I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, all of whom have awarded me fellowships to support the research and writing of my current book project, Faulkner and Love, where material from this essay will appear. I also want to thank friends and colleagues who have read and commented on various versions of this essay: David Bevington, Minrose C. Gwin, Susan McCabe, and especially Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky. A shorter version of this essay will be published in a collection called The Other Romance, edited by Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Donald Pease (forthcoming).

1. Jill Faulkner Summers, interview with the author, February 28, 1993.

2. The precarious state of the Franklins' marriage is recorded in two letters Cornell Franklin's Uncle Malcolm wrote to his nephew just before Cornell brought Estelle back to Shanghai in November 1925 (Cornell Franklin, private collection).

3. My larger argument, which I develop in Faulkner and Love, concerns the centrality of William and Estelle Oldham Faulkner's erotic and intellectual relationship to Faulkner's creativity. Faulkner's biographers and many critics portray Oldham as a stupid, spoiled, hysterical woman: they consider Faulkner's lifelong marriage a tragic mistake. (This narrative has a long genealogy. For choice examples, see, most recently, Karl, Frederick, William Faulkner: American Writer [New York: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1989], 266–69, 355–57, passimGoogle Scholar; and Williamson, Joel, William Faulkner and Southern History [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 239, 241, 250–55, passim.Google Scholar) Biographers also speculate at length on Oldham's mental instability, moral lapses, physical illnesses, alcohol and drug dependence, and her role as millstone around the great author's neck. Perhaps because the facts don't fit this narrative, no one has explained the existence of any of Estelle Oldham's extant fiction — at least six short stories totaling approximately two hundred typescript pages. Nor has anyone explored Faulkner's professional interest in and highly productive use of it, including the interplay of their imaginations that coauthorship and shared readership entail. Scholars have not considered her fiction, their collaboration, and the stories and novels Faulkner made from some of it, as sources of information about either him or the woman with whom the artist had an intense and highly complicated relationship, one that lasted from his childhood to his death in 1962. Yet it was her creativity that William Faulkner engaged in dialogue, delighted in, and profited from.

4. Jill Faulkner Summers, private collection, and Linton Massey Faulkner Collection, University of Virginia Library. I want to thank Jill Summers for exclusive permission to quote from “Star Spangled Banner Stuff” and the other short stories written in all or part by her mother, Estelle Oldham Faulkner.

In late 1924, Faulkner, despite his extensive immersion in Sherwood Anderson's fiction and the prose and poetry of other modernists, had not yet begun to shift from poetic and prose allegory into the forms and voices of modern fiction. His only known stories to date were a 2,500-word comic war piece and an 800-word prose poem or sketch. These were published in the Mississippian during November 1919 and March 1922. I speculate that Faulkner read Oldham's novel and drafts of two stories, “Star Spangled Banner Stuff” and “A Crossing,” in early December 1924, the first time she and her children returned alone to Oxford from Shanghai. The gender confusion and dismantling of iconic figures like the Southern Belle and New Woman in his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, which he began writing within less than two months of Oldham's return, and in Mosquitoes, which he started in the summer of 1925, are, as I argue in my book in progress, more full-blown treatments of issues Oldham explores in “A Crossing” and “Star Spangled Banner Stuff,” her two anticolonial romances. Faulkner would not tackle the racial issues Oldham explores in all of her short stories until much later. Oldham was not an influence in any conventional sense; rather, because of their intense personal relationship, composed of intricate layers of feelings expressed over time and in both spoken and written language, her impact on Faulkner's creativity was unique.

5. Here I am quoting from and paraphrasing John A. McClure's summary of the “reigning romance formulas” used to structure imperial romance. He describes such heroes in “Late Imperial Romance,” Raritan 10 (Spring 1991): 124, 113–14Google Scholar.

6. McClure, John, Late Imperial Romance (London: Verso, 1994), 2Google Scholar.

7. Ibid., 113. This essay is essentially a condensation of the introduction and first chapter of McClure's book. I refer to the essay because its argument is most relevant for my purposes. All further page references to it are cited parenthetically in the text.

8. One might argue that, in part, because Oldham was an alcoholic and a Southern Belle, she was especially attuned to the nuances of acting her own life. As I have shown elsewhere, continual and conscious acting or role-playing was central to William and Estelle Faulkner's relationship. However, in “Star Spangled Banner Stuff,” Estelle's focus is the performativity of race and gender in an American colonial setting. Questions of performance and performativity are also close to the hearts and minds of all of Faulkner's most compelling characters. Think, for example of Quentin Compson, or Temple Drake, Joe Christmas, and Joanna Burden. See my “ ‘Drowsing Maidenhead Symbol's Self’: Faulkner and the Fictions of Love,” in Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction, ed. Fowler, Doreen and Abadie, Ann J. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 124–47Google Scholar; and “Who Wears the Mask? Pierrot, Pantaloon, and the Poetics of Marginality in Go Down, Moses,” in New Essays on Go Down, Moses, ed. Wagner-Martin, Linda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I use performativity here as Judith Butler does to describe the performative aspects of gender and race, their imitative structures, and the ways in which the narrative of compulsory heterosexuality attempts to regulate both race and gender identity/performance. She argues that these identities are assembled through the stylized repetition of actions that are themselves culturally constructed (Gender Trouble, 140). “Trouble” occurs when the performative nature of gender and race are revealed. See Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar; and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar.

9. Cornell Franklin was an ambitious young man from Columbus, Mississippi. He had a stellar genealogy but no money. Thus, in 1914, after working his way through law school at the University of Mississippi, he forsook the dim prospects offered for advancement in his native state and migrated to the colonies. When he arrived in Honolulu in 1914, he became part of the second major wave of U.S. economic and military expansion into the Pacific and Far East. He made his first trip home in April 1918 for the usual purpose — to marry and bring a white wife back to the territories.

10. For a reading of those master narratives as they appear first in Faulkner's apprenticeship poetry and later in his greatest novels, see Sensibar, Judith L., The Origins of Faulkner's Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

11. The stories are “Selvage,” “Idyll in the Desert,” and “A Letter to Grand-mamma.” Joseph Blotner refers briefly to Oldham's original authorship of the stories Faulkner revised and published or tried to publish as his own. He doesn't mention the three extant stories that Faulkner did not rewrite. See Blotner, Joseph, Faulkner: A Biography, Two Volume Edition (New York: Random House, 1974), 604, 643, 646Google Scholar. The letter to Faulkner from Scribner's states unequivocally, “the story ‘Salvage’ [sic] done by you and E. Oldham” (Alfred Dashiell to William Faulkner, February 23 1929, Princeton University Library). Faulkner had mailed the manuscript to Dashiell in December, 1928 (William Faulkner to Alfred Dashiell, n.d., Princeton University Library). It seems unlikely that Faulkner would have been cavalier about coauthorship. Estelle's version of “Selvage” is, appar ently, lost and there is no extant coauthored version, or at least no version that acknowledges Faulkner and Oldham as coauthors. Joseph Blotner indicates that he saw Estelle's version of “Selvage” but his account doesn't clarify matters. Drawing on his 1968 interview with her, he writes that “Estelle had thought of an idea for a story and written it up only to find it thin and unsatisfactory. When she showed it to Bill he suggested that they rewrite it together. She decided she didn't want to, but she'd be happy for him to try it if he liked. In the six manuscript pages that he composed, the plot line remained much the same, but the texture thickened and darkened” (Blotner, , Faulkner: A Biography, [1974], 604Google Scholar). The availabel typescripts and holographs of both “Selvage” and of “Elly,” the title of the version Faulkner, finally published, are reproduced in William Faulkner Manuscripts II, Dr. Martino and Other Stories: Holograph Manuscripts and Typescripts (New York: Garland, 1987)Google Scholar.

12. Sensibar, “‘Drowsing Maidenhead.’”

13. Faulkner, Estelle Oldham to Saxe Commins, November 5, 1956, in Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection, Vol. 2: The Letters, ed. Brodsky, Louis Daniel and Hamblin, Robert W. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), 199Google Scholar.

14. Dating from the 19th century and including the years in which Estelle Oldham lived with her first husband in Shanghai, two major areas of China's richest port were inhabited and governed by foreigners. These were the French and International Settlements. Marie-Claire Bergère points out that “the importance of the foreign settlements was due to their international status as defined by the nineteenth-century treaties and by diplomatic procedure applied thereafter. In Shanghai (as in all other treaty ports) foreign residents had extraterritorial rights and were answerable only to their respective consulates.” Their merchandise was exempt from Chinese taxes or any other Chinese controls, and foreigners ran all local administration, i.e., police, law courts, garbage, public health. In effect, the foreign settlements operated as “a state within a state” and American and British “gun-boats were anchored in the Whangpoo and Yangtze (rivers), reminders of the political and military powers of the countries who kept world order.” See Bergère, Marie-Claire, “‘The Other China’: Shanghai from 1919 to 1949,” in Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis, ed. Howe, Christopher (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 6–7Google Scholar. See also Allman, Norwood F., Shanghai Lawyer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1943)Google Scholar; and Clifford, Nicholas R., Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and in the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1991)Google Scholar.

15. Both Standard Oil and Liggett-Meyers, a major tobacco company, became clients of Estelle's first husband, Cornell Franklin (Cornell S. Franklin, Jr., interview, April 5, 1990).

16. “Star Spangled Banner Stuff,” 36, 52. Following Jenny Sharpe, I use Eve Sedgwick's term homosocial “to designate a desire between men that passes through women as exchange objects. Since it works in the interest of male bonding and enforced heterosexuality, homosocial relations are generally accompanied by a fear or denial of homosexuality.” See Sharpe, Jenny, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 186 n. 31Google Scholar.

17. Describing the social and cultural life of post—World War I Shanghai, Clifford notes that “The Astor House on Whangpoo Road, with its palm garden and its French chef, was the largest and best place to stay, until the new Majestic opened in 1924 on Bubbling Well Road” (Clifford, , Spoilt Children of Empire, 62Google Scholar).

18. Norwood F. Allman, one of the few Chinese-speaking American lawyers practicing in Shanghai in the 1920s and, with Franklin, a member of the American Troop polo team, describes the role clubs played for foreign businessman: “In no other place in the world was a man's club more important to him than in Shanghai. The American Club, [a] five-story male sanctuary with luxurious fittings and some fifty rooms for members, was the center of social life for Americans” (Allman, , Shanghai Lawyer, 156Google Scholar).

19. This composite includes Oldham's husband and his officious uncle, Malcolm Franklin. Franklin was Collector of the Port in Honolulu when Oldham arrived in 1918. He spent weeks at a time as the Franklins' house guest during Oldham's first year in Hawaii, giving her opportunity to observe the alcoholic behavior ascribed here to Fairman.

20. Oldham would have known him personally and had ample time to observe him as he was also the law partner of Cornell's good friend, Major C. P. Holcomb. Holcomb represented Oldham in the divorce proceedings her husband instituted in Shanghai (C. P. Holcomb to Estelle Oldham Faulkner March and August 1928, private collection). Holcomb and his law partners were among the “handful of Americans … who had reached the highest levels of what was otherwise a very British Shanghai establishment” (Clifford, , Spoilt Children of Empire, 22Google Scholar).

21. Clifford, , Spoilt Children of Empire, 22Google Scholar; see also pp. 35, 36, 262.

22. Chinese were not admitted to either the British or the American Club. The American Club began admitting Chinese in 1929 (ibid., 36, 71).

23. Ibid., 71.

24. Chang's degrees are similar to those of other Western-educated Chinese businessmen whose names appear in the “Men and Events” columns of the China Weekly Review. For example, a Doctor H. L. Huang, the assistant manager of the China Banking Corporation, was Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton, where he received his A.M., Ph.D., and Litt.B. degrees (February 11, 1922, 482).

25. From a review of The Yellow Corsair by Bennett, James W. in a review essay, “A Sheaf of Fall Fiction Based on Various Themes of China and Chinese Life,” The Honolulu Star Bulletin, 11 5, 1927, 12Google Scholar. Reviews like these appeared periodically in Shanghai and Honolulu throughout the years in which Oldham lived in these cities. McClure outlines three other formulas for popular imperial romance: “the romance of a life of adventure on the imperial front lines, the romance of heroic sacrifice in the name of civilization,” and “the familiar liberal humanist story of the heroic individual who stands alone against the mob and preserves civilization from its own pathologies” (McClure, 124). Oldham's story “A Crossing” exposes the first and “Star Spangled Banner Stuff” mocks the third.

26. Oldham pursues the potential tragic implications of this theme in her later story “Selvage,” in which she explores the erotic lives of homegrown colonized subjects.

27. In their discussion of new kinds of closure attempted by female modernists, Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs note that “closure in the traditional novel usually means that the heroine gets married, goes mad, or dies,” but that Dorothy Richardson's protagonist Miriam Henderson in Pilgrimage “merely goes on” (Friedman, Ellen G. and Fuchs, Miriam, eds., Breaking the Sequence: Women's Experimental Fiction [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989], 12Google Scholar).

28. When Montjoy's more honorable sidekick wants to apologize to Chang, the “white-faced” Montjoy says, “You can't go back, now,” repeating to himself, “that innocent girl” (59; see also 61).

29. Oldham draws here on a popular metaphor of the period. In fact, there was even a Hollywood movie called The Thoroughbred, which was about the many trials and ultimate success of a “good” woman. The term's general usage make its implications, particularly in a narrative of threatened miscegenation, especially repellent.

30. For a detailed discussion of the place of fictions of interracial rape in colonial discourse in India, see Jenny Sharpe's Allegories of Empire. I have applied some of her insights to my reading of Estelle Oldham's story.

31. Restuccia, Frances, “‘A Cave of My Own’: E. M. Forster and Sexual Politics” (Raritan 9 [Fall 1989]: 111, 112)Google Scholar. In this essay, Restuccia argues that misogyny is given free rein through this trope in Passage to India. John McClure makes a related but slightly different observation about Conrad, 's “notoriously unstable representation of the Congolese” in Heart of DarknessGoogle Scholar. In contrast, Oldham's representations of the Chinese are remarkably stable. In fact, she is careful to show that it is the American businessman, Montjoy, whose representations of the Chinese veer wildly between a sympathetic portrayal and what McClure calls “the luridly demonic Other” (McClure, 123). From Oldham's narrative perspective, it is the colonizers, and their products and technologies, especially alcohol, that are demonized.

32. Quoted in Pal, John, Shanghai Saga (London: Jarrolds, 1963), 87Google Scholar. No citation given for the report.

33. Estelle Oldham Faulkner to Lemuel and Lida Oldham, Oxford, Miss., June 20, 1929, private collection.