Blackwell Reference Online

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A book is the writer's secret life, the dark twin of a man: you can't reconcile them.William Faulkner, MosquitoesWhile Joseph Blotner has laid out connections between the characters in Mosquitoes (1927) and their probable real-life counterparts (1984: 183–5), the novel is more than a roman à clef of the New Orleans literati. Long derided as one of William Faulkner's weaker efforts, his second novel has undergone a decided resurgence of critical interest since the 1990s, thanks largely to the work of feminist scholars who have shown how significant this novel's engagement with matters of gender and sexuality is to Faulkner's subsequent development as an artist. For Frann Michel (1988–9), Faulkner is a lesbian author, who, terrified of cultural emasculation, ultimately uses lesbian sexuality to avoid representing male–male desire; for Minrose Gwin (1996), Michel misses instances of homoerotic possibility between male characters; for Lisa Rado (1993–4), Gwin and Michel overlook the fundamental androgyny of Faulkner's artistic imagination. And Meryl Altman argues for the unhinging of “ ‘homosexuality’ or ‘lesbianism’ from ‘effeminacy,’ ‘inversion,’ even ‘gender dysphoria,’ in order to observe the conjunctions and disjunctions that occur historically between the two sets of ideas” (1993–4: 51). Mosquitoes, we now know, openly portrays sexual multiplicity and dissonances in a fashion ... log in or subscribe to read full text