SOURCE: Monroe, Barbara. “Reading Faulknerian Comedy: Humor and Honor in The Hamlet.” Southern Quarterly 26, no. 4 (summer 1988): 33-56.

In the following essay, Monroe contends that the characters in The Hamlet employ humor as a way to ward off modern capitalism and maintain their honor.

Many studies have shown that Faulkner's comic achievement owes much to nineteenth-century frontier humor.¹ In stressing the historical influences, however, scholars have often overlooked the social and political functions of Faulkner's humor within its cultural context, the New South of the early twentieth century.² Both regional-specific and gender-marked, Faulknerian humor is honor-bound, for it both serves and services a residual honor-shame culture. In The Hamlet, we see a prelegalistic, agrarian community in initial conflict with modern legality and the capitalist ethic of individual acquisitiveness. The characters deploy humor as a kind of rearguard action to contain creeping Snopesism and to maintain their honor. The Snopeses...