The Diminishing Southern Code in William Faulkner's The Unvanquished
In the novel The Unvanquished, by William Faulkner, most of the characters strictly follow by a code of laws and moral values called the Southern Code. At the beginning of the book, the characters follow the Southern Code more strictly than at the end. Some of the rules which start to diminish during the course of the novel are as follows: no stealing, no profanity, no lying, treat women and the elderly with respect, and seek revenge on those who have caused you pain. The characters obey these during the start of the novel, and eventually as the novel progresses, the rules are broken.
The first two rules, no profanity and no lying, are the first two to be broken in the book. In the first chapter, the character Granny visibly and strictly abides by the Southern Code. The main character, Bayard, and his friend Ringo sprint towards their family's house after they have shot a Yankee with their father's gun. Bayard retorts, "We shot him Granny. We shot the bastud!" (Faulkner 27). Proceeding this, Granny applies soap to each of the boys' mouths as a punishment for uttering the word "bastud" . Granny does this because she strictly obeys the Southern Code no matter what the circumstance. Nevertheless, Granny eventually breaks the code by lying to a Yankee colonel. She tells him, in response to the colonel's question that "There are no children in this house nor on this place." (Faulkner 28) The colonel...
In “Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question” James McPherson argues that the North and the South are two very different parts of the country in which have different ideologies, interests, and values. Mcpherson writes this to show the differences between the north and the south. He gives perspectives from other historians to show how the differently the differences were viewed. These differences included the north being more industrialized while the south was more agricultural. He gives evidence to how the differences between the north and south came together as the south produced tobacoo, rice, sugar and cotton, which was then sent to the north to be made into clothing or other fabrics. Mcpherson analyzes the differences
Imagine a historian, author of an award-winning dissertation and several books. He is an experienced lecturer and respected scholar; he is at the forefront of his field. His research methodology sets the bar for other academicians. He is so highly esteemed, in fact, that an article he has prepared is to be presented to and discussed by the United States’ oldest and largest society of professional historians. These are precisely the circumstances in which Ulrich B. Phillips wrote his 1928 essay, “The Central Theme of Southern History.” In this treatise he set forth a thesis which on its face is not revolutionary: that the cause behind which the South stood unified was not slavery, as such, but white supremacy. Over the course of fourteen elegantly written pages, Phillips advances his thesis with evidence from a variety of primary sources gleaned from his years of research. All of his reasoning and experience add weight to his distillation of Southern history into this one fairly simple idea, an idea so deceptively simple that it invites further study.
In the historical narrative Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, Nicholas Leman gives readers an insight into the gruesome and savage acts that took place in the mid-1870s and eventually led to the end of the Reconstruction era in the southern states. Before the engaging narrative officially begins, Lemann gives a 29-page introduction to the setting and provides background information about the time period. With Republican Ulysses S. Grant as President of the United States of America and Republican Adelbert Ames, as the Governor of Mississippi, the narrative is set in a town owned by William Calhoun in the city of Colfax, Louisiana. As a formal military commander, Ames ensured a
Bayard’s Search for Subjective Truth in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished. Unlike Sarty Snopes in “Barn Burning”, the narrator of The Unvanquished leads a somewhat existential life. Sarty takes an objectively moral stance when abandoning his abusive father.
War and Grief in Faulkner’s Shall Not Perish and The Unvanquished. It is inevitable when dealing regularly with a subject as brutal as war, that death will occur. Death brings grief for the victim’s loved ones, which William Faulkner depicts accurately and fairly in many of his works, including the short story “Shall Not Perish” and The Unvanquished.
Johnson, Claudia. "The Secret Courts of Men's Hearts: Code and Law in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird." Studies in American Fiction (1991):129-139.
Imagine yourself wrongly convicted of a crime. You spent years in jail awaiting your release date. It finally comes, and when they let you out, they slap handcuffs around your wrists and tell you every single action you do. In a nutshell, that’s how the Black Code works. The southerners wanted control over the blacks after the Civil War, and states created their own Black Codes. After
In the novel, A Light in August, William Faulkner introduces us to a wide range of characters of various backgrounds and personalities. Common to all of them is the fact that each is type cast into a certain role in the novel and in society. Lena is the poor, white trash southern girl who serves to weave the story together. Hightower is the fanatic preacher who is the dark, shameful secret of Jefferson. Joanna Burden is the middle-aged maiden from the north who is often accused of being a “nigger-lover”. And Joe Christmas is the epitome of an outsider. None of them are conventional, everyday people. They are all in some way disjointed from society; they do not fit in with the crowd. That is what makes them intriguing and that is why Faulkner documents their story.
The South has always been known for its farming economy, confederate tendencies, family pride, and delicate females in ruffled dresses. In the book To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, the South's familiar traditions become ostensible as a theme throughout the plot. This novel takes place in Alabama in the 1930s and tells a story about a lawyer who defends a wrongly accused black man while trying to raise his two children, Scout and Jem, as they go through life's most active learning stage. Southern ways enhance the plot of the story and give a realistic and historic perspective to the book. This portrayal of Southern culture appears in various forms of racism, hatred, meek women, and family.
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.
To Kill a Mockingbird, the novel by Harper Lee embodies a work of Southern literature, set in the 1930s in a small town in Alabama. The book’s genre exemplifies a coming-of-age historical fiction story. The narrator, a young girl named Scout Finch, describes the lessons she and her brother Jem learn when their father, a lawyer named Atticus, defends an African American man who stands accused of raping a white woman. The novel’s premise revolves around the efforts of a father raising his children and guiding them in their moral development. Along the way, the book deals with the themes of courage, prejudice and maturity. These three concepts are defined differently by Atticus than by most of the other people in the town where he lives. According to Atticus, courage means doing what remains as right and resisting what remains as wrong, even if other people oppose you. In contrast to the prejudice of the townspeople, Atticus believes it important to treat everyone equally. Maturity, in Atticus’ view, refers to having a sense of conscience and seeking to protect those who remain innocent. As these definitions show, Atticus Finch displays a strong sense of ethics. His goal as a parent remains to pass his values on to his children. This paper will argue that Scout and Jem learn the true meanings of courage, prejudice and maturity through the influence of their father and the example he sets for them.
In the early 1900s, the American South had very distinctive social classes: African Americans, poor white farmers, townspeople, and wealthy aristocrats. This class system is reflected in William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, where the Bundrens a poor, white family, are on a quest to bury their now deceased wife and mother, Addie in the town of Jefferson. Taking a Marxist criticism approach to As I Lay Dying, readers notice how Faulkner’s use of characterization reveals how country folk are looked down upon by the wealthy, upper class townspeople.
The Unvanquished is composed of a series of stories during which Bayard Sartoris, the narrator, grows up from a twelve-year-old boy to a young man of twenty-four years. The narrative style makes it obvious that events are being related by an adult who is looking back at his past. There are several indications of this: in the very first story “Ambuscade”, the narrator, while describing his war games with his coloured friend, Ringo, states: “We were just twelve then”. (5) He tells the readers how they fantasized about the military exploits of John Sartoris, Bayard’s father, seeing them as heroic and exciting adventures. The narrator describes himself and Ringo at this stage of the novel as “the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane” (7), drawing attention to the fact that while the two boys are positioned in the midst of war with all its attendant destruction and insanity, they have no understanding of its horror.
William Faulkner’s "A Rose for Emily" is perhaps his most famous and most anthologized short story. From the moment it was first published in 1930, this story has been analyzed and criticized by both published critics and the causal reader. The well known Literary critic and author Harold Bloom suggest that the story is so captivating because of Faulkner’s use of literary techniques such as "sophisticated structure, with compelling characterization, and plot" (14). Through his creative ability to use such techniques he is able to weave an intriguing story full of symbolism, contrasts, and moral worth. The story is brief, yet it covers almost seventy five years in the life of a spinster named Emily Grierson. Faulkner develops the character Miss Emily and the events in her life to not only tell a rich and shocking story, but to also portray his view on the South’s plight after the Civil War. Miss Emily becomes the canvas in which he paints the customs and traditions of the Old South or antebellum era. The story “A Rose For Emily” becomes symbolic of the plight of the South as it struggles to face change with Miss Emily becoming the tragic heroin of the Old South.
In the Unvanquished, a version of southern masculinity is developed through the narrator using dialect and the device, or should I say vice of memory. Fairly early in the novel, the reflective standpoint of the narrator becomes obvious, and a certain sense of “retelling” the story, not just telling it as it happened, prevails. This use of memory is not necessarily selective but it does show the processing of perceptions of the narrator’s childhood. As readers, we first get the sense that we are hearing the story from a much older Bayard when he drops comments like “I was just twelve then; I didn’t know triumph; I didn’t even know the word” (Unvanquished 5). If he was just twelve then, he could be just fifteen or sixteen when retelling this story, assuming the grandiosity that adolescence creates, leading to such thoughts as “I was just a kid then.” However, the second part of the statement reveals a much older and wiser voice, the voice of someone who has had time to think out such abstractions as triumph and failure. Furthermore, the almost obsessive description of the father in the first part of the novel seems like the narrator comes to terms, much later in life, with how he viewed his father as a man. “He was not big” (9) is repeated twice on the same page. He was short enough to have his sabre scrape the steps while ascending (10), yet he appeared large and in command, especially when on his horse (13). The shape and size of a man being an important part in defining masculinity, I think Baynard grappled with his father’s physical presence as well as his tenuous position as a leader in the Confederate Army. Other telling moments are on page 66 when Baynard postulates what a child can accept as true in such incredible situations and on page 95 with his declarations on the universality of war. (Possibly he is an old man now and has lived to see other wars.) Upon realizing the distance between the setting of the story and age of its narrator, the reader is forced to consider how memory and life itself have affected the storytelling.