Author William Faulkner and Ideals of Manhood

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Author William Faulkner and Ideals of Manhood

William Faulkner was above all else a lover of the image of southern masculinity. While Hamlet would learn to value his actions’ worth upon their bloodiness, Faulkner would use a masculine critique for his. Even his writing may be described as simply the only successful vessel he could find to indulge in this want of manliness. It was through his stories that Faulkner, in a sense, was able to reconcile the vast difference between the small framed, shunned outcast who stared back at him through a looking glass, and the courageous Colonel Sartoris of his imagination- the man he wished he could be. It appears that for Faulkner, life was a ceaseless struggle against fears of inferiority. While all writers in their efforts to create something significant and original must first, metaphorically speaking, slay their literary fathers, Faulkner‘s ambivalence and anxiety was all the more concrete as his “Literary Giant” was his own grandfather. It was Faulkner’s grandfather, nicknamed the “old Colonel”, who William hoped to see staring back at...

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