American Literature

Unit IV: Short Stories

The Purloined Letter - Edgar Allen Poe

● Detective Story: focused on the criminal - offers immediate gratification and satiety by virtue of being a
short story - a sudden burst of attention in readers
● Magazines and periodicals: Detective story is a product of magazine culture
○ Published in series - (v/s novel also published in series but evolution of narrative
○ Short story takes away liberty of lingering and provides instant satisfaction
■ Self-contained
■ Denouement
■ Satisfaction and closure in completeness
■ Replicated by the next story - beginning of addiction
○ Single hero: will reappear in every story - reasoner par excellence - ratiocination - category of
detective fiction
■ Logical reasoning
■ Calculative
■ Exalted intellectual capacities
■ Recluse - armchair detective - intellectual encounter with the world - crime is not a
matter of sociological instability or theological sin - but just a puzzle that needs to be
solved
● Means by which reason can exercise itself - lacks depth: three-dimensionality or
texture - no excess to interiority or personal import
● He is a cipher/nullity - he is a character only in so far as a detective -
advancing philosophical points
● Dupin is reducible to his function - detection
○ Head rather than the heart
○ Love and adventure - narrative possibilities that are immediately discounted - deemed inessential
○ Dupin is a figure of the mind
○ Has idiosyncrasies - external embellishments to impress him on the readers - individualize him
● Setting of the story - Paris - intimately involved with the emergence of Detective Fiction
○ 19th century - witnessed emergence of detective fiction
○ Detection became a profession (legitimate and de-stigmatised) - Napoleon established French
Criminal Department -Surte - figure of professional detective received social approval + glamor
accrued to it
○ 1828 - memoir of Francois Eugene Widocq
■ Ex-criminal who served in the surte - published recollections of time spent in forces
■ Detective and detection gain traction in the public eye - detective fiction eulogizes
detection
● Dupin is an amateur detective -worthier and more perfected iteration of the detective - presents professional
detectives as an exemplar to follow - transcends brilliance of the police force
○ Dupin and G : brute info provided by G made coherent by Dupin - brilliance leveraged by police
○ Dupin was approximated his approach with that of Widocq
■ Thorough investigation followed by mathematical reasoning - data collection -
observable
■ Detection also requires attention to unseen
■ Inclusive reasoning - takes into account imagination
■ Processing of the data to reach inferences - dependance on the unseen - faculties other
than reason.
○ Become the criminal to catch the culprit - missing evidence - imagination stepped in
● Criminal too is imaginative
● Minister (culprit) - mathematician + poet - synthesis which even detective will have to perform
○ Requires agility in thought and empathy with criminal
○ Detective must compliment rational reasoning with empathy (Christie-detective is in a secure
space) - detective figure is compromised due to his ability to identify with the criminal
 ■ Entanglement of detective with criminal
■ Criminal is a product if social environment - of a departure from the norm - world is
tainted because it is criminal in its violence towards individuals
■ Underscoring proximity of detective fiction with criminal - study internal landscape of
criminal
● Detective is a reader
○ “Letter” - fulcrum of the story - letters that make up literature - story is about an act of reading -
reconstruction of a lost story
■ Organize clues into a coherent pattern and form a narrative - imaginative reconstruction
- process adopted by us as readers or students of literature - detective figure is analogous
to figure of reader
■ Title is suggestive because it gives insight into detective - he is reader of text of crime -
surrogate of reader figure
● Dualism in structure of most works of the genre - two stories - of crime and of investigation - going in
opposite directions of crime - both contained in one story - present in all fiction that we read -story + plot -
○ Story: brute matter
○ Plot: arrangement of events and flexibilities - gives order to story that need not be chronological -
plotting the original story
○ Criminal - story - chronological
○ Investigation - plot - logical (need not be chronological) leads us to underlying chronology
● Broken Codes, Broken Seals, and Stolen Poem in the “The Purloined Letter”
○ techniques Poe used to promote secrecy in his writing: private ciphers, acrostics, allusions, hidden
signatures, chiasmal framing, etymological reference, and plagiarism; purloined writing and
disappearing inks, anonymity, poems and doubling.
○ Encrypted information in the poems - simultaneously declaring that attempts at deciphering will
be futile
○ The story: premised upon an occult relationship of poetry to cryptography
■ Unreality of the story is heightened by a virtually complete temporal and spatial stasis -
action is first compressed to mystery and then to an explanation of the solution
■ The world in the story - as flat as the missing letter - the two dimensionality resists the
the Parisian Police’s three dimensional, volumetrically determined search techniques
■ Dupin's highly developed "resolvent" skill as a detective is based only secondarily upon
his touted skills at induction; in the sense that he can discover the significant detail
among a welter of obscuring information, he is actually an especially perceptive reader.
■ Especially the binary quality of his mind, for he is both mathematician and poet. Skill in
mathematics, insofar as it is presented to us by the story, consists largely of an ability to
perceive sequences, while the poetic imagination is presented as the capability to
transcend sequential patterns by innovating radically, often spontaneously
● The rare combination of skills - allows him to go beyond the police - renders
him vulnerable to Dupin who is skilled at both
○ Dupin’s identity as a poet -
■ Refuses Prefect’s observation that poets are “one remove from a fool”- self depreciation :
“guilty of certain doggerel”
■ Ridicules the Prefect for basing the generalization about poets upon faulty logic
○ Resemblance between criminal and detective:
■ Shared interest in mathematics and verse -
■ Fraternal ties - the minister is said to have a brother who has attained reputation in letters
- this elided fraternal structure is displaced by the story’s structure onto Dupin
■ Erudite - good actors - last names with D
■ Unacknowledged brothers or twins?
● Barbara Johnson points out that Poe probably patterned both characters upon a
single historic personage, André-Marie-Jean-Jacques Dupin, a statesman
renowned for having an encyclopedic memory and for being a polyglot.7
Indeed, in Marginalia, Poe says the actual Dupin was fluent in so many tongues
that according to one contemporary,h e could speak "as nobody else, the
language of everybody" (except, perhaps, the nearly impenetrable
 transcendentalist jargon spouted by the New England "frogpondians," Poe
suggests). That the original Dupin was a governmental minister provides an
important basis, in fact, for Liahna Klenmer Babener's observation that Dupin
and the Minister D resemble two halves of the same personality. Poe evidently
divided the real Dupin's talents between the two fictional characters, so that the
detective Dupin possesses the vaster knowledge, while the Minister is a skilled
statesman, courtier, and politician
■ Capable of encrypting information - turning letters inside out - lying - concealing taunts
inside poetry
● Instead of altering the letter completely,so that it would no longer be even
recognizable as a letter, the Minister is fatally content to let the document remain
what it was, a billet doux. Then too, when he had first encountered the letter, it
had been left lying unconcealed in the Queen's chamber,and his strategy for
hiding it fromt he police is to replicate the original situation by leaving it in plain
view in his own rooms
■ Mimics - refashioning his face to resemble an adversary, he can anticipate what his
opponent will do next -
● The feat of gamesmanship is attributable to an exercise of the poetic imagination
- permits the poet to enter into an alternate state of existence
● The conflict between the detective and the criminal might seem more like boys
at play rather than a battle between good and evil
● Despite Dupin's labeling of the Minister as "that monstrum horrendum, an
unprincipled man of genius," the detective resembles his antagonist so closely
that the accusation rings somewhat hollow.
■ The contest between the both - the letter turns out to be a disputed trophy poem
● Minister attempts to represent the stolen letter as an almost discarded letter sent
to him by an almost rejected mistress
● Turned the letter inside out - re addressed to himself in a feminine hand - on a
card rack on the mantle of the fireplace mantel - in the center of the room
● The seal was large and black - with the D_____ cipher - merely conforms to the
story’s thematic emphasis upon the detection of similarities and oppositions
● The letter was in plain sight - solution to the mystery depends upon Dupin’s
realisation that the stolen letter and the letter in the minister’s apartment are one
and the same
● The counterfeit wax seal - proves to be the undoing of Poe and the Minister
● - unforgivably careless - altered the “gender” of the seal incongrously - the
gendered language used to characterise the original letter could understandably
lead to such confusion -
○ Poe may have reversed the gender of the original lettera s a means of
intensifyingh is tale's dramatici mpact. If the purloined letteri s
construeda s being "feminine,"t he Minister's seizure of it acquires
overtones of rape and kidnaping, for, figurally speaking, the Minister
subsequently" imprisons"t he Queen in his hotel room. Similarly, the
Minister's imposition of his conventionally masculine seal upon the
disguised "captured" letter may be seen as furtherc onfirmation of his
domination over the Queen's person, the symbolic equivalent of his use
of blackmail to curtail her actual freedom of movement and speech.
○ Poe was motivated to affix the wrong seal twice to a letter by psychological factors having to do
with poetry’s complex relation to cryptography - the letter: queen’s abstracted body and a disputed
poem: once stolen loses its provenance or authorship
○ Poe : the plagiarist - and the detector of plagiarism - sensitive to authenricity - Dupin’s plagiarism:
a form of acting - transcends minister’s theft by encompassing his entire identity -
■ In replacing the purloined letter with his counterfeit, Dupin also replicates the sign that
stands for the Minister's presence, that is, his seal.
○ By fashioning a duplicate of the Minister's seal out of bread, Dupin succeeds in "de-ciphering" the
letter
 ○ Writing that is encrypted conceals not only its meaning,but also the author's identity and in "The
Purloined Letter," ecryption depends primarily upon a correct attribution of authorship. Dupin
brings this truthh ome forcefully at the end of the story by neglecting to cite Crébillon, an act of
plagiarism that shows the Minister, by example, how mis- or unattributed writings may be
rendered worthless. In this sense, Dupin's claim upon the letter is both authentic and inauthentic.
So long as the purloined letter-poem duplicitously bears the Minister's seal or cipher, anyone else,
including the detective, may step in and claim it.
○
● The figure-power dialectic: Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”
○ The scene of exchange at the desk - and the diversion in the street - The letter’s purloining: The
momentary presence of Dupin st the minister’s desk serves as an image of Poe the author - the
movement from inside to outside is also a movement from Poe’s most exalted sense of self to his
most diminished (“a lunatic or a drunkard”)
○ Poe's story, in these terms, is not just an allegory for the letter in psychoanalysis but for the letter's
inside-outside relation to ongoing historical process.
■ the story is notjust a reflection, but a refraction, of an historical violence that further
impels the readings
● The Purloined Letter: Poe’s Detective Story vs. Panoptic Foucaldian Theory
○ Foucalt: literary narratives police thought and behaviour - panopticon - the architectural figure of
a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting people -
narrator is the supervisor - the unseen seer
○ For panoptic foucaldians, there is little social or artistic room for narrative artists to resist - writers
who try to avoid this policing function are about to fail - attempts to disown policing is seen as a
cover for more discrete and comprehensive policy of policing
○ The story is a counter example - escapes the inevitability of panoptic narrative theory on the
detective genre - dupin does not conduct surveillance
○ Suggests a need for more inclusive foucaldian theory of narration
○ "The Purloined Letter" is the kind of literature Foucault looked to as a source of new language and
thought. The descriptive representation that panoptic theorists expect of narrative is the old
language Foucault expected to be replaced
○ Dupin recovers the letter for the police - but he does not go where the police cannot - he
understands what the police cannot - he covers up the crime by eschewing description and
representation -
● Dupin’s Detective Inspiration: A Child’s Play
○ He draws an analogy with a young boy playing “even and odd.” In this guessing game, each
player predicts whether the number of things (usually toys) held by another player is even or odd.
If the child guesses correctly, he is given one of the toys. If wrong, he is bound to lose a toy of his
own. The boy whom Dupin is alluding to is well-versed with the game because he makes his
guesses on the basis of his knowledge of the opponent. When this schoolboy is caught in a trying
situation, he imitates his opponent, in an attempt to understand what the opponent is thinking. This
judgment enables the boy to often guess correctly. Dupin asserts that “identification of the
reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent” ensured the triumph of his investigative venture.
This very technique has been associated with the theorizations by Rochefoucauld, La Bougive,
Machiavelli, and Campanella. Dupin further argues that the Parisian police didn’t employ this
strategy and therefore they failed at obtaining the letter: the police were searching those areas
where they themselves would have hidden the letter. He maintains that the Minister was cunning
enough and he didn’t hide the letter in the secret nook or cranny. Dupin also refers to the game of
puzzles in which one player discovers a name on a map and challenges the other player to find the
same. The amateurs tend to pick the most minutely lettered names, the hardest names to find are
the ones that are quite obvious.
● Poe’s Distinctive Approach to Storytelling
○ It is noteworthy that Poe’s story is different from the regular “whodunit” detective story (short for
“Who [has] done it?”) because the identity of the culprit is known from the very beginning.
Considering Poe’s experimental fervor, George Grella has made the following remarks: Poe, it is
generally agreed, invented the detective story and established its basic conventions-the murky
atmosphere, the insoluble problem, the outre method, the incredible deductions, the adoring
 Boswell, and the gifted being who unravels the most difficult crimes. His prototypical detective,
C. Auguste Dupin, possesses a dual temperament, “both creative and ... resolvent,” combining the
intuition of the poet with the analytical ability of the mathematician; the fusion gives him
extraordinary deductive powers, enabling him, for example, to reconstruct his companion's chain
of thought from a few penetrating physical observations (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”).
(Grella 35) Grella has also vividly explained how Dupin’s character combines the traits of
“intellectual brilliance” and “personal eccentricity” which have overtly influenced the evolution of
detective heroes. Readers are able to commend the extent of Dupin’s insight as the story
progresses.
● Narrative Technique
○ Perspective of an unnamed narrator - omnipresent and privy to the conversations
○ Psychological manipulation - contrast to the barbaric violence in The Murders of the Rue Morgue
○ The relay of flashbacks outside the narrative frame -
○ Inability of the police to think from the criminal’s perspective
Dry September - William Faulkner

Weather
1. The weather creates an oppressive backdrop throughout the story. The relentless hot, dry weather has riled
the residents of this small Mississippi town, and the “bloody” twilight forebodes the violence to come. The
comment about the weather that “weather [is] enough to make a man do anything” reinforces the general
idea that the heat and drought play an active role in the actions of these characters. The combination of the
oppressive heat and McLendon’s enthusiasm has whipped the men into a frenzy of irrational anger. The gun
peeping out of McLendon’s waistband foreshadows the violence to come. The sunset brings no relief from
the heat and dry air, reflecting the fact that the men are as enthusiastic about their plan for violence as they
were in the earlier in the day
2. Mayes notably works at an ice factory—a place that, in theory, provides relief from the intense heat of the
town (heat that, in turn, symbolizes its drive toward racist violence). Ice melts in the heat, reflecting that
Mayes’s position as an upstanding citizen proves no match for the racist ire of these men. The image of this
black man in handcuffs, unaware of his crime, is a symbol of the ongoing criminalization of black men in
the post-slavery era. The pale red shade of the moon and the reference to hemorrhaging, or shedding of
blood, foreshadow the spilling of blood that will happen later that night.
3. Ice is again presented as a symbol of escape, with reference to Minnie, from the manic violence whipped up
by the heat and prejudice; yet again, it proves only fleetingly helpful.
4. The gun on McLendon’s bedside table is a symbol of the omnipresence of violence in his life as a form of
dominance over other people, especially more vulnerable groups like women and black men. Heat again is
ever-present throughout the scene, reflecting McLendon’s prejudice. The story ends with a symbolic
parallel: just as the heat has not broken that night, the murder of Mayes will do nothing to alleviate the
racial tensions in Jefferson.

Class notes

Demographic of towns, cities change to accommodation recently emancipated African Americans - with this entry,
there emerges threats of racial intermixing → severe clampdown→ legislation to reinforce segregation of faces
Laws passed to ensure segregation - Jim Crow Laws
Jim Crow
→ colloquial name for these laws
→ derives from a very common racial slur - derogatory term for african Americans - came from a popular song and
dance routine (1930s)
→ white actors would do blackface and do have a conical impression of slaves - caricature of a black individual -
provoke laughter
→ insulting, parodic imitation
→ Jim crow enters colloquial speech
→ with passing of laws, extremely strict laws are being imposed on black spaces, black mobility etc
→ perpetuating legacy of slavery even after its legal abolition
→ not able to escape the vicious cycle of slavery - slavery continues in a clandestine form →
DRY SEPTEMBER - located in this very volatile milieu
→race relations are in the process of recalibrating and fictions and fault lines are re emerging
→ it's compression demand a certain frugality ( with characters etc) on part of the writer- he gives only the bare
minimum information
short story - limited economy but they give you certain space for depth
→ getting brief glimpses of characters' lives and you're being invited to make larger assumptions - not being offered
great deal of insight → but what is offered gives you a good idea about the relations between white and black
characters
→ get a picture of the town itself - great deal of insight into the network they constitute - a landscape in the process
of undulating/ reshaping itself
→ rape between a white woman and a black man
● White woman – Winnie cooper
○ She was once young and attractive
○ Now she's nearing 40 and gradually slipping into irrelevant
○ now she's receded from public sphere and gradually become
 ○ Although she doesn't belong to the privileged strata of society- but middle classes but her charms
has allowed her to mingle with the upper classes
○ With the fading of charms, sexual attention of men have dwindled- her stature has reduced to a
great extent
○ Her Sexual and social value in decline and she has remained unmarried
○ Now - alcoholic spinster who now engages in adultery - becomes an outcast, pariah
○ This gives us her motivation behind the allegations of rape against the black man
○ As she's receding from public adoration, she makes these allegations ( false)
○ Story doesn't offer us enough to corroborate this claim
● Miscegenation
○ the sexual union of different races
○ Moving across racial borders through sexual act
○ literal denotative meaning- what it means
○ connotative meaning - any mixing, contamination, impurity
○ threatening - it interrogates the binary nature of any racist ideology - us v/s them
○ Any racist ideology to legitimize itself will have to convince the masses that we and them are so
socially and biologically distinct- no scope for contact and affinal relations - naturalizing racism
○ Miscegenation shatters this assumption because it means - the difference between races is not
absolute but is strictly relative - races akin to each other
○ miscegenation provokes intense anxiety among the whites- questions the very root of the
continuation of their dominance - if there's any insurmountable difference between whites and
blacks then what reason do they have for oppressing the blacks- questioning very root of racism
○ That is why the Influx of black migrants into towns prompts them to separate them further -
otherwise miscegenation will lead to the collapse of racism
○ So it is imperative to punish Cooper's alleged rapist
■ White males decide to band together and confront the black man(kill)- exact vigilante
justice
■ Segregation Predicated on the anxieties of miscegenation - on the fears that the black man
poses a great threat to white woman
→ this is an imagined fear; imagined sexual threat - says more about the white community than the black
→ there is very much present the possibility that this imagined fear presents white men's insecurities vis a vis their
masculinity
→ plantation economy is declining→ manufacturing based form of economic production
→ influx of migrants but jobs are very few
→ rise in scarcity and the difficulty in earning one's livelihood
→ white men being faced with more and more vivid possibilities that they will not be able to provide for their
families - no longer be breadwinners for their families
→ increased economic hardships and pressures - post civil war era
→Tendency to read this economy failure as a failure of masculinity - a sign of some lack in their maleness - it says
much more about the white man and the very shaky foundation his masculinity rests on - fears are projected onto the
black male precisely because of failures and inadequacies on the white man's part

→ Black man not a threat to white man's virility or any sexual threat- othering the black man in order to assuage
anxieties within yourself
→ white men instigating each other - riling each other up- each of them are compromised in some way- lacking in
some way
→ cooper has harnessed this climate of insecurity and fear - she's triggered the simmering tensions and now they're
erupting

Dryness - sign of heat, extreme susceptibility to combustion

town- ready to be lit on fire with the slightest apart and Cooper's allegation becomes this spark
No distinct claims are necessary; only the mere suggestions are enough to trigger anxieties about miscegenation and
economic failures - bringing together independent factors that had already existed ready for eruption.
→Cooper's social and sexual value is now declining- very little to offer on the marriage as sexual market - position
of sexual insecurities- restores her sexual and erotic and social status
Society places places a great deal of importance on the woman's sexuality- and hence she presents herself as sexual
object restores her her former sexual and social status
Dry- sexual heat that gets restored for her
she starts dressing herself in sexual suggestive clothing- gains from the charge she's leveled against the black man
→ impulses behind the allegations - still conjecture because everything in the story is happening on mere hypothesis
(+ fear - white people attacking the black man on imaginary fears)
→ stuff of imagination

In its simplest form, the White Goddess concept refers to any "lily-white" Southern woman, who is raised in a
society that protects her from any unpleasantries.
● Because she is white, the culture sets her atop a mythical pedestal, creating an imaginary, protective shield
through which the Southern aristocracy lets nothing pass that might endanger — both physically and
emotionally — its women.
● While the Southern white male will allow a woman to fib or tell "white lies" about insignificant matters, he
believes adamantly that a Southern lady could never outright lie; even if she did, a Southern gentleman
would never confront her with the lie.
● Instead, it is obligatory that the white man act upon the premise that a Southern woman can tell nothing but
the truth.
● Psychologically, this complete deference to a woman's integrity is based on the belief that she could never
be attracted to a black man; consequently, she would never lie about such a matter.

In the Will Mayes sections, the dominant image pattern arises from the depressing hotness and dryness of the
midsummer weather, producing the stifling dust which completely permeates the action, while in the Minnie Cooper
sections, the dominant pattern arises from Minnie's attempt to recreate her past.
The ever-present dust, which encloses everything, perhaps refers to the guilt of the town or the crime itself which
none of the people can escape. But more probably it stands for the whole perverted attitude of the Southern town.

But the Days Grow Short: A Reinterpretation of Faulkner's "Dry September" - John K. Crane

Interpretations of Dry September

1. interpretations tend to make McLendon the central character and downplay the story's equal emphasis upon
Miss Minnie Cooper and the barber, Hawkshaw Stribling.
2. heat deterministically responsible for most of what occurs

● Faulkner titles verge on the gratuitous - fail to recognize what a pointed one means
● Title is important - Faulkner changed it just before publication. He reversed the order of the first two
sections-now the description of the heat wave came first and Minnie Cooper's background came second; the
leader of the lynch mob became McLendon instead of Plunkett; and the title was changed from "Drouth" to
"Dry September."
● Switch the emphasis from the white woman to the weather - undo or at least deflect that emphasis.
● Drought - thirst - “One of the potential lynchers goes on to say that "'It's this durn weather. . . . It's enough
to make a man do anything" - referring to the supposed rape of Minnie Cooper by Will Mayes, but surely
this pertains to what he and his friends are about to do to Will as well.
● Tone and mood of the story
○ The air is dead, and he has "a metallic taste at the base of the tongue"
○ "Dust lay like fog in the street. The street lights hung nimbused as in water"
● ignites pent-up racial feelings in violence-prone bigots. Faulkner subtly but unmistakably shows that the
motivation lies elsewhere.
● "Dry September" - common mythical understanding of human existence
○ September is both late summer and early autumn, but a dry one indicates both little growth
(especially after July and August were the same) and poor harvest. Among people who work the
land, it is a season of frustration and despair; in the normal life cycle it is a sense of lost youth and
a resultantly empty middle age which will, because fruitless, blend into old age without notice.

Minnie
She lives, and has for all her years, in a small frame house with an invalid mother and "a thin, sallow, unflagging
aunt" (p. 173). Minnie sits on her porch each morning for an hour and a half, eats dinner, and lies down until the heat
begins to cool. Then she spends her afternoons shopping and haggling over prices. Each year she buys three or four
new dresses. Though when younger she had a reasonably appealing body that "had enabled her for a time to ride
upon the crest of the town's social life" (p. 174), now she watches younger girls paired with younger men while "the
sitting and lounging men did not even follow her with their eyes anymore" (p. 175). All the details here portray a
deadening cyclic repetition which alters only Minnie's age and appeal.

Yet for a September to be tragically dry, whether in agriculture or in the life cycle, the spring and early summer had
to have been comparatively fertile. Twelve years back Minnie had met and probably gone to bed with a cashier at
the bank, a man who owned a red runabout, the first automobile in town.

Just as Minnie's bright dresses contrast now with her empty and idle days with "a quality of furious unreality", so
does her routine-ridden fortieth year stack up badly against a time in her late-twenties and early-thirties when she
was reputed to be the town adulteress and was happy to have the reputation. In the story's present time, she is
without a man and without the appeal any longer to attract one.

What she does possess is her whiteness, however, and she seems to assume that this would be enough to make
Jefferson believe that even a good, respectable "nigger" like Will Mayes would have to, someday, rape her - gains
both a renewed sense of sex appeal in her deranged mind and, dressed later the same day in "her sheerest
underthings and stockings and a new voile dress"

"even the young men lounging in the doorway [tip] their hats and [follow] with their eyes the motion of her hips and
legs when she passed"

She ends her dry spell momentarily but only vicariously.

“... she breaks into endless shrill laughter. She is taken home and her head packed in ice while her friends "removed
the pink voile and the sheer underthings”

an internal heat and dry middle age which motivate her accusation of Will Mayes, with the latter definitely the
stronger motive

it would be incorrect to claim that the hot summer sparked Minnie to slander and, indirectly, to kill Mayes, so it
would be wrong to suggest that it was any more than an intensifying circumstance with McLendon. His life is in a
figurative "dry September"

Jackson McLendon, changed from "Plunkett," - appears in four Faulkner tales - decorated for valor on the
battlefield in 1917.

twelve years since that happened. It is also "twelve years now" (p. 174) since Minnie took up with the bank cashier -
1917: the year when one basked in the glory of heroism and the other in the glory of scandalized public opinion.

By 1921 Minnie's lover was gone, and after that he is recalled by the town only once a year at Christmas

McLendon's medal and anyone's memory of why he got it

Minnie's figurative "dry September" motivated her to accuse Will Mayes, and McLendon's figurative "dry
September" motivated him to kill him.

a military context for his leadership

When he suggests to the barbershop crowd that they have talked enough and ought to be on with the lynching, "he
poised on the balls of his feet, roving his gaze" (p. 172). This is the posture of a military officer back at the barracks,
not on the field, with his troops in formation before him
McLendon himself carries a heavy automatic pistol not a rope or a rifle or a shotgun or a can of gasoline, all more
useful and easily available local weapons. This is an officer's sidearm

the approach of the lynchers to the ice house where Mayes works portrays it in terms of an open frontal attack, not a
covert settling of scores:
"He hurled the car up and slammed to a stop, the headlights glaring on a blank wall"

Throughout his capture and kidnapping, Mayes refers to all of them solely as "captains."

When McLendon reaches home, his behavior is that of a tired soldier in retreat, scared, sweating, dirty, stripping off
his battle-stained clothing, peering from the shadows of his lonely refuge.

Purposely ambiguous clue to the motivation of the story's two main characters-each is entering the core of his or her
middle years with one supreme achievement behind him or her and none in front. Each tries briefly to relive his or
her own particular glory-one sexual and the other military-and winds up terrified by the sheer impossibility of it.

never met, aligned with each other in the story. Both live in very small frame houses with women-Minnie's aunt and
McLendon's wife-who are strained, haggard, pale, lifeless, perhaps reminders of what is ahead for each of them.
Where Minnie was supposedly attacked by a man, McLendon manhandles his wife in the final scene

womanhood as the last quality worth preserving in their small-town Southern existences, though with McLendon it
ironically can be desecrated only by black men, not by his own marital violence

Will Mayes as the means to their respective ends of revived glory. While McLendon is raiding the ice plant in his
blind craze to capture Will, Minnie is having ice packed around her head to alleviate her crazed laughter. Both reach
their climaxes this day amidst voiced suspicions that "'he [Will] never done it"

the South at the height of its own dry September as well

purity of white womanhood - is purity from outsiders. When the two barbers suggest that Will probably did not
commit the crime, a lathered-up out-of-town salesman pops from behind his towel to unite himself with the mob's
position

" 'Do you mean to tell me that you are a white man and you'll stand for it? You better go back North where you came
from. The South don't want your kind here' "

Hawkshaw's response to Will's attempt to break free:

“... slashed the barber [Hawkshaw] upon the mouth, and the barber struck him also"

instinctive return of violence - or a manifestation of still another dry September-a Southern white man whose
loyalties have been questioned several times in the story responding against a "nigger" who dared to resist him.
Hereafter he ceases to defend Will.

He wrestles with the door handle. Will implores his help twice with the words "'Mr. Henry'". Hawkshaw leaps from
the car, leaving Will to his fate. Covered with dust, he limps toward town-like Minnie and McLendon, he is
spiritually depleted by the experience

past is not solely dependent on one achievement but on a life of quiet and successful goodness, he is able to rescue
himself where Minnie and McLendon cannot

where McLendon and Minnie Cooper have succeeded only once and very publicly, Hawkshaw's past achievements
are more substantially based, more ongoing, definitely more modestly concealed and less dependent upon public
recognition. In fact, he apparently never told a soul what he was up to.

fundamentally decent man who has enough courage to oppose a mob but not quite enough to see his convictions
through
a man not nearly as weak as McLendon and Minnie Cooper but one who, unless he takes quick stock of himself, is
in danger of becoming so.

loyalty, devotion, and acceptance of fate, admirable in Faulkner's universe, do not seem to account for the loss of
purpose Hawkshaw exhibits only eight months before his marriage in allowing Will Mayes ro be taken to his death
by McLendon’s mob.

Hawkshaw sacrifices his principles out of sheer weariness of trying to save other people from lurking doom

a better human being than McLendon or Minnie Cooper but subject to the same disillusionments of middle age and,
almost, to the same moral passivity because of them.

Hawkshaw possesses a substantial and disciplined character upon which to draw in order to salvage his own life and
that of another

calculated replacement of the title and then his immediate further development

story of the entry of two separate human beings into their middle years, the years of harvest, when nothing has been
planted in younger life save one little seedling apiece, each of which has already died

two isolated individuals whose purpose in life depends not on themselves but upon their ability to live obtrusively in
a way that others will recognize and celebrate

Faulkner heroes who try to carve their scratches or impose their designs on the blank face of oblivion to
which they are doomed.

Hawkshaw Stribling, a man who surely. possesses the Faulknerian virtues of the heart but who is severely
tested in his own September and nearly discovers himself to be morally dry as well.

William Faulkner's "Dry September": Decadence Domesticated - Jay Dessner

the story "deals with the curious relationship between sex and violence and explores intensely the psychological
conditions of the principal characters”

Faulkner presents rational motives as lost amidst mob behavior, obsessive psychological needs, and individual
insanity

combines realistic description with literary allusion and symbolist imagery

although the action of "Dry September" takes place in a small town in Mississippi, the narrator's tone and diction do
not always partake of the local manner

The narrator has these last words: "There was no movement, no sound, not even an insect. The dark world seemed to
lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars." The "bloody September twilight" under which the story
began has at last given way to this

intermediate stage in the twilight's progress: "Below the east the wan hemorrhage of the moon [had] increased

the sublunary world lies, one might say, "like a patient etherised upon a table,"above which a cosmic demiurge
broods, uncaring and eternal.

The narrator, like the moon and stars, observes the world from outside or above, with some tenderness to be
sure?although there is bitterness in it too - and the irony of seeing from a vantage point the existence of which the
earthlings do not imagine. The tone wakens echoes of lacrimae rerum, the lament over the tears of things
"Faulkner was sketching familiar country with a combination of realistic description and symbolist imagery”

The sense that humans are unwitting pawns of fate's will, that they are puppets on strings?a sense strong in "Dry
September"

On the one hand is the possibility of moral courage - On the other hand is the temptation to enjoy one's sorrow, or
the idea of one's sorrow

exquisite languor, perhaps to the amazement and adoration of the crowd. The temptation to adore one's own
sensitivity and one's dispassionate skepticism, one's enormous freedom from the mundane

As the barber, crouching in the weeds by the side of the road, watches McLendon's car pass and learns with the
reader that the negro has indeed been killed, the dust of two hot months without rain swallows the car, hangs "for a
while" in the air but "soon the eternal dust absorbed it again".

The horror of this event and the tragic pathos of the scene is subsumed into the universal. The narrator
cannot endure very much reality and "soon" retreats from it into infinite time.

Seen from a sufficient distance, the scene glows with a languorous, perhaps even a sickly, decadent beauty

Minnie Cooper is the aging spinster, starved for love, and letting her needs corrupt her conscience and destroy her
dignity. She conforms to the stereotype of the Southern woman who will accuse a black man when white men are
hard to find

The barber is tender and weak, almost effeminate in both stereotypical attributes. McLendon is the miles glorious of
the day, a torrent of social, economic, sexual, and moral frustration, who spews machismo resentment and violence
in every direction including his own. "He had commanded troops at the front in France and had been decorated for
valor." He wears his shirt "open at the throat" and stands, "feet apart," "his heavy-set body poised easily". But his
house is "trim and fresh as a birdcage and almost as small." And his wife, disobeying, waits up for him (p. 182). He
is the hen-pecked husband, though not in the comic mode.

Will Mayes does what the stereotype has him do: "What is it, captains?" He says, "I ain't done nothing. 'Fore, God,
Mr. John”

psychosocial manifestations of bigotry - although doubts are encouraged when we notice that the teacher of
the lesson himself creates people in the image of hoary stereotypes

presents, and mourns, a world irretrievably corrupt and fallen

not the curses of political or social organization or of individual moral or spiritual turmoil that concerns him. He
aspires to literature, to philosophic tragedy rather than to journalism's anatomy of local aberrations

"Dry September" laments the incurable - in the symbolist manner

The story begins with a metaphor for the speed with which the rumor of Minnie Cooper's rape went through town:
"like a fire in dry grass" - based on a real kind of event in an agricultural area.

The fire goes so fast it cannot be stopped - mortal peril, of that which we cannot control. The next developed image
moves from the agricultural domain to the town, to civilization in the form of a barber shop. The weather has been
hot and dry. On a Saturday afternoon, men gather under the shop's fan for comfort and company - cosmetic
preparations.

“... their own stale breath and odors . . . ." (Nature's intractability, its mockery of the impulses of artifice and order)
- the men discuss the rumor of Minnie's rape, the question, that is, of the supposed vulnerability of civilized customs
in the face of nature's forceful power - triumph of passion over reason
"The silk of his shirt clung flat to his heavy shoulders. At each armpit was a dark halfmoon”

images of the intractability of bodily needs and processes, begun ironically in a place designed for and devoted to
the defeat of Nature, are incessantly repeated.

continually reminded of the uncomfortably hot weather and of the perspiration it causes to flow, and of the dust
which hangs in the air

On Will Mayes' last day, she wears "her sheerest under things and a new voile dress." But there are no garments
sheer and light enough to assuage the heat of the sun and of her passionate needs.

She tries, "her hands clenched at her sides," to control the involuntary movements of her body but "she was
trembling worse." She looks forward to being inside the darkened theater where, she thinks, she can "hold back the
laughing so it would not waste away so fast and so soon." But when the hysterical laughter comes, "in trying to
suppress it, it made more noise than ever," and she must be taken home.

The physician is not on hand, so Minnie is fanned - and has ice applied to her temples. This remedy too is merely
temporary

Will Mayes is a night watchman at the local ice plant (p. 176). It is a crucial irony that Mayes is not immune to the
conditions which inflict the other characters: his tormentors can "feel his breath and smell his sweaty reek”.

human inability to control one's own bodily processes - admits of no exception, no matter how innocent or
well-intentioned the person. It is a human limit, even a stigma, but it is not in any way a sign of individual moral
weakness or social pathology. The narrator's insistence on the limits of man's self-control

The barber, having failed to convince his customers that Mayes is innocent or at least not proven guilty, but not
having utterly given up his hope of saving him, joins the posse. Despite McLendon's ominous threat, he repeatedly
tried to dissuade the men from precipitous violence. But when Mayes is taken and cries of "Kill him" are heard, the
barber's own nervous system disables him: "He could feel himself sweating and he knew he was going to be sick at
the stomach”

The barber's nausea makes it imperative for him to get out of the car. He "leaned suddenly forward .... 'Let me out,' "
he says. And although the negro speaks at last, addressing the barber by name,23 the barber "began to tug furiously
at the door.”

The negro's instinctive response to the gang's attack, some reflex of panic, makes him hit the barber as well as his
true enemies

It demonstrates man's inability to control, through his nervous system, the actions of his physical body. Immediately,
the lesson is taught again: "And the barber struck him also." Good men, no more than bad men, cannot do what they
want to do, cannot keep from doing what they believe to be wrong.

Whether or not Minnie and McLendon, the villains of the piece, regret their actions, it is made clear that they too
had been driven, beyond their powers of resistance, to their actions.

Faulkner's metaphors of the body blur the conventional but dubious distinction between the body and the
will.

Minnie's sensibility and expresses her bitter envy and pain

Minnie's jealousy allows her to believe in the efficacy of cosmetics in the special case of the "scented" young, and in
the divinity of youth generally. The narrator, however, joins her in letting himself imagine life as an endless dream,
without progress or point, mere accumulation, a freak show, "beautiful and terrible" at once, with nothing to choose
between the two words.
The "dream" of Hollywood is "silver" and the screen "glowed silver." In the preceding paragraph, the movie screen
has a "silver glare."

imagery of the screen's light with the presentation of other light sources in the story. Street light - heavenly bodies –
silvering the air

The particulars of the theater constitute an epiphany of the universal condition for which light is a controlling
metaphor

Superficial, ready-at-hand explanation: "Don't John. I couldn't sleep ... the heat"

Mrs. McLendon knows better than to mistake the true cause of her inability to obey and to fall asleep. "The heat;
something." "Something" she can barely mention and cannot name – intangible and too terrible

parallels of tone and plot, she is linked to both Will Mayes and the barber

"Dry September": Metaphor for Despair - Edmond L. Volpe

Developed about a central image of aridity, the story evolves into an extended metaphor, a haunting vision of the
human being stretched to the breaking point, the pitiable victim of rigid sterile social traditions and of the moral
sterility of an indifferent universe.

God has abandoned man. In this expression of anger and horror and sorrow and compassion for the human
condition, Faulkner depends more upon image patterns and metaphor than upon traditional narrative structure.

The image of the earth enshrouded in choking dust beneath a clear, bright sky dominates these sections, and it gives
meaning to the other three.

The final sections, IV and V, are tableaus of unbearable anguish. The minimal action in each of these sections builds
to a haunting image, as if a movie projector had been stopped on a frame: Minnie Cooper stretched on her bed
screaming; McLendon stretched against the dusty screen door, sweating and panting.

These two people have caused the death of an innocent black. Faulkner does not mitigate the horror of their act, but
he does envelope these characters with compassion. The final line of the story conveys a sense of the abandonment
of man by God. "The dark world seemed to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars."

The human being is cursed and stricken because there is no divine order, no moral universe which patterns human
life.

The failure of nature produces the drought which tautens the nerves of people to the snapping point.

The aridity of the old traditions stretches the psychic tensions of their victims to the breaking point. Like the society
that gave them its values, both Minnie and McLendon are in the "Dry September" of their lives. Their golden
moment is long in the past.

The murder of Will Mayes, initiated by Minnie and carried out by McLendon is the final turn of the screw. Minnie
cracks, and McLendon is at the breaking point.

The fantasies of both are rooted in the sexual roles ordained for them by the codes and traditions of their society.

McLendon's moment of glory occurs on the battlefield when he commands troops and is decorated for valor.

"birdcage" - his home symbolizes the unglamorous routine of his existence. That drab, inescapable reality is far
removed from the ego-fantasies of the daring commander of battle heroes. In Minnie's life there is a comparable gap.
Her increasing age daily broadens the chasm between reality and her desperate image of herself as sexually
attractive.

The fantasies of both Minnie and McLendon evolve from the old traditions of the society which helped to mold their
psyches.

Faulkner conceived of Jefferson as a microcosm of the world and before he began to give the town romantic
dimensions. The description of the village and county, here, is far bleaker and perhaps far more realistic than the
impression created in the novels and later tales. The feeling of claustrophobia is intense.

The “old traditions” - restricted role society assigns to women of the middle and upper classes. That role is limited to
their sexual function, and the female's sense of self is therefore limited to her ability to function in that imposed role.

Minnie's image of herself has been arrested at the pre-marital stage. She must continue to see herself as flirtatious
and sexually attractive, capable of winning the attention of males. Her new voile dresses and the sheer underthings
she wears on her daily trips to the village center symbolize her arrest at a sexual stage that the passing days make
more and more unreal and ludicrous.

The chorus of women interweave pity and ridicule in the way they look at her and in their comments. The women
relegate her into adultery at the same time they ridicule her as a spinster.

The primary source of her anguish is her failure to fulfill the only function society allows her and the only function
she herself can imagine fulfilling.

Minnie is described as sparkling with static electricity. The image captures her intensified sense of herself as a
sexual being, capable once more in her own eyes and in the eyes of the community of fulfilling society's expectation
of its young, unmarried women to be sexually stimulating. But that capability is a fantasy, as unreal and as removed
for Minnie as the romantic images projected on the movie screen.

The terrible reality is the aging Minnie, sitting in the movie theater and watching the couples entering. The final turn
by fantasy on the screw is conveyed by the gloating triumph that Minnie feels as she holds back on the "laughing so
it would not waste away so fast and so soon". Led out of the theater and put to bed by the ministering chorus of
women who look for gray in her hair, Minnie finally snaps as her laughter turns into screams.

His sense of sexual identity is also determined by the traditions and codes. He is the intrepid defender of defenseless
women and children, the protector of their purity and honor.

In Jefferson that image of masculinity is entangled with the racial code. The myth of the sexual threat posed
by the black male is apparently intensified for the poor white by the economic threat the blacks pose.

In this stronghold of masculinity, their statements challenge the others to live up to their roles as white males. If they
are afraid to do so, then they must be Northerners. No Southern white man would be unable to " 'take a white
woman's word before a nigger's".

Barber - He is not opposing the codes and the tradition. His argument is based solely upon his knowledge of the
persons who are involved in the rumor of a white woman being raped by a black man.

The description of McLendon stresses the image of masculine force. He stands with his feet apart. – serves as a
challenge to the masculinity of the reticent.

The barber continues his attempt to impose reason until the moment he instinctively reacts to being struck
accidentally by the manacled black fighting his captors. His reaction makes clear to Hawkshaw how powerful
traditions are. He recognizes that his struggle is useless.

The dust imagery achieves a crescendo as the automatons of the sterile codes enact the tragic ritual. The moon rides
high and clear above the dust that enshrouds the town. The two cars return, swallowed by dust.
The defender of Southern womanhood manhandles his own wife. This symbol of masculinity is, apparently, sexually
estranged from his wife. – fantasy of masculinity and the reality of his existence.

A divinely ordered universe would not allow the horrors and terrors of human existence.

“Seeing” the Old South: The Roots of Racial Violence in Faulkner’s ‘Dry September’

1. Faulkner’s South had continually recreated “Negroes” to fit its own preconceived image of that race as a
subservient, sub-human (often softened to the euphemism “childlike”) population that Whites could
politically and physically control and economically exploit.

2. No longer legally controlled by the restrictions of slavery, these African Americans were seen in real life by
Southerners and most Northerners as “falling over the edge of civilization,” rapidly regressing into a primal
savage state that threatened the very foundations of their White civilization. As these White fears increased,
so did the racial violence they engendered.

3. The most dangerous of those beasts was the adult Black male simply because, in
Southern eyes, his physical strength made him a real threat. After all, Black women, like their White counterparts,
could always be dominated physically as well as culturally.

But Black males presented White society with the dual threats of physical and sexual prowess. To contain these
threats, the respectable White leadership in local communities “incited, encouraged, and virtually programmed”
publically sanctioned lynchings to maintain social and political stability.

Faulkner went one step further than his predecessors and 1930s contemporaries and employed these flawed racial
preconceptions to juxtapose “the human reality [of Blacks] and the social definition [the White South’s self-serving
construction].” By doing so, he often contradicted and deconstructed the latter.

Of all these self-serving constructs, the most horrific and least understandable was the South’s continual justification
of its recurring acts of individual and communal
violence against its African-American citizens.

In a culture that had historically sanctioned this violence, vigilante rule easily became the South’s acceptable way of
dealing with interracial conflict and enforcing
the Jim Crow restrictions.

“Dry September” not only outlines this deadly ritualistic violence

in realistic detail, its narrative structure and the resultant reader positioning
within that structure highlight Faulkner’s awareness of both the heinous immorality of such violence and the flawed
psychological projections
underlying it.

Omniscient narrative presence

● shifts into the consciousnesses of only two focal characters within the text.

● Faulkner accomplished that goal through creating an overall reliable omniscient narrator who exists
completely outside the narrative action and exercises only very limited privilege, brief shifts into two
participating characters.

● realistic, apparently objective and totally detached position—almost a factual reporting reminiscent of
Hemingway with its sparse adjectives and dry, nondescript verbs—still provides readers with all the
necessary pieces of this particular narrative puzzle:
 ● Because only an omniscient narrator can be in all those places simultaneously and descend into individual
character consciousnesses when necessary, Faulkner had no choice here. He was painting a violent
wasteland canvas of the racially-divided culture the South had become in the early twentieth century in the
years between the two world wars.

● To make his fictive version of this landscape comprehensive and realistic,

Faulkner needed a narrator capable of “seeing,” and therefore revealing,
all of that conflicted society—exterior and interior—for his readers

The barbershop debate between Faulkner’s “one good man,” the barber, and his clientele, the lower-class Whites
determined to vindicate the “assaulted” Southern lady and maintain racial purity regardless of the facts of this
particular incident, must be recounted line for line in order for Faulkner to reproduce Southern tradition’s inflexible
attitude toward even a hint of a Black man/White woman sexual encounter.

The communal argument quickly reverts to Southern Traditionalists’ oldest and most familiar strategy, the outside
agitator- versus-the-community stance; after all, no true Southerner would ever voice doubts about a White
woman’s honor. In the collective eyes of Mississippi’s closed society, the barber becomes the outsider attacking their
social customs, the “damn n***er lover” who “better go back North where [he] came from” because “the South
don’t want [his] kind here”.

The omniscient narrator’s detachment in relating these explosive events is supplemented and underscored by the
subjectivity Faulkner creates through shifts into the two focal characters’ consciousnesses.
These shifts reinforce his thematic point about the racial injustice built into Jefferson’s fictive version of real-life
Southern tradition.

a. The first shift provides that dissenting, logical counterpoint to the town’s mindless, illogical resolve to
punish the offending Black whether or not he actually committed a crime.
Additionally, the shift also presents an effective illustration of the weakness of conforming individuals
faced with the power of the particular mob psychology operating within Southern culture because, in the
end, even the barber succumbs to communal pressure and joins the attack on Will.
b. The second shift into Minnie, much more detailed and developed, allows
readers to experience her progressively going mad. Yet even inside Minnie’s consciousness, Faulkner never
reveals whether or not the rape actually occurred. Possibly Minnie herself, rapidly losing her already
tenuous grip on reality, no longer knows.

Ironically, the mob—composed of those yeomen exercising their “rights” to control the “n****rs”— decides not “to
let the black sons get away with it until one really does it” and executes Will anyway (172).
For them, the rape itself becomes a moot issue. The results of the mob’s fear that it might happen—Will’s senseless
death and Minnie’s subsequent madness—occur either way.
“Dry September” draws a compelling portrait of mob psychology as it operates within Southern culture while it
simultaneously depicts the inner dynamics of this region’s fossilized racial divisions and the inevitable tragic results
of those divisions.

The final scene inside McClendon’s house spotlights the devastating effects of racial division and violence on all
aspects of Southern culture. Within omniscient privilege, readers enter the house and witness directly, again without
any narrative commentary, McClendon’s unprovoked, brutal encounter with his subservient wife.

Faulkner’s detailed description of that encounter clearly demonstrates that McClendon’s murder of Will has
produced for him what an act of lovemaking would engender in a normal world, some kind of sexual release
physically marked by his profuse sweating and obvious excitement (183).

In one sense, McClendon, obviously unable to function sexually in normal circumstances (at least at this moment)
and apparently prone to acts of sexist as well as racial violence, can be interpreted as a symbolic character
representing the ultimate tragic result of generations of repressed male sexual guilt.
In other words, Faulkner could be using McClendon’s behavior and Will’s death to imply that the South’s racial
divisions and the resulting racial “misreading” and subsequent violence demeans, degrades and eventually destroys
the humanity of both its races.

"A MAN WITH SUCH AN APPEARANCE WAS CAPABLE OF anything": Imaginary Rape and the Violent
"Other" in Faulkner's "Dry September" and Oz's "Nomad and Viper

1. This story of women making false accusations against men who are racially marked as "Other" is one that
speaks of both gender and racial tensions.

2. René Girard's theory that people will often use a scapegoat to deal with their own failures and that what (or
who) they sacrifice is almost always tied to perceived violence against them, we can look at the above
referenced historical and literary narratives as examples of the most disenfranchised of the dominant group
exerting what power they have over those who are even more socially marginalized than
themselves,creating scapegoats and enacting violence that allows the disenfranchised to feel momentarily
empowered.

3. Those in the lowest positions within the dominant culture are usually women.5 While the women in the
stories mentioned do not commit the violence themselves, they are its instigators, drawing upon cultural
standards of womanhood and femininity to demand violence in their names.

4. "Dry September" offer a look not only at the literary images, stories, symbols, and themes that cross racial,
cultural, and national boundaries, but also at the cultural processes that lead to violence against the racially
marked Other during times of what Antonio Gramsci might call moments of hegemonic crisis—moments
when the dominant social and political order is challenged and the threat of the destabilization of the
prevailing ideology calls for an act of sudden and swift force.

5. In "Dry September," violence is preceded by the setting up of a polarized "us versus them" dichotomy. And
in neither story is the truth of the situation particularly relevant to the creation of a "them." McLendon asks,
when asked what really happened, "Happen? What the hell difference does it make? Are you going to let
the black sons get away with it until one really does it?

The texts seem to confirm that what is important to the majority culture is twofold.

a. First, it is imperative that cultural ideology and racial purity be maintained. The white fear that a black man
might rape a white woman is, in part, really a fear that a white woman would consensually have sex with a
black man and give birth to a child of indeterminate racial identity.
And, in consequence, the fear that a person may not be easily labeled as black underscores the idea that
blacks are biologically and/or mentally inferior to whites, which could ultimately challenge the entire belief
structure upon which slavery and then segregation in the South were based.
b. The second imperative for these communities requires that a lesson of inferiority and warning be taught to
the minority culture in order to maintain the stability of the dominant ideology.

6. "Dry September" speak with exultation when they ask, the day after the lynch ing, "Do you see? . . .
There's not a Negro on the square. Not one" (181). The lesson is learned, and now, they believe, those black
people will certainly think twice before they attempt to do anything—even walk down the street. The
blacks in the town have been reminded effectively, the kibbutz members and townspeople seem to feel, of
their inferior places.

7. Should the "inferior" members of society not learn their lessons and attempt to exert themselves as
subjects, resisting the objectification imposed upon them through violence, then, in such a moment,
ideology begins to crumble.
8. In a similar explanation, Lillian Smith writes that in the Jim Crow South, an unspoken deal was struck
between the rich whites, the class whose culture predominated, and the poor whites, whose inclusion in the
category "white" was supposed to be the rallying point to keep them from rebelling against the upper
classes or even from recognizing that there was anything against which to rebel.

9. This "deal," though it does not resemble any actual contract or deal made, represents the hegemonic
process by which the upper class maintained a hold upon the Southern community and its values. If people
needed occasional violence to remind themselves and those against whom they acted that they were at the
top of the pecking order (even if they weren't), then that was acceptable because it left the dominant
ideology stabilized.

10. The act of Othering is made complete when, in each of the stories, the previously nonviolent member
of the community is pushed to join in the violence against the Other.

11. In "Dry September" this is seen when Hawkshaw accidentally gets hit by Will during his capture and
responds by striking him back. When Will later begs Hawkshaw for help, Hawkshaw jumps from the car
and goes back to town, leaving Will to his fate.

12. It is unclear, during this moment, whether Hawkshaw jumps out of the car because he has grown
disgusted with Will, because he fears for his safety, or because he knows that while he cannot be a part of
Will's lynching, he is not empowered to stop it either.

13. It is certainly the case that if Hawkshaw stands against McLendon and the mob, he will not be safe no
matter how white his skin is. Whatever the reason for his jump, though, Hawkshaw, who has heretofore
been Will's only hope, becomes a member of the silent white majority.

14. A need for superiority of the subject leads the woman in the stories, Minnie, to enact some of the most
violent and destructive examples of Othering in their communities.

15. Butler, in particular, has argued that as gender is performative, the performance of "masculinity" is a
performance designed in opposition to "femininity." To fail in one's performance of the gender role
assigned to him or her is to become outcast—to become Other.

16. Miss Minnie is a woman of forty, who would have been thought of by her community as merely a
middle-aged woman with no husband and no prospects.
Despite having once had "a slender, nervous body and a sort of hard vivacity which had enabled her for a
time to ride upon the crest of the town's social life," she is now relegated by Southern norms to the role of
"aunty," a role that prescribes for her a life of repetitious shopping trips, theater visits, and female
friendships (174). The men, the narrator tells us, "did not even follow her with their eyes any more" (175)

17. Minnie is, by the rules of Southern womanhood that require marriage and motherhood, a failure. She is
neither an object of beauty nor rich enough to entice men to her side. She is a part of Southern society,
certainly, but she is in the awkward position of also being Other by virtue of failure.

18. In what is perhaps a fit of desperation, Minnie apparently makes vague accusations that something was
done to her by perhaps a black man and that perhaps that thing was sexual in nature. But even making the
vaguest of claims is successful at garnering Minnie exactly the kind of attention that she craves. She may
not be victorious in the realms of marriage and motherhood, but she will be triumphant as a sexually
desired woman, another mark, as has been discussed by a number of Southern cultural and literary critics,
of a successful Southern woman.

19. We cannot ignore, however, that Minnie does not achieve sexual gratification or social normalcy. In
fact, as she is sitting in the movie theater at the end of the story, she is sitting alone amidst "the young men
and girls coming in two and two" and "the young men and girls . . . their paired backs in silhouette" (181).
Everyone around her is paired—she is still alone.
20. Under these conditions, her loud, quick laughter seems almost hysterical and unreal.
And the women who care for her—the women who ask "Do you suppose anything really happened?"—do
not accept her as one of them, but treat her as an oddity and source of entertainment (182). Her laughter
serves as the proof that the situation in which she, and, in fact, the whole town, find themselves is simply
absurd: she lies, everyone knows she lies and does not even pretend that she is telling the truth—and yet
they will maintain to her face that of course she is telling the truth and will even go so far as to kill a man to
protect that lie.

21. Perhaps Minnie's laugh is thus the only way to express the unspeakable. In Minnie's laugh are the
echoes of Faulkner's dark laughter—laughter that simultaneously points to the absurdity of the situation and
the hypocrisy of the townspeople (and by extension, the whole mid-twentieth-century small town South).
Everything that Rises must Converge - Flannery O’ Connor

➔ Julian represents a young white Southerner’s fraught relationship to their cultural history. He believes in
equality, but his family history connects him to a racist tradition. Complicating his relationship to the
family history, Julian, even in his progressivism, loves the elegance of the old estate. His dreams of the
mansion show that even white Southerners who are trying to do right fall victim to the dark allures of a
gruesome history. Julian treats the Well-Dressed Black Man as a symbol, or a prop, in his ongoing moral
argument with his mother. Julian might be more interested in the appearance of a liberal value system than
he is in acting in a sincerely progressive manner.
➔ The abnormal description of the surroundings also creates an almost sinister, otherworldly tone, a
trademark of Southern Gothic fiction.
➔ Julian’s Mother’s fussing with the hat, an essential symbol in this story, demonstrates her investment in
appearances. The southern women’s shared concern for acting in a fashion befitting one’s social class
displays, again, a stronger commitment to appearing to be ethical than to actually treating people ethically.
Julian’s Mother finds black people to be inferior, she goes out of her way to show, especially to children, a
kind of condescending tenderness. This sort of tenderness is a product of a paradoxical Southern etiquette,
in which cruelty is often disguised as gentility. Carver’s Mother, surely accustomed to such condescension,
sees through the charade and scolds Carver for engaging with it.
➔ Julian believes that people demonstrate their character through what they believe, and, thus, can change.
His mother’s view is much more rigid, and suggests that a person’s identity and worth are fixed.
➔ After Julian’s Mother’s shocking experience, which is reflective of a new social order, she descends into a
fantasy of the past. The reality of the present South, in which black people demand her respect—to the
point of violently rebuking her for her lack of respect—traumatizes Julian’s Mother so intensely that it’s as
if she can no longer live in the present. Thus, she begins to look unrecognizable and to insensibly call out
for people from her past. In being drawn back to his Mother, Julian is drawn back to a symbol of the old
South—his mother, who is also literally the source of his life. His rough demeanor changes and he becomes
almost infantilized. The story ends with both Julian and his Mother altered: he has regressed to a childlike
state and she has broken down completely in a classically Southern Gothic fashion.

Flannery O’Connor - Susan Castillo

Southern novelist - all of us are grotesque in one way or another, though we rarely realize this about ourselves - what
is considered normal is often grotesque, while the grotesque itself is the stuff of everyday reality

distortion, freakishness, and absurdity

The uniqueness of the Southern Grotesque, however, is its moral dimension and its attempts to come to terms with
unspeakable histories and events

Amusement - compassion devoid of sentimentality or condescension

Southern fiction attempts to come to terms with the contradictions between this pastoral vision of the South as
idyllic agrarian dream and the historical reality of a patriarchal culture which relied on the extensive use of slave
labor

in the texts of certain Southern women writers that this division between idyllic pastoral dream and crude historical,
economic, and political realities is most clearly apparent

Southern Grotesque can be described as a reaction to the discrepancy between the vision of the South as antebellum
pastoral Arcadia on the one hand and the crude historical realities of a patriarchal, racist society on the other

grottesco, odd or extravagant - paintings decorating the walls of a grotto or cave

1. persons and animals are intermingled with foliage, flowers, fruit, etc. in a fantastic design
2. distortions or striking incongruities in appearance, shape, manner
juxtaposition of contradictory elements or genres, meant to produce a feeling of alienation or defamiliarization

reality characterized by radical discontinuity, devoid of significance, in which human beings attempt to create
meaning in a world which is disjointed and senseless

Suddenness and surprise are essential elements . . .We are so strongly affected and terrified because it is our
world which ceases to be reliable, and we feel that we would be unable to live in this changed world. The
grotesque instills the fear of life rather than the fear of death. …that the categories which apply to our world
view become inapplicable

the South, as a region and a culture of extremes characterized by a certain decadence and by racial and social
fragmentation

The grotesque is ultimately an art of acceptance and reconciliation of contradictory possibilities. It represents a
certain recognition of the fact that amid the essentially chaotic and violent nature of the universe, it is the perception
of the individual that orders and gives meaning to reality.

The grotesque/gothic is an aesthetic based on instability, and that the reconciliation of possibilities - is a contingent
and fleeting one at best. An essential condition of the grotesque is its comic nature.

the subject matter of the grotesque – the raw material which creates the vision – is always potentially
horrible, but the treatment of this material is comic: peculiar complexity of tone, combining both horror and
the ludicrous - our laughter - tinged with uneasiness and a certain sense of guilt at our own amusement

characters in a fiction of the grotesque are always contradictory, with more than a hint of the absurd. The grotesque
plot is characterized by exaggeration, comic melodrama, the juxtaposition of the horrible and the ridiculous.

in the work of certain Southern middle-class writers, the hidden violence of existing social structures (and doubts
about their legitimacy) are repressed and then displaced into figures of comic horror

The possibility of complete alignment between a unified self and a stable, essential culture is nothing more than a
mirage. But the realization that such a concept is merely a chimera and thus ultimately unattainable provokes fear
and pain, and middle-class writers and readers often react by projecting malign intentions onto these grotesque
Others who threaten to reveal the fundamental instability of their structures of meaning and hierarchy

the instability of certain categories that are central to Southern culture and Southern subjectivities. Foremost among
these are race, gender roles, and religion

interracial sexual relationships have existed since time immemorial in the South, regardless of Jim Crow laws and
the Code Noir. The notion of racial separateness, of the two races coexisting side by side in hermetically sealed
divisions and never intermingling, is little more than a fiction

overpowering importance of bodies in Southern culture. In the South, the color of one’s body directly determined
whether one was slave or free; even nowadays, race and racial categories play a significant role in delimiting the
individual’s possibilities of socioeconomic mobility. Gender roles in the South are equally unstable, with
contradictory stereotypes of strong women coexisting with visions of the Southern Lady as a delicate hothouse
flower, particularly after World War II with the entry of increasing numbers of Southern women into the workforce.

Flannery O’Connor, who captures many of these contradictions in her work, was one of the most skilled
practitioners of the style which has come to be known as the Southern Grotesque or Southern Gothic.

Desegregation and the Silent Character in O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” - Michael L.
Schroeder

Flannery O’Connor’s attitude toward race and the changes taking place in racial relations in the late 1950s and early
1960s – Complex ambivalence
O’Connor was silent towards the events of the civil rights movement—in her letters, in her interviews, in her public
talks, and, except for a topical reference in Julian’s mother’s bus ride to the downtown Y

paternalistic but racist establishment that wants to perpetuate segregation, represented by Julian’s mother; misguided
liberals who want to flaunt their integrationist virtues, such as Julian; and African Americans so fed up with
segregation that they are ready to lash out violently even at well-intended condescension. O’Connor appears to be
showing all sides to be at fault

O’Connor depicts the views and attitudes of all three characters negatively because she wants her story to reflect the
complexities of desegregation in the South as viewed by a relatively progressive white southerner at the beginning
of the 1960s

When Julian and his mother board the bus shortly after the desegregation of public transportation, no African
Americans are on board, much less sitting in the seats in the front that had formerly been restricted to white riders

African Americans had been as “thick as fleas—up front and all through” (CW 490). Then, when a professionally
dressed black man sits at the other end of her bench seat, this woman feels compelled, in her segregationist mind, to
move to the back

Julian’s Mother - Unlike the rural mothers of other stories, her pride is rooted in her ancestry, and her primary flaw
is the racism that comes from her romanticized view of slavery and segregation. She believes that she and her son
should be proud of and take strength from their aristocratic heritage as descendants of a governor, and she yearns for
the antebellum days, in which her ancestors, the Godhighs, lived in a mansion maintained by slaves. At the time of
the story, however, she endures in genteel poverty, worried over the cost of a new hat and riding a public bus to
attend a weight-reduction class with those “who are not our kind of people.” Her paternalistic and segregationist
impulses reflect ingrained habit more than conscious offensiveness.

Julian is “another white liberal who turns a rightful demand for racial justice into a wrongful demand for moral
congratulations.” He wishes to “teach [his mother] a lesson” by bringing home— that is, to her apartment in what
used to be a good part of the city—the sort of African American who fits his ideal image: a professor or lawyer, or a
beautiful but “suspiciously Negroid” (494) woman whom he could introduce as his chosen mate. Adding to his own
racist assumptions about the type of African American appropriate for his company, he further displays his
hypocrisy by dreaming of the now-decayed family mansion: “He never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it
without longing.”

Little background or motives of the character who precipitates Julian’s mother’s literal fall, but her attitude is
established from the moment she boards the bus with her young son. She is a large and “sullen” African-American
woman. “Her face,” we are told, “was set not only to meet opposition but to seek it out”

while Julian reluctantly continues to sit by her—she is apparently not the sort of African American he wants to
associate with

“the grotesqueness of much of the death-dealing satire” as “an expression of the author’s own ambivalent fascination
with the great crisis that disrupted the South in the late fifties and early sixties: the rise of the civil right movement”
(197). The author’s ambivalence leads to her use of an ambivalent narrator, one who “seems simultaneously to
approve of and protest her characters’ punishing deaths, to mock and to mourn them”

explanations for “this deliberate disjunction between [grotesquely comical] form and [tragic] content.”

1. Religious perspective -
deliberately places the social tragedy of her white characters—the destruction of their pride, privilege, and
heritage—against the cosmic background of Christian comedy— her characters’ moral obligation to see that they
and their black neighbors are equal in the eyes of God—she dissociates herself partly from their suffering and
humiliation, never allows them to take center stage”
 2. Historical perspective -
crisis and change are “open-ended,” and that these stories “illustrate the simultaneous losses and gains of social
conflict”

compelling blend of contempt and longing that exists in O’Connor’s double-minded narrator perfectly expresses the
peculiar schizophrenia created by historical change”

Julian, his mother, and the African-American woman, “[A]ll three constitute O’Connor’s retort to those . . . who
offer simple solutions to the matter of human perfection” - comprise a retort to arguments for an immediate and
forced solution to the racial dilemmas in the South at the start of 1961.

oversimplification of the situation by northern liberals

embodies in the story an approach to resolving the inequalities with a minimum of upheaval. But to see that
resolution, we must focus on a minor character, the one who says nothing.

In some public spaces, such as grocery stores, “. . . people do not feel they are sharing the same living space,” but
“[t]the social body and the student body virtually coincided in the South

aware of the range of views toward integration among whites, O’Connor would likely have also been aware of
disunity within the civil rights movement

She appears to be favoring King’s approach as more practical because it reflects his position as a southerner familiar
with the social situation as she saw it, in contrast to those arguing for immediate change in spite of the many social
forces involved. Yet she saw the change itself as inevitable.

O’Connor believed the resolution of decades of inequality would require not only discretion and understanding of
the complex social forces involved, but also a recognition of the importance of socially prescribed manners in the
process.

She adds, “The South has survived in the past because it's manners, however lopsided or inadequate they may have
been, provided enough social discipline to hold us together and give us an identity. Now those old manners are
obsolete, but the new manners will have to be based on what was best in the old ones—in their real basis of charity
and necessity”

When Julian tells his mother that her “manners are obsolete,” he is right to a point, but in their place he
offers nothing but rudeness to his own mother and misguided and hypocritical liberalism, totally lacking in
genuine charity.

O’Connor reveals her meager optimism through the only adult character on the bus who is not depicted negatively

Julian wants to strike up a conversation with the man “about art or politics or any subject that would be above the
comprehension of those around them, but the man remained entrenched behind” his newspaper

The man provides a book of matches without looking at Julian, and when Julian returns them with a “sorry,” the man
gives him “an annoyed look” (493). Julian’s attempt to teach his mother a lesson fails because the other man
“refused to come out from behind the paper”

O’Connor intends him to serve as more than a prop or foil for Julian. His suit and newspaper connote a professional
and social status

He displays dignity in his effort to maintain his privacy. He refuses to take offense at or even acknowledge
racist reactions to his presence. And most of all, he expects the right to sit where he wants and to be left alone.

The World of Guilt and Sorrow: Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" - Robert D.
Denham
Standing at the center of the action is Julian, a disheartened, cynical, confused, misanthropic young man. He
habitually uses his sense of moral superiority to elevate himself and thereby judge the inadequacies of others.
Playing the intellectual sophisticate, he sees his task as instructing the unenlightened, especially his mother, in the
ways of "true culture"; and for Julian true culture is always defined in terms of "the mind." He is, in short, a
self-pitying malcontent who enjoys the role of martyr and who treats his mother with an unrelenting contempt,
offering her no love or sympathy and delighting in her discomfort.

Naive in outlook and understanding, she sees her identity in terms of a glamorous but lost past, truth in terms of the
platitudinous cliché, "true culture" in terms of "the heart," and success in terms of social melioration.

Julian's depression, occasioned by his mother's rather outlandish garb, erupts eventually into a string of
contemptuous rejoinders at her efforts at conversation.

At every point mother and son are dia metrically opposed, whether the issue be the purple and green hat, or
the remembrance of things past, or the "rise" of the Negro.

The conflict is developed further in the bus scene, where their attitudes about the racial question become the central
issue.

As mother and son engage in a game of glances. The narrator's intrusions into Julian's mind at this point show us
most clearly the shallowness and pretension of his intellectualism.

The climax of the second episode, and of the story itself, comes in the encounter with the Negro woman, everything
that rises converging figuratively in the recognition by Julian's mother that she and the Negro woman are wearing
the same hat; and converging literally, moments later, with the impact of the black woman's fist.

His perverse intellectualism suddenly pales before the stark reality of his mother's death; so that his futile, yet tender,
cry to her, just before she crumples to the pavement, makes mockery of his earlier testimony that "instead of being
blinded by love for her as she was for him, he had cut himself emotionally free from her and could see her with
complete objectivity."

His cries for help suggest not merely the panic of the moment, effacing his earlier claim of fearlessness; they suggest
also his desperate awareness of the dark state of his own soul. The final words of the narrator, which show Julian on
the threshold of "the world of guilt and sorrow”

A shocking event that changes his moral nature: it alters the attitude toward the evil he has done wittingly and
deflates his unconscious moral egoism - MORAL REVERSAL - the belief that poetic justice will be served if Julian
is somehow punished

Her shortcomings are less vicious and blameworthy, since they derive from unconscious prejudice and naivete

He is possessed throughout by a malevolent desire to see her suffer, to teach her a lesson in morality by hurting her,
even by directly inflicting the pain himself

If death does not ensue, then Julian gets more or less what he desired all along. Julian's re-entry into his world of
moral pride and smug self-esteem. To see Julian's mother suffer anything less than death is sufficient justification for
his sadness - but hardly for guilt and sorrow.

possessed by mixed feeling (contempt and longing) regarding the ancestral heritage in which his mother takes such
pride, and overcome by self-pity to the point of having a martyr complex

His malevolence and misanthropy and moral pretension are particularly heightened, after Julian's abortive attempt at
conversing with the Negro man, he utters not one word for the remainder of the scene; for this, coupled with his
fantasies, indicates the kind of passive character he is and contrasts sharply with the later, genuine outburst to his
stricken mother.
the Negro woman disappears when she has served her function, just as the Negro man, having performed his
fictional duty, is made conveniently to disembark when Miss O'Connor's front seats get a bit too crowded.

Julian's mother has also made a discovery in having to confront, shockingly, the truth of Julian's one correct claim:
her condescending and patronizing attitude toward Negroes - discovery issues in the tragedy and irony of death:
tragedy, from Julian's perspective, since it is only through the loss of his mother that he can enter his new life; and
fateful irony from his mother's perspective, since her irresponsibility, though more innocent than his, is not allowed
the same potential for change

Julian, on the other hand, for whom we have been able to muster little sympathy, has now become a young man
whose desperate cries give us sympathetic joy in his change and more than a modest optimism for his future. The
story, then, is finally Julian's story.

The Lessons of History: Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" - John F. Desmond

the violent convergence occurs between a stout Negro woman and an aristocratically inclined white woman, whose
son Julian witnesses the impact. The encounter between the two women dramatizes the violent forces which erupt in
a clash whose racial manifestations are the terms of deeper spiritual conflict.

Both women, as well as Julian, are guilty of a denial of love and charity because of their prideful isolation.

She is a product of the now-faded aristocratic past, Julian's mother has adapted somewhat to their present "reduced"
condition. It is Julian's indulgence of her as a figure from the past, made in his own image, that is as much
responsible for her gesture of condescension toward the Negroes as her own pride.

A pseudo-intellectual, Julian espouses the gospel of liberalism—toleration of all—but in truth his liberalism is only
a reactionary response to his own ambivalent feelings toward his family history.

He has created his own idealized view of this past and sustains it through the attachment to his mother, but his real
dependence upon her is hidden—an apparent hatred of what she represents. Julian's so-called progressivism, based
upon intellectual and cultural elitism rather than a recognition of spiritual equality, is akin to his mother's own
aristocratic pretensions.

The weekly trips made by Julian's mother to the YWCA "Reducing Class," a comic symbol of both their reduced
circumstances (she was formerly a "Godhigh") and the "Fall" from pride which awaits her, underscore the fact that
she is slightly more adaptable to present realities than her son wishes to believe. Yet she is also possessed of an
exalting pride. What distinguishes her from "common" humanity is the ridiculous purple and green hat she wears.

She assumes an aristocratic stance above common humanity, epitomized in the sales girl's remark, "with that hat,
you won't meet yourself coming and going."

Possessed of a sense of identity that her son lacks, Julian's mother nevertheless suffers a moral blindness manifested
in her nostalgic affection for the past.

Through his belief in her as a representative of the past that he sustains his own false identity— "innocently"
detached from reality and aristocratically superior in his condemnation of her limitations.

When she insists that her family retained sélf-respect in spite of reduced circumstances, Julian's own nostalgia is
revealed.

After they have boarded the bus together, Julian retreats into a "mental bubble" while his mother discusses the race
question with two other women passengers. From his detached perspective, ironically. Julian sees his mother as
living in a "fantasy world," while she believes accurately that her son is inexperienced in the "real world.”
Julian sees himself as liberated from her, when in fact he is vitally dependent upon her as the scapegoat for
his own intellectual and moral self-righteousness.

Julian's postured "toleration" is revealed when he unsuccessfully tries to engage the Negro in conversation. When
the Negro isolates himself behind a newspaper, Julian recalls his other attempts to become acquainted with "the
better types" and imagines the revenge he could perpetrate against his mother's bigotry by bringing a Negro woman
home as his fiancee.”

The bond between Julian's mother and the Negro woman, both isolated and proud, is of course symbolized by the
identical hats which the women wear. Furthermore, the fact that the Negro child sits with Julian's mother and the
woman next to Julian, separated by the aisle, signifies their moral kinship and the incipient theme of convergence.

She suppresses her indignation by assuming a comical attitude toward the likeness, as if "a monkey" were wearing
the hat.

The two women are identical in their blind moral isolation, and their encounter erupts inevitably into violence.

For Julian, the defeat of his mother is a momentary triumph, a confirmation of his self-righteousness and intellectual
"hatred" of her values. Yet while the effect of the violent convergence upon his mother is a fatal heart attack on the
way "home"—she is retreating into the romanticized past as she dies, calling for her childhood Negro maid—her
death also reveals Julian's shallowness and "innocent" detachment from the reaL.

His mother now becomes "the past '' he has not only seen her as representing but from which he has created his own
reproachless, false progressivism; and the false identity this provided him is suddenly destroyed by her death. He
must face the "void" alone. His perversion of her real values and his own prideful isolation have fostered a moral
adolescence in which he has had no mature spiritual identity.

The death of his mother brings Julian for the first time face to face with the reality of history—the "world of guilt
and sorrow"—and unprepared in his innocence, he wishes to retreat from this terrible knowledge

The Domestic Dynamics of Flannery O'Connor: Everything That Rises Must Converge - Bryan N. Wyatt

O’Connor confronts a drastically fallen world in which even the remnants of religious belief are vanishing and the
instruments and recipients of grace themselves may be as sordid as the damned.

Paradox of rising descent, the rising and convergence of suppressed groups (blacks) in society, while at the same
time the society itself is devolving toward the terrible world we are coming to - a spiritual decay signified
metaphorically by the themes of physical sordidness, displacement, hostility. This complex of degeneration marks a
world “too much with us” today, presaging the resonant, faithless world of tomorrow. The domestic arena becomes
in effect a synecdoche of this transfiguration while providing a resistance to it, a tension affording possibilities for
desirable modes of human interaction.

Attempting to practice her class-conscious mannerisms in a world that is “in a mess everywhere,” where social
convergence has blurred class distinctions, where “the bottom rail is on the top” - Displacement is heightened

Modest apartment in a neighborhood once fashionable but now deteriorated and dingy, as contrasted with her sense
of real home, the haven of her childhood, her grandfather’s “mansion,” toward which she reverts in the confusion of
her fatal stroke at story’s end.

The lost mansion - that the mother appears in the end to seek, her heritage - sold, ruined, possessed by Negroes.

Julian has an obsessive attachment to the house, regularly dreaming about it, assuring himself that only he, not his
mother, could have appreciated it, and finally thinking “bitterly of the house that had been lost for him”

Lost for him: the symbolic import of the house is enlarged. The house was lost for Julian’s sake, that whatever
legacy there was to his mother from its sale went to augment the funds scraped together by her in the struggle to
better her son’s welfare, as her own was largely neglected (“her teeth had gone unfilled so that his could be
straightened”)

The house was Julian’s link to his mother’s world and world view, her manners and values.

Despite his professing that he is “not dominated by his mother”. His very being, in fact, seems little more than a
reaction to his perception of hers. “Everything that gave her pleasure,” we are led to believe, “was small and
depressed him”.

Julian is correct in concluding that his mother loves him but excessive in contending that she is blinded by such
love; and his cultivated ability to see her with complete objectivity looms as one of his severest frailties

End what blinds her to him, beyond any recognition, is his rejection of her (evinced through various gestures,
notably his viewing her as a stranger and contemplating abandoning her when they reach their bus stop, and
culminating symbolically in his rationalized complicity with the contemporary forces that erupt in the black
woman's assault on her)

Julian tries to (re)establish genuine familial ties, discarding his conception of her as a child ironically after she has
reverted psychically to her childhood, as he cries, "Mamma, Mamma.”

She finds "nothing familiar" about him, finds "nothing." She has returned to her world, the matrix of her identity, a
world that antedates and excludes him.

It is his rejection of her, his figurative killing of her, that projects the "real world" that he must enter after her death -
"the world of guilt and sorrow.”
The Man to send Rain Clouds - Silko

Silko – native american author

→ second wave of native american literary renaissance
→ movement to move away from these categorisations of native american and non-native american
→ story: clash abt two communities and cultures.
→ she's a repository of different culture - variety of ancestry
→ bases on a true story ( she wrote this in a creative writing class)

4 sections - native American rituals and mannerisms and how they understand death.
→ Graded in 4 sections
Each section has an element of native american ritual
4 (number) - emblematic ; carries a certain significance
● Holy number of pueblo tale
● 4 levels in the cave of death
● Adherence & respect to the ritual present

Rituals important to community

→ comfort: the dead are safe
→ sense of continuity:
1. Unnatural event (death of grandfather) → interrupts the natural slow of time : experience of time becomes
sporadic: time becomes arrested
2. face to face with your own mortality
3. rituals become a sense of steps which have a sense of rhythm which the community can undertake to make
a sense of what's happened
4. you exist in an aberration and a gap - sense of comfort bc how repetitive they are → keep you going
forward
When time is arrested → it becomes comforting bc numbness is comforting
5. Rituals → find way to the ordinary way of living; heal community

Rain clouds
● Native American: it is not just to heal the community but to assimilate the dead in the very fabric of the
community
dead responsible for the future of the living
● celebrate that dead are part of our lives - they continue to exist ( togetherness)
● dead is nothing threatening → becomes a journey that continues forward
● Crisis in story - not just a biological death of a loved one ; death is a point of assimilation

Another death in story - landscape; death of land is of primary importance

● emphasis on the condition of land → landscape which is very dry and dusty
● landscape is not very generous - soil is frozen ; land so dry the holy water immediately disappears
● Land is not separate from the community; harmonious relation between you and the space you inhabit(
land)

Sense of divide between 2 communities

a. the sense of separation is both the communities
b. they don't invite the priest for the funeral - sense of secrecy about their rituals - no outsider
welcome into their community culture
c. When Leon visits the priest's to, it's like he's entered another world
d. Places to sit in the living room and yet the priest brings another chair from the kitchen - anxiety/
crisis about someone who's an outsider ( native american) is in my room. The pollution of the land
can be traced to the divide between the people

● Meeting with priest - The most banal of moments can be epic - meeting point of two distinct communities -
moment of compromise - leon takes the first step and the priest follows his lead - short walk(, literally)
grand walk (symbolically no)
● Rituals allow a community to be a community → leon lets the priest into his community's rituals
● if there's movement toward healing then it stems from compromise
● the priest does not understand what's happening - the coming together
● Death become a site of compromise that allows the outsiders to move toward each other
● which community gave the old man water -

● Union of communities: depicted through the blue mountains - image of synthesis

● Sense of knowledge that goes beyond their knowledge
● Silco- is suggesting a space that teofilo's funeral and father paul- lead to integration

1. Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the prominent contemporary Native American authors who reconfigures
the structural boundaries of Euro-American literary genres in her work. She experiments with multiple
genres- fiction, poetry, historical narrative, and memoir-within a single work.

2. In addition, Silko subverts the Euro-American aesthetic expectations of temporal continuity and
chronology of the plot. These features of her work are aimed at more than a mere demonstration of her
artistic literary skill.

3. These techniques draw upon the narrative patterns of her indigenous Laguna Pueblo oral tradition,
which she artfully inter-weaves with her original poems and fictional narratives. Her unique style results in
narratives that more faithfully capture the experiential qualities of her community's oral tradition and its
reflection of Pueblo orientation in time and place.

4. Silko intentionally rejects the literary conventions of Euro-American genres because they are inherently
un- suited to the inscription of Pueblo worldview and lived experience. In addition, these conventions have
historically served to maintain and propagate ideologies of domination over American Indian cultures.
Silko thus employs strategies of resistance to Euro-American discourses of Native American history and
identity that, although clothed in the veneer of objectivity, in actuality, rigidly define the possibilities of
the real.

5. In Silko's story "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," the death of a beloved Indian grandfather is linked with
the tribal request for rain. The Roman Catholic priest's holy water ritual is needed only to encourage the old
man's departed spirit to send big thunderclouds to deliver rain to their parched soil.

6. The old ways have not been forgotten; only the necessary aspects of Christianity have been accepted, and
a pragmatic approach is taken to the new. In the story, Silko tells of the emotional involvement with her
grandfather that young Louise reveals in her concern for his spiritual wellbeing in the afterlife.

7. She suggests that the priest sprinkle holy water so that "he won't be thirsty." Although all the young people
in the story have Anglo first names, they have not forgotten their tribal custom - the elaborate burial
ritual which involved tying a small gray feather in the old man's long white hair, painting white, blue, and
yellow streaks on his face, and throwing pinches of corn and pollen into the wind.

8. To be on the safe side, and since rain is desperately needed, they also permit the young priest to sprinkle
holy water. Louise is the one who had suggested that the priest be summoned so that the old man's spirit
will send rain clouds, but he had not been needed for the last rites be- cause it "wasn't necessary."

9. Only the limited, necessary aspects of Christianity have been adopted and assimilated without loss of the
ancient rites. The result is a satisfying compromise between the imaginative past and the practical present.
Previous Year Papers

1. What role does imagination play in the story 'The Purloined Letter'? At what points do characters appear to be
using (or misusing) their imaginations?
2. Does McLendon have any redeeming qualities in 'Dry September'? Discuss the extent to which you can feel
sympathy for him.
i. Can feel some sympathy for him because he was entering the core of his middle years with a supreme
achievement behind him but none in front, and briefly tried to relive his military glory and winds up
terrified by the sheer impossibility of it.
a. Military glory - He had commanded troops at the front in France and had been decorated for
valour. When he suggests to the barbershop crowd that they have talked enough and ought to
be on with the lynching, "he poised on the balls of his feet, roving his gaze" (p. 172). This is
the posture of a military officer back at the barracks, not on the field, with his troops in
formation before him.
b. Will Mayes becomes the end to his revived glory
ii. sense of sexual identity is also determined by the traditions and codes. He is the intrepid defender of
defenseless women and children, the protector of their purity and honor.
a. Faulkner's description of McLendon stresses the image of masculine force. He stands with his
feet apart. "His white shirt was open at the throat; he wore a felt hat. His hot bold glance
swept the group" (171). McLendon serves as a challenge to the masculinity of the reticent.
They are unable to resist the challenge. The trap door on reason has snapped closed; the
prisoners of a sterile tradition enact the terrible lynching ritual.
b. The final short section focusing upon McLendon is rich with horrifying irony. The powerful
he-man, armed with a pistol and aided by a whole group of men has murdered a helpless,
defenseless black. The defender of Southern womanhood manhandles his own wife. This
symbol of masculinity is, apparently, sexually estranged from his wife. He spends his
evenings, it seems to be suggested, out with the boys. He objects to his wife sitting up waiting
for him. These are the sad facts that stretch McLendon on the rack between his fantasy of
masculinity and the reality of his existence.
3. Is suspense a casualty in 'The Purloined Letter'? Explain with reference to the narrative devices used in the text.
4. Identify and critically comment: What the hell difference does it make? Are you going to let the black sons get
away with it until one really does it? (Dry September)
i. Spoken by McLendon
5. With reference to any one short story, discuss how they are representative of the indigenous beliefs and mores
of Native American culture and whether these are narratives of hope. [The Man to send Rain Clouds – Leslie
Silko]
i. Traditionalism vs. Modernity: Leslie Silko on American Indian Women – EDITH BLICKSILVER
a. the death of a beloved Indian grandfather is linked with the tribal request for rain. The Roman
Catholic priest's holy water ritual is needed only to encourage the old man's departed spirit to
send big thunderclouds to deliver rain to their parched soil. The old ways have not been
forgotten; only the necessary aspects of Christianity have been accepted, and a pragmatic
approach is taken to the new.
b. tribal custom (elaborate burial ritual) – tying a small gray feather in the old man's long white
hair, painting white, blue, and yellow streaks on his face, and throwing pinches of corn and
pollen into the wind. To be on the safe side, and since rain is desperately needed, they also
permit the young priest to sprinkle holy water so that "he won't be thirsty.
MINNIE COOPER

1. A Reinterpretation of Faulkner's "Dry September" - John K. Crane

a. She lives, and has for all her years, in a small frame house with an invalid mother and "a thin,
sallow, unflagging aunt" (p. 173). Minnie sits on her porch each morning for an hour and a
half, eats dinner, and lies down until the heat begins to cool. Then she spends her afternoons
shopping and haggling over prices. Each year she buys three or four new dresses. Though
when younger she had a reasonably appealing body that "had enabled her for a time to ride
upon the crest of the town's social life" (p. 174), now she watches younger girls paired with
younger men while "the sitting and lounging men did not even follow her with their eyes
 anymore" (p. 175). All the details here portray a deadening cyclic repetition which alters only
Minnie's age and appeal. Yet for a September to be tragically dry, whether in agriculture or in
the life cycle, the spring and early summer had to have been comparatively fertile. Twelve
years back Minnie had met and probably gone to bed with a cashier at the bank, a man who
owned a red runabout, the first automobile in town. Just as Minnie's bright dresses contrast
now with her empty and idle days with "a quality of furious unreality", so does her
routine-ridden fortieth year stack up badly against a time in her late-twenties and early-thirties
when she was reputed to be the town adulteress and was happy to have the reputation. In the
story's present time, she is without a man and without the appeal any longer to attract one.
What she does possess is her whiteness, however, and she seems to assume that this would be
enough to make Jefferson believe that even a good, respectable "nigger" like Will Mayes
would have to, someday, rape her - gains both a renewed sense of sex appeal in her deranged
mind and, dressed later the same day in "her sheerest underthings and stockings and a new
voile dress" "even the young men lounging in the doorway [tip] their hats and [follow] with
their eyes the motion of her hips and legs when she passed" She ends her dry spell
momentarily but only vicariously. “... she breaks into endless shrill laughter. She is taken
home and her head packed in ice while her friends "removed the pink voile and the sheer
underthings” an internal heat and dry middle age which motivate her accusation of Will
Mayes, with the latter definitely the stronger motive it would be incorrect to claim that the hot
summer sparked Minnie to slander and, indirectly, to kill Mayes, so it would be wrong to
suggest that it was any more than an intensifying circumstance with McLendon. His life is in
a figurative "dry September".
2. William Faulkner's "Dry September": Decadence Domesticated – Lawrence Jay Dessner