Southern Attitudes Against African Americans In William

Faulkner’s Fiction Essay, Research Paper

SOUTHERNER S ATTITUDES TOWARDS AFRICAN AMERICANS IN WILLIAM FAULKNER S FICTION

William Faulkner in his novels, The Sound and the Fury, The Intruder In The Dust, and Go Down, Moses written in 1929, 1948, and 1942 shows that Southerners treat African-Americans poorly not only in his fiction but as well as in history. In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner invented many characters from the historic South. He was known as a Southern American novelist and therefore set his fiction in imaginary Yoknapatawpha County during the times of slavery. The use of symbolism, dialect, and structure help to produce a racial theme in which evil and injustice of the world turn a white against a black . From Faulkner s point of view of Southern history, God created and man himself cursed and tainted. In other words, the whites brought the blacks to America and then turned against them.

In 1897, William Faulkner began his journey in the world starting in New Albany, Mississippi. He lived in nearby Oxford, Mississippi, nearly all of his life. Superficially Faulkner, is one of the most markedly regional writers, since the bulk of his work is set in the America deep South, drawing its inspiration from southern myths and traditions and the profound agonies of the southern racial and national predicament. # Faulkner peopled his mythical county, Yoknapatawpha, with the human beings whom he knew and with characters drawn from his own family history. # Everyone he met and everything he saw added more knowledge to his brain about the South. This knowledge transformed into some of his best novels ever. Three primary influences on Faulkner s writing were family legends passed down to him, Faulkner s apprenticeship and his brief association with literary circles in New York and New Orleans, and the Mississippi world in which the author lived most of his life.# As a child, William Faulkner was probably influenced by the Faulkner Negro nurse-mammy, Caroline Barr, to whom he later dedicated Go Down, Moses. Both Dilsey, of The Sound and the Fury, and Aunt Callie, of The Reivers, are at least partial fictional portraits of this loyal family servant.# Faulkner was not a so-called Redneck . He treated African Americans with the same respect that anyone should deserve. Faulkner s treatment of miscegenation is remarkably different from that of many authors who write on this subject. He does not make his mulattoes tragic because of their white blood, or pathetic because of their black blood, nor does he find that mixed blood makes them superior. His treatment of race, if his work is considered as a whole, is social; and his conclusions are based on pragmatic findings.# As a result, Faulkner s conclusions are written out in story form and his background information comes from the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. The human drama is then built on the model of the actual historical drama extending over almost a century and a half. All of the Southern background influenced Faulkner so greatly that his novels were only set in the South. Each person who reads Faulkner s novels can be able to live Faulkner s life as he lived it.

The setting and genre of Faulkner s works was dependent on his time period. Authors in history only wrote about their time period. In 1927 Faulkner s home state, Mississippi, dubbed the worst American state by H. L. Mencken after an exhausting statistical survey, became especially infamous for brutality in enforcing black subjugation through Jim Crow codes, lynchings, and economic exploitation (possibly because as of 1934 it was the last southern state with over fifty percent black population). Already known for violent resistance to change, it was the state most committed to the unabashed style and race baiting of redneck politics.# In relation to his novels, William Faulkner uses facts from the old South to create his characters and the entire plot structure. The story Go Down, Moses is a moral allegory that accuses the white man in the South of guilt and neglect in his treatment of the Negro, and suggests by its example that he must bear the burden of his guilt.# Because the society was so filled with tensions – varied, impersonal, obscure – the Negro became a scapegoat, a personified threat to long-cherished and conflicting values of white Southerners: individualism, localism, family, and a clan.# Southern life for every individual, black or white, was full of racism and cruelty. Faulkner used these lives to enhance his characterization of everyone. Faulkner s mythical and myth rich Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, rather like Thomas Hardy s Wessex in the English midlands, gains validity with each revisit. The reader comes to know a society based on race, religion and family origin, and perhaps to appreciate the love-hate relationship many Southern writers hold toward their heritage.# An important element in Faulkner s education and in his special preparation for a literary career came from his friendship with a fellow townsman, Phil Stone. He suggested authors for Faulkner to read, tried to put him in touch with the literary movements of the day, and helped finance Faulkner s book of poems, The Marble Faun, which appeared in 1924.# Throughout Faulkner s career, there were many bumps to success. However, friends such as Phil Stone gave Faulkner the boost that he needed in times of despair. These