“The Image of You, True or False, Last[s] a Lifetime”: Lillian Hellman’s Memories of Black Women

Abstract

Judith L. Sensibar attributes much of Faulkner’s impetus for writing about race to his childhood relationship with Caroline Barr, the woman he called “Mammy” and to whom he dedicated Go Down, Moses (1942). She states:

Much of Faulkner’s racial unconscious springs (like that of most white middle- and upper-class Mississippians of his generation), from his doubly mothered childhood. Cultural conventions prevented him from ever fully acknowledging one of the two women who nurtured him. Often they required that she be demeaned. In contrast to Faulkner’s eulogy for Caroline Barr, a public act conforming to those conventions, Go Down, Moses, a fiction, is both an act of true mourning and, in rare unguarded moments, of the liberation that true mourning brings. (110)

Reading his fiction through this biographical lens—and his biography through his fiction—Sensibar is able to unpack some of the complex-ities of Faulkner’s presentation of racial issues. Interpreting both Go Down, Moses and the reason fiction enabled Faulkner to break out of the prescribed codes that constricted his public statements about Barr, she argues that the novel allowed Faulkner to explore his loss of Barr as well as his earlier loss stemming from his denial of his love for her:

To identify not only with the feminine but with the black feminine is so shameful and so taboo that the feeling part of the self has to be killed. That loss, because one is never permitted to mourn for it, is always felt as a loss. … But his exploration throughout this novel and throughout the record of his writing of this novel is, as always, fraught with an ambivalence often articulated as blatant racism. (108)