SOURCE: Mortimer, Gail L. “The Ironies of Transcendent Love in Faulkner's The Wild Palms.” Faulkner Journal 1, no. 2 (spring 1986): 30-42.

In the following essay, Mortimer contends that Faulkner's narrative strategy in The Wild Palms causes the story to lose credibility as a love story.

William Faulkner did not often write a fully developed love story. Fictionally, at least, the subject is not one he was comfortable with, nor was it particularly compatible with his more characteristic thematic concern with the vicissitudes of the South's decline. The Wild Palms, however, focuses on the love affair of two people, Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Harry Wilbourne, and their attempts to save their love from the pressures of convention and the mundane. In many ways the story resembles Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: both novels concern runaway lovers trying to flee “a world antagonistic to love”;¹ both women die as a result of...