“Bad Health Is the Primary Reason for All Life”:Diseased Characters, Decayed Society
“Bad Health Is the Primary Reason for All Life”:Diseased Characters, Decayed Society

Summary/Abstract: Dealing with various mental and physical issues to be found in Faulkner’s not-so-imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha, the paper will focus on two novels with different scopes and reputations, yet similar spatial and temporal frames: The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Sanctuary (1931). Famous for his complex plots and stylistic intricacies, Faulkner introduces the reader to the visceral, irrational heritage of the deep American South. Intertwining real and fictional geographies, he places individual (hi)stories within the larger History of the region, dominated by tragic failure, violence, resentment, resignation, and the general collapse of traditional values. Retardedness, incest, castration, suicide, rape are by-products of a disillusioned and segregated society. Race, class, status, gender inequities insidiously underlie and shape Southern mentalities well into the 20th century. Deviant behaviors and their symbolic retributions are exposed as warnings against the unhealthy development of a nation which takes little care of its ‘marginal’ citizens, while it plunges into a destabilizing and often disquieting modernity. Published at the passage between two consecutive, yet very different (st)ages in American history, the hedonistically fulminant 1920s and the tragically decayed 1930s, Faulkner’s fourth and, respectively, sixth novels put forth unexpected insights into the portions of the self that used to lie comfortably hidden by the veils of tabooistic traditionalism.

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