Word: faulknerisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Requiem for a Nun (by William Faulkner) is a journey through the dark night of the soul with a hint of dawn beyond. Its characters do not have the stature for tragedy, yet it is dense with guilt, pity and terror, and it frequently grips the audience in its palm like sinners in the hands of an angry...
...crib. Nancy is a Negro ex-prostitute, but her crime is a mere postscript to the horror-gorged life of her mistress, the dead child's mother, who is enslaved to the devil in the flesh. Mrs. Gowan Stevens was formerly Temple Drake, society-girl heroine of Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, to which Requiem for a Nun is a sequel. While the law has dealt with Nancy, it is the Furies of the past that hound Temple Drake...
...Assistant Professor Lynn seemed lonely, and if his 250 admirers felt rather empty as they shuffled down the Harvard Hall stair, they could take succor in the knowledge they are admirable sacrifices to technology. That only American History-and-Literature seniors and graduate students could learn of Norris and Faulkner, Fitzgerald and West was unimportant--for perhaps they, someday, might venture forth on Assistant Professor Lynn's lonely course, there to edify later generations. It is a good thing the English Department doesn't pay much attention to Henry Adams any more...
...other-directed statistician-turned-sociologist slipped in through the woodwork last night with a message between his two chiseled teeth: Albert Guerard's Politburo of Comp Lit 166 favorites was re-elected almost unanimously. Topping the psychological ten, two years running, was Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Other perennial repeats included Lord Jim, The Power and the Glory, Death in Venice, and The Immoralist. The Devils replaced The Plague, which was dropped from the course...
Requiem for a Nun is no requiem, and its "nun" is a 17th century word for whore. It was adapted by Novelist William Faulkner from his 1951 sequel to his 1930s shocker, Sanctuary. The story is a further look at Temple Drake (Ruth Ford), the Sanctuary college girl who landed in a Memphis brothel-and loved it. In Requiem, Temple has become a guilt-ridden, respectable wife, grappling for salvation. Boston critics agreed that it promised spiritual significance, but found it dramatically static. The Catholic Pilot's George E. Ryan commended it for "daring to grapple with the question...