In this short story titled Hair, Faulkner uses localities and the supporting character to narrate Hawkshaw’s the barber’s tale, who saw his lost love of old in a young girl, called Susan Reed. He waits for the little girl to grow older so he can marry her.
This is a story about a much older man patiently waiting until a little five-year-old reaches marriageable age to claim her for his own. She represents everything of his deceased fiancé Sophie right from her body build, especially her hair. Her hair was neither blonde nor brunette, just like Sophie, the dead fiancé, and it is because of Hawkshaw’s fetish with this little girl’s hair he decides that when the time comes, Susan Reed would be his.
William Faulkner, through excellent narration, creates suspense through the inappropriate feelings and desires of an older man towards an innocent girl. In an otherwise straightforward story, we find here the hidden passion of the barber Hawkshaw for the girl, the sexist lines about women ‘being bad’ right from birth, that Hawkshaw managed to get Susan into his clutches because she was a ‘fallen’ girl, a young painted doll, probably pregnant by him. It is the style one finds in most Southern American stories and novels of that period, which though unnerving for a twenty-first-century reader, is not surprising.
Adapted from Faulkner Archive
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