William Faulkner is a writer who engaged with the natural environment throughout his career, from his early pastoral poetry to short stories about Native Americans to novels that deal directly with issues of land use, hunting, and natural disasters. Ecocriticism is a critical school that has gained increasing usage and popularity since the 1980s, though it has been around much longer than that. Ecocriticsm is an inherently interdisciplinary approach that examines the interactions and interdependencies of humans and the natural environment. Though early ecocriticism often focused on what is frequently termed “nature writing,” many ecocritics want to foreground the natural world in texts where it may seem marginal, peripheral, or unimportant. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) is just such a work.

In Faulkner's novel, it is human nature that is the most obvious focus, and the narrative's interiority concentrates the reader's gaze inward rather than out toward the natural environment. Nature, therefore, is more important in terms of symbolism in The Sound and the Fury, as Faulkner rarely engages with the natural environment as a significant entity in its own right. In many ways, then, his modernist novel is closer to his poetry in The Marble Faun (1924), which is heavily influenced by the symbolist poets Faulkner admired. These pastoral poems treat nature as symbolic background and register for poetic feelings and sentiments, a traditional way of making nature the terra nullius for the “more important” foreground of the human realm. Thomas McHaney makes a similar point in his essay “Oversexing the Natural World: Mosquitoes and If I Forget Thee Jerusalem [The Wild Palms],” in which he says that in The Marble Faun “and on through Soldiers' Pay, Mosquitoes, and Flags in the Dust (a.k.a. Sartoris), Faulkner, then, is one of those writers who … is more likely to abstract us from physical nature than direct us toward it” (34). While Faulkner's work, over time, does engage more with physical nature and environmental issues in works, like As I Lay Dying (1930), If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (1939), and especially Go Down, Moses (1942), The Sound and the Fury is closer to his earlier portrayals of a highly symbolic natural world. Specifically, Faulkner's version of nature in his modernist saga of the Compson family is similarly symbolic and eroticized, as nature is linked to sexuality throughout the novel. While subsequent novels see Faulkner engaging with environmental issues, such as farming techniques, floods, hunting, logging, and land ownership, in The Sound and the Fury, his primary mode for representing nature is as a symbol of feminine sexuality, from which the three Compson brothers are estranged, fenced out of the proverbial garden.

The association of women with nature has a long history in American culture and literature. Critics, such as Carolyn Merchant, Louise Westling, Annette Kolodny, Elizabeth Jane Harrison, and Lucinda MacKethan, wrote pioneering works in the seventies, eighties, and nineties analyzing the ways that ostensibly feminine nature is defined against supposedly masculine culture and preparing the ground for the emergence of ecofeminist literary criticism. As these critics note, to view nature as fundamentally passive, raw material to be shaped and used by masculine science and culture is also to justify as natural a social hierarchy that subordinates women, African Americans, and Native Americans—those people deemed closest to nature. Harrison also notes that, in the context of southern literature, women traditionally have “a narrow association with the southern garden” (11). Whether Faulkner's works participate in this linking of women and nature, or whether they are challenging it by exposing it, is a matter of ongoing debate in Faulkner criticism. But as critic Diane Roberts has said: “There is one Faulknerian equation we think we know, one that seems solid: Woman = Nature” (159). Roberts goes on to succinctly summarize how gender, race, and nature intersect in Faulkner's work: “So much of Faulkner's fiction chronicles white men's attempts to contain, regulate, and exploit the land, while they also try to contain, regulate, and exploit female sexuality. … Women of both races are seen as organic beings—about the only quality they are allowed to share” (160).

Even if nature in The Sound and the Fury is profoundly linked to women, it would be oversimplifying matters to say that is its only function. Faulkner is also responding in this novel (as well as many others) to modernist angst about the death and destruction of the old agrarian pastoral world. The forces of industrialization, mechanization, and modernization that so antagonize the authors of I'll Take My Stand (1930) are also supremely important in Faulkner's oeuvre. While Faulkner's response to them may be less reactionary, more ambivalent than the outright rejection and demonizing of the Southern Agrarians, he does, in several novels, portray such forces as causing humans to become estranged from nature (“The Bear” section of Go Down, Moses being the best-known example). Roberts argues that nature reflects culture in Faulkner's novels: “The modern world seems rotten, men see women as rotten, and so the landscape itself reflects this” (159). However, while it may be true that the modern world seems rotten in The Sound and the Fury, I would argue that the natural world does not, even when viewed and represented by the disaffected, disillusioned, and dyspeptic Compson brothers.

To be sure, Faulkner's other novels may contain rotten landscapes, as Roberts suggests, and other southern fiction published around the same time as The Sound and the Fury often portray ruined nature. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road (1932) and God's Little Acre (1933), two of the best-selling southern novels of all-time, feature barren farms and depleted land, along with diseased, degenerate women, to suggest a similar degraded social and cultural environment. Caldwell's novels focus on once-proud, formerly wealthy families, who have fallen on hard times, but their ruined physical environment is both a cause and a reflection of their modern debasement. However, in The Sound and the Fury, there is no comparably ruined or tainted natural world; in fact, the glimpses and descriptions of nature that we do get in the novel are of a vibrant and dynamic natural world. The honeysuckle that Quentin associates with Caddy links nature to women and sexuality in a traditional way, but I would emphasize that the Compson men are barred from accessing this natural world of sexuality and so must look at it longingly or pretend not to want it at all.

The Compson brothers are estranged from nature and, in a sense, fenced out of the Garden of Eden itself. The Edenic imagery and symbolism is complicated in the novel, but for the three Compson brothers, Eden is identified with nature, sex, timelessness, purity, and innocence. To be locked out of nature and sexuality also entails being barred from access to the rebirth and regeneration that nature offers, for although sexual pleasure may be la petite mort, it also produces new life, as the novel's Easter theme proposes. While it may seem contradictory to suggest that Eden might contain both life and death, sex and purity, this in fact reflects Quentin's tormented psyche and twisted logic quite well. For example, he finds it quite rational to tell his father that he and Caddy have committed incest since, to him, this would be preferable to a public admission that Caddy has had premarital sex. Ironically, Quentin seeks a return to an Edenic state before sexuality, back along the stream of time to childhood, an impossible wish that he can only fulfill through leaping to his death into the maternal waters that might carry him out of time. All three brothers, in different ways, are locked out of Eden, both the future paradise of sexual pleasure in adulthood and simultaneously the sex-free pleasure of childhood innocence and not-knowing.

Benjy's section begins with his looking through the fence at the golfers, fenced out of what was “his” piece of land and nature, from which he is now exiled. The event that precipitates the first time-shift in Benjy's section is his getting snagged on the fence as he tries to pass through it, suggesting that his childhood access to nature (and Caddy) will be closed off as he (and she) grows older. While Benjy continues to use a piece of jimson weed to maintain a connection to his lost sister, it (like the slipper and his other fetishized objects) is important as a symbol, not as a physical part of the natural world—a reflection of nature's importance in the novel as a whole.

This symbolic value of nature is clearly revealed in the scene of the Compson children playing in the branch. Their actions foreshadow their adult relationships: Quentin and Caddy's bickering with thinly disguised sexual tension, Benjy's crying for Caddy to comfort him, and Jason's separation from the rest, playing alone. The importance of the branch, though, is not as a part of nature, and its function as a waterway within a larger ecosystem is unimportant. What is important is the way Faulkner uses the branch to suggest the ceaseless flowing of time that will carry Caddy into adult sexuality and away from her brothers. As Faulkner wrote in his introduction to a proposed 1933 reissue of the novel, “I saw that peaceful glinting of that branch was to become the harsh flowing of time sweeping her to where she could not return. …” (230). In this scene, however, Caddy is still a child, still innocent, still immersed in nature: “Caddy smelled like trees in the rain” (19).

Benjy's sense of smell connects him to nature in a primal way, though it also suggests a more socially demeaning connection to nature, as if his mental capacity makes him less human. The term “natural” is a now outdated euphemism for a person with mental disabilities, and Dalton Ames even uses this term to refer to Benjy (160). The term implies an inherent, animalistic connection to the natural world, and we see others compare Benjy to a bear (253, 274), a cow, a pig (253), and a dog because of his sense of smell (34) and wonder whether he can smell bad luck (89) or even death (90). Caddy rejects one of her early suitors, Charlie, in favor of Benjy, promising to stay with her brother always and washing her mouth out with soap so that Benjy finds she still “smelled like trees” (48). The perfume that Benjy objects to and Caddy consequently gives to Dilsey (42-3) is, of course, a symbol for her burgeoning sexuality, which will eventually force her separation from Benjy, a kind of death. Benjy's mind likewise mixes and confuses memories of Caddy's wedding and Damuddy's funeral, further underscoring the link between sex and death. The tree of knowledge that Caddy climbs to peer in on the funeral while the brothers see her muddy drawers from below brings nature into this equation, and the image as a whole suggests the naturalness of Caddy's inexorable passage from childhood to maturity and sexuality to death, with both Caddy and her daughter, Quentin, apparently using the same tree to sneak out of the house for the sexual liaisons that lead to their virtual deaths within the Compson family. Critic Robert Hamblin points out that Caddy's soiled panties may also symbolize original sin, “which Faulkner (like Hawthorne and indeed a host of writers since Augustine) chooses to identify with carnal experience” (14).

The Compson brothers are the ones who cannot accept the naturalness of Caddy's behavior, and thus we see them estranged from nature throughout the novel. After Benjy's pasture is sold, in order to send his brother Quentin to Harvard, Benjy is now fenced out, separated from the land where people call his sister's name. The golf course itself is a version of nature tamed or neutered, like the three brothers' sexuality, and throughout Benjy's section, there are images of corralled or harnessed horses, penned or slaughtered pigs, cows being restrained and milked, and the dead bones of the family's horse, Nancy, lying in a ditch. In counterpoint to all of this tamed nature is the image of buzzards picking Nancy's corpse, a picture of an active natural world reclaiming death and turning it into life (35). This passage can be interpreted as Faulkner's refusing to present feminine nature as solely a passive entity or refusing to make nature strictly feminine. The former, I think, makes more sense here since it is men who are barred from productive sexuality in the novel and estranged from nature, epitomized in the castrated Benjy's clinging to a fence waiting in vain for his sister to return, his castration the price for breaching the fence that separates him from feminine sexuality. Caddy and her daughter are linked to nature, but they are also active and dynamic characters who are not dependent on men or masculine culture to shape them.

Quentin is the brother most disaffected by his sister's sexuality, and he exhibits even more of an estrangement from nature than Benjy. Water is the most prominent natural element in Quentin's section, and critic Susan Scott Parrish has even connected this water imagery and symbolism to the great Mississippi River flood of 1927. I want to focus on a less obvious set of images, however, that runs throughout Quentin's section and ties in with the Eden theme of Benjy's section: birds. Before examining these repeated bird images, I first want to show how the motif of being estranged from nature, fenced out of Eden, continues from Benjy's to Quentin's narrative. Quentin makes direct reference to the biblical garden when he mentions “the voice that breathed o'er Eden” (81), a reference to a wedding hymn of that name, which suggests Quentin associates marriage with an Edenic paradise, from which he is excluded and Caddy has entered:

However, I would contend it is not Caddy, but Quentin, who feels expelled from the garden, excluded not because of any sin he has committed, but because he cannot reconcile the metaphysical (his abstract principles and values) with the natural, both human and physical nature. That is, sex, birth, and death are natural, sin is also natural (in that it is an innate part of human nature), and Quentin's refusal to accept this leaves him fenced out of an earthly paradise, stranded on the outside, desperately looking in and ultimately feeling as if death is his only method of entry.

This earthly Eden, from which Quentin feels he is barred, is linked to sexual pleasure, and for him, sex is associated with the natural environment: “Why wont you bring him to the house, Caddy? Why must you do like nigger women do in the pasture the ditches the dark woods hot hidden furious in the dark woods” (92). Caddy's sexuality is so bound up with the natural environment for Quentin that “Just by imagining the clump [of cedars] it seemed to me that I could hear whispers secret surges smell the beating of hot blood under wild unsecret flesh watching against red eyelids the swine untethered in pairs rushing coupled into the sea” (176). Quentin is incapable of understanding Caddy, sexuality, and nature, and as he travels around, Boston, a phallic symbol of industry and pollution, blocks his access to the natural world: “I could still see the smoke stack. That's where the water would be, healing out to the sea and the peaceful grottoes” (112). As this reverie goes on, there is a brief flash of the “voice that breathed o'er eden” line again (113) before a return to Quentin walking in the present, escaping the smoke stack, but still fenced out of the garden:

The incident with the boys trying to catch the legendary fish (117–21) also shows males fruitlessly pursuing nature, trying to capture and possess it, yet Quentin sees these children as still part of the garden, even if he is still fenced out:

Quentin's use of the term “[t]he first boy” alludes to Adam, and his footfalls are softer even than leaves falling to the ground. Quentin envies this perceived connection to nature, and the wall here is “dissolving into trees,” almost swallowed up by nature's beauty and life, but still present for Quentin. This separation is underscored as Quentin tries to speak to the boy, who ignores him and then “climbed a picket fence without looking back and crossed the lawn to a tree and sat there, his back to the road” (123).

Perhaps no passage better sums up how the novel links women, sexuality, nature, and death as Quentin's remembered conversations with his father, who tells him “It's nature is hurting you not Caddy” (116), going on to explain:

Here we see the origins of the principles that guide Quentin's attitudes: that women and nature are connected and unknowable, that women are inherently filthy, and that men must necessarily remain outside of knowledge, of women, and of the garden.

In fact, Quentin's near-sexual experience with Natalie occurs in a barn with rain and mud everywhere. As Quentin jumps into “the hogwallow,” he watches “Natalie going through the garden among the rain” (137), and then proceeds to smear mud on Caddy as an expression of his view of sexuality as dirty. Later in the same scene, as he and Caddy hold the phallic knife and contemplate killing themselves, sex, death, and nature merge in Quentin's consciousness: “she held my head against her damp hard breast I could hear her heart going firm and slow now not hammering and the water gurgling among the willows in the dark and waves of honeysuckle coming up the air” (152). This is as close as Quentin gets to the garden, surrounded by water, honeysuckle, and crickets, while he nearly reaches the climax of sex and/or death with Natalie and/or Caddy, but he can't go through with it; he cries and drops the knife. As he and Caddy walk through the natural landscape together (likely Benjy's pasture), Quentin says, “damn that honeysuckle I wish it would stop,” to which Caddy replies, “you used to like it” (153). They pause to look for their horse's bones in the ditch, and as soon as they crawl through the fence to return to the house, Dalton Ames is there to meet them, harshly ending Quentin's reverie in nature with his beloved sister.

While both honeysuckle and water threaten to overwhelm Quentin, the recurring image of birds seems to offer the possibility of transcendence and freedom. In fact, Faulkner had used birds in just such a manner in his early poem “Wild Geese,” written in the early 1920s and later published in revised form in A Green Bough (1933). Early in Quentin's section, a sparrow lands on his dorm room window ledge, and in one of the most lucid passages in his entire section, he describes how the bird seems to watch him, while listening to the clock chimes. Quentin notices the speed of the bird's eyes and its “throat pumping faster than any pulse” (79), signifying the inherent vitality and energy in the natural world that the increasingly morose and turgid Quentin envies, even as he knows he is excluded from it. Caddy is the one in possession of such natural vivacity, and just as memories of Caddy recur throughout his section, so do the images of birds. Quentin compares bootblacks to blackbirds (83); the hands on a watch are “like a gull tilting into the wind” (85); while riding the train, through “a break in the wall” he sees “a glint of water and two masts, and a gull motionless in midair, like on an invisible wire between the masts” (89); when he gets off the train, he watches a boat “with three gulls hovering above the stern like toys on invisible wires” (90); and he later sees another gull “on an invisible wire attached through space dragged” (104). These rather curious birds on invisible wires seem able to ignore, but also pause, and thereby even conquer, time because they are so much a part of nature. He envies them, like he envies his sister, for their freedom, though there is also the hint of a bird who seems free but actually isn't. Even Gerald Bland's eyelashes are compared to a bird— “They gushed like swallows swooping his eyelashes” (106)—perhaps because Gerald does inhabit the promised land of sexual pleasure that Quentin does not.

Instead, Quentin concerns himself with more noble, brotherly pursuits, though even when he's trying to take the little Italian girl home invisible birds intrude:

Here again, nature is inaccessible, beyond Quentin's reach, offering peace that cannot be attained and expressed in language that references the castration story told by Versh. Quentin's figurative castration occurs in his confrontation with Dalton Ames, who is able to hold both Quentin's wrists in one hand before Quentin faints “like a girl” (162). Ames' shooting the piece of bark in the stream (161) demonstrates both his mastery over nature and the feminine, as well as the violence he threatens to them. After his humiliating defeat, Quentin tries to find some solace in the natural world around him:

After being tormented by the honeysuckle (and Caddy) for so long, Quentin, in this scene gets, a taste of the solace nature can provide. Just as his respite is interrupted by the bird's calls, Caddy now rides up and interrupts him as well, chastising him for confronting Dalton Ames. It is here that we see most evidently Caddy's symbolic connection to the birds that recur incessantly throughout Quentin's section as he places his hand on his sister's throat and makes her say Dalton Ames' name like the repeating bird calls:

After he snaps back to reality and realizes he has attacked Gerald Bland, Quentin rides the streetcar alone, noticing a woman wearing a hat “with a broken feather in it” and remembering the flora of his childhood, “wistaria” [sic] and honeysuckle, “the saddest odor of all” (169).

Jason's section chiefly centers on his dashing around town, and the lack of his interaction with the natural world illustrates his estrangement from it. Jason talks about farming, but that's about as close as he gets to interacting with the land. Instead, he tries to make money speculating on cotton prices—a purely abstract, financial connection to the crop—while pontificating populist sentiments: “Do you think the farmer gets anything out of it except a red neck and a hump in his back? You think the man that sweats to put it into the ground gets a red cent more than a bare living” (191). Most of the time, however, Jason disparages farmers as ignorant, and his alienation from the land indicates an inability to understand women, just as it does for Benjy and Quentin: “I didn't know much about them” (205). When he confronts Caddy in the rain-soaked cemetery, Jason seems to repress Quentin-like feelings about his sister and childhood: “We stood there, looking at the grave, and then I got to thinking about when we were little and one thing and another and I got to feeling funny again, kind of mad or something” (203). What he thinks he knows about women is that they are natural only in that they are beneath his superior position and that they possess no faculty for higher thinking: he hopes he doesn't find Quentin sexually engaged with a man “right in the middle of the street or under a wagon on the square, like a couple of dogs” (240); he refers to Miss Quentin as “a little slut of a girl” (243), insinuates that she and her mother are (or will be) prostitutes; and advocates giving his girlfriend, Lorraine, who is also possibly a prostitute, “a bust in the jaw” (193).

The primary mention of birds in Jason's section dovetails (as it were) with the symbolism in Quentin's narrative. Jason carps about the multitude of pigeons inhabiting the Methodist church and the courthouse, complaining that forty-five dollars in tax money (his tax money) had to be spent to the clean the courthouse clock because of the pigeon problem. He complains that Parson Walthall won't allow them to be shot, and his disdain for the pigeons' lives and his characterization of them as free-loading creatures who should “have enough sense to leave town” connects them to his depictions of blacks and women (247). He goes on to complain about the sparrows swarming the courthouse yard, “as big a nuisance as the pigeons, to my notion,” and advocates poisoning them because he fears they will defecate on his hat, a metaphorical version of what he feels Caddy has done to him by “robbing” him of the bank job promised by Herbert Head.

When Jason chases Quentin and the man with the red tie outside of town to a farm (deriding the farmers as he drives for not plowing enough land), he walks through the field, and his antipathy to nature is apparent to the point that it almost seems as if the environment itself is actively blocking Jason's path:

As he continues his stealthy pursuit, his ears are ringing, his sight is blinded by the sun, a dog begins to pester him, and he becomes lost, further ensnared by nature: “I had gotten beggar lice and twigs and stuff all over me, inside my clothes and shoes and all, and I happened to look around and I had my hand right on a bunch of poison oak. The only thing I couldn't understand was why it was just poison oak and not a snake or something” (241). When he finally finds his car again, Miss Quentin has let the air of his tire, and Jason is thoroughly frustrated and defeated by both nature and a woman, foreshadowing Miss Quentin's escape down the pear tree with Jason's ill-gotten cash.

The final, third-person section of the novel opens with a description of nature and explicitly posits Dilsey as a literal part of her natural environment: “The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh” (265). Faulkner participates in the traditional association of blacks and nature in the novel, but while this connection may be negative for certain characters, in the fourth section, it is used to suggest a healthy connection to other people, to God, and to the world as a whole. The five “screaming” jaybirds that greet Dilsey and Luster at the woodpile are told by Luster to “Git on back to hell, whar you belong at” (269). If the birds again represent Caddy (or possibly the four Compson children and Caroline), then their place in hell is perhaps deserved for the torment they have brought to the faithful, enduring Dilsey. However, other references to nature in this section seem overtly racist, such as the multiple comparisons of Rev. Shegog to a monkey (293–4), the figuration of other blacks headed to church to “nocturnal animals” (291), and the linking of a black neighborhood to degraded and despoiled nature:

While there is certainly no estrangement from nature here, it may be debatable whether Faulkner is participating in traditional, racist linkages of blacks and nature or exposing them. Dilsey is portrayed quite sympathetically, to be sure, and she is also the character most in touch with the natural process of rebirth and regeneration, as well as their concomitant spiritual ones, as she says after the Easter sermon, “I've seed de first en de last … I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin” (297). The same question could be asked of Faulkner's portrayal of women as closer to nature. Is it a reductive association or one that is potentially empowering and vital? The men who are consistently estranged from the natural world, locked out of the garden, are undoubtedly characterized much more negatively in the novel. Their lack of access to nature is both a cause and a symptom of their inabilities to connect positively with the life of the world, and being fenced out of Eden denies them access to nature's regenerative and redemptive powers, leaving the Compson brothers impotent, silent, and alone.

Works Cited