Those Changes on South Plantations by Perspective of Literature
As I have discussed in the proposal, William Faulkner is one of the most important modern American writers. He is considered the classic writer after James Joyce. In his creation of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner delineated characters of different racial background, classes, genders, aged or not, and even of different occupations. He told a story from the very early moment that the first group of colonizers tricked over local Indian people’s land for plantation. Unlike what I tried to analyze in multiple perspectives the changes the south underwent in the proposal, I will spend most of the length of this paper to talk about the downfall of southern plantation, based on what I have already got in hand from the proposal.
Historical Retrospection
The early years of America was the story of black labors leaving their homeland and being exploited to work. As a newly found continent, America was sparsely populated, which caused another problem of inadequate labor force. After the colony identity was confirmed, more and more labor became the first requirement to satisfy the need of huge plantations. Waves of smuggled black slaves were illegally transported form Africa. During the Civil War, the population of South America had been tripled, and massive available land was explored into plantations, owned by the white. To some extent, the economy of the south is the plantation economy based on slavery system; not only was it just an economic form, but also a lifestyle at the time. The economy that took family as the working unit appeared to boom, to make white people’s life abundant, and to fill their life with hope and success. Just like Allen Tate said, the center of the South is family (1). Southern people were more sensitive to family, community, and the south place’s prosper or fail, and honor or disgrace than the northern people. Till 1930s, house-centered agriculture of the south was still in dominance of local economy. The closeness and the old tradition decided it would affect the future of America, by some possible social changes.
William Faulkner and His Family History
From Scotland, Faulkner’s ancestor migrated to Carolina. His ancestors belonged to the class of ruling, owning quantitative of slaves and plantations. Faulkner’s great-grandfather, “The Old Colonel” William Clark Faulkner, was said to have a story-like life that imposed great influence on his great-grandson William Faulkner’s writing later. Setting up family business out of nothing, financing to build his own troops to fight the war, and even writing his own fiction, William Clark Faulkner became quite prestigious at his time, which also made William Faulkner quite proud. Even later William Faulkner stereotyped his great-grandfather a character Colonel John Sartoris in Sartoris, the first of his Yoknapatawpha series.
Until the time of William Faulkner’s father, it started to go a down-slope path. His father dropped out of Mississippi University and started working for railway. After attempting for many occupations to make a living, Faulkner’s father only had a stud-farm to support the entire family. His wife’s dissatisfaction and little Faulkner’s belittlement all disheartened his father, but potentially contributed to Faulkner’s writing in later years. His father was the origin of Jason Compson. What’s more, his aunt Jenny, grandmother-in-law and Miss Emily were all projected in his later Yoknapatawpha series fictions.
The Sound and The Fury, and A Rose for Emily
The Sound and The Fury is consistently in comment that describes the downfall of plantation business and family industry of South America. From what William Faulkner meant to put his family members into the fiction to tell the same story of his own family, we can figure this point out. With such a story, the fiction expressed the author’s feeling of a sudden disappointment after a seemingly lasting prosperity. Especially when the story showed the big change occurred on Caddy from an innocent girl to a Nazi military leader’s mistress, the author tried to make the hidden meaning clear and open, that is, the big family industry represented by the Compson was on the way of declining. At the same time, the description that the Compson family only cares to obtain honors, social respect and such vain glory, that the kids grow up in a family without love but contorted perspective of life and value, and that they lost their basic judgment of right or wrong, proves that the south was collapsing. This failure is not only destructive to others but also the family industry themselves. Hence we saw what happened in real the failure of the civil war and the abolishment of local slavery system.
In A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner focused his description on how the family began to fail and how their emotions started to crash. As the last member of the family, Emily still kept an elegant appearance, despite she no longer had in grasp the real power to rule. For the government changed, the new mayor came for levying tax. But Emily refused with belittlement with a response to the visitor that they should ask Colonel Sartoris for details. However, she did not know that Sartoris had been dead for years. With such a description of the old and the new eras, the South America in the story is no longer a place where plantation owners could give orders to make the world work.
The Downfall of Plantation Business
The Compson’s falling
The Mr. Compson in The Sound and The Fury is the third generation of the family. Compared with his grandfather who set up the family with a squire mile’s land, and with his father who fought for the war as a military leader, Compson the third seemed not to be able to revive the family business. As a lawyer, he never accepts cases, so there is no income to give Caddy, his daughter, a decent wedding, and to pay for Quentin, his son, the college tuition. The situation pushed Compson to sell his last piece of pasture. From the story itself, we could read that what is left there in a square mile is now been called “The Compson’s family”, growing weeds around the only one shabby house. Land, pasture and labor force used to stand for a plantation owner’s power, symbolizing the owner’s social status. When losing the last piece of pasture, it is no doubt that it is almost over for the Compsons. Except this house, “what left there in Compson’s home is a strip of vegetable garden, broken horse stable and a cabinet for servant.” (2) Jason Compson later sold the house, which is later changed to a boarding house, accepting cattle businessmen. And the honored family in old days no longer exists.
The Grierson’s falling
The Grierson family in A Rose for Emily is not only obviously noble but also insanely rich, which can be seen from the renovation style and the position in town of the estate. When Mr. Grierson died, the glorious house in the past has been long out of maintenance, shabby and ugly compared with the modern atmosphere around. Having refused to pay tax for times, Emily thinks that Colonel Sartoris has pardoned her duty to levy. Besides, what she owns now after father’s death is just a house full of old furniture. Similarly, as the last member of the family shining in the past, she still struggles between old tradition and the new society after the change of society. Emily lost her financial source and support of life, she had to set off to find a way, and she also need to put down the elegant gesture to mingle in the common. In the pottery painting class, the students she has are not recruited by herself but sent by old friends of Sartoris. This can be seen as giving as a way of charity. Till the moment, the Grierson family has broken, and the lady of the old day is now an ordinary people feeding on her own.
Conclusion
From what is analyzed about William Faulkner’s family development, we can see the similarities between his family stories and what he contributed to write in the fictions. Nevertheless, we could treat the Yoknopatawpha series as a reflection of William Faulkner’s own life, with his family background. Despite there is no discussion of the decay of puritanism in this article as I did in the proposal, actually it also contributed to accelerate the progress of the plantation business collapse, and it is also mirrored in the female character Emily. Though the fictions The Sound and The Fury, and A Rose for Emily did not directly give description to the huge social earthquake, they hide it in every corner of the stories, making it go parallel with the plots. Faulkner’s literature in some way reproduced the scene many decades ago. For modern researchers like us who desire to know details about that historical period, William Faulkner’s contribution is too massive to measure. The fall of the plantation is just single one aspect in the history he tried to record, and his works are too inclusive to talk about in a passage or two.
Work Cited
Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades, The Swallow Press, 1968.
Charles East, “Oxford-in-Yoknapatawpha'’, in The Virginia Quarterly Review,V01.
74,No.3,1998.
Frederick J. Hoffman, “William Faulkner: A Review of Recent Criticism”, in
Renascence, V01.1 3,No.1,1 960. [4]
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, New York: Random House, 1956.
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily, Perfection Learning, Clive, Iowa, 1990
As I have discussed in the proposal, William Faulkner is one of the most important modern American writers. He is considered the classic writer after James Joyce. In his creation of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner delineated characters of different racial background, classes, genders, aged or not, and even of different occupations. He told a story from the very early moment that the first group of colonizers tricked over local Indian people’s land for plantation. Unlike what I tried to analyze in multiple perspectives the changes the south underwent in the proposal, I will spend most of the length of this paper to talk about the downfall of southern plantation, based on what I have already got in hand from the proposal.
Historical Retrospection
The early years of America was the story of black labors leaving their homeland and being exploited to work. As a newly found continent, America was sparsely populated, which caused another problem of inadequate labor force. After the colony identity was confirmed, more and more labor became the first requirement to satisfy the need of huge plantations. Waves of smuggled black slaves were illegally transported form Africa. During the Civil War, the population of South America had been tripled, and massive available land was explored into plantations, owned by the white. To some extent, the economy of the south is the plantation economy based on slavery system; not only was it just an economic form, but also a lifestyle at the time. The economy that took family as the working unit appeared to boom, to make white people’s life abundant, and to fill their life with hope and success. Just like Allen Tate said, the center of the South is family (1). Southern people were more sensitive to family, community, and the south place’s prosper or fail, and honor or disgrace than the northern people. Till 1930s, house-centered agriculture of the south was still in dominance of local economy. The closeness and the old tradition decided it would affect the future of America, by some possible social changes.
William Faulkner and His Family History
From Scotland, Faulkner’s ancestor migrated to Carolina. His ancestors belonged to the class of ruling, owning quantitative of slaves and plantations. Faulkner’s great-grandfather, “The Old Colonel” William Clark Faulkner, was said to have a story-like life that imposed great influence on his great-grandson William Faulkner’s writing later. Setting up family business out of nothing, financing to build his own troops to fight the war, and even writing his own fiction, William Clark Faulkner became quite prestigious at his time, which also made William Faulkner quite proud. Even later William Faulkner stereotyped his great-grandfather a character Colonel John Sartoris in Sartoris, the first of his Yoknapatawpha series.
Until the time of William Faulkner’s father, it started to go a down-slope path. His father dropped out of Mississippi University and started working for railway. After attempting for many occupations to make a living, Faulkner’s father only had a stud-farm to support the entire family. His wife’s dissatisfaction and little Faulkner’s belittlement all disheartened his father, but potentially contributed to Faulkner’s writing in later years. His father was the origin of Jason Compson. What’s more, his aunt Jenny, grandmother-in-law and Miss Emily were all projected in his later Yoknapatawpha series fictions.
The Sound and The Fury, and A Rose for Emily
The Sound and The Fury is consistently in comment that describes the downfall of plantation business and family industry of South America. From what William Faulkner meant to put his family members into the fiction to tell the same story of his own family, we can figure this point out. With such a story, the fiction expressed the author’s feeling of a sudden disappointment after a seemingly lasting prosperity. Especially when the story showed the big change occurred on Caddy from an innocent girl to a Nazi military leader’s mistress, the author tried to make the hidden meaning clear and open, that is, the big family industry represented by the Compson was on the way of declining. At the same time, the description that the Compson family only cares to obtain honors, social respect and such vain glory, that the kids grow up in a family without love but contorted perspective of life and value, and that they lost their basic judgment of right or wrong, proves that the south was collapsing. This failure is not only destructive to others but also the family industry themselves. Hence we saw what happened in real the failure of the civil war and the abolishment of local slavery system.
In A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner focused his description on how the family began to fail and how their emotions started to crash. As the last member of the family, Emily still kept an elegant appearance, despite she no longer had in grasp the real power to rule. For the government changed, the new mayor came for levying tax. But Emily refused with belittlement with a response to the visitor that they should ask Colonel Sartoris for details. However, she did not know that Sartoris had been dead for years. With such a description of the old and the new eras, the South America in the story is no longer a place where plantation owners could give orders to make the world work.
The Downfall of Plantation Business
The Compson’s falling
The Mr. Compson in The Sound and The Fury is the third generation of the family. Compared with his grandfather who set up the family with a squire mile’s land, and with his father who fought for the war as a military leader, Compson the third seemed not to be able to revive the family business. As a lawyer, he never accepts cases, so there is no income to give Caddy, his daughter, a decent wedding, and to pay for Quentin, his son, the college tuition. The situation pushed Compson to sell his last piece of pasture. From the story itself, we could read that what is left there in a square mile is now been called “The Compson’s family”, growing weeds around the only one shabby house. Land, pasture and labor force used to stand for a plantation owner’s power, symbolizing the owner’s social status. When losing the last piece of pasture, it is no doubt that it is almost over for the Compsons. Except this house, “what left there in Compson’s home is a strip of vegetable garden, broken horse stable and a cabinet for servant.” (2) Jason Compson later sold the house, which is later changed to a boarding house, accepting cattle businessmen. And the honored family in old days no longer exists.
The Grierson’s falling
The Grierson family in A Rose for Emily is not only obviously noble but also insanely rich, which can be seen from the renovation style and the position in town of the estate. When Mr. Grierson died, the glorious house in the past has been long out of maintenance, shabby and ugly compared with the modern atmosphere around. Having refused to pay tax for times, Emily thinks that Colonel Sartoris has pardoned her duty to levy. Besides, what she owns now after father’s death is just a house full of old furniture. Similarly, as the last member of the family shining in the past, she still struggles between old tradition and the new society after the change of society. Emily lost her financial source and support of life, she had to set off to find a way, and she also need to put down the elegant gesture to mingle in the common. In the pottery painting class, the students she has are not recruited by herself but sent by old friends of Sartoris. This can be seen as giving as a way of charity. Till the moment, the Grierson family has broken, and the lady of the old day is now an ordinary people feeding on her own.
Conclusion
From what is analyzed about William Faulkner’s family development, we can see the similarities between his family stories and what he contributed to write in the fictions. Nevertheless, we could treat the Yoknopatawpha series as a reflection of William Faulkner’s own life, with his family background. Despite there is no discussion of the decay of puritanism in this article as I did in the proposal, actually it also contributed to accelerate the progress of the plantation business collapse, and it is also mirrored in the female character Emily. Though the fictions The Sound and The Fury, and A Rose for Emily did not directly give description to the huge social earthquake, they hide it in every corner of the stories, making it go parallel with the plots. Faulkner’s literature in some way reproduced the scene many decades ago. For modern researchers like us who desire to know details about that historical period, William Faulkner’s contribution is too massive to measure. The fall of the plantation is just single one aspect in the history he tried to record, and his works are too inclusive to talk about in a passage or two.
Work Cited
Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades, The Swallow Press, 1968.
Charles East, “Oxford-in-Yoknapatawpha'’, in The Virginia Quarterly Review,V01.
74,No.3,1998.
Frederick J. Hoffman, “William Faulkner: A Review of Recent Criticism”, in
Renascence, V01.1 3,No.1,1 960. [4]
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, New York: Random House, 1956.
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily, Perfection Learning, Clive, Iowa, 1990