady, honest, and reliable, is influenced in another way by reading pulp fiction. He reads, one should note, material close to Joe Christmas' fiction of choice, “a magazine of that type whose covers bear either pictures of young women in underclothes or pictures of men in the act of shooting one another with pistols” (LA, 121). At times it seems as though the tall convict were Byron Bunch trying to talk like Joe Christmas. One might speculate that the convict's terse, tough talk to the hill woman reflects his reading of Wild West pulps.

Minority voices notwithstanding, conventional wisdom still sees Charlotte, because of her androgynous delineation, as another of Faulkner's warped and twisted masculinized women.¹⁰ Her androgyny is foregrounded when she meets Harry. She is described as having “that broad, simple, profoundly delicate and feminine articulation of Arabian mares” (WP, 38). One might recall here Joe Christmas' words when he leaves Brown to sleep in the barn: “Even a mare horse is a kind of man” (LA, 119). Charlotte's yellow eyes stare at Harry “with a speculative sobriety like a man might” (WP, 39). As she takes Harry by the wrist, her grasp is “simple, ruthless and firm” (WP, 39), all adjectives of masculinity in Faulknerian discourse; the description in fact recalls Joe Christmas' adoptive father, Simon McEachern. Even her handwriting is ambiguous, since it appears masculine at first but is actually “profoundly feminine” (WP, 81).

We see in Charlotte a portrait of a woman who desires, a woman in charge of herself and her relationships. Initially, she scripts her relationship with Harry: she invites him to dinner, she decides not to make love to him in the hotel room, she orchestrates the consummation of their love on the train to Chicago. Throughout the novel she more frequently initiates sex than Harry; this is what many Faulknerians have difficulty with—the woman who desires, for to desire is to be a subject (no matter how socially constituted that subject is), not an object. But Charlotte's desire encompasses more than sex. As she puts it more than once, “I like bitching, and making things with my hands” (WP, 88). As this sentence suggests, Charlotte's sexuality is closely linked to her art. In her desire to control her body as a sexual being and to create art, she relates herself, oddly enough, to Joe Christmas when she continues her speech: “I don't think that's too much to be permitted to like, to want to have and keep” (WP, 88); just as Christmas' desire for the peace of community—which is all he wanted—fails because of racial ambiguity, Charlotte's quest for subjectivity is too much to ask for in the world of “Wild Palms” because she threatens society's traditional gender distinctions.

Perhaps then the Agrarian hostility toward Charlotte can be explained by the feeling Harry first develops when he tries to argue against engaging a drawing room on the train and that he finally articulates when she announces she intends to work in the studio apartment she finds in Chicago: “There's a part of her that doesn't love anybody, anything” (WP, 82). What Harry learns is that there is a part of Charlotte that cannot be touched, that is inaccessible to him; this zone is her desire to create art, which neatly reverses Agrarianism's male subject/female object dichotomy. Instead of being the natural creator (mother), Charlotte wants to be the cultural creator (artist). Her desire to appropriate a traditionally male role threatens the Agrarian critic's way of seeing women.

The Agrarian stance toward Charlotte carries over into her relationship with Harry. This relationship, like Joanna and Joe's in Light in August, is seen not merely as fundamentally flawed but as perverse. But, stepping away from the Agrarian fear of the strong woman, we can see in Charlotte and Harry's relationship another alternative community based on shared codes of eating, thinking, and sexuality. The health of this alternative community can be seen in how quickly the defensive pretenses between the two disappear when they first meet. Initially, perhaps intimidated by Harry's apparent wealth—he wears a tuxedo—Charlotte lies about her talents, claiming to be a painter. Harry's frankness in revealing that the tuxedo is not his and that it is his twenty-seventh birthday prompts an equally revealing response from Charlotte, who mentions not only how she got the scar on her face while fighting with her brother but also obliquely her incestuous desire for her brother and the reason for marrying Rat (Rittenmeyer was her brother's roommate at college). Charlotte then clears up her lie that has bothered some critics, explaining that she sculpts. In a longish speech she tells Harry about her desire to create art “that displaces air and displaces water and when you drop it, it's your foot that breaks and not the shape” (WP, 41). This is not something she could say to her businessman husband with his perpetual expensive double-breasted suits. Charlotte and Harry's immediate ability to communicate openly points to the communion they will achieve.

McHaney asserts that when Charlotte and Harry are in Chicago “they are not in a community but in an indifferent impersonal world” (WFWP, 71). Because they are not in a cohesive community, “the lovers slip into mechanical roles,” since Chicago represents “a society which doesn't put obstacles in [their] way” (WFWP, 71). Yet a conventional morality does obtain in Chicago and elsewhere in Charlotte and Harry's travels north, west, and south. In Chicago as well as Jefferson there exists a structured hypocrisy of the hegemony. Harry's losing his job at the charity hospital where he tests people for syphilis is a case in point. Because Charlotte fails to write Rat one month, her husband sends a detective to look for her. The detective reveals the adultery to Harry's employer, and, as Harry puts it, “I was fired from a job which existed because of moral turpitude, on the grounds of moral turpitude” (WP, 96).

Of all the “deviant” couples in Faulkner, Charlotte and Harry are probably the most self-conscious of their marginality. In part this self-consciousness may be linked to Faulkner's own recently ended marginal communion with Meta Carpenter. In April of 1937, Carpenter married Wolfgang Rebner, temporarily ending a relationship with Faulkner that had begun in Hollywood two years before. Undoubtedly the most bizarre incident of this passionate relationship occurred when Faulkner decided to “introduce” Carpenter to his wife. After a short trip home in the summer of 1937, Faulkner returned to Hollywood with his wife and daughter. One night, at Faulkner's request, Ben Wasson brought Carpenter as his date over to the Faulkners' for dinner. This uncomfortable scene, which the author seems to have designed to humiliate Estelle Faulkner, registers the extreme contempt he must have felt for his wife at this time. The moment, however, made Carpenter sympathetic toward a rival whom she previously had held in disdain.¹¹

Although in life it is William who teaches Meta self-consciousness by such acts as the one just mentioned, in The Wild Palms Charlotte must teach Harry of their difference. When they first arrive in Chicago, Harry objects to Charlotte's finding an apartment so quickly, since he believes their first few days together should be a honeymoon. Charlotte responds, saying: “Listen: it's got to be all honeymoon, always. Forever and ever, until one of us dies. It cant be anything else. Either heaven, or hell: no comfortable safe peaceful purgatory between for you and me to wait in until good behavior or forbearance or shame or repentance overtakes us” (WP, 83). Charlotte defines love almost exclusively in opposition to the relationships of married couples. It is this opposition, ultimately, that proves to be Charlotte and Harry's undoing, a point I will return to later in this chapter. One of the worst things Charlotte can accuse Harry of is acting like a husband; at the Wisconsin cabin she tells him: “My God, I never in my life saw anybody try as hard to be a husband as you do. Listen to me, you lug. If it was just a successful husband and food and a bed I wanted, why the hell do you think I am here instead of back there where I had them?” (WP, 116-117).

The text, at one level, seems to support Charlotte's distinction between their love and the relations of married couples. The two representations of marriage in “Wild Palms” are hardly positive. The middle-aged doctor and his wife who appear in the first and last chapters of “Wild Palms” lead a barren, lifeless existence, lacking in purpose. It is difficult not to read this unhappily married couple as a veiled commentary on the Faulkners' own troubled marriage.¹² The other married couple, the Buckners, provide a different contrast to Harry and Charlotte's communion. When Harry takes the job with the Utah mining company, he and Charlotte share a one-room house with Billie (who calls herself Bill) and Buck, a couple slightly younger than Harry and Charlotte.¹³ This married couple have but one kind of communication—nightly “abrupt stallion-like” (WP, 192) sexual intercourse which the Buckners continue even when the extreme cold forces the two couples to move their mattresses together for warmth. Harry and Charlotte abstain from sex for the two months that they live with the Buckners, since for Harry and Charlotte private conversations are as much a part of their love-making as the sex act itself. The presence of the Buckners also works against those critics who wish to read “Wild Palms” as Faulkner's antiabortion tract. That line of reasoning claims: Charlotte has an abortion and dies; therefore, Faulkner did not approve of Charlotte and Charlotte is aligned with the forces of death. But Billie has an abortion too and lives through it, so apparently Faulkner felt no need to kill off women who have abortions.

Harry is a long time learning Charlotte's lesson on the opposition of love and marriage. When he suggests she leave the Wisconsin cabin and return alone to Chicago to take the job a friend has arranged for her while he waits in Wisconsin until a job can be found for him, Charlotte cries, “No! No! Jesus God, no! Hold me! Hold me hard, Harry! This is what it's for, what it all was for; what we are paying for: so we could be together, sleep together every night: not just eat and evacuate and sleep warm so we can get up and eat and evacuate in order to sleep warm again!” (WP, 118-119). Charlotte's message on love is repeated many times with different words, but the sense seems to be that love takes place only in the present, so to maintain love it is necessary to abandon all relation to or thoughts of the future. For Charlotte, putting energy into developing a space in which she and the one she loves will someday be able to love safely works against the notion of love; an act that defers love, even in the name of love, is not love. When Harry finally does take up Charlotte's view of love, he does so with a vengeance. In Chicago for a second time, he sees their life together become a routine, albeit a well-paying one. So on Christmas Eve, when Charlotte tells him that the store for which she works has offered to keep her on through the summer, Harry decides it is time to leave Chicago.

As McCord and Harry talk in the train station just before he and Charlotte leave for Utah, Harry responds to McCord's question about why they are leaving by saying “I had turned into a husband” (WP 132), the very thing Charlotte had accused him of while still in Wisconsin. He goes on to explain to McCord: “I had tied myself hand and foot in a little strip of inked ribbon, daily I watched myself getting more and more tangled in it like a roach in a spider web; each morning, so that my wife could leave on time for her job, I would wash the coffee pot and the sink and twice a week (for the same reason) I would buy from the same butcher the groceries we needed and the chops we would cook ourselves on Sunday” (WP, 134-135). Harry might have been more accurate had he told McCord he had turned into a wife. (“Househusband” certainly would not have been a word available in the winter of 1938.) Charlotte and Harry's life together in Chicago is marked by several gender role reversals. Charlotte goes out into the world to her job. Harry stays home, washes the dishes, cleans the kitchen, and goes grocery shopping. He supplements their income by writing pulp fictions that begin “I had the body and desires of a woman yet in knowledge and experience of the world I was but a child” (WP, 121) or “At sixteen I was an unwed mother” (WP, 123). Wilbourne's tales, which he bangs out at his typewriter in a state of near unconsciousness, are another indicator of an androgynous imagination, since they always have women as narrators and protagonists.

Although Wilbourne never fully recognizes his own androgynous humanity, he is correct in his reflections on the attitude of society toward his union with Charlotte. Referring to “Them” (the forces of respectability and conventionality), Wilbourne tells McCord that

Anno Domini 1938 has no place in it for love. They used money against me while I was asleep because I was vulnerable in money. Then I waked up and rectified the money and I thought I had beat Them until that night when I found out They had used respectability on me and that it was harder to beat than money. So I am vulnerable in neither money nor respectability now and so They will have to find something else to force us to conform to the pattern of human life which has now evolved to do without love—to conform, or die. … So I am afraid. Because They are smart, shrewd, They will have to be; if They were to let us beat Them, it would be like unchecked murder and robbery. Of course we cant beat Them; we are doomed of course; that's why I am afraid.

(WP, 140)

His belief that his and Charlotte's love poses a threat to conventional society is not paranoia. Despite the limitations of their lives, married couples such as the Buckners and the doctor and Martha look upon Harry and Charlotte with scorn or superiority. But Harry is wrong about a literal conspiracy. It might seem, therefore, like common sense to say that a chance of nature proves their undoing, since Charlotte's pregnancy cannot be blamed on Them.

Still, when Harry is arrested for manslaughter after Charlotte dies of complications from the abortion, the cohesive Southern community he finds himself in responds with judicial ferocity. The description of how the plump convict in “Old Man” was sentenced to Parchman could as well describe Harry's experience at the bar: “The paladins and pillars of justice and equity … during that moment become blind apostles not of mere justice but of all human decency, blind instruments not of equity but of all human outrage and vengeance, acting in a savage personal concert, judge, lawyer and jury, which certainly abrogated justice and possibly even law” (WP, 26). Just as Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden's relationship is read by the community in terms of its grossest stereotypes so that what people already believe is confirmed, so too are Charlotte and Harry reductively interpreted by the members of the small gulf coast town in which Charlotte dies: Adulterers and adulteresses will come to a bad end.

As in Light in August, the community demands its “nice believing” (LA, 317); that is to say, it uses narratives as a strategy of containment—all behavior must fit into certain stories. During Wilbourne's trial, the community's attempt to write its adulterers' narrative nearly unravels. Rittenmeyer enters the courtroom. The men can see only one possibility; the jealous husband has come to kill the man who stole his wife and killed her. Several men jump on Rat only to discover he has no gun. He wishes only to make a plea for Wilbourne, but this is so incomprehensible to this community of males that they shout him down: “‘Hang them! Hang them both!’ ‘Lock them up together! Let the son of a bitch work on him this time with the knife!’” (WP, 320-321). And so the communal morality play, though temporarily interrupted, works itself through to the end.

Despite the agrarian community's righteous reaction at the perceived threat when the invisible communities Joanna-Joe and Charlotte-Harry become visible, neither Jefferson nor the gulf coast town is threatened fundamentally by these alternative formations; the hegemony has already won the day, since both Joanna's and Charlotte's thinking about their sexuality is co-opted from the start by patriarchal categories; thus, these alternative communities' dissolutions are encoded in their origins. Although both women author their relationships with their partners, Charlotte and Joanna are, we might say, logocentrically prescripted.

Charlotte opposes love and marriage. In doing so, she buys into an opposition of passion and boredom, not to mention the whole tradition of romantic love, as Cleanth Brooks is surely right in pointing out. Charlotte's desire for an abortion is a case in point of how the metaphysics of romance, another form of male textuality, silently informs Charlotte's behavior. For Charlotte, another child would mean that she and Harry would “fall” again into the everyday, rendering their relationship like a marriage. Charlotte's pregnancy itself, which I suggested earlier invites the commonsense perception that here is surely naked nature, may be seen as another instance in which the romance tradition writes itself. Charlotte becomes careless about birth control in Utah because of another cultural narrative: “I remember somebody telling me once, I was young then, that when people loved, hard, really loved each other, they didn't have children, the seed got burned up in the love, the passion. Maybe I believed it” (WP, 205). Charlotte's misinformation reinscribes the love-passion/marriage-procreation opposition she lives by and reminds us that such binary oppositions are not determined merely from a particular source but rather are overdetermined—simultaneously shaped and reinforced by multiple voices and narratives. This pregnancy, then, more than simply a chance of nature, is an instance of culture's molding influence. Oddly enough, Charlotte's decision not to have another child because “they hurt too much” (WP, 217) helps us better understand Joanna's passionate desire to have a child with Christmas. Joanna is more sharply dualistic in her androgyny than Charlotte. Manlike by day, feminine by night, Joanna too operates from a binary opposition that determines her sexuality. Joanna's Calvinism, however, causes her to overlay an opposition of salvation and damnation on Charlotte's opposition of marriage and passion. Like Charlotte, Joanna sees herself in a romance plot, as suggested in particular by her concealing notes for Joe in a hollow fence post and forcing Joe at times to come to her through her bedroom window. These machinations stop, however, as Joe and Joanna's relationship enters its third phase, one that Christmas notices is like a marriage (LA, 289). Perhaps Joanna's position can best be summarized by her brief (non)prayer: “Dont make me have to pray yet. Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while” (LA, 290). In About Chinese Women, Julia Kristeva's reading of the way monotheism produces our eroticism through an economy of symbolic desire speaks to Joanna's dilemma in which she is trapped between the maternal body and the paternal prohibition of her jouissance:

Monotheistic unity [and hence any community worshipping a monotheistic deity] is sustained by a radical separation of the sexes: indeed, this separation is its prerequisite. For without this gap between the sexes, without this localization of the polymorphic, orgasmic body, laughing and desiring, in the other sex, it would have been impossible, in the symbolic sphere, to isolate the principle of One Law—One, Purifying, Transcendent Guarantor of the ideal interests of the community. In the sphere of reproductive relations (at that time inseparably linked to relations of production) it would have been impossible to insure the propagation of the race by making it the only acceptable end of jouissance.

(19)

For Joanna, marrying Joe and having his child would obviate expiation for her passion, since passion leading to procreation is not sinful. Her passion will be justified only if it leads ultimately to a child, which will allow her to be inserted into the symbolic economy of her monotheistic God. Kristeva, following Lacan, tells us that woman as such does not exist, but she also reminds us that “one can make a woman believe that she is (the phallus, if you like) even if she doesn't have it (the serpent—the penis): Doesn't she have the child?” (Kristeva, 22).¹⁴

When Joanna discovers she is not pregnant but rather experiencing menopause, she seeks entry into the symbolic via a different route. She reverts wholly to the masculine and speaks to Joe as if impregnated instead by the Word of God. In her final encounter with Joe, Joanna denies self-interest, claiming to speak the unmediated will of God, in her request that Joe pray with her: “I dont ask it. It's not I who ask it” (LA, 310). By renouncing the maternal body for the symbolic Word, Joanna therefore dies in this psychosexual economy as a male homosexual.¹⁵ This psychoanalytic interpretation leads us to conclude that the androgyny and its attendant gender role reversals that we see in Joe-Joanna and Harry-Charlotte are not in and of themselves sufficient to construct alternative community, inasmuch as androgyny also may be contained—and is in some ways produced—by the paternal Word.

“Wild Palms” ends with Harry sitting in his jail cell, masturbating while he thinks of his life with Charlotte. Harry, who has defied the social order, will serve his sentence at Parchman, that patriarchal institution par excellence with its all-male hierarchy (prisoners, trustees, guards, deputy warden, and warden). At this same prison, the tall convict is seduced into forfeiting his will in part by “screens against the bugs in summer and good stoves in winter and someone to supply the fuel and the food too; the Sunday ball games and the picture shows” (WP, 166), but more importantly through his participation in a system that simultaneously victimizes and supports him in the creation of “his own character … his good name, his responsibility not only toward those who were responsible toward him but to himself, his own honor in the doing of what was asked of him, his pride in being able to do it …” (WP, 166). The tall convict so believes in this patriarchal system that when the warden tells him he is being given ten additional years for attempted escape (a move necessary to protect the career of the politically well-connected deputy warden), he only says, “All right. … If that's the rule” (WP, 331).

But what is the “good” of the tall convict's good and where is the “honor” of his honor? Just as Harry's final appearance in the novel has autoerotic implications, so does the tall convict's final scene. As the tall convict narrates his incredible journey, the questions the other prisoners ask turn to sexual matters. They want particularly to know if the hill woman acted as his “wife,” “just from time to time kind of, you might say?” (WP, 333). Throughout this scene, the tall convict suggestively plays with the cigar the warden gave him. Denying sexual relations with the hill woman, the tall convict nevertheless claims he had to quit one job he took to finance the return trip to prison because he got into trouble with another man's wife. To this revelation, the plump convict responds: “You mean you had been toting one piece up and down the country day and night for over a month, and now the first time you have a chance to stop and catch your breath almost you got to get in trouble over another one?” (WP, 334). The plump convict's use of a particularly degrading term for a woman underscores the misogyny of this all-male world.

We learn here also, as the tall convict thinks about why he was not attracted to the hill woman, that the last time he had had sex was two years before when he apparently raped “a nameless and not young negress, a casual, a straggler whom he had caught more or less by chance” (WP, 335). Goodness and honor, it seems, apply only to other men. Women for this group of men are subhuman, things you merely violently master for sex. The tall convict might have forced the hill woman “if it had not been for the baby” (WP, 334), but experiencing the full procreative power of the woman as she gives birth on the island covered with snakes removes her from the realm of desire as constituted by his narratives of masculinity and femininity. Although Faulkner could not have been familiar with Freud's fragment “Medusa's Head” (written in 1922 but not published until 1940), the Greek myth and Freud's reading of it seem to speak to the convict's absence of desire for the hill woman. Medusa, the reptilian female with a human face and snakes for hair, represents for Freud a moment “when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, … essentially those of his mother” (“Medusa's,” 212). Such a woman “is unapproachable and repels all sexual desires—since she displays the terrifying genitals of the Mother” (“Medusa's,” 213). The Medusa myth for Freud has homosexual overtones, and the presence of the plump convict in the final scene reminds us of the incompleteness of binary sexual constructions because he reintroduces a homoerotic element. Each time the possibility that the tall convict had sex with a woman arises, “the plump one blinked at him” (WP, 333, 335). The blink registers the plump convict's surprise and disappointment that the tall convict might violate their friendship in this fashion.

The androgyny that pervades The Wild Palms is perhaps best summarized via parallel jokes in the two narratives. While speaking of his encounter with a doctor on a riverboat, the tall convict tells his audience that the doctor suggested he was a hemophiliac. The prisoners malapropianly think the doctor was calling the tall convict a hermaphrodite. “That's a calf that's a bull and a cow at the same time,” one claims (WP, 242). All agree that it is an insult. Similarly, when McCord meets Harry and Charlotte to help them move out of their Chicago apartment: “The manager shook hands with all three of them and expressed regret at the dissolution of mutually pleasant domestic bonds. ‘Just two of us,’ Wilbourne said. ‘None of us are androgynous.’ The manager blinked, though just once” (WP, 129). Here the manager repeats the plump convict's blink of surprise. Although we laugh with Wilbourne (and not at him—as we had at the convicts), the offense taken at the suggestion of deviance in one's sexual orientation is the same in both instances. In the world of The Wild Palms at least, one might more accurately reverse Wilbourne's denial—all of us are androgynous. There is of course no changing the novel's communal morality that narrowly conceives of masculinity and femininity, but readers might, one hopes, hazard greater sympathy for the androgynous couple, Charlotte and Harry. Although no hopeful alternative couple survives to continue the struggle against gender dichotimization, as Lena Grove and Byron Bunch do at the end of Light in August, The Wild Palms continues to push us away from an uncritical appreciation of community and toward a scrutiny of the socially constructed nature of gender.

Notes

1. As always, Cleanth Brooks is interested in community. Speaking of both The Wild Palms and Pylon, Brooks warns that “the loss of community has all sorts of distressing consequences. Among them is the disturbance of the sexual code and the concept of love” (A Shaping Joy, 266). Brooks tries to recuperate The Wild Palms by seeing “Old Man” as part of the Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner used to “provide a base line” for the novel (TY, 207). The problem with this reasoning is simply that “Old Man” occurs entirely outside Yoknapatawpha County.

2. The condemnations of Charlotte come whether she is seen as an amoral flapper, as M. E. Bradford (“Faulkner's ‘Elly,’” 186) would have her, or as an amoral earth mother, as David M. Miller (16) types her. “Charlotte,” Michael Millgate decides, “is to be criticized for demanding the abortion”; moreover, her “desire not to have [additional] children is … the outward sign of something lacking in her make-up, in her capacity for life” (172). For Sally R. Page, when Charlotte “attempts to use sexuality as a means of escaping the reality of life's limitations rather than as a means of reproducing life, she aligns herself with the forces which destroy life …” (134). Lewis A. Richards goes so far as describing Charlotte as a woman who “abandoned her two young daughters and her husband for carnality and lechery” (329); her “urging Harry to perform the illegal abortion on her is the greatest proof of her sexual looseness …” (332).

3. For Maurice Coindreau, “Wild Palms” and “Old Man” “illuminate each other, and without their alternation the deepest meaning of each would be lost” (62); Cleanth Brooks finds the two stories “lock into each other” while considering “the same human situation” (TY, 207). Thomas L. McHaney is more explicit: “What happens in ‘Old Man’ helps explain what happens in ‘Wild Palms.’ The physical events of the one correspond to the emotional events of the other” (WFWP, 108). McHaney draws numerous parallels in narrative structure, imagery, and language between the two stories. He suggests that the opening chapter of each forms “a miniature of the larger structure of the novel,” a structure that depends on “the motif of the circular journey”: “Wild Palms” begins and ends on the gulf coast and “Old Man” begins and ends at the state penitentiary at Parchman (WFWP, 39). Interestingly, Random House still publishes “Old Man” in its Vintage Three Short Novels.

4. Like so many of Faulkner's narratives, “Wild Palms” begins with a key incident—a young woman is dying in a small rented summer cottage while living with someone who is apparently not her husband. Toying with our expectations of a narrative beginning, middle, and end, the text forces us to attend not so much to what will happen as to how this moment came about. Our perception of the lovers is external, since it is focalized through a minor character, a middle-aged doctor. After this initial prolepsis, “Wild Palms” is presented chronologically. “Old Man” then introduces both the nameless tall convict, who has been sentenced to the state penitentiary at Parchman for trying to rob a train, and his companion, the plump convict. The chapter ends with news of a possible flood and preparations to evacuate the prison.

5. Writing specifically about Faulkner's war stories, Anne Goodwyn Jones notes that Faulkner incorporated both female physiology and feminine psychology into his “redefined man” (139). I am sympathetic to her claim that Faulkner was unable to work through the implications of his strong women characters (140). The rest of my argument, I hope, will show that Jones is not entirely correct when she claims that after 1929 the “project of reconstructing gender, for Faulkner, is over” (141).

6. For an in-depth study of the way financial transactions are foregrounded in The Wild Palms and Pylon, see Zender (17-29).

7. The hill woman and the tall convict also encounter their own “Martha”; that is, they are given false charity—bread and salt meat—by a woman who refuses to allow her male companions, who are also convicts, to bring the pair in the row boat onto their larger and safer boat (WP, 167).

8. McHaney points out that the middle-aged “doctor and his wife represent what Harry … and Charlotte, stifled in conventional marriage, might have become” (WFWP, 27).

9. To name Hemingway as the author of Charlotte's sense of love is somewhat arbitrary, but less so when we recall that a number of critics have noted parodic allusions to Hemingway in The Wild Palms—for example, the overall parallel between Charlotte and Harry and Catherine and Frederic of A Farewell to Arms (WFWP, 13-17), the drunken table talk of Charlotte, Harry, and McCord (including McCord's line “Set, ye amorous sons, in a sea of hemingwaves” [WP, 97]) and their pilgrimage to Oak Park in the style of The Sun Also Rises, and the tall convict's hunting alligators in which he is “like a matador” with his cajun “aficianados” [sic] (WP, 263).

10. Critics recently have begun to rethink Charlotte's androgyny, seeing it as a source of strength and tragedy. Karen Ramsay Johnson's “Gender, Sexuality, and the Artist in Faulkner's Novels,” which appeared shortly before my manuscript went to press, exemplifies this more generous reappraisal.

11. For a full account of this dinner, see Meta Carpenter Wilde's A Loving Gentleman (172-174). Blotner has a brief account of this evening in his revised biography (FABr, 374).

12. Symptomatic of the marital discord was the classified ad Faulkner ran in the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Oxford Eagle in late June, 1936: “I will not be responsible for any debt incurred or bills made, or notes or checks signed by Mrs. William Faulkner or Mrs. Estelle Oldham Faulkner” (FAB, 938).

13. The woman character named Billie/Bill makes one wonder what kind of self-representation Faulkner may be making here. Faulkner often seems to put bits of himself into his characters so that physical descriptions sometimes suggest Faulkner himself. Interestingly, in published interviews Estelle Faulkner usually spoke of her husband as “Billy.” Meta Carpenter Wilde, however, in A Loving Gentleman calls Faulkner “Bill.” Two times Charlotte comments on Billie/Bill's name, calling it “a perfect whore's name” (WP, 179) and “the whore's name” (WP, 209). These isolated references suggest that Faulkner may be making an indirect comment on his work at Twentieth-Century Fox, where he had been assigned to such films as Slave Ship, Splinter Fleet, Dance Hall, and Drums across the Mohawk prior to beginning The Wild Palms.

14. The phallus is not the literal penis but rather, as Kristeva uses it here in the Lacanian sense, “the very notion of exchange itself—it is not a value in and of itself, but represents the actual value of exchange or the absent object of exchange” (Mitchell, 395). In other words, “the child becomes all that would satisfy the mother's lack, … becoming the ‘phallus’ for the mother, all that would complete her desire” (Wright, 108).

15. Kristeva, following Ernest Jones, elaborates a psychoanalytic reading of the Christian myth of the Virgin impregnated by the Word. The Word or Breath emanates “not of the glottal sphincter, but of the anal” and “tends to prove that impregnation by the fart (hiding behind its sublimation into Word) corresponds to the fantasy of anal pregnancy, the fantasy of penetration or self-penetration by an anal penis, and the fantasy of an identification of anus and vagina: i.e., a denial of sexual difference. Such a scenario is probably more frequent in male subjects, and represents the way in which the little boy usurps the role of the mother, by denying his difference in order to submit himself in her place and as a woman to the father. In this homosexual economy, we can see that what Christianity recognizes in a woman, what it demands of her in order to include her within its symbolic order, is this: while living or thinking of herself as a virgin impregnated by the Word, she lives and thinks of herself as a male homosexual” (26).