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STEPHANIE JENSEN-MOULTON Intellectual Disability in Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. William Shakespeare, Macbeth During the 1920s and 1930s, both John Steinbeck and William Faulkner wrote groundbreaking intellectually disabled characters, but only Stein- beck’s became an operatic tenor. Taking their cue from the socioeconomic upheaval of the Great Depression, both authors contribute to a history of American perceptions of intellectually disabled individuals as unpredict- able and potentially harmful people. Faulkner ’s 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, represents one of the first works of American literature to be presented in part from the point of view of an intellectually disabled character. While Faulkner ’s title alludes directly to Shakespeare’s con- ception of a “tale told by an idiot,” Steinbeck’s Lennie, who does not narrate his own story, is only a few figurative miles down the road from Faulkner ’s Benjy. Although composed decades after the novel, Carlisle Floyd’s 1970 opera Of Mice and Men reinforces the same tropes of dis-
American Music – University of Illinois Press
Published: Feb 22, 2013
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