| This dissertation explores the theme of transgressive desire and its ethical implications in William Faulkner's early major works. I read three novels, The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, and As I Lay Dying, from a Lacanian perspective. Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of ethics and feminine sexuality provides a unique insight into Faulkner's complex, often puzzling, re-presentation of desire, death, and the female body. I argue that Faulknerian death drive connotes the radical politics of an ethical act that negates the repressive establishment of paternal moralism and clears the way for the creation of an alternative order of singularity. The ethical subject in Faulkner does not give way on his or her desire but struggles to open up a creative space of the beyond that ultimately points to the feminine domain of Lacanian not-all. Faulkner's art, therefore, implies a radical feminist ethics of subversion and sublimation, engendering the polyphonic world of infinity. |
