• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.2
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• pp.239-252
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• 2018

Many critics on William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying have read Addie Bundren as the disrupter of patriarchal power. By raising a question about the usefulness of language, which is the symbolic power of patriarchy and having an affair with the preacher Whitfield outside her wedlock, Addie directly challenges patriarchal power. From a quite different vantage point, however, we can read Addie as the faithful protector of the norm of whiteness in the South in light of the social hierarchy. As a former school teacher, Addie is from middle class before her marriage. By her marriage to Anse, who is a lower-class white, Addie has class anxiety that her social status in the stratum of whiteness could be degraded from a middle to a lower-class white, "white trash," which means that she is not white enough to be considered as the normative whiteness. Especially, Addie's anxiety increases due to the fact that her lazy husband is reluctant to work and relies on her neighbors, causing her family to be entrapped at the bottom in the stratum of whiteness. Therefore, she decides to take revenge on her husband after giving birth to her second child Darl by asking Anse to bury her dead body in her familial burial site in Jefferson. By rendering her family to suffer the hardship during her funeral procession, not only does she succeed in taking revenge on Anse on the surface, she regains her social status as a middle-class white by being buried in Jefferson fundamentally.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.233-242
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• 2019

The purpose of this study is to compare a supposedly "pot boiler", Sanctuary and Sanctuary: The Original Text and examine the fact that Horace Benbow in The Original Text is a more complicated and many-sided character who has suppressed desire, Oedipus complex, sense of guilt for a long time, until he came to confront Temple-Popeye case. Since literary narration means unconscious procedure, Horace's incestuous love for his step daughter and Oedipal relation reveals Faulkner's own psychology. In this sense, The Original Text serves as a matrix of many of Faulkner's major novels in terms of themes, characters, and the relationship between past and present. Among these novels are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Flags in the Dust. Faulkner, while writing about his own world creating Yoknapatawpha County, tries to portray characters with artistic value through whom he wanted to express the deep anxiety and turmoil of the 1920s. Starting with Horace Benbow, Quentin Compson, Darl Bundren and young Bayard Sartoris can be doubling through his major works, conveying author's profound despair in the context of modern world.