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Articles

Volume 16, Number 2 (1991)

Wind in August: Les Fous de Bassan's Reply to Faulkner

  • Gregory Reid
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1991-06-06

Abstract

Anne Hébert's Les Fous de Bassan, like William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, is a story of rape and the murder of female victims. Although Hébert's novel mirrors much of Faulkner's style, themes, symbolism, and even characters and narrators, it also underscores the masculine bias of the Faulkner canon. Hébert and Faulkner's work share a regional flavour, a focus on dying communities, and a thematic interweaving of loss of history and tradition with the resulting decline of spiritual values and morality; however, Hébert's novel presents female as subject rather than object. Hébert's Les Fous de Bassan and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August revolve around conflicts between men and women that externalize internal conflicts in men which lead to the violent victimization of women, but Hébert allows a female perspective to emerge which debases and satirizes the masculine bias of Faulkner's version and vision of these conflicts.