Faulkner seems much less interested in his female characters in Go Down, Moses. We don't even learn the name of the wife of the main character in the novel, and we never really hear what the women are thinking. No streaming of their consciousness. Many of the female characters could be seen as stereotypes: Molly, the mammy who raised Roth; the loving and hard-working Mannie; the scheming Sophonsiba who just wants a man to marry; and the manipulative whatshername who tries to seduce Isaac into sacrificing his principles.
Questions About Women and Femininity
- What kind of roles do the female characters in Go Down, Moses play in terms of the relationship between African Americans and whites?
- How is Molly's character different than the rest of the female characters in the book?
- How is the character of Roth's unnamed lover different than the other female characters in the book?
- The narrator never spends any time "inside" any of the female characters' heads. What kind of an impact does this have on the reader's understanding of the female characters?
Chew on This
The black female characters in this book might seem secondary, but they're the strength that holds their families together.
Go Down, Moses ends with a white male character's imagination of what an African American female character might be thinking. Mollie is a stand-in for Caroline Barr, Faulkner's nanny, to whom Faulkner dedicated the book. Faulkner's trying to show that he has tried his best to understand slavery's legacy from Caroline Barr's perspective, but the resulting book is still only a product of his imagination and he can't pretend otherwise.
(Not-so-fun fact: Faulkner wrote a loving eulogy to Caroline Barr, part of which is the book's dedication. He held the main part of the funeral in his very own parlor. Devoted, right? Well, her family didn't think so. They thought he usurped the whole event. They thought that the respectful thing to do would have been to have the entire funeral in the family's own church. And he bought the headstone for her grave. Generous, right? Don't answer until you see this. Art imitating life and all that.)