W9: Modernism and William Faulkner’s “Dry September” (January 1931)
These questions are designed to help you to begin to see how Faulkner’s “Dry September” invites us to notice and rethink inherited belief systems.
1. As we think about Modernism, consider the language in the opening paragraph:
Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass—the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber-shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what happened (49).
a) First, what does this opening suggest about the narrator’s implicit attitude towards the rumor?
b) Now, think about the atmosphere that Faulkner creates in this paragraph. How does the literal weather seem to affect the emotional weather/atmosphere in this town?
2. Notice how Henry Hawkshaw—the barber—is treated by the other men in the opening scene when he suggests that they may not know the facts surrounding Miss Minnie’s accusation of rape against Will Mayes. In what manner—or why—is he shouted down for mentioning “facts”? Do the men mainly accuse him of having his facts wrong in this case, or is their hostility towards him based on something other than a disagreement over the truth of the rumor?
3. This is a story that asks us to think about white womanhood in the Jim Crow South. How does Minnie seem to buy into the myths of the purity of Southern white women? And how does she get condemned by these myths—i.e. how are they used against her?
4. Think back to Hemingway’s iceberg theory for a second. Faulkner, while typically noted for his verbosity, omits a key scene from the story. What scene is that? Why omit it--to what effect?