LITR 5431 American Romanticism UHCL 2010 midterm student sample answers

In “Mountain Victory,” Faulkner locates Gothic and Romantic tropes in a narrative of historical tragedy, in the process dismantling generic constraints on subjectivity to produce a story that submits history as omnipotent and violent repetition. As much of the story’s tension depends on insufficient knowledge in a world of upheaval, to some extent “Victory” negotiates epistemological and ideological crises such as described at length in my first essay. However, these crises are in “Victory” not ends but means. The story’s bleak resolution turns not on Americanistic individual agency however qualified or undermined but, like a Greek tragedy, on the impotence of the individual against inevitable fate.

“Victory” takes place some months after the end of the Civil War, and the racial and class conflicts of the period are foregrounded as the terms of “Victory’s” tropic Gothicism. Faulkner’s language (“dark and smoldering and violent and childlike vanity, 750; “eyes, momentary and phantomlike,” 746) conjures an atmosphere of eerie otherworldliness. But it is the racialized Byronic protagonist Confederate Major Saucier Weddel, mutilated but heroic with his one arm and “dark face … at once thick yet gaunt, and arrogant” (747), who most overtly evokes historicized Gothicism. The men of the poor, Union-serving Tennessee family with whom Weddel lodges, with his slave Jubal on his way home to his Mississippi plantation, take issue both with Weddel’s rebel uniform and with his dark skin. Explaining himself, Weddel tries to level the social problematics. He asserts he is not Negro but part Chickasaw; moreover he is, as a defeated Southern aristocrat, likely as destitute now as the family. Weddel’s state of decay as both Southerner and Indian points to the multiplied Gothicism of a national stage in which all inhabitants, original and conqueror, have fallen into a deteriorated state.[1]

The story’s tropic Gothicism depends not only on race but on the family’s socioeconomic status. Rural mountaineers, they live amidst decay: their cabin—their home and familiar space—is slowly crumbling, “the clay chinking … fallen away in places” (748). The cracks in the wall are large enough to see through, to admit the penetrating gaze of the outsider. Through the cracks the Gothic trope of influence from “outside” is further transmitted through the lens of gender: a daughter, named in the text only as “the girl,” is banished to the kitchen built against the outer wall of the cabin and sees from outside in. In doing so the girl, in such a fallen state as a woman that she lacks even shoes, recognizes not danger but beauty and nobility in the newer outsider Weddel.

The isolated girl identifies with Weddel’s otherness and her resultant love’s potential for marriage offers her an option to overcome her isolation through social means: to align with the nobler sociological decay of Weddel’s aristocracy, thus to possibly effect a Romantic narrative arc toward love’s transcendence over origins. But the relationship between the girl and Weddel is wholly one-sided, and his response to her shuts down any potential for transcendent love. The girl is as much a stranger to Weddel as he to her, but she is ironically uninteresting to him in her strangeness. It is Weddel who “had not caught” the girl’s name, though her father speaks it twice, and Weddel persists in his disinterest when her younger brother Hule comes to him as her advocate. Between Weddel and the girl Faulkner stages an ironic collapse of typical Romantic male/female subject/object relations. The beloved does not even admit the lover’s name to enter his subjectivity, does not even deign to grant objecthood to the lover who as the woman should be, in Romantic fiction, herself loved as an object at least.

Racial subject/object relations are likewise unstable throughout “Victory.” Weddel’s racial identity hangs in limbo for much of the story, and is never completely resolved. Hule worries that his sister is in love with a black man even after Weddel has explained his ancestry. Already uncertain, racial subjectivity is further undermined by comments made by Jubal. The slave himself, though dehumanized as “a large monkey” (746) and caricaturized according to his physical urges, seems to assert some pretence to authority over his master (“I done been fo years trying to take care of you en git you back home,” 752). Moreover Jubal has substantial indirect power over Weddel’s actions. When the slave becomes too drunk to ride away from the hostile family even in the face of mortal threat, the master’s sympathy induces a delay until next morning that seals the dooms of all.

In “Victory” Faulkner not only reworks Romantic/Gothic tropes and ideological subjectivity in the context of universal decay. He also departs entirely from traditional Romantic/Gothic narrative in which the hero passes through ordeal to achieve some form of transcendence. The elder boy Vatch has violent nightmares of victorious battles over the rebel army (Hule explains as reason for Vatch’s hatred of Weddel “he can still here you uns yelling … at night,” 767). Vatch’s inability to let go of past violence signifies the inevitable recurrence of violence, by extension the persistence and permanence of violence as history. Vatch’s hatred toward Weddel as a representative of the violent past causes the destruction of not only the past’s losers, the Southern strangers Jubal and Weddel, but the victors, the Yankee family, themselves.

Though Hule’s request that Weddel take him and his sister to Mississippi is declined, Weddel accepts his offer to lead them down the mountain. Overnight Vatch and his father have staged an ambush in one of three possible locations that Weddel might pass: a laurel copse, the shrubs along a path into the woods, or the house, should Weddel change his mind and return for the girl. In a dizzying sequence in which every screen may hide an enemy, Hule tries to use Jubal as a decoy to save Weddel’s life. In the confusion of bodies and space all three—Weddel, Hule, and Jubal—are shot and killed by the father and Vatch. This moment, Faulkner states early in the story, is from the first meeting of rebel and Yankee “forever irreconcilable and already doomed” (750). Even if Weddel might escape racial hatred, he cannot escape the war attenuated through the hatred of its victor for the vanquished.

The sublime does not exist in this story. The final possible romanticism—the forest scene, starkly described according to places of possible concealment—is not a site of psychological conflict or ideological transcendence but a mere killing ground in which “the war [that] is over” (770) claims three more victims. Taken as a whole, “Victory” describes a state of universal decay in which the individual, that hero of American Romanticism, is as a type disintegrated. Its journey is a wasted effort, its desires however mean (“All I want is to go home,” 768) impossible, its destruction ordained by history. With the individual thematically and textually dead, “Victory” likewise dissolves Romantic/Gothic potential as such, robbing it of agency and telos, enslaving hero and narrative together to forces beyond control.

Faulkner, William. “Mountain Victory.” Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage, 1995. 745-77.

[1] Though it is difficult in “Victory” to verify any individual’s given information, Weddel’s description of his heritage can be assumed as accurate with respect to his author’s corpus. Weddel alludes to the events of Faulkner’s story “Lo!” in which his grandfather Francis Weddel, a Chickasaw chief, sought the President’s judgment on a murder over land rights and received the land on which Weddel’s plantation was built.