William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
The Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of the Gothic writing style, unique to American literature. Like its parent genre, it relies on supernatural, ironic, or unusual events to guide the plot. Unlike its predecessor, it uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South.
The Southern Gothic author usually avoids perpetuating antebellum stereotypes like the contented slave, the demure Southern belle, the chivalrous gentleman, or the righteous Christian preacher. Instead, the writer takes classic Gothic archetypes, such as the damsel in distress or the heroic knight, and portrays them in a more modern and realistic manner —transforming them into, for example, spiteful or reclusive spinster, or a white-suited and fan-brandishing lawyer with ulterior motives.
One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is the grotesque — a stock character who possesses some cringe-inducing qualities typically racial bigotry and egotistical self-righteousness — but enough good traits that the reader finds himself empathizing nevertheless. While often disturbing, Southern Gothic authors use deeply flawed characters for greater narrative range and more opportunities to highlight unpleasant aspects in Southern culture, without being too literal or appearing to be overly moralizing.
This genre of writing is seen in the work of such famous Southern writers as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Lewis Nordan, Barry Hannah, Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and John Kennedy Toole. Tennessee Williams described Southern Gothic as a style that captured "an intuition, of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience.” Through Southern Gothic literature, the Old South’s reputation for sultry decadence lives on. The Southern Gothic is a genre of literature that meshes the moody romanticism of Gothic novels with the American South’s sensibility of tragedy and doom. The South’s mystique of decay and danger became a preoccupation for some mid-twentieth-century novelists, who were drawn to its cultural richness (influences include Creole, Cajun, African American, and Caribbean) and to its exotic history of slavery, pirating, and voodoo.
William Faulkner's and Carson McCullers's classic works unraveled multigenerational tragedies shaped by insanity, alcoholism, and ignorance; these texts exposed the insidious rot of unchanging beliefs at the core of a dismantled Southern aristocracy. In contemporary literature, the Southern Gothic moniker usually implies horror -- sometimes overt, sometimes covert, in either a historical or a modern setting. Novelists Anne Rice and Donna Tartt craft their tales of darkness by the haunting light of a moon-drenched, moss-draped Southern night.
The Gothic in “Southern Gothic”
Gothic literature—so called because many examples of the genre were set during the late-medieval, or Gothic, period—proliferated in England, Germany, and the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Critics date its inception to 1764, when English statesman and writer Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Set against the majestic backgrounds of mysterious castles and aging palaces, many nineteenth-century English gothic novels used such bleak landscapes to create an atmosphere of horror and suspense. In particular, gothic literature found a home with writers of the American South, who used the crumbling landscape of the antebellum era as the backdrop for their tales of fantasy and the grotesque. Major twentieth-century American authors often identified with this genre include Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, and to a lesser extent, Eudora Welty.
Defined by Francis Russell Hart as “fiction evocative of a sublime and picturesque landscape … depict(ing) a world in ruins,” the gothic novel presents readers with an opportunity to vicariously experience horrifying realities. By creating worlds where tragedy and repressed behaviors come to the forefront, gothic writers explore the psychology of human existence on several unique levels, notes critic Elizabeth M. Kerr. Common elements of the gothic novel include explorations of the subconscious through dreams, a good versus evil polarity in the characters, and the use of setting and atmosphere to evoke a vivid emotional response in the reader. While English Gothicism closely paralleled the Romantic movement in literature, frequently focusing on issues of love, sexuality, and the place of reason in human existence, Southern Gothic fiction focuses largely on themes of terror, death, and social interaction.
Some commentators have argued that the adaptation of the gothic format was particularly suited to the American South because the plantation world of the antebellum period provided writers with an analogy to the medieval settings available to English gothic writers. The images of the plantation houses—representative of a quasi-feudal order in times of prosperity—contrasted with their eventual decay were evocative of the ruined castles of nineteenth-century Gothic romances, with both symbolically signaling the end of an era. However, Southern Gothic fiction also embodies an immediacy and poignancy that derives from the personal and community experiences of its authors. Kerr explains this intensity as, “the cult of the past in the South, as symbolized in its ruins, its preserved glories displayed in spring pilgrimages, its monuments and graveyards, owes less to cultural climate and imagination than to remembered history.” This emphasis on history is vital to Southern Gothic fiction, which not only draws on the stylistic characteristics of nineteenth-century gothic fiction, but also finds inspiration from novels of the American past. Certain scholars—such as Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)—have identified specifically national concerns apparent in Southern Gothic fiction, particularly the relationships between races and genders. Other academics have been dismissive towards twentieth-century Southern Gothic novels, referring to the movement as a sub-genre of serious fiction and criticizing the works for their sometimes formulaic and sentimental storylines.
Representative Works
Truman Capote
Other Voices, Other Rooms (novel) 1948
A Tree of Night, and Other Stories (short stories) 1949
The Glass Harp (novel) 1951
William Faulkner
A Rose for Emily (novel) 1924
The Sound and the Fury (novel) 1929
As I Lay Dying (novel) 1930
Light in August (novel) 1932
Absalom, Absalom! (novel) 1936
Leslie Fiedler
Love and Death in the American Novel (criticism) 1960
Zora Neale Hurston
Their Eyes Were Watching God (novel) 1937
Cormac McCarthy
The Orchard Keeper (novel) 1965
Outer Dark (novel) 1968
Child of God (novel) 1974
Suttree (novel) 1979
Flannery O'Connor
Wise Blood (novel) 1952
A Good Man Is Hard to Find (short stories) 1955; also published as The Artificial Nigger and Other Tales, 1957
The Violent Bear It Away (novel) 1960
Everything that Rises Must Converge (short stories) 1965
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (prose) 1969
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (short stories) 1974
William Styron
Set This House on Fire (novel) 1963
Eudora Welty
A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (short stories) 1941
The Wide Net and Other Stories (short stories) 1943
The Golden Apples (short stories) 1949
The Optimist's Daughter (novel) 1972
In Summary:
Gothic Literature
Southern Gothic
Modernism
“A deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but of Western culture in general. Important intellectual precursors of modernism are thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, and morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving the human self…” It is characterized by experimental works of literature, language that is fragmented, images that are dislocated: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Wolf’s novels, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. These works often “subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of narration” (Abrams 167).
Stream of Consciousness
“The unbroken flow of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings in the waking mind…a mode of narration that undertakes to reproduce, without a narrator’s intervention, the full spectrum and continuous flow of a character’s mental process, in which sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts, memories, expectations, feelings, and random associations” (Abrams 298 – 9).
The Regional Novel
“Emphasizes the setting, speech, and social structure and customs of a particular locality…as important conditions affecting the temperament of the characters and their ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting” (Abrams 194) E.g. Yoknapatawpha County
An Introduction to As I Lay Dying
Although it achieved little commercial success at the time of its publication, As I Lay Dying has become one of William Faulkner's most popular novels. At first put off by its controversial subject matter and confusing style, commentators and readers have come to appreciate the novel's vivid characters, elusive tone, and complex narrative techniques.
As I Lay Dying chronicles the death of Addie Bundren and the subsequent journey to bury her corpse in her family's cemetery several miles away. This disastrous and darkly comic tale is enriched by Faulkner's innovative narrative technique, which features narration by fifteen characters, including a confused child and the dead woman, Addie. In addition, Faulkner mixes vernacular speech with "stream-of-consciousness" passages to enhance this unique narrative style.
Through his characters, Faulkner addresses subjects that challenge stereotypical perceptions of poor Southerners. For instance, characters contemplate issues of love, death, identity, and the limitations of language. Their actions and adventures draw attention to rural life, class conflicts, and the repercussions of desire and selfishness. Significantly, Faulkner explores the potent, complex workings of the human mind. Difficult to categorize, As I Lay Dying has provided a rewarding, illuminating, and, at times, unsettling experience for generations of readers.
Overview
The Life and Work of William Faulkner
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897. Most of his life was spent in Oxford, Mississippi, where his family moved when Faulkner was five years old. After dropping out of high school, he held a number of jobs, from bank clerk, painter, book salesman, and postmaster, all of which he performed poorly. He was chided by his father to find a job or to go to school. In 1919, preferring reading to working, he enrolled at the University of Mississippi to study literature. He remained at school for only a year. However, he continued to write. Encouraged by a friend, he eventually devoted all of his energies to writing and produced over nineteen novels, numerous short stories, poetry, and Hollywood screenplays during his lifetime. Faulkner’s stories, dealing with the impact of Southern history on the present, race issues, and hope for humanity earned him the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature.
Many important writers of Faulkner’s generation joined to fight World War I in Europe, even before the United States officially joined the war effort. Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He claimed to have been wounded while on a mission. However, in later years he would admit only to having enlisted in 1918.
In the mid-1920s, he lived in New York City and New Orleans before traveling to Europe. After World War I, many of the great writers of the 1920s and 1930s visited or moved to Europe for artistic inspiration. It was in Paris, in 1926, that Faulkner learned that a New York publisher had accepted his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, for publication. His career as a full-time writer began.
Nearly all of Faulkner’s novels and short stories are set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional Mississippi county created by the writer. The impact of the Civil War on the South was a major influence on Faulkner’s writing. His mother introduced him to literature, and he had grown up hearing Civil War stories from his grandfather, veterans and widows, and from his family servant, Mammy Callie (Caroline Barr). Callie had been born into slavery in 1845. She told him about life in the slave quarters, the Ku Klux Klan raids on Negro communities after the war, and folktales which slaves had passed from one to another orally. He was also influenced by Romantic poetry and dark, eerie Gothic tales.
Sartoris, published in 1929, began the saga of Yoknapatawpha county which introduced the Sartoris and Snopes clans. These families would appear again and again—in major or minor roles—in Faulkner’s novels and short stories. Between 1929 and 1935, Faulkner had written his best works: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom! Absalom!
In As I Lay Dying, his characters, members of a poor white farm family of the 1920s, are inhabitants of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Faulkner’s interest in history is apparent in this story, which is told by fifteen different narrators. Faulkner’s characters speak in stream-of-consciousness, a literary style made famous by the Irish writer James Joyce. Characters say exactly what is on their minds, as they think it, without sorting through thoughts and organizing them into logical groups. Faulkner demonstrates how there are many ways of looking at and interpreting history. It is necessary to consider all views, to synthesize them, and to arrive at a more complete picture.
In addition to using stream-of-consciousness, Faulkner often wrote long, complicated sentences. Some of his novels contain sentences that run for pages without a paragraph break. As I Lay Dying, however, is different in its relatively brief narrative sections, some of which are no more than one or two sentences long.
Faulkner is considered a writer who feels religion deeply. Although his novels deal with dark themes and a number of despicable characters, he does emphasize hope. For example, in As I Lay Dying, although Addie Bundren can be viewed as a devilish character, she is the one who insists that actions or deeds are more important than mere words. She is a direct contrast to the self-righteous, churchgoing Cora Tull who often mouths religious ideas without having an understanding of what she is talking about, or Anse, whose real motive for burying Addie in Jefferson is hidden behind claims that he gave his sacred word that he would bury her there.
Another recurring theme in Faulkner’s writing is the need for human community. If people are unable or unwilling to understand and empathize with others, there is no hope for society. In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner’s characters, such as Darl and Addie, understand the significance of real communication with others. Dewey Dell’s predicament underscores this idea: if there were only someone with whom she could speak, her burden would be lighter. Unable to open up to anyone, she is forced to “communicate” with the dumb animals in the barn.
Though his literary reputation established him as a celebrated and sought-after writer, William Faulkner personal life was unsteady. He had problems with his marriage and finances, as well as with his drinking. Despite the fact that he had been elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1939, his reading public was abandoning him. In an attempt to create security, he accepted a job as a Hollywood screenwriter. He worked for six months at a time in Hollywood, just enough time to earn enough to enable him to support himself and his family for the other six months back home in Oxford. He disliked the Hollywood lifestyle and preferred the life of the gentleman-farmer which he led back in Mississippi.
By 1945, Faulkner’s reputation as a writer was in decline. His books were out of print and publishers and critics slighted his works. Only two of his seventeen novels were listed in the New York Public Library Catalogue. Faulkner was also disappointed with his screenwriting career. In an attempt to save his marriage he left Hollywood and returned to the real home he longed for, Mississippi.
When Faulkner was 46-years-old, he received a letter from Malcolm Cowley, a critic who had read his works extensively and who believed in Faulkner’s talent. Cowley praised Faulkner’s work and asked whether the writer would be interested in meeting with him in order to discuss his life and work for an article he wished to publish. Although he was an intensely private man who preferred to keep his private life out of the public’s view, Faulkner opened up to Cowley and established a correspondence and a friendship with him. Cowley eventually edited and published a collection of Faulkner’s works, The Portable Faulkner, reviving interest in the author. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950, he was again in demand for lectures, interviews, and speeches. In 1955, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Fable. Faulkner seemed embarrassed or uncomfortable at being the recipient of awards and honors. He declined making personal appearances to accept many of these honors and attended the Nobel Awards ceremony only at the urging of his daughter, Jill.
During the 1950s, Faulkner spoke out against racism in response to the tensions surrounding the growing Civil Rights movement. He had upset some fellow Mississippians by saying that African Americans ought to be able to attend the University of Mississippi. Though he firmly believed in racial equality, he believed that Northerners should not force integration on Southerners. As a Southerner, he insisted that Northerners could not understand the South’s deeply rooted emotions concerning race relations nor could they understand the history which bound the two races together in a way which only fellow Southerners, both black and white, could appreciate. His middle-of-the-road stance was realistic. However, he was threatened and criticized by some members of both races.
Before his death, William Faulkner was working as a writer in residence at The University of Virginia and had just completed his last novel, The Reivers, which was scheduled for publication in June 1962. While other writers of his generation sought inspiration abroad and wrote about cosmopolitan characters engaged in universal conflicts and questions, Faulkner is remarkable for having expressed the same kinds of universal themes through characters and plots based in Southern history and a small, fictional Mississippi county. His reputation as one of America’s greatest writers was secure. At the age of 65, six weeks after receiving the Gold Medal for Fiction, William Faulkner died on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi.
Historical Background
World War I caused many social and cultural changes in the United States. The prim and proper ways of the Victorian and Edwardian world were replaced by openness about sex, more permissiveness in dating, drinking, smoking, and fewer restrictions on women’s behavior. The exposure to other cultures which servicemen had experienced resulted in a greater exchange of artistic and philosophical ideas. Modern, abstract, and experimental art, poetry, music, and novel writing were introduced to America. In exchange, America gave the world jazz music. Many American writers and artists found the atmosphere in Europe to be freer and more open to new ideas. They became expatriates and spent much of their lives practicing their art abroad. This period produced some of America’s best writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner.
Another significant by-product of the war was the changing role of African Americans. Segregated units had been sent overseas to fight. However, the European black soldiers were not met with prejudice. For the first time, especially among those black soldiers recruited from the South, they were treated as equals by white people. On returning home to America, they anticipated the same treatment but were met with increased prejudice. Lynchings, riots, and violence broke out all across the country over race issues. The war had changed the face of the world, but America was not ready for all the changes.
Technology was advancing at an astounding pace. Talking pictures were introduced in the late 1920s, the radio brought music, news, and advertising into everyone’s home, and the popularity of the automobile caused the first traffic jams in history. Wartime pilots were now stunt pilots, couriers, and commercial airline entrepreneurs. Household appliances and conveniences made chores easier, provided more leisure time, and created a nation of consumers.
Golf, football, swimming, skiing, and other sports changed our attitudes about health and recreation. Young people now preferred a healthy tan to a refined pallor. The feminine standard of beauty changed from the round, soft curves and flowing hair of the Gibson girl to the thin, straight, boyish figure and short, bobbed hair of the Flapper.
Faulkner began As I Lay Dying during the time of the great stockmarket crash of 1929. The novel was published the following year. Though many wealthy people lost their fortunes because of the crash, the financial disaster affected every part of society. Rural and farm families, like the Bundrens of As I Lay Dying, lost whatever savings they might have had. Because of the poor economy, there was less demand for farm products. As the prices dropped, farmers lost the ability to upgrade their operations, buy essential supplies, and pay their existing bills. Many farmers had to sell off their livestock and equipment just to buy the necessities of life. During the Dust Bowl exodus of the 1930s, large numbers of farm families from the South, Southwest, and Midwest lost their farms and moved West in search of migratory work on California fruit and vegetable farms. John Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath, describes how the Great Depression breaks up a close family when foreclosure forces them to move from the farm on which they had been living together for generations.
William Faulkner is one of the great writers of the “Jazz Age” of post-World War I America. He wrote As I Lay Dying in only six weeks while he was working the nightshift at a local powerhouse. He used the back of an old wheelbarrow for a desk and wrote between eleven at night and four in the morning. Whereas most novelists of his generation set their stories in cosmopolitan or exotic locales, As I Lay Dying, like most of Faulkner’s stories, takes place in a small Southern community, much like the Oxford, Mississippi in which he spent most of his life. The novel depicts the difficult life of impoverished and poorly educated Southern farm families during this period.
The hardships of the Bundren family and the preoccupation of each individual with his or her own interests, needs, and desires reflect the way in which people face misfortune and disasters, each with his own agenda. Though some characters might seem less than admirable, they are realistic if we consider how we might react in their place. The novel received successful reviews and helped establish Faulkner’s early reputation. It is considered among his greatest achievements.
The Nobel Prize
When the Nobel Prize for Literature committee met in 1949 to consider the list of candidates for that year, they knew that making a choice would be difficult. The list included Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Albert Camus, Sir Winston Churchill, and, of course, William Faulkner, among others. Making their decision took to long that the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature was not awarded to William Faulkner until 1950. Faulkner’s acceptance speech is considered to be the best speech ever given by a Nobel Prize winner, although at first he was reluctant to attend the ceremony. Finally, he agreed to leave his farm in Mississippi, rent a tuxedo, and travel to Stockholm, Sweden. When he delivered his speech, he stood too far from the microphone, and his Southern accent made him extremely difficult to understand. The next day the text of his speech appeared in newspapers, however, and readers around the world found inspiration in his words. Read the speech below:
“I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
Analytical Questions:
Symbols, Settings, Motifs, etc.
Yoknapatawpha, Jefferson, the coffin, the wagon, New Hope, Mottson, Anse’s teeth, Cora’s cakes, Jewel’s horse, the milk cow, Vardaman’s fish, religion, sin, family devotion, maternity/motherhood, buzzards, selfishness, sibling rivalry, water/river, and more!
Discussion/Analysis Questions
As I Lay Dying Addie Anse Cash Darl Jewel DeweyDell Vardaman As I Lay Dying Vernon Tull Cora Peabody Samson Armstid Whitfield As I Lay Dying Yoknapatawpha Moseley Mac Gowan Jefferson cow horse fish coffin river death tragicomedy Faulkner As I Lay Dying Southern-Gothic grotesque maternity mythology As I Lay Dying social class stream-of-consciousness As I Lay Dying religion God sin As I Lay Dying teeth i i i i i i
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