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Faulkner Notes

Faulkner Notes

If you have taken English Composition II through Hinds, there's a good chance that you've already been introduced to William Faulkner via his story "Rose for Emily." It's a good first Faulkner experience because it introduces some characters that reappear in other stories and his novels. So, the notes below are relevant to any introduction to Faulkner and certainly important to any Mississippian since Faulkner is the only Mississippian so far to win the Nobel Prize, which he won for literature in 1949/1950. Some books say one, some say the other, since he won in 1949, but was awarded the prize in 1950. I would accept either date on a test question (hint, hint).

 To remember about Faulkner:

  1. His home Rowan Oak has recently been reopened to the public after extensive renovation. It is located in Oxford, MS, and it is a wonderful place to visit if you ever get that opportunity. Bring $5 with you!

Estelle's bedroom, Rowan Oak2.Sanctuary: A book about an Ole Miss coed who is kidnapped and held in a corn crib. Dilsey, the maid in "That Evening Sun," is an important character in this book. 

3.As I Lay Dying: A novel about the Bundrens, a trashy family who lives out in the country. The dying mother's last request is to be buried in Jefferson near her people, and the trip to get her there is told through the voices of several in the family.

4.The Sound and the Fury: A novel about the Compson family, their tragedies and downfall, the book's name is an allusion to Shakespeare's Macbeth and the line "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 

5. Setting of his fiction: About 1940 in and around Jefferson, Mississippi, a fictional (pretend) town that's probably fashioned after Oxford since that was Faulkner's home, in Yoknapatawpha County (also made up). Since this is the Jim Crow era of segregation in the South, African Americans depicted in this story have menial jobs as wash ladies, maids, and laborers. Faulkner's depiction of the racism present is undisguised. His personal feelings about integration are still debated.  He did not preach equal rights, but his depiction of black characters suggests that he believed in equal rights because he ennobled more black characters than white ones. 

6.The major families:  

  • The Snopeses: These trashy folks are not so lazy as the Bundrens, but Abner Snopes was a wife-beater and barn-burner. Other Snopeses are wily enough to make some money and move up the social ladder in Jefferson. But they are still trash, just trash with money.
  • The Compsons: The middle class, professional folks: Jason, the father; Mrs. Compson, Quentin; Caddy; Jason, the son; Benjy, the mentally challenged child who is important in Sound and Fury.
  • The Sartorises: Had position and money in the old South, but have lost all but their name and a decaying mansion by the 1930s. 

These families recur again and again in Faulkner's fiction and are well-known as metaphors almost in Southern fiction.

Considering the information above about Faulkner's characters and setting, you'll notice that the stories are set near the beginning of the 1900s, sometimes earlier, a few a bit later, but nothing past 1950 since he died in 1962. Therefore, the Mississippi he knew was not the same one we know. 

For example, most of the state was agricultural; and in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the little farms often were just enough to feed the family, if that.  In "Barn Burning," Abner is a white sharecropper--I said white because many people think that only African Americans were sharecroppers; but quite a section of population had to make their living that way if they had no land or if they were young and did not know another way to make a living prior to the World War II era.  Mississippians were not as affected as the rest of the country by the Great Depression because the state had already been in a depression since the Civil War. So----there was rampant poverty.  Only a very few people had money; nearly all black and most white people were VERY poor by our standards today. 

Nearly all roads were dirt roads, so there's a lot of dust in the stories. The major U.S. highways were paved and the main streets of most towns, but the interstate highways were not begun until the Eisenhower administration. So most of Mississippians and large numbers of the rest of the country lived on dirt roads, which were hard to travel.

The Long, Hot Summer (originally starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward), was a film based on some of Faulkner's stories, especially "Barn Burning" and the novel The Hamlet. If you get bored one night, rent it.  Ben Quick in this film seems to me to be a grown up Colonel Sartoris Snopes or young Flem Snopes (interesting combination of names!).