Growing Up White in the South: Charles Mallison’s Initiation in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust
學年 103
學期 2
發表日期 2015-05-30
作品名稱 Growing Up White in the South: Charles Mallison’s Initiation in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust
作品名稱(其他語言)
著者 游錫熙; Joseph Yu
作品所屬單位
出版者
會議名稱 2015年北京大學—臺灣淡江大學—太原理工大學 外國語言文學研討會
會議地點 中國山西太原
摘要 Intruder in the Dust (1948), one of William Faulkner’s initiation novels, tells the story of Charles (“Chick”) Mallison’s coming of age morally. Encumbered with his undischarged debt to Lucas Beauchamp, a proud old man of white and black blood, Chick goes to extreme lengths, with the help of Miss Habersham and Aleck Sander, to prove Lucas’s innocence when Lucas is summarily thrown into jail for his suspected murder of a white man and, consequently, faced with the grim prospect of being lynched by a mob. Intruder in the Dust is also one of the novels in which Faulkner gives full expression to his entanglement with the race problems. At the beginning of the novel, Lucas felt slighted by the then twelve-year-old Chick when Chick was provided with comfort and dinner in Lucas’s place after an accident and condescendingly offered to pay Lucas for his hospitality because Lucas, in Chick’s eye, was a “nigger.” Lucas, however, is proud of being a lineal descendant of Carothers McCaslin, a white ancestor as well as the county’s founder, and his unconventional behavior “as a nigger” has provoked much public outrage. It is imperative for the citizenry of Jefferson to teach Lucas to “know his place,” and the suspected murder of a white man affords such an opportunity. To discharge his debt to Lucas, Chick takes it upon himself to save Lucas’s hide, and, in so doing, is initiated into manhood and achieves maturation. One problem, however, remains unresolved: Chick is yet to come to full recognition of his sense of superiority as a white. His deep commitment to his community, a predominantly white one, only complicates the issue. The growth of Chick’s moral consciousness, therefore, falls short because, growing up white in the South, he pledges his loyalty, first and foremost, to his own kind—white Southerners.
關鍵字 Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust;race;initiation novel;white Southern culture
語言 en_US
收錄於
會議性質 兩岸
校內研討會地點
研討會時間 20150530~20150530
通訊作者
國別 CHN
公開徵稿
出版型式
出處
相關連結

機構典藏連結 ( http://tkuir.lib.tku.edu.tw:8080/dspace/handle/987654321/106553 )