Anthony Trujillo
William Faulkner’s novel, The Hamlet, is the tragic tale of a world filled with melancholy, self-destruction, and man’s ability to endure. Faulkner’s characters fall victim to the harsh, cruel earth and the gloomy reality of poor Southern culture. These characters are directly influenced by Faulkner’s opinions and feelings about the South at the time. Faulkner was well known for his strong beliefs in the noble characteristics of man. The New Age Encyclopedia describes him as “preoccupied with man’s compassion, courage, capacity for endurance, and ability to transcend his physical limitations.” This preoccupation is evident in the way Faulkner shows how man can prevail and also how his faults can hinder his ability to succeed. The ability to either balance these qualities or succumb to them shows that in all humans there is that which is either good or that which is evil.
His characters’ traits represent Faulkner’s love/hate relationship with the South. Malcolm Cowley writes in the introduction,“Faulkner’s novels of contemporary Southern life continue the legend into a period that he regards as one of moral confusion and social decay.”2 Faulkner leaves the reader to judge his characters’ outlooks and values. When doing so, the reader can see the varying levels of morality within each of the characters.
In The Hamlet, Flem Snopes tears at the fabric of the small town’s social structure. Throughout the novel, Flem Snopes takes hold of the very town itself. Soon the village is overrun with Flem’s kin. There is Mink Snopes, the ruthless murderer; Lump Snopes, the greedy clerk; Isaac Snopes, the idiot; and Eck Snopes, the closest character in the family with a sense of morality. Although it seems there is a bond between the Snopes, it soon becomes clear that Flem holds no moral distinction between his own family and the residents of the town. Doreen Fowler writes, “Utterly dissociated from humanity, Flem perpetrates cruel exploitations, unopposed by the townspeople. The triumph of evil in The Hamlet can be traced ultimately to this refusal of human beings to realize their relatedness.” Flem’s status is purely driven by his single-minded lust for power; and as Hyatt Waggoner writes, “He parodies the American dream, caricatures the American success myth. He has ambition, go-ahead, gumption, a head for figures: every thing deemed necessary for success in the Ben Franklin-Dale Carnegie popular philosophy.”
In the chapter titled “The Peasants,” Flem Snopes returns from Texas with wild horses after abandoning his brother during his trial for murder. Flem Snopes then auctions the wild horses. Faulkner describes the horses “wild as deer, deadly as rattlesnakes, quiet as doves.”5 It is at this auction that the reader sees Flem’s relentless pursuit of the little money the town has. Flem is ruthless in his dealings with Mrs. Armstid when he takes her last five dollars that were intended for her children.
The townspeople, themselves, are William Faulkner’s effort to show the reader man’s ability to endure as the townsfolk deal with the Snopes’ increasing power and cruelty. For example, Mrs. Armstid is the wife of Henry Armstid who is swindled by Flem into buying one of the wild horses. Henry Armstid then attempts to wrangle one of the wild beasts from the lot where they are being sold. When Henry realizes that no one will help him, he orders Mrs. Armstid into the batch of scary beasts only for her to risk being killed for the sake of her husband. When Henry beats her, Mrs. Armstid does not even protect herself from the blows dealt from her husband’s rope. Both verbally and physically, Henry abuses Mrs. Armstid while the men of the town watch in silence. This is a prime example of the pain and suffering the townspeople endure despite their ability to put an end to the reign of Snopes.
In an interview with Jean Stein, William Faulkner replied to a question about a writer’s economic freedom, in which Faulkner said, “People are afraid to find just how much hardship and poverty they can stand.”6 This is true with Mrs. Armstid and Henry Armstid. This very idea of human suffering and the ability to cope with mistreatment is shown through the character of Mrs. Armstid. Henry Armstid is a man who has suffered a great deal. His family is very poor. As the novel progresses, the reader watches as Armstid turns into a madman. When Ratliff, Bookwright, and Henry partner up to look for gold at the old mansion, we see the men as they slowly lose their wits, each coming closer and closer to madness. While digging in the garden for several days, Ratliff turns to look at the two men around him. Upon looking at Henry Armstid, Faulkner writes that:
Twenty feet beyond, he could now see Armstid waist-deep in the ground as if he had been cut in two at the hips, the dead torso, not even knowing it was dead, laboring on in measured stoop and recover like a metronome as Armstid dug himself back into that earth which had produced him to be its born and fated thrall forever until he died.
(The Hamlet 399)
In the same interview with Jean Stein, Faulkner was asked about the submissiveness many of his characters have toward their fates. Faulkner replied, “I would say that some of them do and some of them don’t.” One of Faulkner’s characters who “doesn’t” is V. K. Ratliff. Ratliff is one of the few characters in The Hamlet who has a heart. Faulkner gives Ratliff compassion, a sense of logic, and a work ethic. This allows the character to flow steadily through the book, alternately narrating from his buckboard.
Ratliff first appears as a friend of the Varners who spends the majority of his time selling sewing machines from the back of his buckboard. In his spare time, he tries to keep up with the epidemic Snopes’ family migration into town. Ratliff is the moral center of the book. One example of this is Ratliff’s feelings toward Isaac Snopes and his love for a cow. When Ike’s relative sells admission to the townsmen who enjoy watching the idiot’s various copulations with the cow, Ratliff goes to the scene where he sees:
a half-brick on the ground beside the wall. With it he drove the nails back while they watched him, the brick splitting and shaling, crumbling away onto his hands in fine dust—a dry, arid, pallid dust of the color of shabby sin and shame, not splendid, not magnificent like blood, and fatal. “That’s all, he said. “It’s over.” (The Hamlet 217)
Ratliff’s action in the barn is in response to his disgust at the idea of the men in town actually finding the sight of Isaac Snopes copulating with livestock amusing. As the men silently regard the misfortunes of another human, the reader cannot help but see the similarity between this spectacle and the scene in book 4, “The Peasants,” chapter 1 (later turned into the famous novella, “Spotted Horses”), when the men looked on as Armstid beat his wife.
Faulkner’s characters are driven by demons that Faulkner may himself have been driven by. This might be the reason why he is considered by many critics to be one of the best writers of the twentieth century. Faulkner’s The Hamlet is a story of men driven by demons. They are demons of greed and power, such as the demons Flem deals with in hell in the “Eula” chapter of the novel. And they are demons of the heart, such as Labove’s feelings toward Eula. When asked “How do you feel about yourself as a writer?” Faulkner responded by saying, “If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did.” The faults of man, an imperfect being, are a major topic in The Hamlet. But despite these demons, man still survives.
Works Cited
Cowley, Malcom, Introduction. The Portable Faulkner. New York: Viking Press,1942.
Faulkner, William. The Hamlet. New York: Vintage, 1991.
“Mississippi.” In A Modern Southern Reader. Edited by Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway (Atlanta, GA: Peachtree Publishing, 1986), 481–499.
The Portable Faulkner. Edited by Malcolm Cowley. New York: Viking Press, 1942.
Fowler, Doreen. Faulkner’s Changing Vision from Outrage to Affirmation. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983.
Inge, Thomas, ed. Conversations with William Faulkner. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Kerr, Elizabeth M. William Faulkner’s Yoknapathawpha: A Kind of Keystone in the Universe. New York: Fordham University Press, 1985.
“Faulkner, William.” In New Age Encyclopedia. 1978.
Stein, Jean. “Interviews: William Faulkner.” In A Modern Southern Reader. Edited by Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishing, 1986), 661–674.