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Faulkner Attitudes towards Slavery William Faulkner in his novel The Bear shows that Southerners treat African-Americans poorly not only in his fiction but as well as in history. In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner invented many characters from the historic South. The use of symbolism, dialect, and structure help to produce a racial theme in which evil and injustice of the world turn a white against a black. From Faulkner's point of view of Southern history, God created and man himself cursed and tainted. In other words, the whites brought the blacks to America and then turned against them. Faulkner is one of the most markedly regional writers, since the bulk of his work is set in the America Deep South, drawing its inspiration from southern myths and traditions and the profound agonies of the southern racial and national predicament.
Faulkner was not a so-called Redneck. He treated African Americans with the same respect that anyone should deserve. Faulkner's treatment of miscegenation is remarkably different from that of many authors who write on this subject. He does not make his mulattoes tragic because of their white blood, or pathetic because of their black blood, nor does he find that mixed blood makes them superior. His treatment of race, if his work is considered as a whole, is social; and his conclusions are based on pragmatic findings. As a result, Faulkner's conclusions are written out in story form and his background information comes from the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South.
The story Go Down, Moses is a moral allegory that accuses the white man in the South of guilt and neglect in his treatment of the Negro, and suggests by its example that he must bear the burden of his guilt. Because the society was so filled with tensions varied, impersonal, obscure the Negro became a scapegoat, a personified threat to long-cherished and conflicting values of white Southerners: individualism, localism, family, and a clan. Faulkner's stories about Negroes illustrate the means and define the nature of their survival. Faulkner was moving from the particular to the general in Negro characterization and symbolism.
Faulkner is primarily a moralist and that his Negro characters are consistent with his moral theory and dependent upon that theory for their particular existence. Faulkner did in fact look at the world as a whole and he demonstrated that in his novels. By examining the theme in the long short story The Bear, the destruction of the wilderness and by critically analyzing the values that end it and survive it, we will see that Faulkner has in this work been constant to his simple, humanistic outlook. But an examination of the method will show that Faulkner has adopted here the characteristics of allegory and essay and that several participants in the action are emblems rather than characters situation which never occurs in the work of the previous two decades. Old Ben, the bear of the story, is a manifestation of the essential wilderness; the hunting of him is a ritual, in which all the participants have set roles to play like actors on a stage. This symbolization shows the destruction of a part of nature for something that can be easily avoided just as the destruction of the old South and slavery.
The white characters in The Bear symbolize the racism and the black characters symbolize the African American race. The white Southern fear, even horror of miscegenation is also alive and well in Go Down, Moses where Sophonsiba Beauchamp ignores her brother Hubert's self-serving defense of his liaison with his black cook Theyre free now! Theyre folks too just like we are (289) and sends the servant packing. In pointing out that bachelor Hubert has never had sexual relations with proper white women, Faulkner underscores how patriarchal idealization of white women as non-sexual ladies only led to sexual exploitation of more accessible black female slaves and servants in the antebellum and post bellum South as well. Some aspects of Faulkner's composition of Go Down, Moses underscore his growing racial awareness. The omniscient narrator of Go Down, Moses, however, occasionally seems ambivalent on the subject of race.
In describing Sam Fathers, Ike's mentor, as having been betrayed by his mother who had bequeathed him not only the blood of slaves but even a little of the very blood which had enslaved it; himself his own battleground, the scene of his own languishment and the mausoleum of his defeat, the narrator subscribes to a kind of essentialism of race and blood (162). Faulkner also points out several times that the servile and inferior blood of the black race has been made so by years of slavery. William Faulkner contributed many ideas to the Southern history. His universal theme of the toll taken by white Southerners towards African Americans emphasized how cruel people can really be. All parts of his writing influenced readers as well as important literary writers. This writing also made it possible to view the history of the South at different perspectives.
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Research essay sample on African Americans William Faulkner
