Fickle Faulknerian Maternity: Considering William Faulkner’s Mothers In Conjunction With Corrective Black Maternal Voices

The aim of this project is to conduct a rhetorical literary analysis of the representations of maternal women within the works of William Faulkner, positioned in comparison with maternal care as understood by twentieth-century southern lay midwives and the contemporary African American reproductive justice movement. Crucial to this analysis is the navigation of space by maternal figures, as informed by Bell Hooks' essay, "Homeplace: A Site of Resistance" (1990) and societal expectations for maternal women across racial lines by dominant ideals of the US South. Revealing in the navigation of maternal space are the societal parameters defined for women, both Black and white, living in both the antebellum and post-Civil War US South. The culminating mission of this project is to track the rhetorical legacy of the oppression of marginalized women's reproductive rights within an example of canonized Jim Crow era literature, in order to reveal cultural trends that have led to contemporary attacks on reproductive justice.