Of course, such laughter also alerts her friends to the fact that she may well be unstable and, therefore, unreliable. Her outburst in the movie theatre may ostensibly seem like heartlessness, but again, it’s more likely a nervous breakdown brought on by her conscience attempting to reassert itself: she, too, is aware that her rumours have led (or will shortly lead) to the lynching of an innocent man, and the inner turmoil prompted by her actions break out in the form of uncontrollable laughter. Did she concoct the story about Will Mayes to suggest that men did still notice her, albeit in the most appalling manner imaginable?

Faulkner tells us that when she had once had the attention of men’s admiring eyes, those eyes follow her no more. Minnie Cooper, meanwhile, cuts a tragic and pathetic figure: a woman who had been popular and admired in her youth, but now, as she approaches forty years of age, a woman who has been left behind when all of her friends got married and had children. On another level, though, it may point to McLendon’s self-loathing at having given in to such a base impulse: he knows that what they did was wrong and they have murdered an innocent man, and his profuse sweating and desire to strip off his clothes may be caused by more than the hot, ‘dry September’ of the story’s title. That was merely an excuse for violence towards a black man. How are we to analyse this behaviour? On one level, Faulkner is clearly revealing McLendon’s hypocrisy: for him, and for Butch as well, the hounding of Mayes was never about justice or standing up for a woman. When McLendon arrives home, having supposedly just defended the honour of a white woman (at least in his mind), he is happy to strike his own wife for merely waiting up for him.

Early on in the story, one of the men in the barbershop cites the ‘durn weather’ – it is an unseasonably dry September, as Faulkner’s title reminds us – as a factor in making men do ‘anything’, whether assaulting a woman or murdering another man. They cannot even take full responsibility for their own behaviour and own what they have done. Furthermore, they reveal themselves to be both irresponsible and hypocritical.

Sparknotes pride and prejudice