"Eclipsed by the Mad Moon: The Artistic Ideal in William Faulkner's If I Forget Thee Jerusalem and The Marble Faun"
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Authors
Robert Vaughan
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Journal Article, Academic Journal
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Abstract
Eclipsed by the Mad Moon: The Artistic Ideal in William Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and The Marble Faun<br><br>In a 1954 interview published in The Paris Review, William Faulkner concisely summarized an aesthetic concern that recurs throughout his works: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and to hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” This theme is most frequently shadowed forth in characters consumed by a desire to hold time at bay in order to conform reality to an idealistic or aesthetic vision. These characters, who either struggle to overcome a Platonic reluctance to be sullied by the world of experience or attempt to flee that realm entirely, are almost all men. Two of the clearest exemplars, however, are not: Charlotte Rittenmeyer of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and the title character of Faulkner’s early poetry collection The Marble Faun. Most of the critical attention devoted to Charlotte over the years has focused on her culturally subversive assumption of the aggressor’s role in her ill-fated affair. Her embodiment of the theme of disconnection from experience has received far less attention, however. Though even the most generous critics have deemed The Marble Faun’s verse unsophisticated, a close reading reveals a number of connections to the novel which illuminate Charlotte’s embodiment of the aforementioned theme of “arrested motion,” as well as the fact that her pursuit of an impossible romantic ideal is an inseparable part of her own artistic vision.