Chapter 6 - From Ivory to Foolscap: Writing and Intimacy

Summary

The final chapter considers the intimacy Faulkner creates between Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes Kohl in his late novels The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). While Gavin and Linda eventually profess their love for one another, they never consummate the relationship sexually, and critics have often described their connection as platonic. In The Town, Gavin tries to teach Linda poetry, but her boyfriend Matt destroys one of the books Gavin gives her such that the book loses its weave of text and thing, becoming more the latter. In The Mansion, set years later, Linda has lost her hearing while fighting for the loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. When she returns to Jefferson, she and Gavin communicate with the writing devices of an ivory tablet with a gold stylus and pads of foolscap paper. Faulkner presents Linda’s husband, who died in the war, as a virile sculptor, and her relationship with Gavin becomes for Faulkner a meditation on the extent to which writing can substitute for more traditionally understood forms of physical intimacy. Finally, in a conclusion to this study as a whole, Boon Hogganbeck in The Reivers (1962) finds an intimate link between bodies and the telephone.