ABSTRACT
Complex, a psychological term, refers to a group of mental factors that are unconsciously associated by the individual with a particular subject or connected by a recognizable theme and influence the individual's attitude and behavior. William Faulkner, a preeminent Southern writer, had deep Southern Complex. He created the “little postage stamp of native soil”-- Yoknapatawpha County which is patterned after his real-life home in Oxford and Lafayette County and set many his works in this imaginary place. Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County novels crown nearly all aspects of the springheads of his Southern Complex. This paper analyzes William Faulkner’s Southern Complex in his works. The paper first defines complex and presents William Faulkner’s Southern Complex. It then elaborates four aspects of the embodiment of Faulkner’s Southern Complex in the Yoknapatawpha County novels: writing style, language, characterization and the setting, Yoknapatawpha County. It finally analyzes the internal cause and external cause that shape William Faulkner’s Southern Complex.
Keywords：Southern Complex; Southern gothic, language, characterization, Yoknapatawpha County
摘 要
情结是一个心理术语，指的是人的潜抑的一组相互关联的感觉和观念以及不自觉产生的复杂情绪体验。威廉•福克纳是美国著名的南方作家，有着深厚的南方情结。他以自己“邮票般大小的故土”为原型创建了约克纳帕塔法县，并以此作为自己作品的背景。福克纳的所有作品几乎都显现了他的南方情结。此篇论文分析了福克纳的南方情结在其作品中的体现。首先，这篇论文给“情结”和福克纳的“南方情结”下了定义。然后，论文从四方面来论证福克纳南方情结的体现：写作风格、语言、人物塑造和背景环境——约克纳帕塔法县。最后，论文分析了福克纳南方情结形成的内在原因和外在原因。
关键词：南方情结；歌特式风格；语言；人物塑造；约克纳帕塔法县
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Faulkner’s Complex research 2
2.1 Definition of Complex 2
2.2 Southern Complex 2
3. Embodiment of Southern Complex 4
3.1 Southern Gothic 4
3.1.1 Gothic atmosphere 4
3.1.2 Gothic plot 5
3.1.3 Gothic charaters 6
3.2 Language 6
3.2.1 Southwest humor 7
3.2.2 Dialect 8
3.3 Characterization 9
3.3.1 Quentin Compson and Emily Grierson 10
3.3.2 Jason Compson 11
3.3.3 Caddy Compson 12
3.4 Yoknapatawpha County 12
4. The causes for the shape of Southern Complex 14
4.1 Internal Causes 14
4.2 External Causes 15
5. Conclusion 17
Acknowledgement 18
References 19
1. Introduction
The man himself never stood taller than five feet, six inches tall, but in the realm of American literature, William Faulkner is a giant. As one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, William Faulkner gains his reputation by novels, novellas and short stories. His most celebrated novels are The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, As I lay dying, and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner is also a prolific writer of short stories, writing hundreds of stories, A Rose for Emily, Dry September included. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Born and living in the southern state Mississippi, Faulkner cherishes a deep love for this land. 15 out of 19 novels and most of the short stories are set in his native state of Mississippi, and Faulkner is considered as one of the most important Southern writers. In his many novels and short stories, Faulkner transforms the American South into his own unique imaginary world. He creates the “little postage stamp of native soil”-- Yoknapatawpha County--a mythical county in northern Mississippi. Faulkner’s apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County, setting for most of his fiction and patterned after his real-life home in Oxford and Lafayette County, Mississippi, is perhaps the most famous address in American literature. Yoknapatawpha County has 15,611 inhabitants who are scattered over 2,400 square miles. As the sole owner and proprietor of the county, Faulkner pours out his complicated feelings and emotions on the county about his native land, the South. Almost all of his novels deal with the landscape, people, events and history of the South, and nearly every page of his works in some way documents the details of ordinary life, above all the speech, its idioms and dialects, but also the dress, the manners, work, leisure, food, and countless other folk customs. 121 William Faulkner has a Southern Complex and he demonstrates the complex in his works.
2. Faulkner’s Southern Complex
William Faulkner’s relation to the South resembles James Joyce’s relation to Ireland. For each of them, his native culture, tradition and history provide the subject matter of his fiction. For Faulkner，he cherishes a deep love for this land and displays his feelings and emotions through his works. All Faulkner’s works is about the South: the southern values and code, the southern landscape, and the southern people. William Faulkner has a Southern Complex.
2.1 Definition of Complex
Complex is a psychological term. Theodor Ziehen coined the term in 1898. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines complex as a group of repressed desires and memories that exerts a dominating influence upon the personality. While in psychology a complex is a group of mental factors that are unconsciously associated by the individual with a particular subject or connected by a recognizable theme and influence the individual’s attitude and behavior. In its original significance, as used by Carl Jung, the term “complex” referred to experience belonging to the unconscious which, though inaccessible to consciousness, is yet capable of influencing thought and conduct. It is especially useful where we are seeking for the explanation of a specific mental manifestation such as a phobia, a fugue, a specific anxiety, a specific feature of a dream, or a specific affection.
2.2 Southern Complex
William Faulkner has a specific affection toward the South. Born into a typical Mississippi family in 1897, Faulkner has a Southern heritage which he integrates into his works. He is eager to describe the diverse aspects of the South, trying hard to tell the southern culture, religion, morality and other characteristics, such as its gothic tradition, its Southwest humor and its dialect. William Faulkner’s obvious love to the South can be concluded as “Southern Complex”. The Southern Complex is a group of largely unconscious ideas and feelings which centre on the American South. Faulkner’s Southern Complex is based on his knowledge of the South, his sympathy for the South and his deep attachment to the South. Southern Complex has influenced Faulkner’s thought and attitude and been illustrated in each of his works. Faulkner creates Yoknapatawpha County that mirrors Faulkner’s hometown Lafayette County whose people, events and history bear strong resemblance to those of the fictional region. Faulkner not only uses his fiction to document his observations of his people and their land, he also is at work probing the South’s past, challenging the foundation of the southern society, raising disturbing questions and trying to evoke the Southerners’ consciousness. [3]17 Faulkner delivers his mixed feelings of pride and scorn toward the South by the language he uses, characters he creates, and themes he adopts of his works, which earns Faulkner’s writing a reputation that as “Southern as Bourbon whiskey.”
3. Embodiment of Southern Complex
William Faulkner’s Southern Complex can be traced in every line, every word of his works. Faulkner sets many of his works in the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, a microcosm of the postbellum South. He explores and displays the South in his Yoknapatawpha system as the Yoknapatawpha County novels have crowned nearly all aspects of Faulkner’s Southern Complex. I will decode Faulkner’s complex feelings towards his southern native land by analyzing the writing style, language, characterization and setting of his works.
3.1 Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a Subgenre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature. It relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot and uses these tools but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South. One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is “the grotesque” — this includes situations, places, or stock characters that often possess some cringe-inducing qualities, typically racial bigotry and egotistical self-righteousness. Southern Gothic authors commonly use deeply flawed, grotesque characters for greater narrative range and more opportunities to highlight unpleasant aspects of southern culture, without being too literal or appearing to be overly moralistic. (Wikipedia) Faulkner is a Southern writer, and he is put in the category of a writer of Southern Gothic. Most of his works have “themes of evil and corruption bearing Southern Gothic tones.” (Wikipedia) Southern Gothic and Southern grotesque are used in most of Faulkner’s works, especially in A Rose for Emily, Absalom, Absalom! and As I lay Dying. I will analyze Faulkner’s gothic novels and stories by three major elements: gothic atmosphere, gothic plot and gothic characters.
3.1.1 Gothic atmosphere
Gothic atmosphere is a basic element. “a gothic tale usually takes place in an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space—be it a castle, a foreign palace, an abbey… a large house or theatre.” (Hoqle, 2002:2) [4]17 Malcolm Cowley placed Absalom, Absalom! “in the realm of Gothic romances, with Sutpen’s Hundred taking the place of the haunted castle on the Rhine.” The beginning of Absalom, Absalom! sets a gloomy
keynote of the whole novel by bringing us to an old gothic southern house: “a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers,” (Faulkner, 1990:1) and “there would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet with the twice-bloomed wisteria against the outer wall by the savage September sun.” (Faulkner, 1990:2) In Quentin’s eyes, the air in the house “was even hotter than outside, as if there were prisoned in it like in a tomb all the suspiration of slow heat-laden time.” (Faulkner, 1990:6) Absalom, Absalom! has a prevailing atmosphere of terror and mystery which is the very feature of Southern Gothic. In A Rose for Emily, Miss Emily’s house is as decaying as the waning southern society in the aftermath of the civil war: “Only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eye sore among eyesores” (130, paragraph 2). The interior of her house is becoming eerie along with the exterior: it was dim and “It smelled of dust and disuse-a close, dank smell…It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture…they could see that the leather was cracked; and when whey sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray” (131, paragraph 5). The morbid atmosphere is helpful in supporting the gothic theme of the story.
3.1.2 Gothic plot
Gothic plot is important in Southern Gothic. Gothic plot is often full of mystery and violence. In A Rose for Emily, Faulkner has revealed a looming family secret in a truly gothic fashion. At the end of story, the long lost Homer Barron is found dead and decaying in Miss Emily’s attic bedroom. Emily poisons her lover to death with arsenic and keeps his corpse for more than forty years. What is more gothic is that “Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair” (135, paragraph 60). A picture of Miss Emily sleeping next to the deceased Homer Barron or even having sex with him comes into readers’ minds. In Absalom, Absalom! there are altogether eight people who are dead unnaturally. One person (Rosa Coldfield) died of imprisonment, one person died of suicide, two people (Clytie and Henry Sutpen) burnt themselves to death, and the other four people (including Sutpen) were murdered by others. This plot can embody the gothic nature of the novel.
3.1.3 Gothic character
Gothic character is another crucial element of Southern Gothic. The hero or heroine is always a “villain/ hero, the charismatic yet terrifying figure.” (Weinstein, 2000:129) Miss Emily Greirson, in A Rose for Emily is a stereotypical Southern Gothic character. As the last descendant of the Greirsons who once stood among the elite of the South, Miss Emily insisted on placing high value to “honor and pride” to which the old South pays homage. Although times are changing, Miss Emily is not. She always sticks to being held at a higher rank than everyone else. Moreover, after her beloved father passes away and her Yankee lover “leaves”, Miss Emily slips into a life of seclusion, escaping from the reality and never leaves her home. When the aldermen entered her decrepit parlor to collect her taxes, Miss Emily insisted that the aldermen discuss the tax situation with a man who had been dead for a decade. She said “See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson” (131, paragraph 12). At that time, Miss Emily was described as looking “. . .bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue.” For fear of her lover, Homer Barron’s abandon, Miss Emily takes the offensive by poisoning him with arsenic and keeps his corpse in her attic bedroom for more than forty years. Only after her death has the secret been revealed. The murder makes her a monster in readers’ eyes. The discovery of a strand of her hair on the pillow next to the rotting corpse suggests that she slept with the cadaver or, even worse, had sex with it. What Miss Emily has done to Homer Barron exactly shows the Gothic nature of the story in that Gothic novels and stories also often include unnatural combinations of sex and death. In her later years, Miss Emily was “a small, fat woman in black…leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold heart” (131, paragraph 6). Emily Greirson is a typical decaying, morbid character of a Southern Gothic story.
3.2 Language
William Faulkner’s Southern Complex is expected in every aspect and the feature of the Southern language can never be ignored. Southwest (Frontier) humor is a unique feature in the South which Faulkner is good at using. As Malcolm Cowley p oints out in The Portable Faulkner (Intro.), Faulkner has an astonishing humor, what Cowley calls “a sort of homely and sober-sided frontier humor that is seldom achieved in contemporary writing.” A dialect is a variety of language that is characteristic of a certain area. The way people speak says a lot about where they are from, who they are and what they care about. Southern dialect is recognizable in Faulkner’s works. Through the Southern dialect, Faulkner shows us Southerners’ identities and ways of life.
3.2.1 Southwest humor
Folk humor is a distinctive feature in American culture. It is divided into two types: one is the “Down East type”, which is popular in the North; the other is “Southwest humor”, or “frontier humor”, which is spread in the South. Southwest humor is the name given to a tradition of regional sketches and tales based in the “old South-West”: Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Humor is found everywhere in Faulkner’s work and his comic achievement owes much to nineteenth-century frontier (Southwest) humor. Relying on his own experience and the tradition he is a part of, Faulkner’s heritage is also the abundant riches of Southwestern humor. Using his own region and his own local or rural people, the very speech and behavior of these people will in itself function as a comic element. Faulkner exaggerates wildly, uses inversion of roles or practices for comic purpose, invests wit and cunning in the presumed lower races, and even in the purported weaker sex, uses different levels of styles e.g. in direct speech so as to juxtapose them and make fun of one or the other, dependent on the perspective; and many of his backwoods people are comic characters if they are not plainly grotesque. [5]83
In As I Lay Dying, after Addie Bundren’s death, her husband, daughter and four sons take her corpse to the grave. During the whole process, they meet a lot of difficulties, such as fire and flood. The entire “adventure” is just like a comedy. During the adventure, many of the details are exaggerating and absurd, such as curing the broken leg with cement, and marring a woman who looks like a duck. These are the typical embodiments of Southwest humor.
The Hamlet best demonstrates Faulkner’s use of southwest humor. Examples of Faulkner’s use of comic effects in The Hamlet can be found in the description of the reactions of the members of the Varner family when Eula has become pregnant:
“Hold him till I get a stick of stove wood,” she gasped. “I’ll fix him. I’ll fix both of them. Turning up pregnant and yelling and cursing here in the house when I am trying to take a nap!”
Old man Varner, Will, was smarter than his wife and son, and had no plans of revenge or punishment:
“You mean you aint going to do nothing?” Jody said. “Not anything?”
“Do what?” Varner said. “To who? Dont you know them damn tomcats are halfway to Texas now? Where would you be about now, if it was you? . . .” . . . “Now you go on out to the barn and set down until you cool off. Make Sam dig you some worms and go fishing. If this family needs any head-holding-up done, I’ll tend to it myself.” . . . “Hell and damnation, all this hullabaloo and uproar because one confounded running bitch finally foxed herself. What did you expect - that she would spend the rest of her life just running water through it?”
3.2.2 Dialect
Southern Complex in Faulkner’s works is presented by a special and important feature: the common characteristics of Southern speech. In his works, Faulkner displays an excellent sample of the Southern language, including linguistic qualities of both black and white speech. Faulkner establishes a unique literary voice which was recognizable due to variances from standard English in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammatical form. Faulkner creates a literary dialect which is consistent throughout his works. A literary dialect is best defined as an “author’s attempt to represent in writing a speech that is restricted regionally, socially, or both”. [6]1 The literary dialect in the works of William Faulkner is almost a carbon-copy of the Southern dialect he truly speaks.
The literary dialect is illustrated by an intentional misspelling, like “marster” for master, the replacement of “the” and “that” by their variations “de” and “dat”, as negro slave Simon’s words in Flags in the Dust “He got offen de two o’clock train.”, the use of “Miss” along with the given first name of a female, as in “Miss Corrie.” or the multiple cases of double negative. These are distinctly Southern speech traditions. Moreover, this local speech is a mixture of Southern American
and Negro dialogue. Southern aristocracy can shift not only vocabulary and pronunciation, but even grammar, according to the audience. For example, in The Reivers, the upper-class grandfather character Boss is an educated man of high social standing in the community. Yet, when he is in the company of only his grandson Lucius, as part of a lecture, he says “the safe things ain’t always the best things” The presence of African American speech features is also characteristic in Southern dialect. It is a general rule of Southern Negro speech that African American have the tendency to pronounce words like more, store, four, and floor without the /r/ sound, as in mo, sto, fo, and flo (Smith 365). Faulkner shows this feature in his works. For instance, in As I Lay Dying, the character Cash offers a statement which proves Faulkner’s conformity to this black English norm when he says, “I ain’t so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what ain’t.”
Faulkner uses dialect to “make a distinction between their social positions.” (Faulkner) For example, in Flags in the Dust, there is a conversation between Miss Jenny and the Negro Simon.
“Mist’ Bayard done come home,” he remarked, in his forer conversational tone.
“Where is he?” Miss Jenny demanded immediately.
“He aint come out home yit,” Simon answered.
“I speck he went to de graveyard.”
“Does Colonel know he’s home?”
“Yessum, I tole him, but he don’t ack like he believed I wuz tellin’ detroof.”
Since Faulkner has employed a vast and complex Southern dialect in his stories, the language he used has become a microcosm of Southern language as a whole. As one critic has noted, “local forms of speech maintain one's individual dignity in a homogenizing world”.
3.3 Characterization
Characterization is always the most important part of literary work. It helps to demonstrate the theme. Almost every character in Faulkner’s works is a typical Southerner or “Northern invader”. The Sound and the Fury is no doubt William Faulkner’s masterpiece. It consists of four parts by different narrators: Benjy Compson, Quentin Compson, Jason Compson and the Compson family’s negro maid Dilsey. Among them, Quentin Compson is a tragic hero who lingers in the past and tries to escape from the reality, while Jason Compson is a South of material greed influenced by the North invasion. Caddy Compson is the real central figure in The Sound and the Fury for all his brothers, Benjy, Quentin and Jason have special connections with her. Emily Grierson is a female “Quentin Compson”. She is as pathetic as Quentin is, sticking to old traditions and southern values.
3.3.1 Quentin Compson and Emily Grierson
Quentin Compson is the oldest of the Compson children. He is a “good” child, fully in control, resourceful, responsible, sensitive and competent. As the last generation of the once-glorious southern family, Quentin struggles to grope backwards for his homeland’s “debilitating golden age.” Quentin feels an inordinate burden of responsibility to live up to the family’s past greatness and prestige and the South’s honor and glory. He is a slave to the Old South and to the past. Quentin is preoccupied with traditional southern code of conduct and morality, which defines order and chaos within Quentin’s world, and causes him to idealize nebulous, abstract concepts such as honor, pride, virtue, and feminine purity. His strict belief in this code causes Quentin profound despair when he learns of Caddy’s promiscuity. In Quentin’s eyes, Caddy’s virtue is a matter of family pride. Quentin holds firmly to the moral leaven of southern society, attempting to shame Caddy, by making her realize her transgressions against the family’s honor: “Why wont you bring him to the house, Caddy? Why must you do like nigger women do in the pasture the ditches the dark woods hot hidden furious in the dark woods”. Turning to his father and mentor Mr. Compson for guidance, Quentin feels even worse when he learns that his father does not care about the southern code or the shame Caddy’s conduct has brought on the family. Quentin is trying to cope with the order of the world, trying to tolerate some degree of disorder, but he cannot do it. When Quentin finds that his sister and father have disregarded the code that gives order and meaning to his life, he is driven to despondency and eventually suicide at the age of nineteen. Faulkner admits: “Ishmael is the witness in Moby Dick as I am Quentin in The Sound and the Fury” (Zender 18, 62). Jackson Benson forcefully argues that Quentin represents an emotional “self-portrait” of William Faulkner. “Quentin appears to have been created out
of mixed feelings, and the relationship of Faulkner to his central character seems to involve both distance and identification,” Benson writes.
Emily Grierson in A Rose for Emily is another typical example of southern decadence. As is mentioned above, Emily is a product of the southern society and she clings desperately to the Southern honor and pride that are diminishing. After the death of her father, Emily isolates herself from the wider world which moves and changes with time. Like Quentin Compson, She also becomes a victim of her old society. The Quentins and Emilys are led to their inexorable end by passions caused by inheritance, traditions, and environment.
3.3.2 Jason Compson
Jason Compson, the third Compson child, is a cruel, vengeful, bitter, enraged miscreant. However, he goes with the tide and, to a certain degree, he is the only survivor of the Compson family. Jason does not mourn but feels only contempt for his family and his past. The resentment and rage of the past and family make Jason become mean-spirited and vicious. Jason accuses everyone but himself of his hardships, whereas he is more truly the author of his own misfortune than of anything else. He is invariably cruel to Benjy, rebellious against Caddy, and tormenting his niece. Jason treats Benjy cruelly because of Benjy’s idiocy. He hates Caddy for he believes that Caddy’s promiscuity deprives him of the job because Herbert would not left her if her daughter, also named Quentin, has not been born too early. As a result, he views his niece Quentin as the symbol and joint cause of his present misery and acts out his revenge on Caddy through her. As is expressed by his motto “once a bitch always a bitch”, he shows no mercy to Caddy and little Quentin. He hides Caddy’s letter to her daughter in a drawer, Caddy’s checks from his mother, and the daughter’s money from everyone. Jason is equally vicious to others. He threatens to starve Dilsey, he burns circus tickets in front of Luster, and he brutalizes the Gibson family.
Jason is a “counterpoint” to his brother, Quentin. Faced the same situation of the lost Old South, Jason reacts differently from Quentin and turns into an extreme self- interest materialist. He despises and gets rid of the banal moral code but accepts a capitalistic code, focusing only on money. Jason has no desire to grow in a positive spiritual or societal sense, only to profit. Unlike Quentin, who is obsessed with the past, Jason thinks solely about the present and the immediate future, offering fewer flashbacks. Jason is a South of material greed.
To sum up, Jason Compson is the pure symbol of evil. Faulkner puts almost all kinds of Southern evil on Jason. The reason why his novel is full of Southern evil is his deep love toward the South. Faulkner hopes that through the description of the evil, the villains, such as Jason Compson feel so embarrassed that they will be determined to atone for what they have done.
3.3.3 Caddy Compson
Caddy Compson is the only daughter of the Compson family. She is supposed to be a “Southern belle”. In her childhood, she is beautiful, enthusiastic, loving, affectionate and compassionate. She splits the role of hero with Quentin and acts the role of Little Parent, assuming the parental care-taking duties that both Mr. and Mrs. Compson have abdicated. Caddy especially concernes for her idiot brother, Benjy. Caddy is the one family member to provide Benjy with the nurturing love that he needs. Moreover, Caddy is a defiant and bold-spirited girl, braver that her brothers. When young Caddy climbs the pear tree to look into the parlor window, she demonstrates courage, adventurousness, and a willingness to defy authority. When she grows up, Caddy despises and rejects the traditional southern code that has defined her family’s history and that preoccupied Quentin’s mind and shows contempt for family honor. Unlike Quentin, who is unable to escape the tragic world of the Compson household, Caddy manages to get away. As a young woman, she has repeatedly violated the taboos of the South patriarchy. Her relationships with Dalton, Herbert, Charlie and other men, promiscuity and illicit pregnancy completely ruin her “Southern belle” image. Caddy experiences the breakup with Herbert, the loss of her child and the banishment from the household, and tragically becomes a “fallen woman.”
Caddy is the central figure in The Sound and the Fury for the novel is about the rage and anguish created through the loss of Caddy. Faulkner himself calls The Sound and the Fury “a tragedy of two lost women: Caddy and her daughter.” From a Southern belle to a fallen woman, the degeneration of Caddy signals the bankruptcy of the southern code.
3.4 Yoknapatawpha County
As a representative of the Southern writers, Faulkner describes a series of true and vivid pictures of history, culture and lo
cal customs of the South in an imaginary place, Yoknapatawpha County. It is the apocryphal setting of as many as fifteen novels and other short stories. In his Introduction to the Portable Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley writes, “Faulkner performed a labor of imagination that has not been equaled in our time, and a double labor: first, to invent a Mississippi county that was like a mythical kingdom, but was complete and living in all its details; second, to make his story of Yoknapatawpha County stand as a parable or legend of all the Deep South.”
On a map of Yoknapatawpha County he prepares for the first edition of Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner writes, “William Faulkner, Sole Owner and Proprietor.” Yoknapatawpha County is located in northwestern Mississippi and its seat is the town of Jefferson. This fictional county is bounded on the north by the Tallahatchie River and on the South by the Yoknapatawpha River, is 2400 square miles in area and has a population of 15,611. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County is a mythical and actual place, which is in reality Lafayette County where Faulkner spent most of his settled years. It is illustrated that almost every character in Faulkner’s works—rich, poor, young, old, white or black can be found its archetype. Every book of Yoknapatawpha County is part of a living picture. Although the picture is based on a single Mississippi county, it can be extended to the Deep South as a whole. Faulkner said, “that chronicle which was a whole land in miniature, which multiplied and compounded was the entire South” (The Bear 280) Yoknapatawhpa County is not only a complete and detailed creation of a mythical kingdom, it functions also as an allegory or a parable of the South. Yoknapatawhpa County witnesses the decline and dishonor of many Mississippi’s once aristocratic families and the collapse of the once glorious Old South. William Faulkner has two types of feelings toward the South. On one hand, Faulkner has a deep attachment to the South showing beautiful life before the Civil War. On another, Faulkner laments for the past, violence, perversion, racial hatred, depravity and feared that what he loved in the South will be ruined by ignorance and avarice. Therefore, he exposes the dark and evil aspects in the southern society attempting to save the South from corruption and maintain its dignity. Faulkner seeks the redemption for past sins and expects that the beauty of the South returns.
4. The Causes for the shape of Southern Complex
William Faulkner’s Southern Complex is based on his understanding of the South. Faulkner is a Southerner who grew up in the early 20th century. Faulkner takes advantage of his growth environment and period for he is not only familiar with the Old South but also adjusts himself to the new ruling North power. The shape of William Faulkner’s Southern Complex is due to two causes: one is internal cause, Faulkner’s Southern identity, and the other is external cause, the changes of the South brought by the defeat of the Civil War and the North invasion.
4.1 Internal causes
William Faulkner once says that the writer “collects his material all his life from everything he reads, from everything he listens to, everything he sees, and he stores that away in sort of a filing cabinet . . .” Since Faulkner, who claims that “I just happen to know it (the South), and don’t have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time.”, has an intimate connection with Mississippi and the South, most of his works are centered on them. Phil Stone, Faulkner’s friend, writes that “the sunlight and mocking-birds and blue hills of North Mississippi are a part of this young man’s very being.” (Brooks, 1978:17) Faulkner wants to tell about the South. “What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”
William Faulkner creates an entire world which directly reflects his own personal experience in his writing. His fiction is based on what he saw in Oxford (Mississippi) or remembered from his childhood; on scraps of family tradition; on kitchen dialogues between the black cook and her amiable husband; on Saturday-afternoon gossip in Courthouse Square; on stories told by men in overalls squatting on their heels while they passed around a fruit jar full of white corn liquor; on all the sources familiar to a small-town Mississippi boy. [7]63
William Faulkner writes about the area in and around Mississippi, where he is from, during the post-Civil War period. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner soon moved with his parents to nearby Ripley and then to the town of Oxford, the seat of Lafayette County. Faulkner defines Mississippi as his literary territory, changing Oxford to “Jefferson” and Lafayette County to “Yoknapatawpha County,” because it
is here that he lived most of his life and wrote of the people he knew. Faulkner is surrounded by people with a deep interest in southern history. His understanding of history comes through a variety of sources, mostly oral traditions, passed from elderly aunt, black servants, old men at the courthouse square, and scholars at university. He absorbs the past and then writes it in his works. Erik Ehn believes that Faulkner is really a dramatist hiding in novelist’s clothes. “His novels are implicit stagings in the imagined theatre of Yoknapatawpha County”. The county where Faulkner lived and the history have nourished Faulkner’s fiction and shaped his view of the world.
William Faulkner was raised up in an “old aristocracy” Mississippi family. He was well aware of his family background. His great-grandfather had been a colonel in the Confederate army, and other family members included a governor, bankers, railroad builders, lawyers, and politicians. His grandfather carried on the family traditions of community engagement and enterprise. His father worked with the railroad, ran a livery stable, and eventually became business manager of the University of Mississippi. Faulkner integrates many of these family figures and other aspects of his “aristocratic” Southern heritage into his work with a complex mixture of pride and scorn.
4.2 External causes
William Faulkner is a keen observer of his social environment. He draws heavily from his southern roots in building the exposition, themes and characters of his fiction. He weaves a tapestry of lost nobility, past sins, guilt, death, destruction of the land, and rapid change in the decaying culture of the Old South.
The Civil War defeat and the consequences of defeat are merely the soil out of which his epics grow. Before the Civil War, the Southerners strongly believe in their superiority in every aspect. They are proud of the Southern plantation myth, and insistent on their traditional culture and values. The Civil War is a turning point, whose aftermath is disastrous. As are said by Gaines and Floan, “the plantation myth was born in the controversy and emotion of struggle over slavery.” After the defeat of the Civil War, with the abolishment of slavery, the plantation economy is destroyed and the southern economy lies in ruins. Southern whites are forced to swallow the bitter fruits of defeat right down to their worm-eaten cores: impoverishment, decay, degeneration in its many varied forms. Much of their power is gone, and they are suffering. Southerners begin to question the moral code and Southern values that they stick to for years and realized that they are no longer useful. Meanwhile, northern culture and values start to dominate the South. The economic and political impacts are obvious. Southerners begin to believe that their military defeat in the Civil War shows that the northern culture is superior to the southern culture. Southerners cannot face this situation, so some of them just escape from the reality and cling to the past for they do not want to wake up from their sweet southern dream, and others are assimilated into northerners slowly. In a word, the South is under northern hegemonic ruling, and the Southerners are losing their cultural identity.
For fear of northern hegemony and lost of cultural identity, Faulkner, who has deep attachment to the South, devotes himself to addressing this problem. Faulkner wants to arouse his compatriots’ historical and regional awareness, resist the hegemony and make them pursue their own cultural identity. Therefore, Faulkner represents the southern history and culture in his works.
5. Conclusion
William Faulkner is essentially a regional writer. Faulkner’s fiction is a reflection of Mississippi and even American Southern history. The name of the southern state in which Faulkner was born and reared has long been well known. If we could say that Mark Twain put the Mississippi River on the literary man, then Faulkner created out of the state of Mississippi one of the landmarks of twentieth-century world literature. Faulkner presents a vivid picture of the South. Faulkner’s narration of the South is elaborated, transformed, given convulsive life by his emotions. In his fiction Faulkner shoulders the burden of history and sets focus on the southern culture for is deliberately constructing a historically based “legend” of the South. His Southern Complex, which shows his attachment and fondness of the South, roots in southern society, economy and tradition. Because of his Southern Complex, Faulkner clearly emerges as a major Southern writer not just of his generation but as one of the greatest writer of the 20th century. With the appearance of Faulkner a renaissance in Southern literature began. The Southern Renaissance was the reinvigoration of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s. The emergen
ce of the Southern Renaissance as a literary and cultural movement has been regarded as a consequence of the opening up of the predominantly rural South to outside influences due to the industrial expansion that took place in the region during and after the First World War.
Acknowledgement
My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to Han Xiaoya, my supervisor, for her constant encouragement and guidance. She has walked me through all the stages of the writing of this thesis. Without her consistent and illuminating instruction, this thesis could not have reached its present form.
I am also indebted to the teachers at the Department of English who have instructed and helped me a lot in the past four years. They are Wang Jinsheng, Yang Xue, Feng Shaozhong, Zhu Ming, Wu Qing and many others.
Last my thanks would go to my beloved family for their loving considerations and great confidence in me all through these years. I also owe my sincere gratitude to my friends and my fellow classmates who gave me their help and time in listening to me and helping me work out my problems during the difficult course of the thesis.
The remaining weakness and possible errors of the dissertation are entirely my own.
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