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William faulkner the old south
The influence of William Cuthbert Faulkner
The influence of William Cuthbert Faulkner
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Many writers work have influenced many people. One author in particular that has influenced many people over the last 50 plus years, is William Faulkner. William is known for his play on words, and his theme. Faulkner is also known as one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century. A Fable, which is his greatest work, won a Pulitzer Prize. Faulkner was raised as a southern boy, whose writing was influenced by two people and one major event, his greatest work A Fable. Preeminent figure in the twentieth century American literature, Faulkner created a complex and profound body of work in which he often explored exploration and corruption in the south. Many of his novels and short stories are set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional place …show more content…
“Mark Twain was a direct influence on William Faulkner” (Faulkner, William; Enotes) “Nearly a year after the publication of Soldiers’ Pay. Mark Twain inspired the publication of Mosquitoes” (Wilkoski, Wiki). William Faulkner’s most famous theme is “The South.” William Faulkner has been credited with having the imagination to see, before other serious writers saw, the tremendous potential for drama, pathos, and sophisticated humor in the history and people of the South. In using this material and, in the process, suggesting to others how it might be used, he has also been credited with sparking the Southern Renaissance of literary achievement that has produced much of the United States best literature in the twentieth …show more content…
Due to its elements of mystery, suspense, and macabre, it has enjoyed a popular appeal. This was William Faulkner’s first story published in a major magazine, The Forum, but received little attention from the public. After several revisions and republishing, it started to gain popularity and is now looked back as on as one of the stories that jump started his career. Emily Grierson, an aging southern belle, murders the lover who spurned her and sleeps beside his decaying body for a number of years is only the most sensational aspect of the story. What is more interesting to the serious reader of Faulkner is the interplay between Emily Grierson and the two generations of townspeople who attempt to cope with her-one the old guard and the other a new generation with “modern ideas.” (Enotes-William Faulkner) The story, is a comment on the postbellum South, which inherited the monstrous code of values, glossed over by fine words about honor and glory, that characterized the slave era; that postbellum South learns to ignore the unsavory elements of its past by ignoring Emily the recluse and murderess and by valorizing the romantic “tableau.” This is however, a complex matter. The new generation, a generation excluded from the code of honor, valor, and decorum that the old Confederates believed to have sustained them and excluded from the benefits that were to be gained
Emily was drove crazy by others expectations, and her loneliness. ““A Rose for Emily,” a story of love and obsession, love, and death, is undoubtedly the most famous one among Faulkner’s more than one hundred short stories. It tells of a tragedy of a screwy southern lady Emily Grierson who is driven from stem to stern by the worldly tradition and desires to possess her lover by poisoning him and keeping his corpse in her isolated house.” (Yang, A Road to Destruction and Self Destruction: The Same Fate of Emily and Elly, Proquest) When she was young her father chased away any would be suitors. He was convinced no one was good enough for her. Emily ended up unmarried. She had come to depend on her father. When he finally died, ...
I would like to consider two comments made by men who had known Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi. One, a blacksmith, said that one day Faulkner suddenly left in the middle of a conversation with him. Faulkner’s only explanation later was that “when I think of something, I’ve got to go.” The other, a former friend of Faulkner’s speculated that he didn’t “think anyone knew who Bill really was, he was so moody…he was different from anybody else, seemed like.” The first comment indicates Faulkner’s unpredictability, possibly a humorous idiosyncrasy, but certainly not what is expected of a father. The second comment is intricately tied to the first. Because Faulkner’s behavior was unpredictable, often indicating that he was entirely self-absorbed in his own ideas and work, others found him to be distant.
Growing up in Mississippi in the late Nineteenth Century and the early part of the Twentieth Century, young William Faulkner witnessed first hand the struggles his beloved South endured through their slow progression of rebuilding. These experiences helped to develop Faulkner’s writing style. “Faulkner deals almost exclusively with the Southern scene (with) the Civil War … always behind his work” (Warren 1310. His works however are not so much historical in nature but more like folk lore. This way Faulkner is not constrained to keep details accurate, instead he manipulate the story to share his on views leading the reader to conclude morals or lessons from his experience. Faulkner writes often and “sympathetically of the older order of the antebellum society. It was a society that valued honor, (and) was capable of heroic action” (Brooks 145) both traits Faulkner admired. These sympathetic views are revealed in the story “A Rose for Emily” with Miss Emily becoming a monument for the Antebellum South.
Faulkner’s father and great grandfather could be described as the embodiment of Southern masculinity. The video “A Life on Paper” made it clear that the Faulkner men were “manly men.” The “Old Colonel” was remembered as a valiant war hero and a wonderful storyteller. William’s father continued perfectly in his footsteps. He had an intense work ethic and he served in the military. He provided for his family and he never turned down a good fight. Together they set the mold for the perfect Southern man, a role that William could never hope to fulfill.
The end of the American Civil War also signified the end of the Old South's era of greatness. The south is depicted in many stories of Faulkner as a region where "the reality and myth are difficult to separate"(Unger 54). Many southern people refused to accept that their conditions had changed, even though they had bitterly realized that the old days were gone. They kept and cherished the precious memories, and in a fatal and pathetic attempt to maintain the glory of the South people tend to cling to old values, customs, and the faded, but glorified representatives of the past. Miss Emily was one of those selected representatives. The people in the southern small-town, where the story takes place, put her on a throne instead of throwing her in jail where she actually belonged. The folks in town, unconsciously manipulated by their strong nostalgia, became the accomplices of the obscene and insane Miss Emily.
The time period has largely influenced the works of Faulkner. Through out the 1900's the traditional form of writing began to expand and evolve. Experimentation and individualism became morals and were thought to affect all authors of the time period. This general time period experienced a spectrum of cultural shocks. The first of the drastic changes of society was World War 1, which was supposedly the “War to End All Wars.” However, this war was so gruesome that it affected society as a whole and sunk the nations into a period of unknown fate. Authors such as Faulkner lived for these moments to have the ability to build on the depression and write stories such as, “A Rose for Emily.” The time period experiences drastic advancements and changes that greatly influence the content of the story.
Any one who’s ever visited the south has a true appreciation for the writings of William Faulkner. Everything ever written by William Faulkner has a trace of the South that can be felt by just reading his words. Growing up in Mississippi, Faulkner was exposed to the Deep South and everything it had to offer, both good and bad. Through his writings, William tackles some of the most difficult issues of his time period and sheds light to the every day issues going on in the South. William Faulkner set the precedent for future generations, and he will arguably never be contested in his southern style. Without William Faulkner, American literature would be blind to the truth of the South and all its glory.
As a person one might find that we follow a specific routine on the day to day basis. Sudden changes to these routines feels weird and out of place. In William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” based in a fictional town called Jefferson taking place during the twentieth century. The time period is indeed an important factor because southern tradition was above all of the highest importance. This short story gives the audience details of life during that time in which they followed the values of southern tradition and the importance to never stray away from those traditions. The context of the story is laced with subliminal messages of humanities resistance to change.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, and Yoknapatawpha William Faulkner, one of America’s great modernist writers, born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897 and died on July 6, 1962. He was the author of many novels and short stories… and was even awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. One of his most famous novels written was, As I Lay Dying. Faulkner spent most of his writing life in Mississippi and set all of his fiction there. Using his literary prowess, Faulkner ultimately created an entire world out of his various novels in which he named Yoknapatawpha.
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” weaves the tale of the troubled Miss Emily Grierson as she struggles against the modernization taking place around her that threatens to disrupt her idealized perception of the past, a woman who is so incapable of adaptation, that she wages a crusade of personal isolation against the changing times in order to protect the only way of life she has ever known. Faulkner tells us Emily herself is a tradition, “Alive Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care” (p 125). As such, her character is depicted as the physical embodiment of tradition, giving human form to the concept of stasis of time, in that she stubbornly stays the same over the years despite, or more accurately, in spite of, the many changes going on around her. Faulkner also refers to her as an “idol”, which furthers the concept of her personification of the past. Emily, much like a statue erected in the town square to pay homage to past idols, is literally frozen in time. She refuses mail service, refuses to pay taxes, and eventually refuses to leave her home, effectively blunting the progression of time, and leaving the townspeople to speculate on the strange recluse that is Miss Emily Grierson. Her inability to let go of the past paralyzes her and prevents her from embracing any kind of future, or even functioning in the present. Her unwillingness to accept the change that inevitably accompanies passing time provides the framework for a less obvious, but no less important, underlying theme in “A Rose for Emily”.
On September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, a son was born to Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Faulkner. This baby, born into a proud, genteel Southern family, would become a mischievous boy, an indifferent student, and drop out of school; yet “his mother’s faith in him was absolutely unshakable. When so many others easily and confidently pronounced her son a failure, she insisted that he was a genius and that the world would come to recognize that fact” (Zane). And she was right. Her son would become one of the most exalted American writers of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzers during his lifetime. Her son was William Faulkner.
In 1929 Faulkner wrote Sartoris, the first of fifteen novels set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional region of Mississippi - actually Yoknapatawpha was Lafayette County.
The Southerners were brought up with certain ideas and actions engrained in their minds, and they did not realize the shame behind what they did. After the transition to New Southern ways, however, the Southerners easily saw the disgrace behind these traditions. The inability to leave the past behind is a reoccurring theme in both the South and in “A Rose for Emily.” “Drawing on the tradition of Gothic literature in America, particularly Southern Gothic, the story uses grotesque imagery and first-person-plural narration to explore a culture unable to cope with its own death and decay” (“A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner” 72).... ... middle of paper ...
William Faulkner has been credited with having the imagination to see, before other serious writers saw, the tremendous potential for drama, pathos, and sophisticated humor in the history and people of the South. In using this material and, in the process, suggesting to others how it might be used, he has also been credited with sparking the Southern Renaissance of literary achievement that has produced much of the United States best literature in the twentieth century.
Faulkner utilizes his theme by creating a setting, which has interrelation with history context revolving around the idea of compelling change. The main aspect of setting is the Old South after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, Southern society consisted of a group of aristocracy and slaves. Onward to a post- Civil War period, forceful changes in the society arose. Many Southerners refused to accept that their conditions had change. They tended to cling to old values and customs. Death of Emily’s father marked the end of the old lifestyle. In contrary, entrance of Homer Barron represents the progress of civilization: "The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her father's death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron” (31). Here, Faulkner illustrates that the new progress of changing era is destroying the old traditions of a dying age. The pr...