SOURCE: Duvall, John N. “Androgyny in The Wild Palms: Variations on Light in August.” In Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities, pp. 37-56. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Duvall examines constructions of gender in The Wild Palms and Light in August.

“What?” the plump convict said. “Hemophilic? You know what that means? … That's a calf that's a bull and a cow at the same time.”

—William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

When François Pitavy claims that Light in August begins “a search for a new form—a contrapuntal structure—which reaches an extreme development … in The Wild Palms,” he makes a promising move to connect Faulkner's seventh and eleventh novels (7-8). But this link may be elaborated. The Wild Palms, in fact, repeats not only the narrative structure of Light in August but also the earlier novel's delineation of the structures of...