As a white man, Faulkner had, as he acknowledged, limited access to the suffering of an old black female servant. But he gives us her tears. As she listens to the Rev. Shegog’s sermon, claiming the power of the blood of the Lamb, what she has suffered emerges in the safe space of a worshiping community where she can lay her burden down. As readers, we become aware that we are almost intruders upon the intimacies of her pain, which, though public, is as utterly personal as the wracked and worn body that sags beneath the purple Easter dress in which she appears, iconic and, Faulkner would say, indomitable. Dilsey’s weeping “signifies,” in the antique sense of bringing forth meaning in the story she inhabits. For her to suffer is to act, and her suffering is the only redemptive action in this whole bleak tale of spiritual squalor.
Wednesday, 30 March 2022
To suffer is to act
Referring to the character Dilsey in William Faulkner's novel, The Sound and the Fury, Marilyn McEntyre comments:
