Writing an essay on William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and working through some thoughts...
We'll never get away from Faulkner, even as we begin to address the controversy of whether or not we should be reading him. My university recently replaced a literature course on Faulkner with a course on disabled voices in the field of literature. I'm happy to see the inclusion of diversity, but since I'm reading his works in my class on modernism, I actually think there's a lot to be learned from his collection. In my class, we're reading his short story alongside works like Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright, so I recognize the difference between exclusively reading Faulkner and reading Faulkner alongside black voices. One glorifies him, and one acknowledges his influence in the literary canon as well as analyzes his failings.
The issue is that Faulkner is a white man who writes about white people. There is only so much he says, or can say, about slavery without explicitly writing about black characters, something he mostly avoids doing. I think the best way to read Faulkner is not on its own but as one of many in the canon of literature written about the post-Antebellum South.
The thesis of my essay (if y'all can pray that I get a good grade please) is that Faulkner sets out to criticize the South for the Lost Cause narrative that painted the Civil War as a great tragedy for the South and glossed over the horrors of slavery, but also that in doing so, he falls victim to his own criticisms. Because his stories are about white people and how slavery was like some sort of poison root causing the demise of the white Antebellum South, he ends up actually whitewashing the South. His argument is supposed to be that slavery undermined the South's success, but he kind of forgets that there are black people in the South whose success was also undermined by slavery, and just talks about white people interacting with white people. So his criticism is that white people are whitewashing the Civil War, but he ends up whitewashing his stories. And so on.
Probably not new thoughts for anyone who has studied Faulkner before, but something I wanted to hash out anyway.