.IIIIIIII - IIIIIIIIIII'III'IB THESlS _~¢.._»..‘¢ \ '1' 11:23?- This is to certify that the dissertation entitled THE ANIMA-ANIMUS IN FOUR FAULKNER NOVELS presented by Jacqueline w. Stalker has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph.D. degree in En9115h Qfimmoae ajor professor Date October l0, 1983 MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771 MSU LIBRARIES __ RETURNING MATERIALS: Place in book drofi~to remove this checkout from your record. FINES will be charged if book is returned after the date stamped below. :3 fit}? fewffiwgmm End. 5;"r i {4: «ES? ‘r" w THE ANIMA-ANIMUS IN FOUR FAULKNER NOVELS BY Jacqueline W. Stalker A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1983 Copyright by JACQUELINE W . STALKER 1983 ABSTRACT THE ANIMA—ANIMUS IN FOUR FAULKNER NOVELS BY Jacqueline W. Stalker As an artist, William Faulkner was deeply in touch with the unconscious and its archetypes. His work is a conduit of images, symbols, themes and mythos of the archetypal mas- culine, the animus, and the archetypal feminine, the anima, that psychological pair symbolizing the two halves of the human psyche, ego-consciousness and the unconscious. This study applies the Jungian concept of the collective uncon- scious, the archetypes of the anima and animus, to four of William Falkner's novels, Soldiers"Pay, Sartoris, Pylon, and Absalom, Absalom! 'In these novels consciousness is most frequently aligned with white male characters who_are active seekers after traditionally heroic lifestyles, such as the Sartoris code of glamorous fatality, or Thomas Sutpen's am- bition to complete his grand design. The archetypal feminine, however, is projected by those characters, settings, and symbols which reflect its dark, unconscious, nurturant, sac- rificial naturev—women, Negroes, the earth, and the old sol- stice festivals and myths. This thesis argues that Faulkner's major characters in these novels show a terrible and fatal psychic division, a division that they project toward each other reflecting an estrangement between the rationalism of consciousness, and the intuitive wisdom of the unconscious. The pilot and war heroes, Donald Mahon, Bayard and John Sartoris, and Roger Shumann, are examples of inflated and estranged masculine in Soldiers' Pay, Sartoris, and Pylgn. They share with Thomas Sutpen of Absalomy'Absalom! a fatal disregard for the archetypal feminine. The female characters in Faulkner's novels are also shaped and estranged by both the anima projections of the men in their lives, as well as by their own animus which they project toward these men. Margaret Powers, Jenny DuPre, and Narcissa Benbow, Laverne Shumann, Rosa Coldfield, and Judith and Clytie Sutpen, search to find a balance between their primary feminine instincts, and the devaluing and disenfran- chising projections of a patriarchal society. Rosa Coldfield and Judith and Clytie Sutpen of Absalom, Absalom! recognize to a greater extent than the women of the earlier novels their participation in the dark, annealing unconscious with which the males must come to terms if they are to survive and en- dure. Chapter I. FAULKNER'S FICTION AND JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES: THEORETICAL AND CRITICAL FRAMEWORK II. FLYING ACES . III. VERBAL FLIGHTS, AIR RACES, AND THE MOTHER GODDESS: IV. SUTPEN'S FOLLY OR WHAT CLYTIE KNEW CONCLUSION . . . . BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . TABLE OF CONTENTS PYLON IN PERSPECTIVE iii Page 71 135 175 249 266 CHAPTER I- FAULKNER'S FICTION AND JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES: THEORETICAL AND CRITICAL FRAMEWORK This thesis will apply Jungian psychology of the uncon- scious to an analysis of four of William Faulkner's novels: 1 Soldiers' Pay, Sartoris,2 Pylon,3 and Absalom, Absalom!4 I will use the Jungian concepts of the shadow, the anima and the animus, and the archetypal masculine and archetypal feminine, as Carl Jung5 and Erich Neumann6 have defined them, to argue that the characters in these novels unconsciously project these archetypal images toward each other. From this mutual projection of inner, unconscious archetypes, many of the conflicts in these novels arise--not only between the male and female characters, but among characters of the same sex as well as among the family members. While I will make use of the depth-psychology works of Carl Jung and Erich Neumann, the focus of this study will be on the literature, particu- larly on the characters and symbols and settings, and the ways these reflect the archetypal masculine and feminine. The purpose of this study is not to psychoanalyze the l 2 characters in these novels, focusing on their personal, psychosexual conflicts and neuroses, as such Freudian studies as John Irwin's Doubling and Incest: Repetition and Revenge,7 Judith Wittenberg's Faulkner: The Transfiguration of Biography,8 and Lee Jenkin's Faulkner and Black and White Relations9 have successfully done. While such characters as Quentin Compson, Charles Bon, Judith Sutpen, and Narcissa and Horace Benbow might well suffer from classic incest neuroses, they as well as other characters in these novels may be profitably viewed from the broader, collective psy- chology of Jung, who asserted that the parental figures of psychic conflicts were far less personal and much more archetypal and collective than Freudian theory argues. In Jungian theory, the primal parents are not simply the per- sonal or historical parents, but are literally, the instinc- tive genetic predisposition to project outward, to objectify by projection, the primitive, pre-conscious modes of thought and experience alongside more modern, more consciously civilized modes of human thinking and acting. In essence, ego-consciousness and unconsciousness stand as two archetypes, the archetypal feminine and archetypal masculine, two opposing systems of human thought. These archetypes are the Primal Parents--the mother and father, sister and brother, masculine and feminine--of most psychic conflicts and projections. 3 The men and women of Faulkner's novels seek love, power,. money, recognition, or.a positive spiritual affirmation of the value of life. But they mostly fail to gain any of the things they want, and they often search without a clear sense of what the object of their search is. They consistently flee from more experiences or memories than they actively embrace, or they compulsively repeat unsuccessful attempts to satisfy their restless and often desperate but unspecified needs. Bayard Sartoris is a prime example of this restless, risk-taking, death-defying, compulsive search and flight. But women like Narcissa Benbow or Margaret Powers also search, trying out marriage as a solution to problems that press upon them but that they poorly visualize or understand. Faulkner's characters are inheritors of a positivistic, scientific world which has given them inadequate education and methods based almost purely on reason, on Logos, which fails them in their quest to find the identity of or solution for their needs. Science, the result of ego-consciousness' power to focus on manipulating matter, has created airplanes, pilots, war- madhines, and automobiles, but has few or no answers for Margaret Powers or Bayard Sartoris in their quest for a reason to live. Neither does an education at Harvard solve Quentin's problems in Absalom, Absalom! of how to deal with his heritage as a white, racist Southerner, which he projects 4 outward into his creation and confrontation with his double, Henry Sutpen. Alongside the elaborate scientific civilization into which the characters in these novels were born, and along with the considerable powers of analysis and ego-conscious- ness that most of them, both women and men, exhibit, there is another, alien, and conflicting method of thinking that these characters use and project. This second kind of thinking is instinctive, and is exhibited by these characters' attraction toward the seasonal rhythms of the earth, and toward the high risk situations of war, and the intense physical efforts of mock-combat events like hunting or air races. Against all reason, against all the modern and technological phenomena of nineteenth and twentieth century rationalism, the characters in these novels are drawn toward, seized by, the ancient symbols and images of sacrifice, marriage, and the magic promise of wholeness, healing, and rejuvenation present in the archetypes of marriage and the birth of a child. The characters in Soldiers' Pay, for example, all undertake increasingly frantic and irrational manipulations to cure the incurable and obviously dying Donald Mahon by means of marrying him to a young and vital woman. Bayard Sartoris of Sartoris finds that immersing himself in the intense labor of spring planting allays his 5 restless alienation-~until the crops are planted and nature leaves nothing else for him to do. The Reporter of Eylgn is seized by the sexually liberated gypsy life-style of a family of flyers, especially by the powerful sexual symbolism of Laverne Shumann and her son. Quentin and Shreve of Absalom, Absalom! become intensely involved in the love and brotherhood story of Charles Bon, Henry Sutpen, and Judith Sutpen, just as Rosa Coldfield's adolescence is created and formed by or creates and forms Charles Bon. In essence, the rational, ego-conscious individuals who figure prominently in these novels search for a meaning in life, and in Jungian terms, their unconscious responds by projecting compensating archetypes to engage their searching intellects. The archetypes, instinctive in all humans according to Jungian theory, seize ego-consciousness as if they were "objective" realities rather than subjective, instinctive, unconscious projections, which the unconscious sends forth to compensate the over-developed modern conscious- ness. But lacking an organized system of religion or myth, a communally directed spiritual guidance, these archetypal projections are not recognized as inner, psychic guides to be assimilated into consciousness as guides. They are taken as personal, objective directives. Margaret Powers of Soldiers' Pay more than half believes that marriage will cure and 6 rejuvenate Donald Mahon, thereby also relieving her guilt about her treatment of her own dead husband. Joe Gilligan believes that Margaret Powers will make him happy if she would only marry him. Narcissa Benbow of Sartoris believes first that marriage with Bayard will make her complete, and then that her son will not fall heir to the machismo code of the worst of the Sartorises. The Reporter of gylgg_believes, beyond the evidence of rational caution and foreknowledge of logical consequences, that he can supplant Roger Shumann in Laverne Shumann's life, and that he will be whole and satis- fied if he can only take care of her and her children. Laverne obviously married Roger Shumann expecting a change ‘and escape, a repudiation of all bereavement and separation, symbolized by her sexual union with Shumann in an airplane just before her first parachute jump. The marriage of Judith and Charles in Absalom, Absalom! is obviously a sacred symbol of a new order,10 a healing power in a brave, new world, though all reason and experience in the narrations argue not only that custom and law prohibits it, but that the two indi- viduals involved really do not, in rational terms, even know each other. Archetypal projections, the forms and myths and collective images of archetypal emanations in Faulkner's novels, dominate rational, conscious knowledge and thought. This "eruption" 7 of the archetypes from the collective unconscious simultan- eously confuses and destroys and yet enriches and transforms individual lives. The compensating numinousity of archetypal images, especially the archetypal feminine (anima), the archetypal masculine (animus), and the sacred couple (szygy), and the archetype of the child, symbolic of the full, future oriented individuation of the whole self, balanced by con- sciousness and unconsciousness, could enrich lives in these novels more than it does. But these modern men and women rely too much upon reason, Logos, the archetypal masculine of ego-consciousness and the canon of the Father Spirit, which has supplanted and denigrated the wisdom of the ancient world of participation mystique. Theoretically it was necessary to divide and supplant the unconscious, the archetypal feminine in order to attain consciousness. Yet ego-consciousness requires communication with and assimilation of the human instincts, that is,the unconscious. Both Jung and Neumann argue that not only has the denigration of the unconscious and its essentially feminine (nourishing) character operated to the detriment and oppression of individual women, but equally, that the whole of modern, western mankind has lost a nourishing relationship with the unconscious.11 Few of Faulkner's characters, whether male or female, are able to assimilate or engage the unconscious. They simply 8 flee from it or fall victim to it. Especially the male characters,12 all dominated by Logos ideals symbolized by air-flight, intellectual attainments, law, science, money, and empirical reason, fear being devoured by their own projections of the dark, chaotic, naturalistic, primitive symbols and images of the archetypal feminine, the uncon- scious. They systematically attempt to conquer and hold in subjection and rejection all individuals, classes, and races that are opposed to their ego-persona ideal of masculinity, power, whiteness, and freedom from the constraints of earth, flesh, and death. They cannot face and know the compensating factor of the archetypes, cannot recognize that they are symbolic guides toward a balanced wholeness, a fulfillment of their total humanity. Dominated by their positivistic, rationalistic "education" as modern Americans and Westerners, men like Thomas Sutpen and his heirs cannot recognize that to achieve their ultimate design, their dreams, they must compromise with, bargain with the darkness of the archetypal feminine, the "taint" that comes in the blood of humanity from the maternal side of the race. They fail to see that the designs of reason and applied science and personal ambition require compromise with and assimilation of the archetypal feminine, symbolized in Absalom, Absalom! by Negroes and 13 women. 9 I do not argue in this thesis that William Faulkner ever read or consciously used either Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. In fact, he consistently denied that he had read Freud.14 Faulkner is undeniably a "psychological” novelist, however, because of his interest in conflicts within the human heart, eternal conflicts, which he said should engage the writer, and thereby the reader, as opposed to our immediate problems of modern political hostilities and nuclear weapons. He is a “psychological" writer because of his multiple narrators and because of his attempts to render their free ranging and often totally imagistic responses to an often silent, absent, dead or mysterious central charac- ter such as Donald Mahon (Soldiers' Pay), Laverne Shumann (gylgn), Thomas Sutpen (Absalom, Absalom!), or Caddy Compson or AddieBundren. Also, his "stream of consciousness" style, which attempts to duplicate the associative, imagistic ellipses of the human psyche, is an attempt to render the process of the unconscious in Jungian terms. His prolific career in which he returns to the same families, region, town, charac- ters, and symbols mark him also as a psychological novelist, not because he returns to the same themes with neurotic, obsessive compulsion, nearly always an incest-block and 15 rivalry with the personal father, in Freudian theory. Rather, he had a true artist's servitude to the collective 10 unconscious, the well spring of archetypal themes and symbols, that could compensate a modern age's preoccupations with atomic weapons and nuclear war. He understood, as his Nobel Prize address makes clear, that the older conflict within mankind, within each individual heart or psyche or soul, must be known and understood and recognized before the solutions to atomic war could be approached. In fact, proper attention to the inner conflicts would guarantee survival and, possibly, triumph over the external conflicts. In Jungian terms, atomic war, like Thomas Sutpen's grand design, or the old South's racism, or the innate sexism of the world as a whole, stems from an inflation of the arche- typal masculine and from the origins of ego-consciousness in humankind in the separation of consciousness from unconscious- ness. Humankind may possess great and growing powers of reason and domination of material technology, yet is captive in an older reality, the earth, the flesh, and abidogical mortality and interdependence. I think that Faulkner gave speech, credence, and reverence to those factors, and many of his most sympathetically drawn people embody the older wisdom of these realities. They may not, like Isaac McCaslin, have the whole and only truth of the human condition, a wisdom of the wilderness that the young, like Roth Edmunds disregard and, indeed, scarcely recognize as kinsmen, yet 11 they embody and speak, if listened to and seen, an important truth, a truth literally as old as the hills, as old as the presence of animals and forests on earth. II. Writing in two essays, "On the Relation of Analytical "16 17 Psychology to Poetry, and "Psychology and Literature," Carl Jung tried to define extensively the true meaning of the artist and his art, as well as the contributions that may be possible for understanding literature through psychology. As in all other of his theories, he argued against adopting a personal, Freudian approach to literature, against reducing the artist's symbols to "symptoms" of his neurotic malad- justment to his personal past, his personal unconscious. In ."Psychology and Literature," Jung says, Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person'endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense--he is 'collective man,‘ a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. (101) In his ”0n the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," Jung says, We would do well, therefore, to think of the 12 creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche. In the language of analytical psychology this living thing is an autonomous complex. It is a split-off portion of the psyche, which leads a life of its own outside the hierarchy of consciousness. Depending on its energy charge, it may appear either as a mere disturbance of conscious activities or as a supraordinate author- ity which can harness the ego to its purpose. (75) Jung says there are at least two categories of writers. The first one consciously shapes and designs his or her work. He or she "acquiesces from the start when the unconscious imperative begins to function" (75). This artist's work transcends the limits of ordinary, conscious comprehension. In his essay "Psychology and Literature," Jung designates this sort of writing as "psychological," meaning that the contents of such "psychological" fiction always "derive from the sphere of conscious human experience--from the psychic fore- ground of life. . .It remains within the limits of the psychologically intelligible. Everything it embraces--the experience as well as its artistic expression--belongs to the realm of a clearly understandable psychology" (90). The second sort of artist and her or his literary creations, Jung terms as "visionary." Of this "visionary" art Jung says: It is something strange that derives its existence from the hinterland of man's mind, as if it had emerged from the abyss of prehuman ages, or from a superhuman world of contrasting light and dark- ness. It is a primordial experience which surpasses man's understanding and to which in his weakness he may easily succumb. . .the primordial experiences 13 rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which. is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomable abyss of the unborn and of things yet to be. (91) Such a creation sounds like Yeats' rough beast slouching to- ward Bethlehem or the monstrous forms of Kafka's fiction, per- haps more than such primordial experiences resemble Faulkner's all too recognizable red necks and intellectuals, but only at first glance. Donald Mahon's scarred face and vegetable ex— istence render him horrible, frightening, and yet fascinating to the characters of his novel. Addie Bundren is not a myth- ological mixture of beasts and mankind, perhaps, but she is an emblem of the decay of death and earthly matter from which life and human passions seem to breed and spring. The list of Faulkner characters that contain the power and mastery of "something strange that derives its existence from the hinter- land of man's mind" might well cover almost every major char- acter and beast that Faulkner created. Indeed, the intense and diverse range of critical definitions that surround Faulkner's characters, ranging from arguments about their "realism"18 or their adherence to Gothic prototypes,19 might well be taken as a testimony to their ambiguity and mystery, that is, to their archetypal nature. It is precisely the juxtaposition in Faulkner's work be- tween the ordinary, comprehensible, rational and"visionary" underside of human experience which lends his work its rich- 14 ness and disturbing intensity. There are many characters and events in Faulkner's fiction that seem to belong to the daylight world of consciousness, but which go far beyond the range of individual psychology. Joe Christmas' psychological maladaptation is clearly comprehensible from his personal history, but its power and monstrosity and darkness enlarges him to the stature of the archetypal opposites of white and black, light and dark, male and female. He becomes the arche- type of master and slave, that struggle for dominance or bal- ance which rages not only in each individual on earth, but contests doubly in the person caught in the schizophrenic symbolism of an apartheid society. The important point of Jung's essay on psychology and literature rests in his discussion of the artist's-use of Symbol and archetype, of the collective unconscious, as the visionary artist uses them, or is used by them. The creative process, so far as we are able to fol- low it at all consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and sha- ping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up forms in which the age is most lack- ing. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and onevsidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest un— consciousness he brings it into relation with con- 15 scious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.(82—83) Most people, Jung argues, follow the general attitudes and directions taken by their peers and elders. They lead conven- tional lives according to conventional patterns. But, he argues, this sort of life implies exclusion . . .exclusion means that very many psychic ele- ments that could play their part in life are denied the right to exist because they are incompatible with the general attitude. . .but the man who takes to the back streets and alleys because he cannot endure the broad highway will be the first to dis- cover the psychic elements thatare waiting to play their part in the life of the collective. Here the artist's relative lack of adaptation turns out to his advantage; it enables him to follow his own yearnings. . .and to discover what it is that would meet the unconscious needs of his age. Thus, just as the one—sidedness of the individual's conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the uncon- scious, so art represents a process of self-regu- lation in the life of nations and epochs. (83) In "Psychology and Literature," Jung repeats and expands these assertions, when he says that "the manifestations of the collective unconscious are compensatory to the conscious attitude" (98). Or again, Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. When- ever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought to bear upon the cone scious outlook of an age, this event is a crea— tive act which is of importance for a whole epoch. A work of art is produced that may truthfully be called a message to generations of men. (98) 16 It is a deviation from the middle way that gives rise to the archetypal images. ”Whenever conscious life becomes one-sided or adopts a false attitude, these images instinctively rise to the surface in dreams and in the visions of artists and seers to restore the psychic balance, whether of the individual or of the epoch” (104). Faulkner essentially affirmed Jung's contention that the artist offered a healing, compensatory image to his society. Ours is clearly an age of technology, bombs, warfare, and applied economic theory with its concomitant cycles of war, cold.war, money making, and depression. To this age Faulkner offered the study of the human heart, and he offered in his fiction images of people, beasts, and places too "primitive" and outmoded to fit it--women, Negroes, children, "drop-outs" like Isaac McCaslin and like Sam Fathers and their vanishing Wilderness. In many other characters and novels, the ancient and modern exist in conflict, side by side. Faulkner makes it possible for us all to sympathize with Quentin Compson who feels older at nineteen than most people who have already died. Faulkner offers us the opportunity to see with Isaac MCCaslin and Sam Fathers, the ageless epitome of the wilder- ness, the archetypal old stag, which materializes out of the mellow notes of a hunting horn. —— l7 Jung's major contribution to twentieth century psycho- logical theory is his concept of the collective unconscious: In contrast to the personal unconscious, which is a relatively thin layer immediately below the threshold of consciousness, the collective unconscious shows no tendency to become conscious under normal conditions, nor can it be brought back to recollection by any analytical technique, since it was never repressed or forgotten. The collective unconscious is not to be thought of as a self-subsistent entity; it is no more than a potentiality handed down to us from primordial times in the specific form of mnemonic images or inherited in the anatomical structure of the brain. There are no inborn ideas, but there are inborn possibilities of ideas that set bounds to even the boldest fantasy and keep our fantasy activity within certain categories: g_priori ideas, as it were, the existence of which cannot be ascertained except from the effects. They appear only in the shaped material of art as the regulative principles that shape it; that is to say, only by inferences drawn from the finished work can we reconstruct the age-old original of the primordial image. ("Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," p. 80). Jung continues by defining the primordial image as an archetype, or figure, a human image or type or a process that Constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever Creative fantasy is freely expressed. Elsewhere Jung defines the collective unconscious, that inherited predisposition to Preject and respond to archetypal images, as "very close" to the archetypes, "so close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are 18 patterns of instinctual behaviour."22 In addition to using the dreams and the delusions of his patients whom he encountered in his medical practice as a psychiatrist, Jung also used his enormous knowledge drawn from an investigation of folklore and myth to support his theory of a collective unconscious. He argued that myths and folklore, as well as art and religious ritual and motifs, were examples of the archetypes projected by the collective unconscious operating universally in each individual. Jung came to argue that while we can know, project, and recognize archetypal images in the projections of others, we can never finally apprehend the archetypes pe£_§e, because they are structures, genetic determinants, that continally activate the archetypal images, but do not themselves have a shape or a form. Jung believed that most human problems stem from the fact 'that in the history of our race, and in the life of every individual, too, consciousness splits from unconsciousness. The unconscious, the totality of all the archetypes, is the deposit of all human experience right back to its remotest beginnings. Not, indeed a dead deposit, a sort of rubbish-heap, but a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual's life in invisible ways—- all the more effective because invisible. . .hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by his- tory, but is the very source of the creative impulse. 19 It is like Nature herself-~prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation. ("The Structure of the Psyche," 44) Had consciousness not evolved racially and individually, Jung says, human beings would not have problems and conflicts beyond environmental adaptation. Consciousness, to Jung, is an erratic and "ephemeral phenomenon" (45) that accomplishes all provisional adaptations and orientations. Consciousness deals with the external world by way of the senses, but it also deals with the internal world of the psyche, which the collective unconscious projects outward by "feeling-toned" images that we perceive as objective, sensory reality. Both Jung and Neumann emphasize constantly that con- sciousness is opposed to instinct, to nature, and therefore to unconsciousness. To primitive people, or, presumably, prehistoric people, there is only the way of instinct, nature, and ritual. But to modern human beings, culture and reason, doubts and reflections, oppose nature and instinct. Con- sciousness and culture are in our times called upon to do what nature and ritual did in a far past time. Therein lies a source of uncertainty and fear, that consciousness will fail to do what nature requires and might, were we not conscious beings, do better than reason. We are essentially orphaned and isolated, Jung argues, "abandoned by nature and driven to COHSCiOUSIleSS. . .We are forced to resort to COHSCiOUS 20 decisions and solutions where formerly we trusted ourselves to natural happenings. Every problem holds both the poten- tial of widening consciousness and strengthening it thereby, but also of saying farewell to a childlike trust in nature."21 Jung emphasizes that this is the curse that follows the biblical fall of man, the acquisition of knowledge and a consequent separation from God and the Garden of Eden.22 Neumann, in his Origins of Consciousness from Uncon- sciousness, theorizes the stadial development of every individual, as well as of collective man, in terms of a hero, the anthropomorphized symbol of ego-consciousness. This hero, ego-consciousness, is born inia primal, uroboric round composed of the undifferentiated Primal Parents. Gradually the emerging ego-consciousness, the hero, divides the Primal Parents, (Mother/Father, or the mythic Garden and God of Jung's example) eventually liberating himself/itself from the devouring dragon of the Primal Parents, the uncon- scious state. Neumann depicts other stages in the advance and individuation of the hero-~the dragon fight, winning the fair captive and the hoard of gold or kingdom, and the eventual establishment of the new kingdom or the new self, in which the ancient Primal Parents are spiritualized and de-potentiated, and thereby assimilated into an expanding power of ego-consciousness. This process of individuation, 21 this assimilation of unconscious contents into ego-conscious- ness, is a life-long process, according to both Jung and Neumann, with the separation of the Primal Parents and the defeat of the dragon of the unconscious and the winning of 'the fair captive or kingdom as the dominating pattern of the first half of life. Both men establish that a reversal of this pattern, in a sense, a devotion to different aims and a widening of ego and self in the assimilation of unconscious contents, marks the second half of life. This pattern of the second half of life would be of incidental concern in this study, for most of the problems among the characters in this novel are really those of the dragon fight and the attempts to bring consciousness and unconsciousness into some balance in their lives. I have, however, chosen novels from Faulkner's early and middle career, following David Williams' Jungian analysis of the goddess in Faulkner, and his estimation that after 1941 Faulkner began to tell rather than show the power of the feminine at work in mankind's life.23 He sees, for example, that Eula Varner is said to have a powerful effect on men's lives, but is rarely shown to simply appear as a numinous goddess in the ways a character like Lena Grove does. Perhaps the different psychic development of the second half of life, theoretically suggested by Jung and Neumann and recently 22 become a firm tenet of modern psychiatry (popularized as the "mid-life crisis") would naturally alter a writer's methods and symbols. The aim is not to debate or prove this point, but to take note of it as a possible contributing factor to Faulkner's later style. Since The Reivers offers a possible return to the earlier symbolic representation of the feminine, according to both David Williams and Judith Wittenberg,24 it could be quite useful to look closely at this last novel, in comparison with Faulkner's other novels after Go Down,Moses, in 1941. Ego-consciousness, then, is a hero, for both men and women, an archetype of consciousness who appears in dreams, fantasies, literature, myth, and foklore. Both Jung and Neumann assign a masculine identity to consciousness, whether appearing in projections of men or women, because of its 25 active, heroic, striving, rebellious, and rational character. Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope in The Female Hero, have taken exception to this machismo identity of the hero and have attempted to posit a different definition of the arche- typal heroic journey.26 It could be argued, however, that Pearson and Pope's strong, conquering women, who do not knuckle under to the role-definitions imposed by society, their parents, or their male lovers, are simply demonstrating Jung's and Neumann's contention that ego-consciousness is a 23 courageous, heroic, role-shattering, and futuristic instinct of the psyche. Even heroic ego-consciousness is, like all_ parts of the psyche, vulnerable to the past and the status quo which are symbolized by the devouring first parents in all their guises. Many of Faulkner's most engaging and vital heroines have masculine characteristics-~strength, energy, and intelligence--and they struggle with ways to balance the masculine and feminine "role" and attributes and instincts within their own lives. Both men and women in Faulkner's novels confront the dragons of matriarchal and patriarchal society, but the female hero, as Pearson and Pope suggest in arguing their case with other fiction, has the entire convention of Western society against her in her struggle. At some time in the pre-history ofwestern man, patriarchal society and patri- archal myths displaced the older matriarchal society and myths. No one, neither Jung nor Neumann, nor any scholar, knows precisely when or why this displacement occurred, but Jung and Neumann suggest that its occurence dates from about the same point as the emergence of consciousness as an individual and collective phenomenon, accompanying the passage of ritual, rites, and magic into the domain of the male collective, with its Father spirits and the male shaman. Consciousness is a slippery, difficult state to define, 24 even medically, with our current deeply probing physiological methods of investigation. Consciousness and its psychologi- cal components, ego and personality, are also nearly impossibhe to define, and a glance at Jung's definitions in 5&223. Researches into the Phenomenonology of the Self, can easily convince anyone that theoretical depth-psychology indeed resembles philosophy or religious mysticism more than it does medicine and science. Ego and consciousness, as Jung and Neumann use the terms, are components of the self, the much larger and mostly unconscious center of the psyche. Ego and consciousness imply awareness and knowledge of, not only a focused and sensory nature, but also of an inner and psychic nature. In fact, consciousness is defined more by its limitations, the unknown against which the consciousness con- 'dnually impinges, than by any directly positive, factual state. In Jungian theory, the unconscious, both personal and collective, is much vaster at any given point than the island of ego-consciousness, which always implies a focused, selective concentration. At any minute of consciousness, however, we are not aware of being conscious of all else that we might know or all else that we might say we are conscious of. Essentially, ego-consciousness acquires energy by liberating it from the unconscious, just as Prometheus stole 25 fire, always a symbol of consciousness and knowledge, as is light and brightness. Ideally, consciousness is in constant contact and assimilative communication with the unconscious, an exchange facilitated by religion, myth, ritual, and such things as the telling of dreams engaged in by many tribes, and by psychoanalysis as well. The rituals, formula plots and ”events" of popular culture encourage this participation mystique, with film and television having replaced many cultural festivals and celebrations of earlier, simpler times. Ideally, consciousness constantly expands by engaging and assimilating the instinctive wisdom of the unconscious. The archetypal images and patterns projected by the unconscious are the medium and catalyst of exchange and perception. The expansion of energy to the ego and consciousness is unlimited and constant in this sense. If this natural assimilation is blocked by a disruption in this process, consciousness loses energy to the unconscious. This loss of energy to the unconscious means that consciousness is liable to be entirely overwhelmed by the unconscious, or to hold tightly to a narrow, rigid focus on the immediate present and the minutia of incoming sensory data. In either case, a loss of libido occurs and an individual, or a collective group like a nation, can become sick, either inflated with the mystic power of the overwhelming attraction of the archetypes, or fleeing them in 26 a narrow, focused attempt to exclude them and thereby avoid them, forget them altogether. i To Freud, this loss of libido that disrupted conscious- ness was nearly always caused by personal factors that were recoverable through analysis from an unconscious that was largely composed of personal, repressed contents. Freud's concept of an historical unconscious, which retained instinc- tive guilt, such as the guilt caused by a theoretical, tribal "first" murder of the dominant male primate (and replacing him with a successor) is small in comparison with Jung's concept of an unconscious that contains not only all the patterns and forms of the primitive instincts, but an historical succession of the images these instincts have assumed as well. In contrast to Freud, Jung assumes that the blocking of any one of several instincts, not only of the sexual instinct by the incest taboo, might be responsible for the loss of libido or energy available for the healthy expansion of consciousness. In fact, a life or a culture disregarding the archetypes, and thereby disregarding the instincts and the collective unconscious, disrupts the heahmy exchange with the unconscious. In a curious way, Jung's psychology of the collective unconscious, which seems to give so little importance to the individual, in fact emphasizes that nature is aristocratic, 27 caring more for one individual than for ten.27 Individuation, the full expansion of consciousness and of the self, can occur only when the individual recognizes that much of what he thinks of as persona1--mother, father, love, home, home- land-~are actually archetypal images, representations of the instincts projected by the collective-unconscious. The individual can assume all too easily and simply that these collective, instinctive images are personal. In this case, a woman or man has little more individuality than the collec- tive, for he or she assimilates all the thoughts, forms, feelings and ideals of the collective, and mistakenly assumes they are true expressions of his or her individual self. Both Jung and Neumann feel that modern society and education, as well as what currently passes for religion and myth, have personalized all of experience—-interpreted all of experience as a personal matter. Jung and Neumann see Freudian psychology as part of this atomistic tendency. They blame as well the culture-wide dissolution of religious beliefs and cultural rituals that people at one time had faith in. Both men term this the collapse of the archetypal canon, and hold it responsible for a sickness of the modern spirit, in which people are liable to collective frenzies, seized by the power of an archetypal image conjured up as a compensating device by the collective unconscious. In such 28 a collective frenzy, consciousness fails to recognize the archetypal image as a symbol and takes it for a "fact." The logical process of reason and consciousness denies such a seizure, all the while being assimilated by the archetypal image. In essence, Jung and Neumann claim that we innately speak an archetypal language of images, but because of a too focused attention to sensory information, as in the scientific application of reason to matter, we have forgotten how to speak the language of the archetypal images. we are, howeven as susceptible as primitives to their fixative, numinous power. We are more susceptible, in fact, because we have no ritual, no shaman, no spiritual or psychological education regarding what they are. In looking at the collective unconscious, Jung postu- lates the persona and its paired opposite, the shadow. These opposites exist at that intriguing boundary between conscious- ness and the collective unconscious, the personal unconscious, all of that material of which the individual might easily become conscious. The persona can be easily mistaken for. the self or the ego, but it is actually a mask that accommo- dates the individual self to the demands of the social norms, the collective. We jokingly refer to the Ken and Barbie stereotypes of the modern, well adjusted male and female, or of the Superman image, or the all—American guy, or of the 29 suffering artist or liberated woman (meaning £22 liberated for most men's taste). Yet, these are essentially composite persona that are quite similar to the personas that most of us adopt and present as ideal selves. One of the difficulths with a persona is that it feigns individuality, "making others and oneself believe that one is individual, whereas one is simply acting a role through which the collective psyche speaks" ("Ego and the Unconscious," 105). Ego-conscious- ness identifies totally with the persona, though the self, that portion of us which is unconscious, does not. Jung says, "the purely personal attitude of the conscious mind evokes reactions on the part of the unconscious, and these, together with personal repressions, contain the seeds of individual development in the guise of collective fantasies" (”Ego and the Unconscious," 105). The shadow is the first archetypal figure, the one nearest to consciousness, encountered in the collective unconscious. It is, Jung says, by far the easiest figure of the collective unconscious to recognize because it is basically the opposite of the conscious personality—-all of those attributes belonging to the individual and to his persona, too, which have been repressed, deleted, neglected, and disliked by the individual in his conscious adaptation. The shadow is "dark," that is, unconscious, and often black 30 -in its symbolic color. The shadow is same-sexed. Any strong negative reaction to a person of our same sex should trigger an alert mechanism-~we are probably dealing with a projection of our own shadow, or we are meeting someone who has attributes we strongly dislike in ourselves as a matter of adaptation. Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom! encoun- tering Clyte is really reacting to her own shadow self, and to a collective shadow as well when she reSponds to Clytie with, "Get your hand off me nigger!" Faulkner depicts the racial tension between blacks and whites as a matter of persona and shadow. In Faulkner the white/conscious/ collective/identity persona of an apartheid society speaks contemptuously to its shadow self. Thomas Sutpen's shadow, any white racist's shadow, is surely a Negro.28 I have used the terms shadow and persona extensively in this thesis in discussing conscious adaptation to collective norms-~sometimes Southern norms, sometimes American ones-- with an awareness that the machismo code of the Sartorises, while it has apparently Southern components, probably differs little from the machismo image of the dashing flier, pilot, astronaut, that has taken the fancy of not only a wide spectrum of the whole American male population, but the fe- male population as well. At the date of this writing, the first American woman astronaut, Sally Ride, is circling the 31 earth. The repressed, neglected portion of us that resides in the shadow is not necessarily "bad" or "goodf in objective terms. In fact, knowing her or him is vital to knowing who we are as individuals, and to accepting that person as a valuable part of us. Thatshadow person compensates us, keeps us in balance, and is, in truth, a more true portion of our individual uniqueness than is our adaptive persona. Quentin Compson, in The Sound and the Fury, recognizes the attraction, the need to merge with his shadow self that last day of his life. His need to meet and turn downward into the dark, watery unconscious is a sound, healthy one, but he is overpowered by the shadow image in the collective unconscious, much as he.is overpowered in Absalom, Absalom! by his shadow in the form of Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon. There are no interpretive guidelines in Quentin's life to enable him to know that he is facing a dreaded antagonist/ brother who is ultimately a transpersonal identity designed by his own unconscious to compensate his conscious attitude. It is easy to see Thomas Sutpen's shadow projection of social, economic, and racial inferiority in the "balloon nigger" whose presence haunts him throughout his life, and whose presence he projects into his first wife and abandoned son, Charles Bon. It is somewhat more difficult to recognize 32 the shadow aspects of Bayard Sartoris' projections because Bayard's shadow-brother, John, contains more positive qualities than the shadow often possesses. In such a case the ego plays an essentially negative or unfavorable role with regard to the shadow. Thomas Sutpen nowhere demonstrates a conscious, aware dissatisfaction with his ego-consciousness or persona, but Bayard Sartoris does. Bayard is fairly conscious of the positive, caring, jgie_de_yiy£e_qualities of his dead brother. Or examine the opposition of Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon, Southerner and Northerner, one moody and sensitive, the other very rational, athletic, and in full possession of slangy, iconoclastic (smart-alec) exuberance. Faulkner requires both of them in their personal and shadow aspects to construct a portion of the Sutpen story The other two archetypes projected from the collective unconscious, constantly throughout life, but intensively whenever the psyche needs a balance between conscious and unconscious aspects, are the animg and animus. These are contra-sexual figures. While the shadow represents first and foremost the contents of the personal unconscious and is therefore relatively accessible to the conscious, the anima and animus, Jung says, "are much further away from consciousness and in normal circumstances are seldom if ever realized” ("The Shadow," 148). 33 The anima, the opposite sexed projection of males, is a complex and many faced "woman." The personal women that a man experiences, beginning with his mother and sisters, and extending to women outside his immediate family, are the carriers, the recipients of this projection, but not the source. The unconscious is the source of this arche- typal image, and she represents, ultimately, the archetype-- creating unconscious itself--herself. Jung says, "EVery mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. . .she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must some- times forego; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life" ("The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," 151). The negative potentialities of this archetype, Jung categorizes as her great illusion- spinning capacity, "the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya-~and not only into life's reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another” (The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," 150). The archetypal feminine (a term that I use along with 34 Jung and Neumann as a general term to designate the feminine archetype in the unconscious projections of all human beings, male or female) appears in a variety of forms. Her most elemental form is as The Great Mother, the mother earth, or Mother Nature, the nourisher and source of life and earth. Her bountiful and terrible (death and destruction) aspects are unified in her personification as Nature. She is that which contains, enfolds, protects, nourishes, absorbs, devours--she is the essential uterine cavity/death maw/an eternal renewer of life. Erich Neumann discusses the most primitive appearance of the archetypal feminine as a bi-sexual image, as The Great Round, the uroboros, or The Primal Parents before their separation into conscious (Father) and unconscious (Mother). This primal experience of the archetypal feminine as the beginning and end of all experience, corresponds to the pre—natal and early infancy stage in the life of the indivi- dual, and to the pre-conscious, primitive state in racial development. It is Adam and Eve in the Garden--before the apple and serpent; it is the bliss of unconscious forgetful- ness and sleep and death into which most human beings, at some time or another, yearn to relax, relinquishing all the burdens of consciousness and striving. At this undifferenti- ated level of consciousness, ego-consciousness is often 35 represented as the suckling son of the mother/madonna, or at an even more undifferentiated level, as the sheaf of wheat or grain held by the goddess/mother/madonna. Obviously, consciousness, ego, is almost totally dependent on the feminine, the unconscious. In the personal life of an individual, the archetypes of the anima for males, and the animus for females, can become very dangerously and seductively entangled with the individual's experience of the personal parents, siblings,or lovers. If that happens, the son can never develop beyond the passive Eros of the child. "He seeks as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him" ("The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," 148).. The desire to touch reality leads even such a man to make a series of starts toward independence, but "the fragment of world which he, like every man, must encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap,does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only by force“ ("The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," 149). The mother and son who never break this sort of pre-conscious bond enact a drama so common it is the source of many myths. Jung says the son often becomes a 36 homosexual, much to the conscious consternation of the mother and perhaps the son. "There is consummated the immemorial and most sacred archetype of the marriage of mother and son“ ("The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," 150). The archetypal projection is meant to project the eternal dependence of and birth from the unconscious of conscious- ness, but individual mothers and sons can turn it into a drama of their entire lives. Jung says that the projection can only be dissolved for people who are fastened and impeded by it “when the son sees that the archetypal feminine is not only the mother, but the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess" ("The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," 150). Jung's chief quarrel with Freud was that Freud insisted on person- alizing all traumas as The sexual trauma of incest with the mother or female relative, when in truth, the archetypal projections could disrupt the personal life in individuals who were susceptible. The psychological truth, as Jungians see it, is that all human beings have a fragile but potenti- ally unlimited ego-consciousness, that can easily be (and usually is at one or more points) overwhelmed by the mysterious and primal nourishing force of the unconsciousness. The struggle for balance and recognition is the struggle of life, essentially, and is a script of individuation in which 37 the personal parents are generally insignificant unless the individual loses her/his personal identity to the archetype. Quentin Compson's incestuous longing for his sister Caddy, or indeed all of the Compson sons' entanglements with their projections of Caddy, is a clear example of the inter- play of personal and archetypal projections of the anima. To Faulkner, Caddy was clearly an anima figure, an inspiration, a heart's darling, a girl-child, essentially an orphaned child, always a representative of the true psychological potential of the human self. To the males of his novel, she is a private, personal vision that is always unattainable, and thereby, she is a "bitch" for not fulfilling the all- nourishing role that they have assigned to her. Only Jason is honest, in this sense, about her nature to him as a "bitch." But Benjy represents her as the total absence, the void, the lost essence he cannot have, symbolized by the feminine symbols of helper (Caddy), the pasture, the water/mirror, the fire. To Quentin she is his feminine opposite that will, if he can unify and isolate himself with her, arrest the con- tinuous struggle he senses with this archetypal force of the feminine. To all of them, Caddy's individual significance as a person, who happens to be also a woman, is lost. Her father treats her as an abstraction, too, defining the pain that she is causing Quentin as "nature" and caused by the 38 natural differences between men and women. Caddy's only relationship to her mother is her usefulness as a virgin daughter who can fetch a high price on the marriage market. It is easy to hate Ms. Compson as the selfish, sickly, complaining bitch of this piece, until we remember that she too suffers from the projections of the men who surround her and who have defined the norms she internalizes. As an archetypal projection of the unconscious herself, the dark, wise, nourishing and instinctive mother, even Dilsey is ultimately powerless to heal the hurts stemming from the male archetypal projections of the feminine in this novel. She can "see" the first and last; she offers compensation, but the heroic action rests with the younger Ms. Quentin, who at least escapes the confines of Jason, patriarch of the Compsons. The men and women of the novels I discuss extensively suffer these counter productive mechanisms of the anima- animus projections. The reporter of EXlEE is driven temporarily mad by his projection of Laverne Shumann and her son, just as Byron Snopes of Sartoris is driven mad by his anima projection of Narcissa Benbow. Narcissa, in turn, is just as susceptible to her animus projections of the Sartoris twins, Byron's love letters, and her brother, Horace. Rosa Coldfield of Absalom literally "creates" 39 Charles Bon, and "recreates" Thomas Sutpen, just as Quentin and Shreve do much toward "creating“ Judith and Charles as lovers. Both Jung and Neumann emphasize that the anima-animus archetypal figures alter in an individual's life, beginning with the first splitting of negative and positive qualities, and gaining increasing complexity and spirituality, and thereby losing their primitive, unconscious power. Essenti- ally the archetypal projections aid ego-consciousness in its strengthening and resiliancy against the larger, more powerful unconscious. They cause internal realities to seem objective and therefore become contents that the conscious- ness can treat as it treats other truly objective realities. Jung particularly emphasizes that many of these projections are collective and archaic, paralleling the history of conscious development for the human race as a whole. Not surprisingly, then, very archaic images exist side by side with more spiritual, less chthonic ones. In Faulkner's fiction, the animus-anima projections fall along a full range of possibilities, with some containing the full mystery and paradox of the positive and negative aspects of the archetypal feminine. Margaret Powers, Judith and Clytie Sutpen, and Laverne Shumann appear with a certain trickster aspect, as women who can point the way equally to death and 40 rebirth. . The chief accomplishment for ego-consciousness is the slaying of the'uroborfl:dragon of the primal parents, and the undifferentiated, devouring aspects of the feminine unconscious. The primal parents with their fundamentally feminine character, which parallels the fundamentally. feminine biological structure of human beings, are recreated and projected as a sisterly feminine counterpart or as a fair-beloved. The devouring and overwhelmingly dark power of the feminine is thus demythologized and depotentiated. The archetype of the masculine hero, ego-consciousness, battling the dragon and winning the fair captive, however, recurs throughout life whenever ego-consciousness undertakes the task of asSimilating unconsciousness. The anima-animus projection recurs throughout life and is of enduring interest to human beings, because it depicts the stadial development of the psyche. The unconscious, contra-sexed projection of women is the animus. Since both Jung and Neumann were males, they seem less than completely adequate in describing the animus pro- jection of women. Both caution that, since the underlying biological and psychological nature of human beings is essentially feminine (a dark, creative, emotional force), the stadial development of women is different. Ultimately, 41 women are less likely than men to become divided from their instinctive (unconscious) nature. While they may think they are seeking the Father Wisdom and spirit represented by their animus, they ultimately seek a reConciliation with the feminine. Just as males must spiritualize and intellectual- ize the archetypal feminine to assimilate her, females must deal with the intellectual and therefore alien being of the animus to make use of him. The animus can too easily become mere stubborn, limiting "public“ opinion as it represents the Father Wisdom or Father Spirit of cultural values. The danger in accepting this Father Wisdom, as both Neumann and Jung point out, is particularly great for women, because the cultural canon of the masculine culture contains archaic but pervasive prejudices against the matriarchal culture. At some time in the human past, psychologists and archeologists find evidence that the patriarchy gained the power of law and religion from the older, chthonic, matri- archal culture. Jung and Neumann assume that because the unconscious state of primitive man was the domain of the older, matriarchal culture, the newer values of consciousness, with its masculine orientation toward Logos and the objectiwm conscious adaptation toward physical reality, feared the older symbols and powers of the matriarchal culture, just as consciousness fears the mystery and power and ultimate 42 darkness of the unconscious. In displacing the matriarchal culture, the patriarchy also displaced the female and her values because of her archetypal connection with the threat of the unconscious. Modern women continue to suffer this historical, symbolic, "archetypal" displacement which is part of the masculine canon, and therefore part of the imagistic component of the masculine archetype as well as part of the structure of masculine law and attitude. The father culture of values, laws, customs and attitudes toward what constitutes masculinity and femininity can isolate both sexes from normal psychic development. But women, because their basic nature is more at home in the unconscious world of the feminine, have trouble bringing their emotional wisdom and the intellectual logic of their animus into a balance. Faulkner's modern, educated and highly conscious women have as much problem with their animus projections toward men and with knowing how to bring reason and instinct into balance as do Faulkner's heroes. David Williams discusses at length the overwhelming life-~wisdom of such Faulkner heroines as Caddy Compson, Lena Grove, and Corrie Everbe. Lena and Corrie do not seem to have conflicts between their basic nature and their animus—~in fact, they seem to have little of the masculine in their lives. Caddy Compson and 43 her daughter do not have such centered lives; they are more typical of the modern woman, who is possessed of a heroic ego-consciousness as capable of reason and assertion as any man's. Instinct leads these women, like Laverne Shumann, to change the confining and "virginal" circumstances of their lives and to have a child, which reason and logic, stemming from the press of circumstances in a man's world, forces them to abandon. 'Margaret Powers is a woman who tries with reason and manipulation to understand her own and other's instinctive and intellectual natures, but with only limited success. Reason leads her to assert that loss. is the logical consequence of union of the sexes and love. "All'men who marry me die," she concludes, with accurate logic. But logic addresses none of the overwhelming emotions and needs of her life, and the lives of others around her. She is, as indeed most Faulkner characters are,hopelessly suspended between nature and culture, instinct and reason. These suspended, powerful, and seeming irreconcilable opposites are the anima-animus, the paired opposites of psychic structure. The projection, the "appearance," of these opposites should make possible a union, a solution, a reconciliation, a marriage in metaphorical terms. It is precisely this divine pairing or coupling that captures the emotions and 44 imagination of so many characters in Faulkner's novels. .For Margaret Powers and the ReVerend Mahon, the divine pair of Soldiers' ng should be Donald Mahon and Cecily Saunders, the hero and the virgin princess. But Donald Mahon is dying of his war wound. Reason argues that the marriage will not cure Donald or be of any benefit to any of the individuals concerned, but archetypal projection captures the reason of the characters of this novel. Par- ticularly captured by this archetypal image of the union of anima—animus is Margaret Powers, who is trying to come to terms with her own animus problem of a dead husband she married impulsively, wanted to leave, but could not because he had already been killed in battle. Similarly, the marriage of Narcissa and Bayard, in Sartoris, becomes a focal union that comes to hold all the possibilities of psychic healing and future health that are absent from the present scene. The union of male and female, Roger Shumann and Laverne, is one of the central symbols and events of Eylgg, and their marriage is the event from which most of the consequences in their lives flow, just as it is a catalyst for the entirely different but parallel problems of the Reporter. Judith and Charles Bon are the paired opposites of Absalom whose union obviously symbolizes a psychological and sociological adjust- ment of racial attitudes among their Mississippi community. 45 As a psychotherapist, Jung ultimately deals with marriage as a part of the individual's struggle to see past the anima- animus projections, ultimately realizing that individuals generally seek union with themselves in marriage, union with the unconscious figure of his or her animus-anima. They only gradually come to realize that the person whom they married might very well be not only much different than their pro- jections led them to believe, but might also be projecting their own anima-animus. Marriage and sexual union should help heal the split between instinct and intellect in an education process ("Marriage as a Psychological Relationship," 163). Obviously, marriages in these novels have mbre arche- typal reality than individual reality, and this is nowhere more apparent than in Absalom where the two people involved, Judith and Charles, do not seem to have any individual expecta- tions of each other. III. Needless to say, the critical indebtedness of this thesis is vast. To use a metaphor in the spirit of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, each individual piece of Faulkner criticism is part of an incredibly complex network of kin- ship and extended family, stretching backward to the beginnings 46 of Faulkner criticism, and expanding into other disciplines, such as history or the psychological theory that I use in this thesis. For this reason, it is often difficult to pin-point precisely why or how an article or book has been useful and educational, especially if it is not directly related to the themes and novels that I discuss, or directly about Faulkner and his work. Thus I owe a large debt to many people who have contributed generally to my understanding of William Faulkner and his region. Several works provide insightful interpretations and «discussions of Faulkner's south. A most useful book is W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South, especially his chapters "Of {Time and Frontiers" and "Of the Man at the Center" in which lne describes and categorizes the myths and realities of the Social structure of the Old South.29 The Virginia Cavalier Ileegend which he proposes has its parallels in Faulkner in Silach characters as the Sartorises and Virginia DePre. Cash “Jtividly depicts the frontier tooth and claw speculation of ‘tlne westward cotton frontier, and Thomas Sutpen fits per- fectly into Cash's description of the "new" aristocrat of the 18303 through the 18509, the king-cotton era of Southern society.30 Similarly, Cash accurately describes the poor-White's exploitation by the racist myth of white supremacy and the class leadership of the Southern planter. 47 Wash Jones, who finally sees the light regarding "The Cunnel," echoes Cash's descriptions of the delusions and secret angers of this class of Southerners. C. Vann Woodward's The Burden of Southern'History31 has been an important “source" book for me, enabling me to see, with the application of my Jungian theory, the South as a "shadow" self of America from colonial times onward, but increasingly representing the dark side of the American 1rojective myths that cluster around such issues as mis- <=£egenation.32 Thomas Jefferson is a Southerner who formed <3tnr collective, "public" thought on issues of freedom. IPresumably he deplored slavery, and he did in time free all