Blankman, Erika

In William Faulkner’s the Sound and the Fury, many scholars have debated about Caddy as Eve, the functionality of hermeneutic structure in relation to narrative function, and the use of Edenic scenery as a metaphor for Quentin Compsons’ world coming to an end. However, there is yet to be an analysis of Faulkner’s text in relation to trauma and ecocriticism and its influence on later Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. It is through the female and the aquatic bodies that widen the interpretation of Faulkner’s exploration of Southern male identity in relation to trauma, water, and memory its reflection onto the Southern environment. In Conroy’s text, he mirrors the way in which trauma is explored through the idea of water and the Faulknerian narrative technique, the stream of consciousness, which is activated only with the remembrance of the sister and her social ruin. Faulkner and Conroy delve into the South and communicate it as a site of decay, ruin, and a liminal space that inevitably exposes one to trauma. The men within Faulkner’s and Conroy’s texts must sift through their memories, both present and past, to define and identify the wound that disrupts their psyche [and its consequences]. This thesis aims to unpack Faulkner’s utilization of the female, terrestrial, and aquatic bodies as spaces that communicate male trauma. This thesis aims to suggest that, as an echo of Faulkner, Conroy’s text expands and further adapts the canon of Southern literature that takes an ecological approach to explore trauma in the form of water and the female body. This analysis aims to propose that the construction of Faulkner’s Southern ecology and its intersection between ecocriticism and trauma studies in relation to water influenced this approach and framework for Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides.