MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

As literary scholarship tends to reinforce the boundaries between literature for adults and children, few critics have paired William Faulkner’s modernist novels and Francis Hodgson Burnett’s children’s literature. Yet, a closer examination of Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! reveals that the Compson family weaves the primary plot line of Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy’s into their tellings and retellings of the Sutpen family drama to explore intertwining Southern failures, the white intellectual transplant and the black male heir. The similarities are marked: both narratives feature a young, “mixed-blood” boy who, as the last remaining heir to a decaying lineage, is brought back to the grandfather’s home to receive his inheritance, a connection foregrounded by dressing Charles Bon’s illegitimate heir, Charles Etienne De Saint Velery Bon, in the iconic Fauntleroy suit. To clarify this connection, however, I turn to Gabrielle Owens’ queer re-reading of Jacqueline Rose’s “impossible relation between child and adult.” For Owens, “child” and “childhood” can “[function] ideologically as an empty category,” in which adults can construct narratives that both obscure children’s “lived reality” and reinforce ideal adult subjectivies (qtd. in Owens 258, 255, 257). Although Charles Etienne’s narrative is merely one thread of a much larger tapestry of stories passed down through the Compson family, I argue that Charles Etienne’s transformation into an American Fauntleroy turns his failed efforts to revive the Sutpen plantation into a morality tale of failed black manhood. As the Sutpens’ family story passes from father to son to Shreve, this piece of 19th-century pop culture becomes an intergenerational ideological battleground over competing definitions of white manhood in turn-of-the-century America, a battle in which Quentin, increasingly burdened under the weight of so many narratives, lose his own sense of personal narrative and transforms into an empty signifier like Charles Etienne.