Southern History

What Faulkner lashed out against mostly in his own "little postage stamp of native soil" was the South's romantic view of itself. The southerner's insistence that his aristocratic plantation life that involved owning slaves was not over and never would be, despite the loss of the Civil War and the Emancipation of slaves, created a mythical cocoon that many southerners wrapped themselves in. Their resistance to modernism and the industrial invasion of their agricultural society and their pastoral ideals lead to a violent response that inspired many of Faulkner's writings.

For many land owning southerners, the world was spinning out of control and the efforts to smash the causes for the changes to southern life and to do anything to hold onto the world as they knew it, despite the perversions and cruelties associated with such obsessive preservation, became the subject matter for conflicts, themes, and characters in Faulkner's novels. Frederick R. Karl goes on to say about the South that

Everything converged in violence. A narrow society which could not tolerate criticism or even analysis of its situation, while insisting on a romantic ideal view of itself, could not possibly settle anything without recourse to physical force. The latter was clear, even pure-and final. Violence was implicit in the chivalric code toward women, in racial relationships, in attempts to preserve the Southern way of life (whatever that was becoming in the face of Northern insinuation) in presenting a solid front to the North as if the war was still continuing and even in the need to demonstrate family solidarity as a Christian virtue. The South was God-fearing and God-practicing, and force would be the means by which that message was conveyed to its people and to the rest of the nation.) (from William Faulkner: American Writer. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 1989.)

This was part of the world that Faulkner was influenced by and that defined his life and times and consequently laid the foundation for much of what would drive the purpose of his writings. Faulkner's commentary through the character of Chick Mallison in Intruder in the Dust speaks volumes about what he perceived as the South's responsibility to itself:

"I only say that the injustice is ours, the South's. We must expatiate it and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice" (204).

You can read more about Faulkner's South in Don Doyle's book, Faulkner's County. The Introduction to the book can be read by clicking the book's title.