A Good Man Is Hard to Find | Author Biography
Although she produced relatively few works in her short lifetime of 39 years, Mary
Flannery O'Connor is considered one of the most important short story writers of the
twentieth century because of her strange but interesting characters, her violent plot
elements, and her religious world view. O'Connor was a Roman Catholic writer who
knew that most of her audience did not share her strict moral view of the world. She
sought, however, to present a message of God's grace and presence in everyday life. Born
in the "Bible Belt" Southern city of Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, O'Connor's...
A Good Man Is Hard to Find | Introduction
Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" first appeared in the
author's short story collection by the same name, which was published in 1955. Since
then, it has become one of O'Connor's most highly regarded works of short fiction
because it exhibits all the characteristics for which she is best known: a contrast of
violent action with humorously and carefully drawn characters and a philosophy that
underscores her devout Roman Catholic faith. Critics have admired the prose and the way
O'Connor infuses the story with her Catholic belief about the role God's grace plays in the
lives of ordinary people. The story is disturbing and humorous at the same time—a
quality shared by many of O'Connor's other works, including her novels Wise Blood and
The Violent Bear It Away.
Though the story begins innocently enough, O'Connor introduces the character of the
Misfit, an escaped murderer who kills the entire family at the end of the story. Through
this character, O'Connor explores the Christian concept of "grace"—that a divine pardon
from God is available simply for the asking. In the story, it is the Grandmother—a petty,
cantankerous, and overbearing individual—who attains grace at the moment of her death,
when she reaches out to the Misfit and recognizes him as one of her own children. For
O'Connor, God's grace is a force outside the character, something undeserved, an insight
or moment of epiphany. Often, however, O'Connor's characters miss moments of
opportunity to make some connection; their spiritual blindness keeps them from seeing
truth.
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find'' is the title story of O'Connor's first short story collection,
and, therefore, often serves as an introduction to the rest of her fiction. The story is
enjoyable for its humorous portrayal of a family embarking on a vacation; O'Connor has
been unforgiving in her portrayal of these characters—they are not likable. However, in
creating characters that elicit little sympathy from readers, O'Connor has carefully set the
premise for her main argument: that grace is for everyone, even those who seem
loathesome
A Good Man Is Hard to Find | Summary
O'Connor's story is told by a third-person narrator, but the focus is on the Grandmother's
perspective of events. Even though she complains that she would rather go to Tennessee
than Florida for vacation, she packs herself (and secretly her cat, Pitty Sing) in the car
with her son Bailey, his wife, and their children June Star, John Wesley, and the baby. In
a comical instance of foreshadowing, she takes pains to dress properly in a dress and hat,
so that if she were found dead on the highway everyone would recognize her as a lady.
When the family stops for lunch at Red Sammy Butts'...
In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" an escaped convict and his companions murder a
family because of a series of mishaps on the part of the Grandmother. Thinking that an
old house is in Georgia rather than Tennessee, she insists that her son Bailey take a
detour that leads them to their deaths. Because she has secretly brought her cat along, her
son Bailey drives the car off the road when the cat leaps to his shoulders. Finally, she
blurts out the identity of the murderer so that he has no choice but to murder them all.
Readers are introduced to a quirky family and what appears to be a typical...
[The entire page is 903 words long]
Symbolism
Symbols, elements in a work of fiction that stand for something more profound or
meaningful, allow writers to communicate complicated ideas to readers in a work that
appears to be simple. O'Connor includes several symbols in "A Good Man Is Hard to
Find." For example, skies and weather are always symbolic to O'Connor, and she often
uses such descriptions to reveal a character's state of mind. In another story "The Life
You Save May Be Your Own," O'Connor ends the story with a man being "chased" by an
ominous thundercloud, because the man is feeling guilty for abandoning his...
The Civil Rights Movement
Fueled with the speeches of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and with the deaths of
several African-American activists, the civil rights movement was at its peak in 1955.
Just the year before, the Supreme Court of the United States had struck down legal
segregation in schools in a landmark decision. In 1955, Rosa Parks of Montgomery,
Alabama, made her heroic and famous decision not to give up her seat on the bus to a
white man. This single action engendered a widespread bus boycott which catapulted its
organizer, Martin Luther King, Jr., to national...
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the title selection of O'Connor's 1955 collection, has
received a great deal of critical attention. The story serves as an excellent introduction to
O'Connor's fiction because it contains all the elements that typify O'Connor's work: a
combination of humor and horror, grotesque characters, and an opportunity for characters
to accept God's grace. Critics were initially intrigued with O'Connor's use of violence in
her stories, uncommon for a writer—not to mention a woman—in the 1950s and 1960s,
yet they recognized her ability to draw characters with clarity...
CHARACTERS:
The Grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is the story's principal character. Her
religious epiphany at the story's end provides the philosophical thrust behind the
narrative. By giving her no name other than Grandmother and crotchety conversation that
provides much of the story's humor, O'Connor paints her as a tragically comic caricature,
one that a reader can easily, but wrongly, feel superior to. She is selfish and pushy; in
fact, her desire to see a house from her childhood results in the family's death at the end
of the story. The story's primary action involves a family car...
The Misfit is an escaped murderer who kills the family at the end of the story and shoots
the Grandmother three times in the chest. Described as wearing tan and white shoes, no
socks, no shirt, he is an older man with glasses "that gave him a scholarly look." By his
speech, readers can tell that he is rather uneducated. However, he speaks to the
grandmother and the others with deliberate politeness. He remains calm throughout the
scene as he instructs his two companions, Bobby Lee and Hiram, to take the family to the
woods. He says to the Grandmother, "it would have been better for all of...
Bailey
Bailey is the son of the principal character in the story, the Grandmother, and is the father
of June Star and John Wesley. He drives the car as the family embarks on their vacation.
Bailey's major importance in the story is his relationship to other people, especially his
mother. He allows her to boss him around and to convince him to go out of the way to
visit an old house she remembers from her childhood, where the family is killed. Bailey
seems unresponsive to his wife and children, allowing them to take advantage of him.
Overall, Bailey, who wears a yellow shirt with...
A Good Man Is Hard to Find | Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to
Find: The Moment of Grace
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In the following short essay, Clark discusses the moment of grace in O'Connor's story,
when the grandmother reaches out to touch the Misfit. Though O'Connor has repeatedly
explained the ending to her story, many critics remain confused about her intentions,
particularly those who do not agree with or understand her strict approach to religion.
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is one of Flannery O'Connor's most discussed and most
problematic short stories. The major difficulty involves the story's climax. Should the
Grandmother's final act—her touching of the Misfit—be taken as a token of true, divine
grace and spiritual insight? Or should the story be interpreted strictly as a naturalistic
document? Perhaps the Grandmother achieves no spiritual insight. One can find critics on
both sides of the argument. Since the issue is central to O'Connor's work at large, it is
worth further examination. While this question may ultimately be...
A Good Man Is Hard to Find | A Cloak of Grace: Contradictions in A
Good Man Is Hard to Find
In the following essay, Ochshorn attempts to dispel some common misinterpretations of
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" -mainly that the grandmother was evil and the Misfit was
misunderstood. Nevertheless, Ochshorn concedes that the grandmother's act of reaching
out towards the Misfit was a last-ditch effort to save her own life.
Flannery O'Connor was often shocked to find how people interpreted her stories. Some
readers of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" believed the grandmother was evil, even a
witch. Soon O'Connor set out, quite explicitly, in letters and lectures to detail the
theology of the story and the importance of the grandmother as an agent of grace. In a
letter to John Hawkes, she explained how violence and grace come together:
More than in the Devil I am interested in the indication of Grace, the moment when you know
that Grace has been offered and accepted—such as the moment when the...
Flannery O'Connor, Writer


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Born: 25 March 1925
Birthplace: Savannah, Georgia
Died: 3 August 1964 (complications from lupus)
Best Known As: Southern author of "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
Name at birth: Mary Flannery O'Connor
Writer Flannery O'Connor is best known for her short stories, the most famous being "A
Good Man is Hard To Find" (1953) and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1961).
Her stories are populated with misfits and fanatics from the American South and often
address issues of violence and spiritual faith. She died from lupus at the age of 39, having
also published two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear it Away (1960). A
posthumously published collection, The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor,
won the National Book Award in 1972.
O'Connor's novels: Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960).
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Biography
Home > Library > People > Biographies
Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was a writer of short stories and novels in which
comedy, grotesquerie, and violence were united with a profound moral and theological
vision.
Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, the only child of
Regine Cline and Edwin Francis O'Connor. Both her parents came from Catholic families
that had lived in the South for generations. In the late 1930s her father developed
disseminated lupus, an immunological disorder that causes the body to make antibodies
against its own tissues, and the O'Connors moved to Milledgeville, which had been the
home of the Cline family since before the Civil War. At that time lupus was untreatable,
and O'Connor's father died in 1941.
O'Connor graduated from Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville with a
degree in social science in 1945. A fellowship enabled her to attend the Writers'
Workshop at the State University of Iowa, from which she received a Master of Fine Arts
degree in 1947. While at Iowa she published her first short story and won a prize for a
novel in progress. After leaving Iowa she continued to work on her novel at Yaddo, the
writer's colony at Saratoga Springs, New York; in New York City; and in Connecticut,
where she lived in the household of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald.
In December 1950, on her way home to Milledgeville for Christmas, she became
seriously ill on the train and was hospitalized on her arrival in Atlanta; she was diagnosed
as having lupus, the same illness that had killed her father nine years earlier. The recent
discovery of cortisone made the disease treatable, but it was still considered incurable.
After several months, during which time O'Connor was in and out of the hospital, she and
her mother moved to "Andalusia," a dairy farm four miles from Milledgeville that Mrs.
O'Connor had recently inherited and that she ran with the help of tenants. Dairy farms,
the capable and efficient women who run them, and their tenant help figure largely in
O'Connor's later stories. O'Connor spent the remaining 14 years of her life at Andalusia,
writing and raising various kinds of fowl, including peacocks.
During the first year after the outbreak of her illness O'Connor continued to work on the
final revisions of her first novel, Wise Blood, which was published in 1952. Strong,
original, drawn with hard outlines and in a peculiarly modern style, at once bizarrely
comic and completely serious, it is the story of the ultimately futile attempts of Hazel
Motes, the grandson of a Southern fundamentalist preacher, to escape from Jesus.
Following the publication of Wise Blood O'Connor returned to writing short fiction. The
stories written between the summer of 1952 and 1955 (collected in A Good Man Is Hard
To Find, 1955) make it obvious that she had come into her own as a short story writer.
Wickedly funny, realistic, displaying her sharp eye for the comic and the grotesque and
her accurate ear for Southern speech, often ending in unexpected and shocking violence,
the best of them - "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," "The Life You Save May Be Your
Own," "The Artificial Nigger," "The Displaced Person," "Good Country People" - are
classics of the short story form.
O'Connor, who took her Catholicism as seriously as she did her writing, called them
stories about original sin. She described her work in general as being about the action of
grace in the world, about those moments in which grace, usually in the form of violence,
descends on her comically complacent characters, sometimes opening their eyes to an
appalling realization, sometimes killing them. Many readers find O'Connor's
identification of the transcendent with a violent and disruptive force unpalatable and even
more shocking than the stories themselves. O'Connor, however, felt that a violent shock
was necessary to bring both her characters and her modern secular audience to an
awareness of the powerful reality of the realm of transcendent mystery.
Although a softening of the bone in her hip caused her to have to use crutches, O'Connor
frequently accepted invitations to speak at colleges and writers' conferences in the latter
half of the 1950s and early 1960s. She took advantage of these opportunities not only to
give perceptive talks on the nature of fiction but to clarify her own position as a writer
"with Christian concerns." Such a writer, she said, was interested both in the everyday
reality seen all around (the level of manners) and in making that everyday reality
transparent to the underlying level of mystery, the level of the eternal and the absolute.
These talks, together with a number of essays on similar subjects, were edited by Sally
and Robert Fitzgerald and published after O'Connor's death under the title Mystery and
Manners (1969).
O'Connor's second collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge,
continued in much the same vein as the first. It was completed just before her death and
published posthumously in 1965. Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), has
some thematic similarities with Wise Blood, although it is very different in style. As Wise
Blood follows the protagonist's attempts to escape from his vocation to be a Christian,
The Violent Bear It Away deals with the efforts of a backwoods Southern boy to escape
his calling to be a prophet. In both cases, an act of violence plays a role at the turning
points at which the characters embrace their painful vocations.
O'Connor had to have abdominal surgery in the spring of 1964. Her lupus reacted to the
stress of the surgery and could not be controlled by drugs. In July she suffered kidney
failure, and she died in the Milledgeville Hospital on August 3, 1964. In 1972 she was
posthumously awarded the National Book Award for her Collected Stories. A collection
of her letters, edited by Sally Fitzgerald and titled The Habit of Being, was published in
1979.
Further Reading
No biography of Flannery O'Connor has yet been published, but there are more than a
dozen critical studies of her fiction. These include Leon Driskell and Joan Brittain,
Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O'Connor (1971); David Eggenschwiler, The
Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor (1972); Dorothy Tuck McFarland, Flannery
O'Connor (1976); and Dorothy Walters, Flannery O'Connor (1973), among others.
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Home > Library > Reference > Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Mary Flannery O'Connor
(born March 25, 1925, Savannah, Ga., U.S. — died Aug. 3, 1964, Milledgeville, Ga.)
U.S. writer. She spent most of her life on her mother's farm in Milledgeville, Ga. A
devout Roman Catholic, she usually set her works in the rural South and often examined
the relationship between the individual and God by putting her characters in grotesque
and extreme situations. Her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), combines a keen ear for
common speech, a caustic religious imagination, and a flair for the absurd that
characterized all of her work. With the story collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find
(1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), she was acclaimed as a master
of the form. Her other work of fiction was the novel The Violent Bear It Away (1960).
Long crippled by lupus, she died at age 39. The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short
Fiction is the preeminent American award of its kind.
For more information on Mary Flannery O'Connor, visit Britannica.com.
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Encyclopedia
Home > Library > People > Columbia Encyclopedia - People
O'Connor, Flannery (Mary Flannery O'Connor), 1925–64, American author, b. Savannah,
Ga., grad. Women's College of Georgia (A.B., 1945), Iowa State Univ. (M.F.A., 1947).
As a writer, O'Connor is highly regarded for her bizarre imagination, uncompromising
moral vision, and superb literary style. Combining the grotesque and the gothic, her
fiction treats contemporary Southern life in terms of stark, brutal comedy and violent
tragedy. Her characters, although often deformed in both body and spirit, are impelled
toward redemption. All of O'Connor's fiction reflects her strong Roman Catholic faith.
Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960) are novels focusing on religious
fanaticism; A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must
Converge (1965) are short-story collections. Her Collected Stories was published in
1971. O'Connor was the victim of a type of lupus and spent the last ten years of her life
as an invalid, writing and raising peacocks on her mother's farm near Milledgeville, Ga.
She died in 1964 at 39.
Bibliography
See her Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. by S. and R. Fitzgerald (1969); her
letters, ed. by S. Fitzgerald, The Habit of Being (1979); studies by J. Hendin (1970) and
K. Feeley (1972, 2d ed. 1982), S. Paulsen (1988), R. Giannone (1989), and B. Ragen
(1989).
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Works
Home > Library > Arts > Works by Authors
Works by Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
1952 Wise Blood. The first of O'Connor's two novels concerns a zealot who founds the
Church of Christ Without Christ, then blinds and tortures himself after killing a
false prophet of his church. O'Connor nonetheless refers to her work as a "comic
novel." A Georgia native, O'Connor began her writing career publishing short
stories, most of which were completed as part of her master's thesis at the
University of Iowa.
1955 A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories. The first of O'Connor's two story
collections, which help redefine the short story in the postwar period, includes
acclaimed works such as "Good Country People," "The Artificial Nigger," "The
Displaced Person," and the title story, perhaps her most famous and notorious
work, concerning the encounter between an insufferable Southern family and a
homicidal psychopath named The Misfit, who becomes an agent of spiritual
redemption.
1960 The Violent Bear It Away. O'Connor's second and final novel concerns the efforts
of a backwoods prophet, Francis Marion Tarwater, to escape his calling. The
book is an elaborate, symbolic treatment of the soul's tortuous struggle for faith,
drawing on the author's characteristic Southern grotesque elements.
1965 Everything That Rises Must Converge. O'Connor's second, posthumously
published story collection contains two of her greatest stories, "Judgment Day"
and "Parker's Back." Her Complete Stories would be issued in 1971.
1969 Mystery and Manners. This posthumously published collection of lectures and
essays contains O'Connor's fullest explication of her works, creative process, and
artistic vision.
1971 Complete Stories. The volume adds to O'Connor's previously collected works her
first published story, "The Geranium," and several other early works. It receives
the National Book Award and substantiates O'Connor's reputation as one of the
American masters of short fiction.
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WordNet
Home > Library > Reference > WordNet
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.
The noun Flannery O'Connor has one meaning:
Meaning #1: United States writer (1925-1964)
Synonyms: O'Connor, Mary Flannery O'Connor
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Quotes By
Home > Library > People > Quotes By
Flannery O'Connor
Quotes:
"I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best."
"It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he
writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they
have."
"There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could
get out of it, and however naïve that may have been, it was a good deal less naïve than
some of the limited objectives he has now. Today novels are considered to be entirely
concerned with the social or economic or psychological forces that they will by necessity
exhibit, or with those details of daily life that are for the good novelist only means to
some deeper end."
"Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad
manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary
manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that
produces writers."
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they
don't stifle enough of them."
For more famous quotes by Flannery O'Connor, visit QuotationsBook.
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Wikipedia
Home > Library > Reference > Wikipedia
Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Born:
March 25 1925
Savannah, Georgia
Died: August 3 1964
Occupation: Novelist, short story writer
Genres: Southern Gothic
Mary Flannery O'Connor (b. March 25 1925, Savannah, Georgia – d. August 3 1964,
Baldwin County, Georgia) was an American author.
Biography
Flannery O'Connor was the only child of Edward F. O'Connor and Regina Cline
O’Connor. Her father was diagnosed with lupus in 1937; he died on February 1 1941.
The disease was hereditary in the O'Connor family. Flannery was devastated, and almost
never spoke of him in later years.
Flannery described herself as a "pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a youleave-me-alone-or-I'll-bite-you complex." When O'Connor was five her aunt gave her a
chicken that could walk backwards, and it was this that led to her first experience of
being a celebrity. The Pathé News people filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with her trained
chicken, and showed the film around the country. She said, "That was the most exciting
thing that ever happened to me. It's all been downhill from there."
O'Connor attended the Peabody Laboratory School, from which she graduated in 1942.
She entered Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State
University), where she majored in English and Sociology (the latter a perspective she
satirized effectively in novels such as The Violent Bear It Away). In 1946 Flannery
O'Connor was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop.
In 1949 O'Connor met and eventually accepted an invitation to stay with Robert
Fitzgerald (translator of Greek plays and epic poems, including Oedipus Rex and both the
Odyssey and the Iliad, and also a respected poet in his own right) and his wife, Sally, in
Redding, Connecticut.[1]
In 1951 she was diagnosed with disseminated lupus, and subsequently returned to her
ancestral farm (see Andalusia) in Milledgeville. There she raised and nurtured some 100
peafowl. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, hens, geese, and any sort of
exotic bird she could obtain, as well as incorporating images of peacocks often in her
books. She describes her peacocks in one essay. Despite her sheltered life, her writing
reveals an uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. She was a deeply devout
Catholic, living in the mostly Protestant American South. She collected books on
Catholic theology and at times gave lectures on faith and literature, traveling quite far
despite her frail health. She also had a wide correspondence, including such famous
writers as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. She never married, relying for
companionship on her correspondence and on her close relationship with her mother.
She died on August 3, 1964, age 39, of complications from lupus at Baldwin County
Hospital and was buried in Milledgeville, Georgia. Regina Cline O'Connor outlived her
daughter by many years, dying in 1997 at the age of 99.
Career
An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 31 short
stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer in
the vein of William Faulkner, often writing in a Southern Gothic style and relying heavily
on regional settings and -- it is regularly said -- grotesque characters. However, she
remarked "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the
northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic"
(Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose 40). Her texts often take place in the South and
revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race looms in the
background. One of her trademarks is unsubtle foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of
what will happen far before it happens. Finally, she brands each work with a disturbing
and ironic conclusion.
Her two novels were Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She also
published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
(1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965).
A life-long Roman Catholic, her writing is deeply informed by the sacramental, and by
the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Yet she would not write
apologetic fiction of the kind prevalent in the Catholic literature of the time, explaining
that a writer's meaning must be evident in his or her fiction without didacticism. She
wrote ironic, subtly allegorical fiction about deceptively backward Southern characters,
usually fundamentalist Protestants, who undergo transformations of character that to
O'Connor's thinking brought them closer to the Catholic mind. The transformation is
often accomplished through pain, violence, and ludicrous behavior in the pursuit of the
holy. However grotesque the setting, she tried to portray her characters as they might be
touched by divine grace. This ruled out a sentimental understanding of the stories'
violence, as of her own illness. O'Connor wrote: "Grace changes us and change is
painful." She also had a deeply sardonic sense of humor, often based in the disparity
between her characters' limited perceptions and the awesome fate awaiting them. Another
source of humor is frequently found in the attempt of well-meaning liberals to cope with
the rural South on their own terms. O'Connor uses such characters' inability to come to
terms with race, poverty, and fundamentalism, other than in sentimental illusions, as an
example of the failure of the secular world in the twentieth century.
However, several stories reveal that O'Connor was familiar with some of the most
sensitive contemporary issues that her liberal and fundamentalist characters might
encounter. She was aware of the Holocaust, touching on it closely in one famous story,
"The Displaced Person." Integration comes up in "Everything that Rises Must Converge,"
and O'Connor's fiction became more and more concerned with race as she neared the end
of her life.
Her best friend, Betty Hester, received a weekly letter from O'Connor for over a decade.
These letters provided the bulk of the correspondence collected in The Habit of Being, a
selection of O'Connor's letters that was edited by Sally Fitzgerald. The reclusive Hester
was given the pseudonym "A.," and her identity was not known until she died in 1998.
Much of O'Connor's best-known writing on religion, writing, and the South is contained
in these and other letters.
The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor, is a prize
given annually to an outstanding collection of short stories.
Bibliography
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Wise Blood, 1952
The Life You Save May Be Your Own, 1953
A Good Man Is Hard To Find, 1955
The Violent Bear It Away, 1960
A Memoir of Mary Ann (Editor and author of introduction), 1962
Everything That Rises Must Converge, 1965
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert
Fitzgerald, 1969
The Habit of Being: Letters, Edited by Sally Fitzgerald, 1979
The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews, Edited by Carter W. Martin,
1983
Compilations:
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Three by Flannery O'Connor (contains Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard To
Find, and The Violent Bear It Away), 1964
Three by Flannery O'Connor (contains Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away and
Everything That Rises Must Converge), 1983


The Complete Short Stories, 1971
Collected Works (contains Wise Blood, A Good Man Is Hard To Find, The Violent
Bear It Away, and Everything That Rises Must Converge), edited by Sally
Fitzgerald, 1988
Unfinished Works:

Fragments exist of an unfinished novel tentatively titled Why Do the Heathen
Rage? that draws from several of her short stories, including "Why Do the
Heathen Rage?" "The Enduring Chill," and "The Partridge Festival."
Other facts




Her father died from lupus when she was 15.
She herself was diagnosed with lupus. She was only expected to live five more
years; she lived nearly 15.
She completed over two dozen short stories and two novels while lupus ravaged
her body.
The last story she published before dying was called "Judgement Day", which
was a drastically rewritten version of her first published story, titled "The
Geranium".
Footnotes
1. ^ Various sources incorrectly cite Ridgefield, Connecticut as Fitzgerald's home
from the 1940s into the 1960s. He, in fact, lived on Seventy Acres Road in the
adjacent town of Redding, Connecticut. He and Flannery O'Connor used a
Ridgefield mailing address on their correspondence because, in those days, rural
delivery to that portion of Redding was done by the Ridgefield post office. This
has been confirmed by articles that have appeared in The Redding Pilot, the local
newspaper, as well as searches through Ridgefield and Redding records.
External links
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Literary Encyclopedia biography
Biography
PAL
O'Connor's home in Milledgeville, Georgia
Flannery O'Connor Frequently Asked Questions
Flannery O'Connor: Heaven Suffereth Violence
Flannery O'Connor Collection at the Georgia College & State University
Flannery O'Connor in Georgia
Everything That Rises Must Converge at Flannery ToxicUniverse.com article by
David Abrams
Reading Between the Lines Ragged Edge Magazine article by Louise Norlie

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Presenting Disability and Illness Disability Studies Quarterly article by Nicole
Markotic
Who's Afraid of Flannery O'Connor? Credenda article by Douglas Jones
Summary of "Good Country People"
In Search of Flannery O'Connor New York Times travel article by Lawrence
Downes, February 4, 2007
The Works of Flannery O'Connor
Novels: Wise Blood • The Violent Bear It Away • Why Do the Heathen Rage?
(unfinished)
Short Stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find • The River • The Life You Save May Be
Your Own • A Stroke of Good Fortune • A Temple of the Holy Ghost • The Artificial
Nigger • A Circle in the Fire • A Late Encounter with the Enemy • Good Country People
• The Displaced Person • Everything That Rises Must Converge • Greenleaf • A View of
the Woods • The Enduring Chill • The Comforts of Home • The Lame Shall Enter First •
Revelation • Parker's Back • Judgment Day • The Geranium • The Barber • Wildcat • The
Crop • The Turkey • The Train • An Afternoon in the Woods • The Partridge Festival
Collections: A Good Man Is Hard To Find • Everything That Rises Must Converge •
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose • The Habit of Being: Letters • The Presence of
Grace and Other Book Reviews
Persondata
NAME
O'Connor, Flannery
ALTERNATIVE NAMES O'Connor, Mary Flannery
SHORT DESCRIPTION American novelist, short story writer
DATE OF BIRTH
March 25 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH
Savannah, Georgia
DATE OF DEATH
August 3 1964
PLACE OF DEATH
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William Faulkner, Writer
Born: 25 September 1897
Birthplace: New Albany, Mississippi
Died: 6 July 1962 (heart attack)
Best Known As: American author of As I Lay Dying
Name at birth: William Cuthbert Falkner
William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying (1930) and other
novels, short stories and plays. Many of his stories took place in
fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and Faulkner's
writings gave an almost mythological status to the culture of the
southeastern United States. He also wrote screenplays for
Hollywood, including the 1944 adaptation of Raymond
Chandler's The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Source
Bacall. His most famous novels include The Sound and the Fury
(1929), Light in August (1932), Absalom! Absalom! (1936), and The Reivers (1962). In
1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature ""for his powerful and artistically
unique contribution to the modern American novel."
During World War I, when Faulkner was trying to get into the Royal Air Force in Canada
(he was too short for the Americans), he changed the spelling of his name so it would
look more English. Faulkner did join the RAF, but never made it overseas... Faulker was
preceded as Nobel Laureate by T.S. Eliot (1948) and followed by Bertrand Russell
(1950).
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Writer
Home > Library > People > Actors
William Faulkner
Born: Sep 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi
Died: 1962
Occupation: Writer
Active: '30s-'60s, '80s
Major Genres: Drama, Adventure
Career Highlights: The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, Gunga Din
First Major Screen Credit: Today We Live (1933)
Biography
Distinguished American author William Faulkner has written numerous classic novels
and has won both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. Many of his works have been adapted
into films including Sound and the Fury (1959) and The Reivers (1969). Though others
adapted his work, Faulkner refused to adapt it himself. He did however work on the
screenplays of others and frequently worked in conjunction with Howard Hawks. ~
Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
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Biography
Home > Library > People > Biographies
William Faulkner
William Faulkner (1897-1962), a major American 20th-century novelist, chronicled the
decline and decay of the aristocratic South with an imaginative power and psychological
depth that transcend mere regionalism.
William Faulkner was born on Sept. 25, 1897, in New Albany, Miss. He grew up in
Oxford, Miss., which appears in his fiction as "Jefferson" in "Yoknapatawpha County."
William was the oldest of four brothers. Both parents came from wealthy families
reduced to genteel poverty by the Civil War. A great-grandfather, Col. William Falkner
(as the family spelled its name), had authored The White Rose of Memphis, a popular
success of the 1880s. William's father owned a hardware store and livery stable in Oxford
and later became business manager of the state university. William attended public
school only fitfully after the fifth grade; he never graduated from high school.
In 1918, after the U.S. Army rejected him for being underweight and too short (5 feet 5
inches), Faulkner enlisted in the Canadian Air Force. During his brief service in World
War I, he suffered a leg injury in a plane accident. In 1918 he was demobilized and made
an honorary second lieutenant.
In 1919 Faulkner enrolled at the University of Mississippi as a special student but left the
next year for New York City. After several odd jobs in New York and Mississippi, he
became postmaster at the Mississippi University Station; he was fired in 1924. In 1925 he
and a friend made a walking tour of Europe, returning home in 1926.
During the years 1926-1930 Faulkner published a series of distinguished novels, none
commercially successful. But in 1931 the success of Sanctuary, written expressly to make
money, freed him of financial worries. He went to Hollywood for a year as a scenarist
and an adviser.
It was not until after World War II that Faulkner received critical acclaim. French critics
recognized his power first; André Malraux wrote an appreciative preface to Sanctuary,
and Jean Paul Sartre wrote a long critical essay on Faulkner. The turning point for
Faulkner's reputation came in 1946, when Malcolm Cowley published the influential The
Portable Faulkner (at this time all of Faulkner's books were out of print!).
The groundswell of praise for Faulkner's work culminated in a 1950 Nobel Prize for
literature. His 1955 lecture tour of Japan is recorded in Faulkner at Nagano (1956). In
1957-1958 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia; his dialogues with
students make up Faulkner in the University (1959). William Faulkner: Essays, Speeches
and Public Letters (1965) and The Faulkner-Cowley File (1966) offer further insights into
the man.
Faulkner had married Estelle Oldham in 1929, and they lived together in Oxford until his
death on July 6, 1962. He was a quiet, dapper, courteous man, mustachioed and sharpeyed. He steadfastly refused the role of celebrity: he permitted no prying into his private
life and rarely granted interviews.
Poetry and Short Stories
During the early 1920s Faulkner wrote poetry and fiction. In the volume of verse The
Marble Faun (1922), a printer's error allegedly introduced the "u" into the author's name,
which he decided to retain. The money for another book of poems, The Green Bough
(1933), was supplied by a lawyer friend, Philip Stone, on whom the lawyer in Faulkner's
later fiction is modeled. Faulkner's poetry shows the poet's taste for language but lacks
stylistic discipline.
Faulkner is considered a fine practitioner of the short-story form, and some of his stories,
such as "A Rose for Emily," are widely anthologized. His collections - These Thirteen
(1931), Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), Go Down, Moses and Other Stories
(1942), and Knight's Gambit (1949) - deal with themes similar to those in his novels and
include many of the same characters.
Early Novels
Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927) precede Sartoris (1927), Faulkner's first
important work, in which he begins his Yoknapatawpha saga. This saga, Faulkner's
imaginative recreation of the tragedy of the American South, is a Balzacian provincial
cycle in which each novel interrelates, clarifies, and redefines the characters. The central
figure is Bayard Sartoris, returned from the war, who drives and drinks violently to
compensate for his sense of alienation. He seems determined to find some extraordinary
form of self-destruction. He becomes an experimental aviator and dies in a crash, leaving
his pregnant wife to sustain the family name. The novel introduces families that reappear
in many of Faulkner's novels and stories: the Sartoris and Compson families, representing
the agrarian, aristocratic Old South; and the Snopes clan, representing the ruthless,
mercantile New South.
"The Sound and the Fury"
The book generally regarded as Faulkner's masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury (1929),
is a radical departure from conventional novelistic form. It uses a stream-ofconsciousness method, rendering a different type of mentality in each of its four sections.
The title, taken from Macbeth's utterance of cosmic despair in Shakespeare's play, is a
clue to the profound pessimism of the novel, which records the decay and degeneracy of
the Compson family and, by implication, of the aristocratic South. It is difficult to read,
and Faulkner's "Appendix," written much later at the publisher's request, hardly clarifies
it.
Each section takes place in a single day; three sections are set in 1928 and one in 1910.
The difficulties begin with the fact that the 1910 section is placed second in the book, and
the other three are not sequential in their 1928 three-day span. Further, the opening
section is rendered in the stream of consciousness of an idiot, who cannot distinguish past
from present.
Unquestionably the most difficult for Faulkner to write, the Benjy section (of April 7,
1928) is also the most difficult to read. It has been likened to a prose poem, with the
succeeding three sections being simply variations on its theme of futility. Because the
mentally impaired Benjy lives in a state of timelessness, his report is purely sensuous,
and the reader must figure out his own chronology. Faulkner gives two aids: the device of
signaling time shifts by alternating the typeface between bold and italic, and the variance
of the African American attending Benjy (Roskus and Dilsey ca. 1898; Versh, T.P., and
Frony ca. 1910; Luster ca. 1928).
Out of Benjy's garbled report come a number of facts and motifs. He is 33 years old, in
the constant care of an African American youth named Luster. Benjy is tormented by the
absence of his sister, Candace, though she has been out of the household for 18 years;
each time he hears golfers on the neighboring course call "Caddy!" (coincidentally her
nickname), he is painfully reminded of her. The golf course, formerly part of the
Compson estate, was sold so that Benjy's older brother, Quentin, could attend Harvard,
where he committed suicide in 1910. Mrs. Compson is a self-pitying woman; Mr.
Compson was a drunkard; Uncle Maury was a womanizer; Candace was sexually
promiscuous and, in turn, her daughter, confusingly called Quentin (after her dead uncle),
is also promiscuous. Benjy has been castrated at his brother Jason's order.
Ironically, the most sensitive and intelligent Compson, Quentin (whose day in the novel
is June 1, 1910), shares Benjy's obsession about their sister. Candace and the past
dominate Quentin's section, which is set in Boston on the day he commits suicide. His
musings add more facts in the novel's mosaic. The head of the family, Mr. Compson, is
wise but cynical and despairing. Quentin has falsely confessed incest with Candace to his
father; the father has not believed him. Quentin had fought one of Candace's lovers over
her "honor." He is oppressed by knowing that the pregnant Candace is to be married off
to a northern banker; the impending marriage is symbolic to Quentin of his irremediable
and intolerable severance from Candace and is the reason for his suicidal state. Quentin's
ludicrously methodical preparations for his suicide culminate when the last thing he does
before leaving to kill himself is brush his teeth.
Jason (his day in the novel is April 6, 1928) is one of the great comic villains of literature.
He has an irrational, jealous loathing of Candace. Now head of the family, he complains
bitterly of his responsibilities as guardian of Candace's daughter, Quentin, while
systematically stealing the money Candace sends for her care. Jason is cast in the Snopes
mold - materialistic, greedy, and cunning. What makes him humorous is his self-pity. He
sees himself as victim - of Candace, who he feels has cost him a desired job; of his niece,
whose promiscuity seems a personal affront; of Benjy, whose condition causes
embarrassment; of Mrs. Compson, whom he constantly bullies and whose inefficiency
has burdened him; of the Jews, whom he blames for his stock market losses; of the
servants, whose employment necessitates his own work at a menial job. Jason's lack of
soul is evident in all his habits. He leaves no mark on anything and lives totally in the
present - the perfect Philistine of the New South.
The novel's final section, the only one told in the third person, gives the point of view of
the sensible old black servant, Dilsey (her day is April 8, 1928). As with other Faulkner
African Americans, her presence is chiefly functional: her good sense and solidity point
up the decadence of the whites. In this section Jason meets with an ironic, overwhelming
defeat. The novel's chief social implication is that the South is doomed.
Novels of the 1930s
As I Lay Dying (1930) is a farcical burlesque epic, again using the multiple stream-ofconsciousness method to tell the grotesque, humorous story of a family of poor whites
intent on fulfilling the mother's deathbed request for burial. Sanctuary (1931), taken
seriously by most critics, was discounted by Faulkner as a "potboiler." It is the lurid tale
of Popeye, a sexually mutilated bootlegger, who has degenerate sexual acts performed for
his gratification. One of his victims is a college girl whose lie in Popeye's behalf at the
trial of another bootlegger results in the latter's conviction of Popeye's crime. In an ironic
ending, Popeye is hanged for a crime of which he is innocent.
The story in Light in August (1932) takes place in a single day. It is overly complicated
by a subplot. Beginning with a pregnant girl searching for her lover, this plot is
subordinated to the story of Joe Christmas (same initials as Jesus Christ), whose uncertain
racial identity perplexes him. Though structurally unsound, Light in August generates
enormous power and probably ranks second among Faulkner's books.
Late Novels
Faulkner's creativity ebbed after 1935. Though occasionally interesting and fitfully
brilliant, his work tended to be increasingly repetitious, perverse, and mannered to the
point of self-parody.
Pylon (1935), one of Faulkner's weakest novels, is the story of a flying circus team.
Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is an extremely complex novel; the title comes from the
biblical cry of David ("My son, my son!"). This novel tells of a poor white from the
Virginia hills who marries an aristocractic Mississippi woman, inadvertently launching a
three-generation family cycle of violence, degeneracy, and mental retardation.
Two minor novels, The Unvanquished (1938) and The Wild Palms (1939), were followed
by an uneven but intriguing satire of the Snopes clan, The Hamlet (1940). Of this novel's
four parts, the first and the last manifest Faulkner's greatest faults: they are talky and
oblique and seem out of focus. The middle sections, however, are Faulkner at his best.
Intruder in the Dust (1948) takes a liberal view of southern race relations. Lucas
Beauchamp, an eccentric old African American, is saved from a false murder charge
through the efforts of fair-minded whites. A Fable (1954) is a very poor parable of Christ
and Judas. The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962), a trilogy that
is part of the Yoknapatawpha saga, are generally regarded as minor works.
Further Reading
Faulkner's thoughts on literature and many other subjects can be found in James B.
Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William
Faulkner, 1926-1962 (1968). Faulkner is discussed in several memoirs: John Faulkner,
My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Reminiscence (1963), and Murry C. Falkner, The
Falkners of Mississippi: A Memoir (1967). A biography of Faulkner is in the introduction
of Edmond L. Volpe, A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (1964). Some of the best
critical work on Faulkner is in Frederick J.
Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery, eds., William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism
(1960). Although Joseph Blotner's biography, in progress, should be the definitive work,
useful studies of Faulkner's life and work include Irving Malin, William Faulkner: An
Interpretation (1957); William Van O'Connor, William Faulkner (1959); Hyatt Howe
Waggoner, William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (1959); Michael Millgate,
The Achievement of William Faulkner (1966); and H. Edward Richardson, William
Faulkner: Journey to Self-Discovery (1969). See also Robert Penn Warren, ed., Faulkner:
A Collection of Critical Essays (1966), and Richard P. Adams, Faulkner: Myth and
Motion (1968).
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Home > Library > Reference > Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
William Cuthbert Faulkner
(born Sept. 25, 1897, New Albany, Miss., U.S. — died July 6, 1962, Byhalia, Miss.) U.S.
writer. Faulkner dropped out of high school and only briefly attended college. He spent
most of his life in Oxford, Miss. He is best known for his cycle of works set in fictional
Yoknapatawpha County, which becomes an emblem of the American South and its tragic
history. His first major novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), was marked by radical
technical experimentation, including stream of consciousness. His American reputation,
which lagged behind his European reputation, was boosted by As I Lay Dying (1930),
Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942), which
contains the story "The Bear." The Portable Faulkner (1946) finally brought his work into
wide circulation, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. His Collected Stories
(1950) won the National Book Award. Both in the U.S. and abroad, especially in Latin
America, he was among the most influential writers of the 20th century.
For more information on William Cuthbert Faulkner, visit Britannica.com.
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US History Companion
Home > Library > Reference > American History Companion
Faulkner, William
(1897-1962), novelist. Considered by many critics to be America's greatest writer,
Faulkner wrote novels and stories that are drenched with a sense of history's (and the
South's) agonies. He was born in Mississippi to a distinguished family and in high school
was a mediocre student whose main interest was football. An older friend introduced him
to avant-garde literature, and he soon preferred reading and attempting to write to
working in his grandfather's bank. In 1918 he enlisted in the Canadian air force, hoping to
see action in World War I, but the war ended before he completed flight training.
Faulkner published his undistinguished first novel, Soldier's Pay, in 1926. In his third
novel, Sartoris (1929), he hit his stride, creating his fictional realm, Yoknapatawpha
County, and a southern family full of foolhardy, suicidally defiant men and suffering,
caring women. In his next novels he enlarged this portrait of a South wracked by grief
and defeat, clinging to old values while struggling to embrace the harsh rationality of
modern capitalist America. Faulkner married this historical imagination to a profound
humanism and a readiness to experiment with a wide range of fictional techniques. His
books are full of convoluted time sequences and interior monologues, exploring his
characters' deepest drives and unrecognized anxieties.
Although some critics and reviewers praised his talent, for twenty years Faulkner's novels
sold poorly. He made his living with straightforward stories written for magazines and
stints as a Hollywood screenwriter. In 1944 Faulkner's career was apparently at a dead
end. He seemed doomed to be regarded as a regional writer with a very small following.
He was out of step with the social realism and left-leaning ideology that had dominated
fiction in the preceding decade.
In 1946 an astonishing reversal of fortune began. Viking Press published The Portable
Faulkner with a prescient foreword by critic Malcolm Cowley, asserting that Faulkner
was a writer exploring universal themes. In 1948 he was elected to the prestigious
National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1949 was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature. In the next ten years he collected a National Book Award and two Pulitzer
Prizes. Abandoning his reclusive life in Oxford, Mississippi, he toured as a lecturer and
became a writer in residence at the University of Virginia. Affluence enabled him to take
up fox hunting and other pleasures of the southern gentleman. He died from injuries from
a fall from a horse, a denouement a Faulknerian narrator would have appreciated.
His last book, The Rievers, published a month before his death, is a nostalgic look at
Yoknapatawpha County in 1905. Near its close, Lucius Priest, a young man who is just
beginning to grasp the power of the past, asks his grandfather if he can somehow forget
the embarrassing, humiliating events of the story. The old man replies with words that
sum up Faulkner's enduring contribution to American literature and our sense of history.
"Nothing is ever forgotten," the grandfather says. "Nothing is ever lost. It's too valuable."
Bibliography:
Richard P. Adams, Faulkner: Myth and Motion (1986); Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A
Biography, 2 vols. (1974); David Mintner, William Faulkner: His Life and Work (1980).
Author:
Thomas Fleming
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Encyclopedia
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Faulkner, William, 1897–1962, American novelist, b. New Albany, Miss., one of the
great American writers of the 20th cent. Born into an old Southern family named Falkner,
he changed the spelling of his last name to Faulkner when he published his first book, a
collection of poems entitled The Marble Faun, in 1924. Faulkner trained in Canada as a
cadet pilot in the Royal Air Force in 1918, attended the Univ. of Mississippi in 1919–20,
and lived in Paris briefly in 1925. In 1931 he bought a pre–Civil War mansion,
“Rowanoak,” in Oxford, Miss., where he lived, a virtual recluse, for the rest of his life.
As a writer Faulkner's primary concern was to probe his own region, the deep South.
Most of his novels are set in Yoknapatawpha county, an imaginary area in Mississippi
with a colorful history and a richly varied population. The county is a microcosm of the
South as a whole, and Faulkner's novels examine the effects of the dissolution of
traditional values and authority on all levels of Southern society. One of his primary
themes is the abuse of blacks by the Southern whites. Because Faulkner's novels treat the
decay and anguish of the South since the Civil War, they abound in violent and sordid
events. But they are grounded in a profound and compassionate humanism that celebrates
the tragedy, energy, and humor of ordinary human life. The master of a rhetorical, highly
symbolic style, Faulkner was also a brilliant literary technician, making frequent use of
convoluted time sequences and of the stream of consciousness technique. He was
awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known novels are The Sound and
the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932),
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in
the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954; Pulitzer Prize), The Town
(1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962; Pulitzer Prize). In addition to
novels Faulkner published several volumes of short stories including These 13 (1931),
Go Down, Moses (1942), Knight's Gambit (1949), and Big Woods (1955); and
collections of essays and poems.
Bibliography
See the reminiscences of his brother, John (1963); biographies by H. H. Waggoner (1959)
and J. Blotner (2 vol., 1974, repr. 1984); studies by R. P. Adams (1968), L. G. Leary
(1973), and J. W. Reed, Jr. (1973); F. J. Hoffman and O. W. Vickery, ed., William
Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism (1960).
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Works
Home > Library > Arts > Works by Authors
Works by William Faulkner (1897-1962)
1924 The Marble Faun. Faulkner's first book is a collection of pastoral verse that sells
so poorly that most of the five-hundred-copy edition is remaindered to a bookstore
for ten cents a copy. Sherwood Anderson, whom Faulkner would meet in New
Orleans in 1925, helped convince Faulkner that his talent lay in writing prose.
1926 Soldiers' Pay. Faulkner's first novel, about a disfigured American flyer's painful
homecoming to Georgia, is published with the assistance of Sherwood Anderson,
who supposedly agreed to recommend it to his publisher under the condition that
he would not have to read the book.
1927 Mosquitoes. Faulkner's second novel assembles a mixed group of characters on the
yacht of a New Orleans matron for conversations on literature and sex. Daring for
its time in its references to masturbation, lesbianism, and syphilis, the book,
according to critic Cleanth Brooks, "is Faulkner's least respected novel, and it is
easy to see why... there is almost no story here; nothing of real consequence
happens to any of its characters." The book retains a biographical relevance in
expressing Faulkner's view of the New Orleans literary scene.
1929 Sartoris. Faulkner's third novel, an abridgment of the unpublished The Flags in the
Dust, is his first work set in Yoknapatawpha County, the imagined equivalent of
the author's native northern Mississippi. It traces Bayard Sartoris's return home
from the war, haunted by the death of his twin and his aristocratic Southern
family's legacy. The novel introduces themes, settings, and characters that would
dominate Faulkner's books from then on. Faulkner also publishes The Sound and
the Fury, which presents the disintegration of the Southern patrician Compson
family through stream-of-consciousness interior monologues of the three
Compson sons--the idiot Benjy, the incestuously haunted Quentin, and the
grasping Jason--concerning their relationship with their fallen sister, Caddy. The
fourth section is an objective account focusing on the Compson's black cook,
Dilsey. It is the first of Faulkner's technically innovative narratives and one of his
greatest achievements.
1930 As I Lay Dying. Faulkner's most experimentally daring novel, written over a sixweek period when Faulkner was working the night shift at a powerhouse, is a
multivocal stream-of-consciousness account of the poor white Bundren family's
journey to bury their mother, Addie, in her native town, Jefferson, Mississippi.
The book combines horror, comedy, and a profound meditation on the nature of
being.
1931 Sanctuary. Failing to reach the public with his previous novels, Faulkner set out to
write a potboiler--"the most horrific tale I could imagine"--to make money.
Composed in three weeks (but substantially reworked by a shocked Faulkner when
he received the galleys), the story of Temple Drake's rape and torture by the
sadistic psychopath Popeye becomes Faulkner's only bestseller. Also published in
1931 is the story collection These 13, including some of his greatest stories, such
as "Victory," "Red Leaves," and "A Rose for Emily."
1932 Light in August. One of Faulkner's greatest novels concerns the tragic
ramifications of the purportedly mixed-blood heritage of the outcast Joe Christmas
and the rigidity and alienation of a large cast of memorable characters, including
New England liberal Joanna Burden, disgraced minister Gail Hightower, and
seduced-and-abandoned country girl Lena Grove.
1933 A Green Bough. The writer, who would regard himself as a "failed poet,"
publishes his second and last poetry collection.
1934 Doctor Martino, and Other Stories. Faulkner's story collection includes "Fox
Hunt," "Smoke," "Mountain Victory," and "Honor."
1935 Pylon. Between the masterful Light in August (1934) and Absalom, Absalom!
(1936), Faulkner publishes what is generally regarded as a minor work about
aviators during a Mardi Gras celebration.
1936 Absalom, Absalom! Regarded by many as the writer's masterpiece, this complex,
multivocal novel depicts the fall of the house of Mississippi's Thomas Sutpen and
reflects American and Southern history before, during, and after the Civil War.
1938 The Unvanquished. Faulkner groups previously published short stories into a
narrative chronicling the Sartoris family of Mississippi during the Civil War and
Reconstruction.
1939 The Wild Palms. Two stories centered on the precariousness of love juxtapose a
New Orleans doctor's tragic affair with a married woman and a convict's
relationship with a pregnant hill woman during a flood.
1940 The Hamlet. The first of a trilogy that includes The Town (1957) and The Mansion
(1960), the novel covers the rise to power of the grasping, corrupt Flem Snopes
and his kin in Faulkner's imagined county in Mississippi.
1942 Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. Faulkner's short story collection deals with
the McCaslin clan and includes one of his most admired works, "The Bear."
Reviewers alternately recognize evidence of Faulkner's maturity and greatness as a
writer and express their irritation at the "hopelessly tangled skeins" of his
sentences, creating opaqueness rather than lucidity.
1946 The Portable Faulkner. This selection and arrangement of Faulkner's work, edited
by Malcolm Cowley, is widely credited with reviving interest in the writer, most
of whose books were out of print by 1946.
1948 Intruder in the Dust. In a working out of Faulkner's response to the South's "Negro
Problem" (as it was called at the time), Lucas Beaucamp, a black Mississippi
farmer, is charged with the murder of a white man. He is eventually cleared by
black and white teenagers and a spinster from an old Southern family.
1949 Knight's Gambit. A story collection featuring country attorney Gavin Stephens in
Faulkner's version of the detective genre. According to critic Malcolm Cowley, the
work is "the slightest... and the pleasantest of all the books that Faulkner has
published."
1950 Collected Stories. These forty-two stories represent what, according to Faulkner,
constitutes his achievement as a short story writer. The stories are arranged with
care into six thematic units that provide a key to the author's intentions. The
collection is universally praised and receives the National Book Award.
1951 Requiem for a Nun. This sequel to Sanctuary is yet another of Faulkner's
experiments with novelistic form. Three prose sections providing historical
background are interspersed with three others constituting a three-act play. The
story concerns the fate of Nancy Mannigoe, a black nurse accused of murdering a
white child.
1954 A Fable. Faulkner's novel is a long parable about the passion of Christ, set during
World War I. Faulkner had labored for years over the novel and considered it his
masterwork. Although it wins the Pulitzer Prize, later critics would deem it one of
his weakest books.
1955 Big Woods. Faulkner's collection brings together his previously printed hunting
stories--"The Bear," "The Old People," and "A Bear Hunt"--with a new story,
"Ride at Morning," as well as the author's explanatory comments.
1957 The Town. The second installment of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy appears seventeen
years after the first volume, The Hamlet (1940). The novel focuses on an outsider,
the lawyer Gavin Stevens, and his naive longing for two of the Snopes women.
Narration by another outsider, the itinerant sewing machine salesman V. K.
Ratliff, integrates The Town with its predecessor in the trilogy. The set would be
completed with the 1960 publication of The Mansion.
1958 New Orleans Sketches. This book collects Faulkner's experimental prose pieces
written in 1925, marking his transition from poetry to fiction.
1959 The Mansion. Faulkner concludes his trilogy on the Snopes family, begun with
The Hamlet (1940) and continued in The Town (1957). The novel shows a
prosperous Flem Snopes and the vengeance of his cousin Mink, which ends Flem's
career.
1962 The Reivers: A Reminiscence. Published one month before his death, Faulkner's
final novel is a nostalgic last look at Yoknapatawpha County in a comic tale set in
1905. It wins Faulkner a second Pulitzer Prize.
1965 Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters. This collection includes Faulkner's review of
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, lectures, introductions, essays on
various writers including Sherwood Anderson and Albert Camus, impressions of
Japan and New England, and comments about social issues such as race relations.
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WordNet
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Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.
The noun William Falkner has one meaning:
Meaning #1: United States novelist (originally Falkner) who wrote about people in the
southern United States (1897-1962)
Synonyms: Faulkner, William Faulkner, William Cuthbert Faulkner, Falkner
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Quotes By
Home > Library > People > Quotes By
William Faulkner
Quotes:
"The tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey."
"If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and
defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and
unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. If
we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder
children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive, and
probably won t."
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it
fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is
life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something
behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of
scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through
which he must someday pass."
"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's
usually too busy to wonder why."
"When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar."
"People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do
but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do --after forty. Between
twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not
begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil
through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's
anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty."
"The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."
For more famous quotes by William Faulkner, visit QuotationsBook.
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Wikipedia
Home > Library > Reference > Wikipedia
William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Faulkner photographed in 1954 by Carl Van
Vechten
Born:
September 25, 1897
New Albany, Mississippi, U.S.A.
Died:
July 6, 1962
Byhalia, Mississippi, U.S.A.
Occupation:
Novelist, short story writer
Genres:
Southern Gothic
Literary
movement:
Modernism, stream of consciousness
Influences:
James Joyce, William Shakespeare,
Ernest Hemingway, Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche, Nathaniel Hawthorne, T.S.
Eliot
William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American
novelist and poet whose works feature his native state of Mississippi. Regarded as one of
the most influential writers of the twentieth century, Faulkner was awarded the 1949
Nobel Prize for Literature.
Faulkner's writing is often criticized as being dense, meandering and difficult to
understand due to his heavy use of such literary techniques as symbolism, allegory,
multiple narrators and points of view, non-linear narrative, and especially stream of
consciousness. Faulkner was known for an experimental style with meticulous attention
to diction and cadence, in contrast to the minimalist understatement of his rival Ernest
Hemingway.
Along with Mark Twain and possibly Tennessee Williams, Faulkner is considered to be
one of the most important "Southern writers". He was relatively unknown before
receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, but his work is now favored by the
general public and critics.[1]
Life
Faulkner was born William Falkner (without a "u")[2] in New Albany, Mississippi, and
raised in and heavily influenced by that state, as well as by the history and culture of the
South. His great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, was an important figure in northern
Mississippi who served as a colonel in the Confederate Army, founded a railroad, and
gave his name to the town of Falkner in nearby Tippah County. Perhaps most
importantly, he wrote several novels and other works, establishing a literary tradition in
the family. More relevantly, Colonel Falkner served as the model for Colonel John
Sartoris in his great-grandson's writing.
It is understandable that the older Falkner was influenced by the history of his family and
the region in which they lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the
tragic position of blacks and whites, his keen characterization of usual Southern
characters and his timeless themes, one of them being that fiercely intelligent people
dwelled behind the façades of good old boys and simpletons. After being snubbed by the
United States Army because of his height, Faulkner first joined the Canadian and then the
Royal Air Force, yet still did not see any of the World War I wartime action. The
definitive reason for Faulkner's change in the spelling of his last name is still unknown.
Some possibilities include adding an "u" to appear more British when entering the Royal
Air Force, or so that his name would come across as more aristocratic. He may have also
simply kept a misspelling that an early editor had made.
Although Faulkner is heavily identified with Mississippi, he was living in New Orleans in
1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, after being influenced by Sherwood
Anderson into trying fiction. The small house at 624 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner
from St. Louis Cathedral, is now the premises of Faulkner House Books, and also serves
as the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.
Faulkner married Estelle Oldham in April of 1929 at College Hill Presbyterian Church
just outside of Oxford, Mississippi. In the 1930's Faulkner purchased Rowan Oak where
he and his family lived for some time. Still, today, one can find Faulkner's mysterious
scriblings on the wall here.
On writing, Faulkner remarked, "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is
interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut.
The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own
mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough
to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old
writer, he wants to beat him," in an interview with The Paris Review in 1956.
Works
Faulkner's most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay
Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), The Unvanquished (1938), and Absalom,
Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was a prolific writer of short stories: his first short story
collection, These 13 (1932), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently
anthologized) stories, including "A Rose for Emily," "Barn Burning," "Red Leaves,"
"That Evening Sun," and "Dry September." In 1931 in an effort to make money, Faulkner
crafted Sanctuary, a sensationalist "pulp fiction"-styled novel. Andre Malraux
characterised "Sanctuary" as "intrusion of Greek tragedy in the pulp fiction". Its themes
of evil and corruption (bearing Southern Gothic tones) resonate to this day. A sequel to
the book, Requiem for a Nun, is the only play that he published. It includes an
introduction that is actually one sentence spanning more than a page.
Faulkner was also an acclaimed writer of mysteries, publishing a collection of crime
fiction, Knight's Gambit, that featured Gavin Stevens (who also appeared in Light in
August, Go Down, Moses, The Town, Intruder in the Dust, and the short story "Hog
Pawn"), an attorney, wise to the ways of folk living in Yoknapatawpha County. He set
many of his short stories and novels in this fictional location, based on—and nearly
identical to in terms of geography—Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford,
Mississippi, is the county seat; Yoknapatawpha was his very own "postage stamp" and it
is considered to be one of the most monumental fictional creations in the history of
literature. His former home in Oxford, Rowan Oak, is operated as a museum by the
University of Mississippi. Faulkner wrote two volumes of poetry -- The Marble Faun
(1924) and A Green Bough (1933), neither of which were well received.
Awards
Faulkner's Literary accolades are numerous. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1949 for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American
novel." Interestingly enough, only two of what would be considered as Faulkner's
"minor" novels were those to receive the Pulitzer Prize. First was his 1954 novel A Fable,
which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and then his 1962 novel, "The Reivers," which was
posthumously awarded the Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards,
first for his Collected Stories in 1951 and once again for his novel A Fable in 1955.
Personal
In his later years, he conducted a 13-year affair with a young writer who considered him
her mentor. The relationship with Joan Williams became the subject of play, written by
Williams' son in 2005.[3]
Later years
William Faulkner's Underwood Universal Portable typewriter in his office at Rowan Oak,
which is now maintained by the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a museum.
In the 1930s Faulkner moved to Hollywood to be a screenwriter (producing scripts for
Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not,
both directed by Howard Hawks). Faulkner started an affair with Hawks' secretary and
script girl Meta Carpenter. Faulkner was rather famous for drinking as well, and
throughout his life was known to be an alcoholic. Some of this can be seen in the film
Barton Fink where the character of W.P. Mayhew was a composite character of 'Lost
Generation' with novelists William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald being influences on
the character, most notably Faulkner.
An apocryphal story regarding Faulkner in his Hollywood period found him with a case
of writer's block at the studio. He told Hawks he was having a hard time concentrating
and would like to write at home. Hawks was agreeable, and Faulkner left. Several days
passed,with no word from the writer. Hawks telephoned Faulkner's hotel and found that
Faulkner had checked out several days earlier. It seems Faulkner had been quite literal
and had returned home to Mississippi to finish the screenplay.
Faulkner donated his Nobel winnings "to establish a fund to support and encourage new
fiction writers," eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957 until his
death in 1962 of a heart attack. He was a very close friend of fellow Mississippi writer
Muna Lee.
A Rose for Emily
| About the Author | Summary | Critical Essay |Character Analysis of
Emily| Letters to the Author |Quiz |
About the Author
Quick facts about the Author by Fatima
The picture and info about William Faulkner is taken from:
http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-bio.html
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William Faulkner was born in 1897 from an old southern family and
grew in Oxford, Mississippi.
He joined the Canadian and the British, Royal Air Force during the First
World War. He then studied for a while at the University of Mississippi.
In 1940, Faulkner published the first volume of the Snopes trilogy.
The reivers, his last piece of literature, with many similarities to Mark
Twain's Huckleberry Finn, appeared in 1962, the year of Faulkner's death
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Summary
Summary of "A Rose for Emily" by Fatima
This story is narrated through a third person's point of view. The story is told
from the townspeople. The story starts off with Ms. Emily's funeral. It states
that "the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the
women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one
save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least
ten years." As we can see, Ms. Emily was sort of like a mystery to citizens of
the town. The author continuously uses symbolism in the story. When the
deputation came to her house for her taxes, Faulkner describes how the house
and Ms. Emily looks. "only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn
and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an
eyesore among eyesores", this statement explains how the house gives off such
a depressing mood. "Her skeleton was small and spare;", this line shows us
how her appearance showcases death also.
When Ms. Emily was younger, her deceased father used to force away all the
young men that was in love with her. The summer after her father death, she
fell in love with a Yankee by the name of Homer Barron. Everyone in the town
was whispering about their relationship and wondering if they were married.
After a while they stop seeing Homer and decided that they got married. The
townspeople then proceeds by saying that Ms. Emily then died a while after.
They didn't know she was sick.
After they buried her, they knew that there was one room that wasn't opened.
So after they decently buried her they went to see upon the room. When they
opened the room they was greeted by great amounts of dust. They also explain
that the "room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains
of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon
the delicate array of crystal and the man's toilet things backed with tarnished
silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured." They also saw a
man's collar, tie, suit, shoes, and discarded socks. "Then shockingly, laying
right there in the bed was the man. For a long while we just stood there,
looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently
once lain in the attitude of an embrace. What was left of him, rotted beneath
what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which
he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of
the patient and biding dust. Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the
indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward,
that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand
of iron-gray hair."
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Critical Essay
When one lives his/her life in the public eye it is often difficult to live up to
everyone's expectations. These repressions often lead these people to use
radical methods to fulfill their own needs. In this essay we will use the short
story " A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner to portray the idea that society's
view on a "celebrity" can not only be powerful but also destructive.
Miss Emily Grierson is the socialite of her town. Naturally with this status
there is a certain reputation she has to withhold. She not only represents her
family name but in a sense the people of her town. Because she is such a
dominant figure the townspeople have put her on a pedestal and are very
judgmental of her actions. During the time in which her father was alive Emily
was seen as a figure to be admired but never touched. Many sutures she had
but according to her father none were suitable enough. Emily was revered as a
goddess in the townspeople's eyes.
When her father passed it was a devastating loss for Emily. Never being able
to developed any real relationship with anyone else it was like her world
completely crumbled around her. Emily tried to hold on to him in some way
even though his spirit had left. The townspeople subtlety but open objected to
this and eventually took his body away. Although this was a sad moment for
Emily it was in a sense liberating. She cut off her hair as a sign of breaking
away from her father's control. For the first time in her life she felt free even
though she was already thirty years old.
With this restraint being cut and this new found freedom Emily set out to
fulfill her desires of finding love and living her own life. In Homer Barron a
laborer from the north, Emily founded love. This odd relationship shocked the
towns people and they were in turmoil over how to resolve this problem. In
Emily's distant cousins they found a resolution. With these cousins now
placed in town to watch over Emily they believed everything would change
back to normal. As time passed the people began to recognize the genuine
happiness Emily displayed and instead of rejecting the relationship they
embraced it. Despite the joy the two expressed all knew it was a matter of time
before Homer would leave Emily, like everyone else did but for the moment
they vested in her beauty and jubilance.
Although the townspeople did not directly come into contact with Emily their
views on her and her family greatly affected her life. Their praises and
admiration forced her father to keep her sheltered longer than she needed.
When she finally was released she latched on to the first thing who was not
intimidated or judgmental of her. Being naive to the burdens of relationships
and love Emily was not cautious and dove head first into it. When she realized
Homer would leave again she made sure he would always be there by killing
him. In his death Emily found eternal love which was something no one could
every take from her.
Dominique
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Letter to the Author
Letter to the Author by Fatima
Dear Mr. Faulkner,
I just wanted to applaud you on your outstanding piece of literary work. "A
Rose for Emily" is just an original piece that is simply wonderful. The
procedure you took to write this story was fantastic and was new to me. I love
to read stories that are written differently from others.
Although, I admire your unique style of writing, I have noticed that you use
many common techniques that other writers use. One that I automatically
realized was a major technique was the use of symbolism. "It smelled of dust
and disuse--a close, dank smell." This line intertwines with the description of
Ms. Emily. "Her skeleton was small and spare". "She looked bloated, like a
body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes,
lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed
into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the
visitors stated their errand." I can see it all comes together to describe how
depressive Ms. Emily looks while the description of the house symbolizes
death too.
I have also noticed that you strongly used symbolism in the title of your story.
It also was used as foreshadowing I would think. A single rose can represent
so many different things. A rose can represent love, respect, and sadly death.
In the story Ms. Emily was loved by many men of the town but they all was
forced away by her father. At her funeral they all brought roses with them. I
see that it is here that the rose represents love and respect they and the others
have for her. I also observed it symbolizes death.
One exciting thing I experienced when reading was I felt like a detective. From
the beginning, I knew that Emily had died but didn't know the circumstances
under how she died. While I continued reading I came upon more facts that
lead to her death and what happened.
Another style of writing I observed was how disorganized the story was. I see
that it was for a worthy cause though. Personally, it only intrigued me much
more. It had me constantly thinking about what events was occurring in the
story. I would say it was a stream of consciousness.
Finally, I have to comment on your surprise ending. Who would've known
that Homer Barron would die that way. Surprise endings is always like a zesty
touch to a meal. It only made the story even better.
I would love to read other magnificent work of yours in the future. I enjoyed it
dearly and hope you receive many astounding awards for your work. I would
also like to inform you that I have recommended your story to various aspiring
talented young writers that are trying to reach to the top. I think the essence of
your story and the way you used the techniques would help them out a whole
lot.
Sincerely yours,
Fatima
Letter to the Author by Josefina
Dear William Faulkner,
First I would like to congratulate you for such an amazing piece of literature.
The symbolism is truly astounding in that it is, I think, the major literary
element you chose to convey your idea. Miss Emily was not just a woman. She
represented aristocracy and was the talk of the town, be it a good or a bad
thing. She was their very own town celebrity. As a young woman she did not
have love in her life because her father pushed all the men away from his
daughter. When he passed she was lost and tried to hold on to the corpse
because he was all she ever knew. Another thing was the fact that she refused
to pay taxes and undermined the new authorities of the town. When she died,
the men went to her funeral out of respect, and women went out of curiosity. It
was not tragic because she was not truly loved. She was simply admired,
feared, and respected by the people of the town. I found all of the symbolic
meanings of the story very interesting. It was an exemplary work for kids that
are learning about literary elements and techniques.
Sincerely, Josefina
Character Analysis Based on “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner
Perhaps, the most enticing word for Emily isn't “sick”. Demented and
perpetually disturbed appears more appealing to a novice that does not
understand the true depth of Emily's nature. The narrator that speaks of this
story has a personality that of the old with an age of the young. Whether it
may be girl or boy, the rose symbolizes kudos to Emily as a maverick in early
women's movement. The type of person Emily is wholly due to the men that
have left a drastic yet resonating impact on her life; them being her father and
Homer Barron. And with their coexistence in her life, she became the women
that she is at the end from their impact and the town’s comments.
Borne into a family of great wealth with a well pronounced rich lineage; a
duty of any woman of her age was supposed to follow, was expected to be
followed and with exact precision. But with Emily being highly concealed by
her father, she had to live with many restrictions of life, resulting in a
pronounced backlash and profuse alteration of her personality. Giving the
reader a limited impression that as a character, she is shown with excessive
pride, leaving an enduring imagination to readers, as to what she was as an
adolescent; but imagination does permit us to consider her as any young child;
easily manipulative. Yet as a person Emily reacts to her situation in her youth
filled years like any child would during this time; reserved, complacent and
with the utmost respect, as could be seen in the following excerpt “So when
she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly…”;
although this does not state and show her obedience it bluntly, as it does
imply that although she had wonderful suitors and her father sent them away
she did nothing to stop it; clearly sending the message that she is a acquiescent
child.
Her father however there is no imagination needed for; from context we
can plainly see that he is a powerful man with much character. Nevertheless
his impressionable nature has been left to us in the very beginning of the story
where it is shown to the reader from the thoughts of the town as such “Miss
Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled
silhouette with foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip…” It is
this image that offers this lingering image of a demonizing man with
intimidation as his most favored pass time. We can tell he is clearly successful
with such a trait for when he died “Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed
as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father
was not dead…Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke
down, and they buried her father quickly.”
Yet the damage had been done; she quickly grew into the one that she is
late in life after her father’s death. And having been a women of immense
prestigious lineage; she began to look at the world in a condescending manner.
To her those in the "ordinary" or "lower class" men were something she was
not only used to but abhorred. After some time she reemerged as what the
people of the town would say "a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels
in colored church windows-- sort of tragic and serene." It is this image that
shows the reader that her father’s death was a catalyst in changing her yet
again-- this time into an independent woman dependent on past actions and
future values.
However she would not let the 'tragic' fact that she was a woman bring her
down into the world of the 'poor'; she would hold her head up high, work to
make a living and not live by the support of another. However much she did
try she was still considered as "Poor Emily" in the eyes of her fellow
townsmen. With her growing interests in Homer Barron, so did the pitiful
remarks that the townspeople. This did not discourage her at all; but instead
allowed her to hold her head up higher and look at them with the eye of a sort
of "noblesse oblige". Plainly we can tell she obviously heard the comments
made by those in the “lower classes” about her and she didn’t care. She was
going to live her life the way in which she wanted to and they would have to
like it. That is why when they stated that “Homer himself had remarked—he
liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’
Club—that he was not a marrying man”. Later we said, “Poor Emily”” she kept
her head up high; like a rebel intended on doing what she felt even if the
towns people didn’t approve it. Clearly she knew that he didn’t want to
commit; of course not at first but later into their relationship. This was another
catalyst in changing Emily; knowing previously that Homer Barron was not
intending to stay pushed her into going into the drug store demanding in the
most noble and dignified manner “I want arsenic”. At this point it appears that
Emily was fighting against the town. As though, if she wanted to be happy she
was going to have to fight for her right. But yet, it almost seems that to show
the town that even though she was the last Grierson, she was going to keep her
head up high and act like a true noble woman, which was getting what she
wanted.
Emily is clearly not a sick or twisted woman; she is a woman that is
fighting for her right to live and be happy as much as she can. It’s the damage
that was inflicted upon her that coexists within her from the moment her
father dies till the moment Homer Barron leaves that makes her a woman of
strong wits and beliefs. And fighting for the right that women deserve to have,
which is happiness be it if the man likes it or not. It is this influence that her
father leaves on her that remains throughout the rest of her life-- a firm able
impression that continuously molds her into the woman she eventually
becomes at the end, which is a woman at “seventy four…vigorous iron-gray,
like the hair of an active man.”
-By Fatima
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Details:A Rose for Emily
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Copyright?
Yes, that appears to the case-- this entry should be rewritten to confirm to normal
copyright specs.
Huh wha...? To say "A Rose for Emily" is "strongly referenced" in that MCR song seems
like more than a little stretch. "To The End" may have similiar themes but unless
someone can show me where the band makes this connection, it seems pretty forced to
me. Pariah23 21:46, 20 February 2006 (UTC)
Cache
The Google link at the bottom is broken (or unhelpful) at least on Firefox. --threedimes
but anyone knows why the witter use non-chrolonogical skill? what is his purpose?
Homer
I do not think that Homer likes to look at men. During the time period that Faulkner was
writing this story, the term "he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the
younger men in the Elks' Club" does not always mean he was gay. It acually means that
he liked to hang out with young men but did not have sexual relations with them, always
remember the time period in which it is written.
Issues
I have several issues with this article.
1) Homer Barron is most certainly not gay,75.31.15.59 01:56, 25 January 2007 (UTC)I
disagree with you because homer was meeting tobe at the back door and he meets emily
at the front. This could resemble a sexual relationship between homer, tobe and emily
which would make homer bisexual.Think about what it means when the author say s that
they met at the back door which could resemble tobe taking one up the but. And also
when he meets emily at the front door which resembles regular male female sex. and was
never suspected to be. As said above, it is simply an expression that can be taken the
wrong way in today's society. The statement in the story that gives this impression is only
ment to say that he liked to drink with the guys and wanted to remain a bachelor in order
to continue his partying. In fact, many picture him as being manly (or at least not
feminine) due to his involvement in construction and his position as foreman.
2) If this article is to include the spolier (and I think it should, due to the fact that the
main dispute over A Rose For Emily is in regard to the ending), the arguments and ideas
about what actually happened should be included, as well as the generally accepted ideas.
For example:
-It is accepted (even though it is not explicitly stated in the writing) that Emily poisoned
Homer Barron.
-It is also therefore conjectured, especially because he is described as "not the marrying
type," that he would not marry her, which supplies her motive for the poisoning (keeping
in mind that her family had a history of insanity, and that she wanted Homer to stay with
her as her husband, whether he was alive or not).
-Her response to her father's death (when women come to the door to give her their
condolences, she sends them away saying "My father isn't dead.") foreshadows her
actions involving Homer's corpse (denial of death, acting as though they had married and
he was still alive).
-Some (well, most) say that she had sexual relations with his corpse, which explains the
gray hair found in the pillow next to it.
-Some claim that she did not have sexual relations with the corpse, but slept next to it, as
if he were still alive.
-One very rare opinion is that she only lay with the corpse at death/shortly after death.
This opinion is supported by the fact that they had to break into the room, and that it
appeared as though it had not been disturbed for 40 years. However, there is some dispute
as to whether she had gray hair at the time of his death or not.
--Two for joy 20:09, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
Homosexuality
"Homer Barron is most certainly not gay, and was never suspected to be. The language
used is simply an expression that can be taken the wrong way in today's society. The
statement in the is only ment to say that he liked to drink with the guys and wanted to
remain a bachelor in order to continue his partying. In fact, many picture him as being
manly (or at least not feminine) due to his involvement in construction and his position as
foreman."
The Body
I've just removed this: "Yet another theory is that the corpse is not Homer's at all, but
rather that of Emily's long-deceased father. Daughters of domineering fathers may find it
hard or even impossible to part from the paternal figure, and Emily may have wanted to
preserve him, and not Homer, forever."
The story clearly states that her father was buried.
yea that quote is bs --Rairun 03:32, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
Civil War Allegory
I'm a bit worried about the Civil War allegory given. It claims that Homer can be viewed
as the South and Emily as the North, but then does not offer an explanation for why
Homer was portrayed as a Northerner and Emily as a Southerner, which would contradict
the allegory. Without any citation for the allegory, it's highly unbelievable. Citations for
the other points in the article would also be nice. 129.2.194.197 03:55, 6 March 2007
(UTC)
Kudos, whoever you are. I was about to say the exact same thing, but you had beat me to
it.
Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen
Born:
March 20, 1828
Skien, Norway
Died:
May 23, 1906
Kristiania
Occupation: Playwright
Nationality:
Norwegian
Genres: Social Realism
Influenced:
Social Realism, George Bernard Shaw, Georg
Brandes, James Joyce
"Ibsen" redirects here. For other people named Ibsen, see Ibsen
(disambiguation).
Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828 – May 23, 1906) was a major Norwegian
playwright largely responsible for the rise of modern realistic drama. He is often referred
to as the "father of modern drama."[1]
Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors and one of the most important
playwrights of all time, celebrated as a national symbol by Norwegians.[2]
His plays were considered scandalous to many of his era, when Victorian values of
family life and propriety largely held sway in Europe and any challenge to them was
considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen's work examined the realities that lay behind
many facades, possessing a revelatory nature that was disquieting to many
contemporaries.
Ibsen largely founded the modern stage by introducing a critical eye and free inquiry into
the conditions of life and issues of morality. Victorian-era plays were expected to be
moral dramas with noble protagonists pitted against darker forces; every drama was
expected to result in a morally appropriate conclusion, meaning that goodness was to
bring happiness, and immorality pain. Ibsen challenged this notion and the beliefs of his
times and shattered the illusions of his audiences.
Family and youth
Henrik Ibsen was born to Knud Ibsen and Marichen Altenburg, a relatively well-to-do
merchant family, in the small port town of Skien, Norway, which was primarily noted for
shipping timber. He was a descendant of some of the oldest and most distinguished
families of Norway, including the Paus family. Ibsen later pointed out his distinguished
ancestors and relatives in a letter to Georg Brandes. Shortly after his birth his family's
fortunes took a significant turn for the worse. His mother turned to religion for solace,
and his father began suffering from severe depression. The characters in his plays often
mirror his parents, and his themes often deal with issues of financial difficulty as well as
moral conflicts stemming from dark private secrets hidden from society.
At fifteen, Ibsen left home. He moved to the small town of Grimstad to become an
apprentice pharmacist and began writing plays. In 1846, he fathered an illegitimate child
with a servant maid whom he rejected. Ibsen went to Christiania (later renamed Oslo)
intending to attend university. He soon cast off the idea (his earlier attempts at entering
university were blocked as he did not pass all his entrance exams), preferring to commit
himself to writing. His first play, the tragedy Catilina (1850), was published under the
pseudonym Brynjulf Bjarme, when he was only 22, but it was not performed. His first
play to be staged, The Burial Mound (1850), received little attention. Still, Ibsen was
determined to be a playwright, although he was not to write again for some years.
Life and writings
He spent the next several years employed at the Norwegian Theater in Bergen, where he
was involved in the production of more than 145 plays as a writer, director, and producer.
During this period he did not publish any new plays of his own. Despite Ibsen's failure to
achieve success as a playwright, he gained a great deal of practical experience at the
Norwegian Theater, experience that was to prove valuable when he continued writing.
Ibsen returned to Christiania in 1858 to become the creative director of Christiania's
National Theater. He married Suzannah Thoresen the same year and she gave birth to
their only child, Sigurd. The couple lived in very poor financial circumstances and Ibsen
became very disenchanted with life in Norway. In 1864 he left Christiania and went to
Italy in self-imposed exile. He was not to return to his native land for the next 27 years,
and when he returned it was to be as a noted playwright, however controversial.
His next play, Brand (1865), was to bring him the critical acclaim he sought, along with a
measure of financial success, as was his next play, Peer Gynt (1867), to which Edvard
Grieg famously composed the incidental music. With success, Ibsen became more
confident and began to introduce more and more his own beliefs and judgments into the
drama, exploring what he termed the "drama of ideas." His next series of plays are often
considered his Golden Age, when he entered the height of his power and influence,
becoming the center of dramatic controversy across Europe.
Portrait from around 1870
Ibsen moved from Italy to Dresden, Germany in 1868. Here he spent years writing the
play he himself regarded as his main work, Emperor and Galilean (1873), dramatizing
the life and times of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. Although Ibsen himself
always looked back on this play as the cornerstone of his entire works, very few shared
his opinion, and his next works would be much more acclaimed. Ibsen moved to Munich
in 1875 and published A Doll's House in 1879. The play is a scathing criticism of the
traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage.
Ibsen followed A Doll's House with Ghosts (1881), another scathing commentary on
Victorian morality, in which a widow reveals to her pastor that she has hidden the evils of
her marriage for its duration. The pastor had advised her to marry her then fiancé despite
his philandering, and she did so in the belief that her love would reform him. But she was
not to receive the result she was promised. Her husband's philandering continued right up
until his death, and the result is that her son is syphilitic. Even the mention of venereal
disease was scandalous, but to show that even a person who followed society's ideals of
morality had no protection against it, that was beyond scandalous. Hers was not the noble
life which Victorians believed would result from fulfilling one's duty rather than
following one's desires. Those idealized beliefs were only the Ghosts of the past,
haunting the present.
In An Enemy of the People (1882), Ibsen went even further. In earlier plays, controversial
elements were important and even pivotal components of the action, but they were on the
small scale of individual households. In An Enemy, controversy became the primary
focus, and the antagonist was the entire community. One primary message of the play is
that the individual, who stands alone, is more often "right" than the mass of people, who
are portrayed as ignorant and sheeplike. The Victorian belief was that the community was
a noble institution that could be trusted, a notion Ibsen challenged. In An Enemy of the
People Ibsen chastised not only the right wing or 'Victorian' elements of society but also
liberalism of the time. He showed it to be just as self-serving as Conservatism. An Enemy
of the People was written as a counterblast to the people who had rejected his previous
work, Ghosts. The plot of the play is a veiled look at the way people reacted to the plot of
Ghosts.
The protagonist is a doctor, a pillar of the community. The town is a vacation spot whose
primary draw is a public bath. The doctor discovers that the water used by the bath is
being contaminated when it seeps through the grounds of a local tannery. He expects to
be acclaimed for saving the town from the nightmare of infecting visitors with disease,
but instead he is declared an 'enemy of the people' by the locals, who band against him
and even throw stones through his windows. The play ends with his complete ostracism.
It is obvious to the reader that disaster is in store for the town as well as for the doctor,
due to the community's unwillingness to face reality. American playwright Arthur Miller
wrote his own adaptation of the play to correspond to the political climate in the United
States under Trumanism. It has also been made into a popular Bengali film titled
Ganashatru, literally meaning "the enemy of the people", by Oscar-winning Indian film
maker Satyajit Ray. American actor Steve McQueen also filmed the play in 1978 with
himself in the lead role.
As audiences by now expected of him, his next play again attacked entrenched beliefs
and assumptions -- but this time his attack was not against the Victorians but against
overeager reformers and their idealism. Always the iconoclast, Ibsen was as willing to
tear down the ideologies of any part of the political spectrum, including his own.
The Wild Duck (1884) is considered by many to be Ibsen's finest work, and it is certainly
the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his
hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal.
Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy
home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the
"Summons of the Ideal". Among these truths: Gregers' father impregnated his servant
Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been
disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. And while Hjalmar
spends his days working on a wholly imaginary "invention", his wife is earning the
household income.
Ibsen displays masterful use of irony: despite his dogmatic insistence on truth, Gregers
never says what he thinks but only insinuates, and is never understood until the play
reaches its climax. Gregers hammers away at Hjalmar through innuendo and coded
phrases until he realizes the truth; Gina's daughter, Hedvig, is not his child. Blinded by
Gregers' insistence on absolute truth, he disavows the child. Seeing the damage he has
wrought, Gregers determines to repair things, and suggests to Hedvig that she sacrifice
the wild duck, her wounded pet, to prove her love for Hjalmar. Hedvig, alone among the
characters, recognizes that Gregers always speaks in code, and looking for the deeper
meaning in the first important statement Gregers makes which does not contain one, kills
herself rather than the duck in order to prove her love for him in the ultimate act of selfsacrifice. Only too late do Hjalmar and Gregers realize that the absolute truth of the
"ideal" is sometimes too much for the human heart to bear.
Letter from Ibsen to Edmund Gosse in 1899
Interestingly, late in his career Ibsen turned to a more introspective drama that had much
less to do with denunciations of Victorian morality. In such later plays as Hedda Gabler
(1890) and The Master Builder (1892) Ibsen explored psychological conflicts that
transcended a simple rejection of Victorian conventions. Many modern readers, who
might regard anti-Victorian didacticism as dated, simplistic and even clichéd, have found
these later works to be of absorbing interest for their hard-edged, objective consideration
of interpersonal confrontation. Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder center on female
protagonists whose almost demonic energy proves both attractive and destructive for
those around them. Hedda Gabler is probably Ibsen's most performed play, with the title
role regarded as one of the most challenging and rewarding for an actress even in the
present day. There are a few similarities between Hedda and the character of Nora in A
Doll's House, but many of today's audiences and theatre critics feel that Hedda's intensity
and drive are much more complex and much less comfortably explained than what they
view as rather routine feminism on the part of Nora.
Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted
by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theater to this day. From Ibsen forward,
challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of
the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment. Ibsen returned to Norway in
1891, but it was in many ways not the Norway he had left. Indeed, he had played a major
role in the changes that had happened across society. The Victorian Age was on its last
legs, to be replaced by the rise of Modernism not only in the theater, but across public
life. Ibsen died in Christiania on May 23, 1906 after a series of strokes. When his nurse
assured a visitor that he was a little better, Ibsen sputtered "On the contrary" and died. In
2006 the 100th anniversary of Ibsen's death was commemorated in Norway and many
other countries, and the year dubbed the "Ibsen year" by Norwegian authorities.
Trivia
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In May 2006 a biographical puppet production of Ibsen's life named 'The Death of
Little Ibsen' debuted at New York City's Sanford Meisner Theater.
There is only one known picture in which Ibsen smiles.
List of works
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(1850) Catiline (Catilina)
(1850) The Burial Mound (Kjæmpehøjen)
(1852) St. John's Eve (Sancthansnatten)
(1854) Lady Inger of Oestraat (Fru Inger til Østeraad)
(1855) The Feast at Solhaug (Gildet paa Solhoug)
(1856) Olaf Liljekrans (Olaf Liljekrans)
(1857) The Vikings at Helgeland (Hærmændene paa Helgeland)
(1862) Love's Comedy (Kjærlighedens Komedie)
(1863) The Pretenders (Kongs-Emnerne)
(1865) Brand (Brand)
(1867) Peer Gynt (Peer Gynt)
(1869) The League of Youth (De unges Forbund)
(1873) Emperor and Galilean (Kejser og Galilæer)
(1877) Pillars of Society (Samfundets Støtter)
(1879) A Doll's House (Et Dukkehjem)
(1881) Ghosts (Gengangere)
(1882) An Enemy of the People (En Folkefiende)
(1884) The Wild Duck (Vildanden)
(1886) Rosmersholm (Rosmersholm)
(1888) The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra Havet)
(1890) Hedda Gabler (Hedda Gabler)
(1892) The Master Builder (Bygmester Solness)
(1894) Little Eyolf (Lille Eyolf)
(1896) John Gabriel Borkman (John Gabriel Borkman)
(1899) When We Dead Awaken (Når vi døde vaagner)
The Pillars of Society
The Pillars of Society (original Norwegian title: Samfundets støtter) is an 1877 play
written by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.
Ibsen had great trouble with the writing of this play which came before the series of
masterpieces which made him famous throughout the world. The ending is the most
criticised feature, since Bernick is clearly guilty of attempted murder but gets off
unscathed, but successfully illustrates that the rich and powerful are often selfish and
corrupt.[1]
Problems
The neutrality of this section is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.
There are problems in the opening scene, when the exposition of what happened 15 years
ago is told somewhat clumsily. That, combined with its large cast, has meant that it is
rarely staged. But the play has great strengths and foreshadows many of the themes we
associate with his work.
The relationship between Bernick and Lona is handled with great skill. In spite of the
way he abandoned her, she still sees hope for his salvation if he can only bring himself to
admit the truth about the past. This theme, that lies rot and corrode those who have told
them, is a frequent motif in Ibsen.
Plot
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Karsten Bernick is the dominant businessman in a small coastal town in Norway, with
interests in shipping and shipbuilding in a long-established family firm. Now he is
planning his most ambitious project yet, backing a railway which will connect the town
to the main line and open a fertile valley which he has been secretly buying up.
Suddenly his past explodes on him. Johan Tonnesen, his wife's younger brother comes
back from America to the town he ran away from 15 years ago. At the time it was
thought he had run off with money from the Bernick family business and to avoid scandal
because he was having an affair with an actress. But none of this was true. He left town to
take the blame for Bernick, who was the one who had actually been having the affair and
was nearly caught with the actress. There was no money to take since at the time the
Bernick firm had been almost bankrupt.
With Tonnesen comes his half-sister Lona (whom Ibsen is said to have modelled after
Aasta Hansteen), who once loved and was loved by Bernick. He rejected her and married
his current wife for money so that he could rebuild the family business. In the years since
Tonnesen left, the town has built ever greater rumours of his wickedness, helped by
Bernick's studious refusal to give any indication of the truth.
This mixture only needs a spark to explode and it gets one when Tonnesen falls in love
with Dina Dorf, a young girl who is the daughter of the actress involved in the scandal of
15 years ago and who now lives as a charity case in the Bernick household. He demands
that Bernick tells the girl the truth. Bernick refuses. Tonnesen says he will go back to the
US to clear up his affairs and then come back to town to marry Dina. Bernick sees his
chance to get out of his mess. His yard is repairing an American ship, The Indian Girl,
which is deeply unseaworthy. He orders his yard foreman to finish the work by the next
day, even if it means sending the ship and its crew to certain death because he wants
Tonnesen to die on board. That way he will be free of any danger in the future. Things do
not work out like that. Tonnesen runs off with Dina on board another ship which is safe,
leaving word that he will be back. And Bernick's young son stows away on the Indian
Girl, seemingly heading for certain death.
Bernick discovers that his plot has gone disastrously wrong on the night the people of the
town have lined up to honour him for his contribution to the city.
It's all set up for a tragic conclusion, but suddenly Ibsen pulls back from the brink. The
yard foreman gets an attack of conscience and rows out to stop the Indian Girl from
heading to sea and death; Bernick's son is brought back safely by his mother; and Bernick
addresses the community, tells them most of the truth and gets away with it. His wife
greets the news that he only married her for money as a sign there is now hope for their
marriage.
List of characters
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Karsten Bernick, a shipbuilder.
Mrs. Bernick, his wife.
Olaf, their son, thirteen years old.
Martha Bernick, Karsten Bernick's sister.
Johan Tonnesen, Mrs. Bernick's younger brother.
Lona Hessel, Mrs. Bernick's elder half-sister.
Hilmar Tonnesen, Mrs. Bernick's cousin.
Dina Dorf, a young girl living with the Bernicks.
Rorlund, a schoolmaster.
Rummel, a merchant.
Vigeland and Sandstad, tradesman
Krap, Bernick's confidential clerk.
Aune, foreman of Bernick's shipbuilding yard.
Mrs.Rummel.
Hilda Rummel, her daughter.
Mrs.Holt.
Netta Holt, her daughter.
Mrs.Lynge.
Townsfolk and visitors, foreign sailors, steamboat passengers, etc.
THE SCANDINAVIAN DRAMA: HENRIK IBSEN
THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY
THE disintegrating effect of the Social Lie, of Duty, as an imposition and outrage, and of
the spirit of Provincialism, as a stifling factor, are brought out with dynamic force in "The
Pillars of Society."
Consul Bernick, driven by the conception of his duty toward the House of Bernick,
begins his career with a terrible lie. He sells his love for Lona Hessel in return for the
large dowry of her step-sister Betty, whom he does not love. To forget his treachery, he
enters into a clandestine relationship with an actress of the town. When surprised in her
room by the drunken husband, young Bernick jumps out of the window, and then
graciously accepts the offer of his bosom friend, Johan, to let him take the blame.
Johan, together with his faithful sister Lona, leaves for America. In return for his
devotion, young Bernick helps to rob his friend of his good name, by acquiescing in the
rumors circulating in the town that Johan had broken into the safe of the Bernicks and
stolen a large sum of money.
In the opening scene of "The Pillars of Society," we find Consul Bernick at the height of
his career. The richest, most powerful and respected citizen of the community, he is held
up as the model of an ideal husband and devoted father. In short, a worthy pillar of
society.
The best ladies of the town come together in the home of the Bernicks. They represent
the society for the "Lapsed and Lost," and they gather to do a little charitable sewing and
a lot of charitable gossip. It is through them we learn that Dina Dorf, the ward of Bernick,
is the issue of the supposed escapade of Johan and the actress.
With them, giving unctuous spiritual advice and representing the purity and morality of
the community, is Rector Rorlund, hidebound, self-righteous, and narrow-minded.
Into this deadening atmosphere of mental and social provincialism comes Lona Hessel,
refreshing and invigorating as the wind of the plains. She has returned to her native town
together with Johan.
The moment she enters the house of Bernick, the whole structure begins to totter. For in
Lona's own words, "Fie, fie--this moral linen here smells so tainted--just like a shroud. I
am accustomed to the air of the prairies now, I can tell you. . . . Wait a little, wait a little-we'll soon rise from the sepulcher. We must have broad daylight here when my boy
comes."
Broad daylight is indeed needed in the community of Consul Bernick, and above all in
the life of the Consul himself.
It seems to be the psychology of a lie that it can never stand alone. Consul Bernick is
compelled to weave a network of lies to sustain his foundation. In the disguise of a good
husband, he upbraids, nags, and tortures his wife on the slightest provocation. In the mask
of a devoted father, he tyrannizes and bullies his only child as only a despot used to being
obeyed can do. Under the cloak of a benevolent citizen he buys up public land for his
own profit. Posing as a true Christian, he even goes so far as to jeopardize human life.
Because of business considerations he sends The Indian Girl, an unseaworthy, rotten
vessel, on a voyage, although he is assured by one of his most capable and faithful
workers that the ship cannot make the journey, that it is sure to go down. But Consul
Bernick is a pillar of society; he needs the respect and good will of his fellow citizens. He
must go from precipice to precipice, to keep up appearances.
Lona alone sees the abyss facing him, and tells him: "What does it matter whether such a
society is supported or not? What is it that passes current here? Lies and shams--nothing
else. Here are you, the first man in the town, living in wealth and pride, in power and
honor, you, who have set the brand of crime upon an innocent man." She might have
added, many innocent men, for Johan was not the only one at whose expense Karsten
Bernick built up his career.
The end is inevitable. In the words of Lona: "All this eminence, and you yourself along
with it, stand on a trembling quicksand; a moment may come, a word may be spoken,
and, if you do not save yourself in time, you and your whole grandeur go to the bottom."
But for Lona, or, rather, what she symbolizes, Bernick--even as The Indian Girl--would
go to the bottom.
In the last act, the whole town is preparing to give the great philanthropist and benefactor,
the eminent pillar of society, an ovation. There are fireworks, music, gifts and speeches in
honor of Consul Bernick. At that very moment, the only child of the Consul is hiding in
The Indian Girl to escape the tyranny of his home. Johan, too, is supposed to sail on the
same ship, and with him, Dina, who has learned the whole truth and is eager to escape
from her prison, to go to a free atmosphere, to become independent, and then to unite
with Johan in love and freedom. As Dina says: "Yes, I will be your wife. But first I will
work, and become something for myself, just as you are. I will give myself, I will not be
taken."
Consul Bernick, too, is beginning to realize himself. The strain of events and the final
shock that he had exposed his own child to such peril, act like a stroke of lightning on the
Consul. It makes him see that a house built on lies, shams, and crime must eventually
sink by its own weight. Surrounded by those who truly love and therefore understand
him, Consul Bernick, no longer the pillar of society, but the man become conscious of his
better self.
"Where have I been?" he exclaims. "You will be horrified when you know. Now, I feel as
if I had just recovered my senses after being poisoned. But I feel--I feel that I can be
young and strong again. Oh, come nearer--closer around me. Come, Betty! Come, Olaf!
Come, Martha! Oh, Martha, it seems as though I had never seen you in all these years.
And we--we have a long, earnest day of work before us; I most of all. But let it come;
gather close around me, you true and faithful women. I have learned this, in these days: it
is you women who are the Pillars of Society."
Lona: "Then you have learned a poor wisdom, brother-in-law. No, no; the spirit of Truth
and of Freedom--these are the Pillars of Society."
The spirit of truth and freedom is the socio-revolutionary significance of "The Pillars of
Society." Those, who, like Consul Bernick, fail to realize this all-important fact, go on
patching up The Indian Girl, which is Ibsen's symbol for our society. But they, too, must
learn that society is rotten to the core; that patching up or reforming one sore spot merely
drives the social poison deeper into the system, and that all must go to the bottom unless
the spirit of Truth and Freedom revolutionize the world.
HENRIK IBSEN (1828-1906)
This article was originally published in A Short History of the Drama. Martha Fletcher Bellinger. New York: Henry Holt & Company,
1927. pp. 317-22.
IN the entire history of literature, there are few figures like Ibsen. Practically his whole life and
energies were devoted to the theater; and his offerings, medicinal and bitter, have changed the
history of the stage. The story of his life -- his birth March 20, 1828, in the little Norwegian village
of Skien, the change in family circumstances from prosperity to poverty when the boy was eight
years old, his studious and non-athletic boyhood, his apprenticeship to an apothecary in
Grimstad, and his early attempts at dramatic composition -- all these items are well known. His
spare hours were spent in preparation for entrance to Christiania University, where, at about the
age of twenty, he formed a friendship with Björnson. About 1851 the violinist Ole Bull gave Ibsen
the position of "theater poet" at the newly built National Theater in Bergen -- a post which he held
for six years. In 1857 he became director of the Norwegian Theater in Christiania; and in 1862,
with Love's Comedy, became known in his own country as a playwright of promise. Seven years
later, discouraged with the reception given to his work and out of sympathy with the social and
intellectual ideals of his country, he left Norway, not to return for a period of nearly thirty years. He
established himself first at Rome, later in Munich. Late in life he returned to Christiania, where he
died May 23, 1906.
IBSEN'S PLAYS
The productive life of Ibsen is conveniently divided into three periods: the first ending in 1877 with
the successful appearance of The Pillars of Society; the second covering the years in which he
wrote most of the dramas of protest against social conditions, such as Ghosts; and the third
marked by the symbolic plays, The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken. The first of the
prose plays, Love's Comedy (1862) made an impression in Norway, and drew the eyes of
thoughtful people to the new dramatist, though its satirical, mocking tone brought upon its author
the charge of being a cynic and an athiest. The three historical plays, or dramatic poems, Brand,
Emperor and Galilean, and Peer Gynt, written between 1866 and 1873, form a monumental epic.
These compositions cannot be considered wholly or primarily for the stage; they are the poetic
record of a long intellectual and spiritual struggle. In Brand there is the picture of the man who
has not found the means of adjustment between the mechanical routine of daily living and the
deeper claims of the soul; in Emperor and Galilean is a portrayal of the noblest type of pagan
philosophy and manhood, illustrated in the Emperor Julian, set off against the ideals of the Jewish
Christ; and in Peer Gynt is a picture of the war within the soul of a man in whom are no roots of
loyalty, faith, or steadfastness.
When The Young Men's League was produced, the occasion, like the first appearance of
Hernani, became locally historic. The play deals with political theories, ideas of liberty and social
justice; and in its presentation likenesses to living people were discovered, and fierce
resentments were aroused. The tumult of hissing and applauding during the performance was so
great that the authorities interfered. The Pillars of Society, Ibsen's fifteenth play, was the first to
have a hearing throughout Europe. It was written in Munich, where it was performed in the
summer of 1877. In the autumn it was enacted in all the theaters of Scandinavia, whence within a
few months it spread over the continent, appearing in London before the end of the year. The late
James Huneker, one of the most acute critics of the Norwegian seer, said: "The Northern
Aristophanes, who never smiles as he lays on the lash, exposes in The Pillars of Society a varied
row of white sepulchres. . . . There is no mercy in Ibsen, and his breast has never harbored the
milk of human kindness. This remote, objective art does not throw out tentacles of sympathy. It is
too disdainful to make the slightest concession, hence the difficulty in convincing an audience that
the poet is genuinely humain."
The Pillars of Society proved, once and for all, Ibsen's emancipation, first, from the thrall of
romanticism, which he had pushed aside as of no more worth than a toy; and, secondly, from the
domination of French technique, which he had mastered and surpassed. In the plays of the
second period there are evident Ibsen's most mature gifts as a craftsman as well as that peculiar
philosophy which made him the Jeremiah of the modern social world. In An Enemy of the People
the struggle is between hypocrisy and greed on one side, and the ideal of personal honor on the
other; in Ghosts there is an exposition of a fate-tragedy darker and more searching even than in
Oedipus; and in each of the social dramas there is exposed, as under the pitiless lens of the
microscope, some moral cancer. Ibsen forced his characters to scrutinize their past, the
conditions of the society to which they belonged, and the methods by which they had gained their
own petty ambitions, in order that they might pronounce judgment upon themselves. The action is
still for the most part concerned with men's deeds and outward lives, in connection with society
and the world; and his themes have largely to do with the moral and ethical relations of man with
man.
In the third period the arena of conflict has changed to the realm of the spirit; and the action
illustrates some effort at self-realization, self-conquest, or self-annihilation. The Master Builder
and When We Dead Awaken must explain themselves, if they are to be explained at all; for they
are meaningless if they do not light, in the mind of the reader or spectator, a spark of some
clairvoyant insight with which they were written. In them are characters which, like certain living
men and women, challenge and mystify even their closest friends and admirers. Throughout all
the plays there are symbols -- the wild duck, the mill race, the tower, or the open sea -- which are
but the external tokens of something less familiar and more important; and the dialogue often has
a secondary meaning, not with the witty double entendre of the French school, but with
suggestions of a world in which the spirit, ill at ease in material surroundings, will find its home.
It is significant that Ibsen should arrive, by his own route, at the very principles adopted by
Sophocles and commended by Aristotle -- namely, the unities of time, place and action, with only
the culminating events of the tragedy placed before the spectator. After the first period he wrote in
prose, abolishing all such ancient and serviceable contrivances as servants discussing their
masters' affairs, comic relief, asides and soliloquies. The characters in his later dramas are few,
and there are no "veils of poetic imagery."
IBSEN'S MORAL IDEALS
The principles of Ibsen's teaching, his moral ethic, was that honesty in facing facts is the first
requisite of a decent life. Human nature has dark recesses which must be explored and
illuminated; life has pitfalls which must be recognized to be avoided; and society has humbugs,
hypocrisies, and obscure diseases which must be revealed before they can be cured. To
recognize these facts is not pessimism; it is the moral obligation laid upon intelligent people. To
face the problems thus exposed, however, requires courage, honesty, and faith in the ultimate
worth of the human soul. Man must be educated until he is not only intelligent enough, but
courageous enough to work out his salvation through patient endurance and nobler ideals.
Democracy, as a cure-all, is just as much a failure as any other form of government; since the
majority in politics, society, or religion is always torpid and content with easy measures. It is the
intelligent and morally heroic minority which has always led, and always will lead, the human
family on its upward march. Nevertheless, we alone can help ourselves; no help can come from
without. Furthermore -- and this is a vital point in understanding Ibsen -- experience and life are a
happiness in themselves, not merely a means to happiness; and in the end good must prevail.
Such are some of the ideas that can be distilled from the substance of Ibsen's plays.
On the plane of practical methods Ibsen preached the emancipation of the individual, especially
of woman. He laid great stress upon the principle of heredity. He made many studies of
disordered minds, and analyzed relentlessly the common relationships -- sister and brother,
husband and wife, father and son. There is much in these relationships, he seems to say, that is
based on sentimentalism, on a desire to dominate, on hypocrisy and lies. He pictured the
unscrupulous financier, the artist who gives up love for the fancied demands of his art, the
unmarried woman who has been the drudge and the unthanked burden-bearer -- all with a cool
detachment which cloaks, but does not conceal, the passionate moralist.
From the seventh decade of the last century to his last play in 1899, the storm of criticism,
resentment, and denunciation scarcely ceased. On the other hand, the prophet and artist which
were united in Ibsen's nature found many champions and friends. In Germany he was hailed as
the leader of the new era; in England his champion, William Archer, fought many a battle for him;
but in the end no one could escape his example. Young playwrights learned from him, reformers
adopted his ideas, and moralists quoted from him as from a sacred book. His plays scorched, but
they fascinated the rising generation, and they stuck to the boards. Psychologists discovered a
depth of meaning and of human understanding in his delineation of character. He did not found a
school, for every school became his debtor. He did not have followers, for every succeeding
playwright was forced in a measure to learn from him.