Sexual Harassment in Professional Training: Faulkner’s Precarious Mentorship and Joan Williams’s The Wintering

Abstract

Naoko Ohri

The close friendship that Joan Williams had with William Faulkner has been regarded as a romance beyond differences. However, this article suspects that it was more like that between offender and victim of sexual harassment. Williams’s experience with Faulkner reveals her intellectual injury and psychosexual victimization, and her reproductions of their personal relationship indicate its sexually exploitative nature. In addition to her novel dedicated to his memory and other related writing, this article explores Faulkner’s correspondence with Williams. Thereby Williams’s account of her interactions with Faulkner is verified and supplemented by his side of the story. This article compares the relationship between Williams and Faulkner with that between the protagonists in her novel who are closely modeled on the two writers. Showing that each case involves the indulgence of professional privilege in a sexual manner, this article argues that the relationship between Williams’s protagonists and that between Williams and Faulkner both constitute sexual harassment.

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