William Faulkner

## Biography

Faulkner grasped hold of the almost moribund tradition of American Southern fiction and brought to it the energy and resources of experimental Modernism, to the point where some of his finest fictional explorations of form and consciousness fully compare with those of Joyce, Proust or Virginia Woolf.

What made Faulkner's historical and social vision so different from that of his contemporaries was the distinctive, defeated nature of Southern history, its great chivalric and rural traditions broken apart by the American Civil War that already lay sixty years in the past but was everywhere in Southern consciousness when Faulkner began to write of it.

Faulkner always remained essentially a Southern writer. Born to an old southern family in 1897, he was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he lived most of his life, apart from frequent visits to Hollywood to earn money by screenwriting.

Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel".

* 1918 - joins the Royal Air Force
* 1919 - enrolled at university
* 1932 - worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood
* 1962 - dies of a heartattack at 64

## Historical & Cultural Context

### Civil War and Reconstruction

Since the nation’s early days, the northern and southern parts of the United States had followed different ways of life. Each section wanted to extend its own way of life to the new territories and states in the West. Tensions between northern and southern states over the issues of states’ rights and slavery continued to grow and led to a four-year-long civil war.

From 1865 to 1877, Union troops occupied the South and enforced the constitutional protections. This period is called Reconstruction. After federal troops left the South, white Southerners passed laws that limited African Americans’ rights and made it difficult for them to vote. Such laws also encouraged segregation, or separation, of blacks and whites in the South. African Americans continued to face discrimination in the North as well.

### World Wars

* World War I

By the late 1920s, European nations were rebuilding war-torn economies. They were aided by loans from the more prosperous United States. Only the United States and Japan came out of the war in better financial shape than before. In the United States, Americans seemed confident that the country would continue on the road to even greater economic prosperity. One sign of this was the booming stock market. Yet the American economy had serious weaknesses that were soon to bring about the most severe economic downturn the world had yet known.

* World War II

### Southern Gothic

Faulkner's novels of the 1930s show a Southern world of hate, perversion, lust, and obsession. This kind of fiction came to be known as "Southern Gothic". Its typical exploration of evil in historical, regional, and moral dimensions has occupied a number of Southern novelists, notably Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor.

Southern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day. Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations. During the 20th century, Charles Crow has noted, the South became “the principal region of American Gothic” in literature. The Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. Southern Gothic texts also mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history. Because of its dark and controversial subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) became the first Southern Gothic writer to fully explore the genre’s potential. Many of his best-known poems and short stories, while not placed in a recognizable southern setting, display all the elements that would come to characterize Southern Gothic.

While Poe is a foundational figure in Southern Gothic, William Faulkner (1897–1962) arguably looms the largest. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County was home to the bitter Civil War defeat and the following social, racial, and economic ruptures in the lives of its people. These transformations, and the resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic. On top of this, Faulkner’s complex, modernist, labyrinthine language creates in readers a similarly Gothic sense of uncertainty and alienation. The generation of southern writers after Faulkner continued the exploration of the clashes between Old and New South.

## Bibliography

The best of Faulkner’s novels include *The Sound and the Fury* (1929) and *As I Lay Dying* (1930), two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under the stress of losing a family member; *Light in August* (1932), about complex and violent relations between a white woman and a black man; and *Absalom, Absalom!* (1936), perhaps his finest, about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through racial prejudice and a failure to love. Most of these novels use different characters to tell parts of the story and demonstrate how meaning resides in the manner of telling, as much as in the subject at hand.

He also created three novels focusing on the rise of a degenerate family, the Snopes clan: *The Hamlet* (1940), *The Town* (1957), and *The Mansion* (1959).

* *The Sound and the Fury* (1929)
* *As I Lay Dying* (1930)
* *Light in August* (1932)
* *Absalom, Absalom!* (1936)
* *The Wild Palms* (1939)
* *Go Down, Moses* (1942)
* *The Reivers* (1962)

### Literary Style

Faulkner created an entire imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections extending back for generations. Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, “Jefferson,” is closely modeled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its surroundings. Faulkner re-creates the history of the land and the various races — Indian, African-American, Euro-American, and various mixtures — who have lived on it.

An innovative writer, Faulkner experimented brilliantly with narrative chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated subordinate parts.

Faulkner’s themes are southern tradition, family, community, the land, history and the past, race, and the passions of ambition and love.

In almost all of Faulkner's stories, time is treated in a special way. He uses the "continuous present" style of writing. Past, present and future events are mixed. Everything, including events from a century before, seems to happen at the saem time. Everything is part of the "now" of the novel. Because of these techniques it is usually hard work to read a Faulkner novel.

Faulkner's descriptions of human goodness are as powerful as his descriptions of human evil. Often (but not always) his "good" people are black. Black or white, these people show their goodness in their relationship with nature and their ability to love.

William Faulkner's short fiction is inspired by such motifs as the decay of the South and race relations. Faulkner wrote several stories combining a process of recognition with a realistic plot and symbolic events. One such story is "The Bear" (published in *Go Down, Moses*, 1942), in which Faulkner uses stream-of-consciousness techniques, thus achieving a fiction that is much more complex than Hemingway's. Told from the viewpoint of the rich landowner Isaac McCaslin, "The Bear" tells of the killing of Old Ben, a bear symbolizing the freedom of nature and the wilderness, and of the death of Sam Fathers, a half-blood.

Like his novels, Faulkner's stories are set in Yoknapatawpha, an imaginary Southern county he peopled with eccentric characters driven and motivated by myth, past crimes, and vengeance. The stories often refer to each other and, together, establish a convincing if partly grotesque picture of the South as Faulkner saw it.

It was what he made of that engrained history and the angles he took upon it that made him a great writer. The impact of that terrible defeat that had wasted the South and fulfilled the curse that lay upon it, leaving it to the disorders of Reconstruction and the growing predations of industrialization and mercantilism, was one main source of his writing. But another was the impact of Romantic, Decadent and modern literature.

Yoknapatawpha County became a populuous, rich, almost real literary landscape in which universal themes could work themselves out. Around its county seat, Jefferson, lies a distinctive world of dispossessed aristocrats, of carpetbaggers and entrepreneurs, sharecroppers and former slave owners, of woods, bear hunts and pine-winey afternoons, of a long history of settlement back to Indian days when the white man's curse was first brought to the irgin land, of lasting guilts and the defeat of 1865.

The various fates of Southern aristocrats and poor whites, blacks and Indians, work themselves out in an apocalyptic landscape. Rape and corruption, miscegenation and human taint enact their historical cycles, making Faulkner frequently a novelist of gothic extremity and violence.

## A Rose for Emily (1930)

* **Setting**: Between 1861-1933, Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
* **Narrator**: First person, plural, "omniscient" ("The Town" functions as a character who narrates the events)
* **Plot**: Non-linear - it demands an active role on the reader
* **Characters**:
	+ Miss Emily: Aristocrat, white lady who lives by herself in her mansion. She doesn't leave her house.
	+ Emily's father: He was very impportant for the town until his death.
	+ Tobe: a black servant and Emily's main caretaker.
	+ Homer Baron: Suspected to have been Emily's suitor. HE seemed to have disappeared at some point since he was never seen again.
	+ Colonel Sartoris: Influenced the town's government to exent Emily and her father from taxes on account of an alleged debt.

### Summary

Five-part story narrated by the townspeople of Jefferson, in the first-person plural perspective (we). The first section opens with a description of the Grierson house in Jefferson. The narrator mentions that over the years, Miss Emily Grierson's home has fallen into disrepair and become "an eyesore among eyesores" (par. 2). The first sentence of the story sets the tone of how the citizens of Jefferson felt about Emily:

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant, a combined gardener and cook, had seen in at least ten years. (par. 1)

The narrative jumps back in time when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor, tells Miss Emily she will not have to pay taxes, then jumps forward again 30 years when the new generation of government leaders send her a tax bill. Miss Emily ignores it and they don't know what to do as Colonel Sartoris has been dead for years.

The narrative goes back in time again, when Miss Emily's father dies. However, she refuses to admit it for the following three days. Then she recluses herself in the house for six months. Later, Homer Barron, a young and funny Tankee, arrives in town to oversee the construction of Jefferson's new sidewalks. He and Miss Emily become "friends" but "the town" is against their relationship.

The narrative moves forward a year to when Miss Emily purchases arsenic from the drug store. Everyone is convinced she is going to kill herself because of Homer's insistence he's not a marrying man, even after a year of courtship.

After a while, Homer vanished. Miss Emily disappears too, emerging some time later with graying hair and a significant gain in weight. As the years pass, Miss Emily is seen less and less and her hair becomes grayer and grayer. The only sign of life about the house is Tobe, her aging black servant, who does the household shopping.

Finally, when Emily dies, the narrator's reminiscing brings the story back to the present. A few days after Miss Emily's funeral, the townspeople break open the door to an upstairs bedroom in the old Grierson home. The interior is decorated like a bridal suite but has the atmosphere of a long-ignored tomb. On the bed is the decomposed body of Homer Barron. Next to him, on an empy pillow, is a single strand of long, gray hair.

### Analysis

* **Symbols**:
	+ The house: respresents the arrested development, the decay of the town. Also, the traditional, old moral values of the South in conrast with the progress and changes of the post-bellum period (the new generations in the story).
	+ The rose: The rose in the title is allegorical. Faulkner had an experience with a woman who had suffered a tragedy. He pitied her andhanded her a rose. The town pities Emily for her situation (not being able to find love and living in decay and isolation), but the town also sees her as a burden, which is why they show no intentions of intervening when she buys the arsenic.

* **Southern Gothic elements**:
	+ The complexity of characters: The town as a "character" and the different feelings about Emily; Emily showing the delicate, fragile façade while hiding the morbid secret of her murderous act.
	+ The South: Exploring the traditional values of the south, especially in the portrayal of Tobe (we can ssume he is no longer a slave, but he remains "loyal" to his white employers)
	+ Different points of view: Similar to his novel *The Sound and the Fury*, where he employs four different points of view, here he decides to show the story from the varying points of view of the people in the town. What we learn about Emily as a character, we do through the assumptions and constructions from the townspeople.
	+ Active role of the reader: The non-linearity of the plot and recurrent jumps in time demand an active role on the reader.

## Barn Burning (1939)

"Barn Burning" (set in about 1895) opens in a country drug store, which is doubling as a Justice of the Peace Court. A hungry boy named Sarty craves the stew and bread in the store. He is afraid. His father, Abner Snopes, is in court, accused of burning down Mr. Harris's barn. Sarty is called up to testify against his father, and he knows that he is going to have to lie and say his father did not burn the barn. The Justice and Mr. Harris realize they are putting the young boy in a bad position, and they let him off the hook. The judge tells Mr. Snopes to leave the county and never come back.

As Sarty leaves the courthouse, a kid calls him "Barn Burner!" and knocks him down, twice. Sarty tries to chase the kid but his father stops him. Sarty, his older brother, and his father get into the family wagon, where his mother, aunt, and two sisters are waiting. The wagon is already loaded with their broken possessions. That night, the family camps. After Sarty falls asleep, his father wakes him up and tells Sarty to follow him. Sarty does. His father accuses him of being on the verge of betraying him in court. He hits Sarty. Then he tells him that the most important thing is to stand by one's family.

The next day the Snopes family arrives at their new home, a shack on the farm where they will be working as tenant farmers. Abner wants to talk to the owner and he takes Sarty with him. When Sarty sees the owner's fancy, white mansion he feels like everything just might be all right after all. He thinks his father can not possibly hurt people who live in a house like that. On the way to the front door, Sarty notices that Abner deliberately steps in some fresh horse excrement. At the front door, a "House Negro" greets them and tells Snopes to wipe off his boots. In defiance of the request for politeness, Snopes pushes past with a racial insult and tracks the excrement all over the white rug in the front room.

Later that day, the owner of the rug and mansion, Mr. de Spain, has the rug dropped off at Abner's shack. Abner sets his two daughters to cleaning it, and then dries it in front of the fire. Abner then damages on the rug with a flattish rock. Early the next morning, Abner wakes Sarty and the two of them return the rug to de Spain. De Spain shows up shortly after, insulting Abner and complaining that the rug is "ruined". He tells Abner that he is going to charge him twenty extra bushels of corn to pay for the hundred-dollar rug. When he leaves, Sarty tells Abner that they should not give de Spain any corn at all.

After working hard all week, Sarty goes with his family to town that Saturday. He goes with his father into a store, and sees that a Justice of the Peace Court is in session. De Spain is there. Sarty does not realize that Abner is suing de Spain to have the fee of twenty bushels reduced. Sarty blurts out that his father is not guilty of burning any barns making the Justice think the rug was also burned. Abner sends him back to the wagon, but he stays in the store to see what happens.

The Justice decides that Abner is responsible for the damage to the rug, but he reduces the fee to ten bushels. Sarty, his father, and his brother spend some time in town and do not go home until the sun has almost set. After dinner, Sarty hears his mother trying to stop his father from doing something. He realizes his father is planning to burn the de Spain barn. His father and brother realize that Sarty is planning on alerting de Spain, and they leave him behind, held tight in his mother's arms.

Sarty breaks free and runs to the de Spain house. He is only able to say "Barn!" a few times, and then he is on the run again. De Spain is right behind him, about to run him over. Sarty jumps into a ditch and then returns to the road. He hears three gunshots soon after. At midnight Sarty is on top of a hill. He has come a long way. Everything is behind him. He mourns the loss of his father (who he seems to assume is dead), but is no longer afraid. He falls asleep and feels better when he wakes up. The whippoorwills are singing and it's almost morning. He starts walking toward the woods in front of him. He does not turn around.

## Intro Paragraph

The beginning of the twentieth century in the southern states of America was marked by ongoing economic and social shifts that had started as far back as the end of the Civil War. Although communities belonging to this region had begun a slow process of acceptance in terms of these changes, racial, patriarchal, and class-related struggles still prevailed. In the midst of this complex situation, some artists started to use their pieces to share their controversial thoughts on the reality of the south. This was the case of the Southern Gothic writers. This literary movement developed in the austral region of America due to artists’ desire of depicting with honesty the struggles present in their often loved homeland. Pieces belonging to this movement were characterized by the presence of grotesque, macabre incidents whose main protagonists were delusional characters, characteristic resonating from the darkness of its mother Gothic current. One of the main leaders of the Southern Gothic movement was William Faulkner (1897 – 1962), a multi-awarded American writer author of a series of creative yet obscure pieces which ranged from novels to plays. One of Faulkner’s most widely-known writings is “A Rose for Emily”, a symbolic short story whose non-linear plot explores the fight between tradition and change in an often merciless southern community. In “A Rose for Emily”, Faulkner is able to masterfully reflect two of the most important tenets of the Southern Gothic movement: The depiction of somber, horrifying events related to diverse struggles, and the revelation of the flaws of the once considered idyllic southern society.

### MLA citation

Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." 1930. *Collected Stories of William Faulkner*. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001, pp. 40-44.

Faulkner, William. "Barn Bruning." 1939. *Collected Stories of William Faulkner*. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2001, pp. 3-10.

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1  Ruland, Richard and Malcolm Bradbury. *From Puritanism to Postmodernism*. Viking, 1991.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1  Hans-Peter, Wagner. *A History of British, Irish and American Literature*. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2010.
3. ↑  Bjerre, T. Southern Gothic Literature. *Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature*. Web.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1  VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. *Outline of American Literature*. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1994. Print.
5. ↑  High, Peter B. *An Outline of American Literature*. Longman, 1986.