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Hans de Kanter
Finalt draft MA Thesis
Dr. G. Moore
June 29, 2012
Commercialization and Deforestation: The Economy of William Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha
With Flags in the Dust, originally published in an edited version as Sartoris in 1929, William
Faulkner introduced his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which would serve as setting for
the majority of his work. Fifteen novels and numerous short stories later, the story of
Yoknapatawpha covers the history of the American Deep South, ranging from the Indian and
Antebellum period to the end of the first half of the twentieth century. In his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech, Faulkner claimed that only “the problems of the human heart in conflict
with itself” is worth writing about. Not surprisingly, the stories set in Yoknapatawpha are
more than anything stories about the county’s inhabitants and their (inner)conflicts and
struggles. However, the (changing) economy operates as an ever-present force in the
background of these stories, and often plays an important role in the struggles of Faulkner’s
characters. Already starting at the time of the first white settlers, economic motives and
demands have left their mark on Yoknapatawpha’s history, and stand at the basis of the
disappearance of the Chickasaw Indians from their native soil. Important changes within the
Yoknapatawphan economy are caused by the Civil- and First World Wars, since they
influenced both the (economic) dreams of the county’s inhabitants, and stimulated
commercialism and mechanization, while the destruction of the wilderness and conquest of
the land for economic progress is a recurring theme throughout the history of
Yoknapatawpha. The economy and economic developments are not only essential for
understanding the struggles and conflicts of Faulkner’s characters, but also stand at the basis
of both the birth and death of Yoknapatawpha itself.
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“Put it in the book”, is the simple solution, offered by the merchant Ratcliffe, for the
first financial crisis that the early Yoknapatawpha settlers experience (Requiem for a Nun,
18). This crisis, sparked by the loss of a fifteen-pound lock belonging to the mail carrier
Pettigrew, and by extension belonging to the state, eventually results in the naming of the
settlement, Jefferson, after Pettigrew’s middle name (25-26). The book Ratcliffe refers to is a
ledger
in which accrued, with the United States as debtor, in Mohataha’s name (the
Chickasaw matriarch, Ikkemotubbe’s mother […] ) the crawling tedious list of calico
and gunpowder, whiskey and salt and snuff and denim and pants and osseous candy
drawn from Ratcliffe’s shelves by her descendents and subjects and Negro slaves.
(18-19)
According to the narrator, Ratcliffe’s solution not only solved the problem but “abolished it;
and not just that one, but all problems, from now on into perpetuity, opening to their vision
like the rending of the veil, like a glorious prophecy, the vast splendid limitless panorama of
America” (18). The christening of the settlement can be seen as the last step of its founding,
which started with the Chickasaw agency trading post around 1800, and was pushed further
when Quentin Compson traded his race horse with Ikkemotubbe, the native Chickasaw chief,
for a square mile of land, around which the settlement would expand (12). Thus the founding
of Jefferson, and the colonization of Yoknapatawpha, is based on two economic principles: on
the one hand the acquisition of Indian land or wilderness, and on the other hand the creation
of a debt structure.
In Faulkner’s County, Don H. Doyle offers a grim picture of the trading-scene
between the Mississippi settlers and the indigenous Indians. Doyle points out that the first
white traders were successful in “cultivating a market culture among Chickasaws” and
“increasing Chickasaw consumer appetite,” prompting them to purchase and trade goods
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based on a “specific, accountable value,” instead of simply exchanging gifts (30). The
artificial commercial desires of the Indians far outweighed their needs. This became not only
apparent through the Indians favor for luxury consumer items, but also through their
purchases of slaves, since the Chickasaw had no need for slaves, at least not in relation to the
number of slaves they bought. In Faulkner’s short story “Red Leaves,” this surplus of slave
labor among the Indians serves as backdrop for the story and is mentioned explicitly when
Three Baskets tells his companion; “In the old days there were no quarters, no Negroes. A
man’s time was his own then. He had time. Now he must spend most of it finding work for
them who prefer sweating to do” (Collected Stories, 314).
The excessive consumer habits of the Indians would prove to be their downfall, and
not just because liquor became the main good they traded for, but because their land became
the valuable property they traded with (Doyle, 31, 37, 42). Doyle notes about Faulkner’s
Indians that they “are dispossessed of Yoknapatawpha only after they embrace the conceit
that it is theirs to sell” (46). This image of the Indians losing their land through excessive
consumption appears in Requiem for a Nun, when Mohataha, Ikkemotubbe’s mother, sings
the papers forfeiting her native land;
[...] seated in a rocking chair beneath a French parasol held by a Negro slave girl, old
Mohataha would come to town on Saturdays (and came that last time to set her capital
X on the paper which ratified the dispossession of her people forever, coming in the
wagon that time too, barefoot as always but in the purple silk dress which her son,
Ikkemotubbe, had brought her back from France, and a hat crowned with the royal
colored plume of a queen, beneath the slave-held parasol still with another female
slave child squatting on her other side holding the crusted slippers which she had
never been able to get her feet into, and in the bag of the wagon the petty rest of the
unmarked Empire flotsam her son had brought to her which was small enough to be
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moved; driving for the last time out of the woods into the dusty widening before
Ratcliffe’s store where the Federal land agent and his marshal waited for her with the
paper. (185-186)
Mohataha’s clothes and slaves reflect Doyle’s comments concerning the consumer habits of
the Mississippi Indians. While Mohataha’s French dress, imitating the attire of European
royalty, underlines the Indians’ desire for luxury goods, her two slave girls embody the
surplus of slave labor. Holding slippers can be seen as a form of work that Three Baskets
lamented having to spend time on to come up with. Ratcliffe’s store as location of Mohataha’s
final act on Yoknapatawphan soil is not without significance either. After all, his store, which
provided the Indians with the liquor, clothing and candy which they eagerly pulled off his
shelves, played an important role in the acquisition of Indian land.
Compson is the second white man, after Louis Grenier, to acquire land in
Yoknapatawpha, and the manner in which he does so presages the county’s future. After all,
where Grenier “was granted the first big land patent” (Requiem for a Nun, 7), Compson
bought his land from the natives. He is in this sense the first land speculator in
Yoknapatawpha, since he is the first pioneer to put a price tag on a piece of land, and by doing
so turns it into a commodity, a sellable item. Before his arrival this land had been, if not
ownerless, at least a common resource. Comspon’s purchase of the land is at the same time
also a first, though probably unintended, act of removing the Indians from their native soil and
from the emerging economy of Yoknapatawpha. Compson gives Ikkemotubbe his racehorse
as payment for the land. A racehorse is not only a luxury good, but also to some extent the
automobile’s predecessor. The relation between (race)horse and car is made explicit in The
Reivers, one of Faulkner’s most comical novels, when Ned McCaslin, the Priest’s black
coachman, trades Grandfather Priest’s car, one of the first to arrive in Yoknapatawpha, for a
racehorse in Memphis. Throughout the Yoknapatawpha novels, Faulkner often mentions the
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disappearance of the wilderness in favor of farmlands and economic progress. The automobile
functions in his work as the epitome of this consumerism and money driven progress. Thus
where Grenier’s plantation embodies the start of the destruction of the wilderness in favor of
farmland, Compson’s payment of the racehorse for the land can already be read as a first step
towards the destruction of the wilderness in favor of consumerism and mobility.
Ratcliffe’s solution for the lost lock foreshadows the economic development of
Yoknapatawpha. He refers to the ledger as a way to sell on credit, which presages the
economy based on debt peonage and buying on credit that can be found in Yoknapatawpha
after the Civil War. Ratcliffe’s own descendent, whose last name has changed to Ratliff by
then, still upholds this credit system in his activities as a travelling salesman, since he sells
sewing machines on credit to people who could otherwise not afford it. And Loosh Peabody,
Jefferson’s and Yoknapatawpha’s corpulent doctor also operates under this system. In As I
Lay Dying, Peabody asks Anse Bundren if he ever heard of him “worrying a fellow before he
was ready to pay?” (39). In Flags in the Dust Faulkner attributes an even more altruistic work
ethic to Peabody, since the narrator points out that the doctor has not kept a daybook for forty
years, but instead accepts for fee a meal, fruit or flower bulbs, and that “from time to time a
countryman enters his shabby office and discharges an obligation, commemorating sometimes
the payer’s entry into the world, incurred by his father or grandfather and which Dr. Peabody
himself had long since forgotten about” (102). Thus the system of purchasing on credit is not
confined to commercial transactions only.
The system of debt peonage is an essential aspect in The Hamlet: the first part of the
Snopes trilogy set in Frenchman’s Bend, a hamlet in Yoknapatawha named after and located
at Louis Grenier’s ruined plantation. Will Varner, the patriarch of Frenchman’s Bend, rents
land and sells products on credit at high prices to poor farmers, and by doing so keeps them
subjugated. When Flem Snopes, who will eventually become an economic powerhouse within
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the Jefferson community, becomes a clerk in Varner’s store he abolishes the credit system,
which leads to the comical moment where he makes Will Varner pay, in front of several
customers, for tobacco from his own store (The Hamlet, 60). In An Economy of Complex
Words, Richard Godden comments on Flem’s decision to refuse store credit:
[…] read from the perspective of 1940, his decision is at one with the regional shift
from “debt” to “wage,” and so is the act of a financial innovator. Varner, we are told,
races to the store to reassert the credit option; for him to do anything less would be to
connive at the subversion of “cropping” as a system for the coercion of a low-paid
work force. Varner needs his tenants and croppers in debt, the extent of their debt
being the extent of his control, and so his profit. (18)
Godden’s comment underlines the importance of the credit system for Varner. However, he
fails to specify why Flem refuses store credit. Flem’s advantage in doing so lies with his own
role as a money-lender. After all, within a short time after his appointment as store clerk “it
was generally known that any sum between twenty-five cents and ten dollars could be
borrowed from him at any time, if the borrower agreed to pay enough for the
accommodation” (67-68). In other words, with its credit system Varner’s store was operating
in the same market as Flem. Refusing store credit is one of Flem’s first acts that reveals him
as a cunning businessman, cunning that would eventually lead him to become President of the
Sartoris Bank in Jefferson.
One of Faulkner’s concerns was the decay of the American dream. His plan to write a
book aptly titled The American Dream was never completed, although one of the intended
chapters was published as an essay entitled: “On Privacy, The American Dream: What
happened to It?“ (Hamblin, 265). In this essay, Faulkner describes the American dream as;
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a sanctuary on the earth for individual man: a condition in which he could be free not
only of the old established closed-corporation hierarchies of arbitrary power which had
oppressed him as a mass, but free of that mass into which the hierarchies of church
and state compressed and held him individually thrilled and individually impotent. (1)
Faulkner attributes a dream to some of the most prominent characters in his works. John
Sartoris’ dream can be related to his railroad (Flags in the Dust, 44) and the progress of
Yoknapatawpha (The Unvanquished, 277-278), while the dreams of Louis Grenier, (The
Hamlet, 4) and Thomas Sutpen are directly related to the land. In The Unvanquished, Bayard
Sartoris tells his stepmother, Drusilla, about a meeting between his father and Sutpen, in
which Sartoris attempts to persuade Sutpen to take his side against carpet-baggers;
Father said, “Are you with us or against us?” and he said, “I’m for my land. If every
man of you would rehabilitate his own land, the country will take care of itself,” […]
Nobody could have more of a dream than that. (277)
Sutpen’s dream fits seamlessly with Faulkner’s description of the American dream. He
refuses, after all, to be contained by a political force, and focuses on his individual freedom.
Many critics have interpreted Absalom, Absalom!, the novel which depicts Sutpen’s
rise from poverty to plantation ownership, as a novel about the American dream. Fred
Hobson, for example, claims that it is “a novel about the American dream just as fully as The
Great Gatsby is a novel about that dream” (5). However, Sutpen is only able to establish his
plantation through the labor of his slaves and the services of a captive French architect.
Sutpen controls this labor savagely, hunting down the architect after he attempts to flee
through the swamps, and fighting with his slaves. Richard Godden points out that Sutpen’s
“fights with Haitian slaves embody his recognition that slavery rests on a continuous
repression of revolution.” (Fictions of Labor, 56) Yet Sutpen himself is as much a slave to his
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dream as he forces the Haitians and the Frenchman to be. After all, he works alongside his
slaves in the mud and sleeps together with his slaves at night under the open sky, until his
plantation and manor have been created. Thus Sutpen’s dream of individual freedom is,
hypocritically, based on collective slavery.
While John Sartoris’ dream differs from Thomas Sutpen’s dream, Louis Grenier’s
dream, or at least the execution of it, appears to be quite similar. Grenier remains at all times a
legendary figure of the past. His importance lies in what he has left behind; a legend, a ruined
plantation and a hamlet carrying his nickname. His plantation was not only similar to Sutpen’s
Hundred in both splendor and sheer size, but was also built up with an enormous amount of
slave labor. Faulkner does not offer much insight into Grenier’s past, but when the narrator of
The Hamlet points out that “all that remained of him was the river bed which his slaves had
straightened for almost ten miles to keep his land from flooding […] (4), it is clear that the
labor his slaves put into his plantation even exceeded that of Sutpen’s slaves.
John Sartoris’ dream is also a dream of freedom, but he acts, unlike Sutpen from a
collective point of view. To Bayard’s claim that nobody could have more of a dream than
Sutpen, Drusilla responds with; “But his dream is just Sutpen. John’s is not. He is thinking of
this whole country which he is trying to raise by its boot-straps” (277). She also defends
Sartoris’ assassination of two carpet-baggers by pointing out that “They were Northerners,
foreigners who had no business here” (278). In other words, she defends Sartoris’ action by
pointing out that it was an act of freeing Yoknapatawpha from political, Northern
interference. Sartoris’ dream is not expressed in the creation of his plantation, but through the
construction of a railroad that will benefit the whole county. His belief in his dream is so
strong that he even risks ending up in the poorhouse for it (The Unvanquished, 280).
However, the dreams of Sartoris, Sutpen and Grenier cannot resist changing times. Grenier’s
plantation ends up in ruins (The Hamlet, 4), while Sartoris is killed over a dispute related to
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his railroad before he can complete his dream himself. Sutpen’s dream is initially destroyed
because of the Civil War, which decimates his hundred acres to one. After he has rebuilt his
plantation his own past destroys both him and his dream.
The American dream of freedom and prosperity, as represented through Sutpen,
Sartoris and Grenier, dies quickly after the Civil War. When Will Varner, the owner of the
Old Frenchman’s place around the turn of the century, tells Ratliff that he likes to sit at the old
plantation house because he is “trying to find out what it must have felt like to be the fool that
would need all this” (The Hamlet, 7), it is evident that Varner is living in a different time
period, in which the old dream is no longer accessible. In Faulkner and the Civil War: Myth
and Reality, D.T. Millar notes;
In the author’s canon the Southern struggle from 1861 to 1865 is the major turning
point, forming a watershed between the Old South of the planter-aristocrats—the
Sartorises, Sutpens and Compsons—and the post-bellum South dominated by the
Snopeses and the Popeyes. (319)
Faulkner hardly attributes a dream to any of his 20th century characters. However, one
character who does have a dream is Flem Snopes; but his dream is very different from the
dreams of the old “planter-aristocrats”. In a commentary on Arthur Miller’s Death of a
Salesman, Merrit Mosely points out that the American dream has experienced a change in
meaning over time;
The historical American dream is the promise of a land of freedom with opportunity
and equality for all. This dream needs no challenge, only fulfillment. But since the
Civil War, and particularly since 1900, the American dream has become distorted to
the dream of business success. A distinction must be made even in this. The original
premise of our dream of success –[…] – was that enterprise, courage and hard work
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were the keys to success. Since the end of the First World War this too changed.
Instead of the ideals of hard work and courage, we have salesmanship. Salesmanship
implies a certain element of fraud: the ability to put over or sell a commodity is to
make a deal, to earn a profit – the accumulation of profit being an unquestioned end in
itself. (212-213)
The dreams of Sutpen, Sartoris and Grenier fit seamlessly with Mosely’s description of the
“original premise” of the dream. After all, they worked hard and risked much in order to build
their plantations and railroad. However, not only the old dream, but also the 20th century
implementation of it can, through Flem Snopes, be retraced in Faulkner’s work. Flem’s dream
seems to be solely based on the accumulation of money. And he employs the exact means
which Mosley identifies as the common demeanor which leads to the realization of the
modern dream. Flem is the epitome of salesmanship in its worst connotation. He enters any
line of business in which he thinks he can make a profit by selling, ranging from cattle
trading, real estate and banking to brass theft and restaurant exploitation. Whatever he is
selling, there is always an element of fraud involved, whether it is the dubious quality of the
meat in his hamburgers (The Town, 33), or the wild nature of his spotted Texan horses. And
just as in Mosely’s description, Flem’s ultimate goal appears to be solely the accumulation of
money.
However, Flem also symbolizes the emptiness related to this shallow dream of wealth.
His last years are spent between the interior of the bank and the chair in front of the fireplace
in his mansion. Gavin Stevens refers to this mansion as;
the vast dim home-made columned loom of [Flem’s] dream, nightmare, monstrous
hope or terrified placatement, whichever it was, whatever it had been; the cold
mausoleum in which old Snopes had immolated that much of his money at least
without grace or warmth. (The Mansion, 394)
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Noel Polk argues that “In The Mansion—and in the mansion—Flem confronts the emptiness
of the American dream, which he has so masterfully succeeded in realizing” (26). It is clear
that Flem’s dream has become a nightmare. His mansion, which symbolizes the completion of
his dream, is almost literally empty. Even though he has attempted to give it an external look
of grandeur by constructing columns at the front of it, the only internal change he makes is
nailing a wooden plank on the fireplace on which he can rest his feet. The fact that he spends
his evening sitting there without doing anything, or without anyone to share his wealth with,
apart from his estranged daughter with whom he does not have much contact, indicates the
emptiness that he is left with after he has fulfilled his dream.
Douglas T. Miller argues that “In the broadest sense most of Faulkner’s fiction is
concerned with the defeat of the South or the effects of that defeat” (316). The Civil War had
a devastating effect on the economy of the South. In The South During Reconstruction, E.
Merton Coulter points out that;
Tennessee and Mississippi lay in ruins wherever armies had marched. Alabama
claimed destructions amounting to $300,000,000 and the cane planters alone in
Louisiana suffered losses set at $100,000,000. […] Total material destruction
throughout the South has been estimated in billions of dollars. (2)
Coulter describes the destruction of two thirds of the Southern railroad system (3), the
evaporation of hundreds of millions of insurance money and bank capital (4), and a decrease
in both farmland and livestock which would take decades to restore to antebellum quantities
(4-5). These issues are to some extent reflected in the economy of Yoknapatawpha. After all,
the Old Frenchman’s plantation has “reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their
first master had hewed them” (The Hamlet, 3), and the railroad which Ringo so desperately
wants to see has been destroyed when he, Bayard and Granny pass through Hawkhurts (The
Unvanquished, 96-97). Coulter’s remark that “the hairpin and corkscrew methods, heating the
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rails and twisting then around trees, had been most effective” (3) mirrors Ringo’s exclamation
when he finally lays his eyes on the railroad; “You mean hit have to come in here and run up
and down around here trees like a squirrel?” (106). Miller points out that “much of Faulkner’s
descriptive detail [has] a valid base in historical reality” (318). He mentions the aimlessly
wandering negroes, gangs of lawless, plundering men, and widespread destruction of
property, all of which can be retraced in The Unvanquished.
However, for all these similarities, Faulkner differentiates Yoknapatawpha in one
important respect from the reality of the early post-bellum South. In Requiem for a Nun, the
narrator mentions that “on New Year’s Day, 1865, while the rest of the South sat staring at the
northeast horizon beyond which Richmond lay, like a family staring at the closed door to a
sick-room, Yoknapatawpha County was already nine months gone in reconstruction” (204).
This fast reconstruction of Yoknapatawpha can to a great extent be attributed to the return of
John Sartoris and Thomas Sutpen. Even though the South has lost the war, their dreams are
still alive. Sutpen quickly turns to re-establishing his ruined plantation, and Sartoris focuses
his efforts on the creation of his railroad. Their active rebuilding of Jefferson and
Yoknapatawpha can be contrasted with the passive attitude which Faulkner attributes to the
rest of the South. While they are waiting, the people of Yoknapatawpha take an active hand in
rebuilding their county themselves. Another person who enables Yoknapatawpha to
commence with their reconstruction far ahead of the rest of the South is Redmond, John
Sartoris’ partner in the railroad company. Although he is first described as a rapacious
carpetbagger ahead of his time, it is eventually thanks to “no small portion of the fruit of his
rapacity” that Yoknapatawpha experiences the influx of money needed to restore the town and
construct the railroad (Requiem for a Nun, 205). Thus the fast restoration of Yoknapatawpha
takes places thanks to a combination of Southern enterprise and Northern capital.
However, the reconstruction of Yoknapatawpha by no means starts with the return of
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the old, legendary plantation owners or the arrival of Redmond, but with the entrepreneur-ship
of Bayard, Granny, Ringo, and, at least to some extent, Ab Snopes. In The Unvanquished, this
motley crew devices a plan in which Ringo, Granny and Bayard cheat companies of Union
soldiers out of mules, only to have Ab sell them back to them. This scheme is so successful,
and Granny so generous with the profits, that, as Bayard comments: “she had made
independent and secure almost everyone in the county save herself and her own blood” (186).
An important scene takes place in the church, where Granny divides and redistributes the
profits, both money and mules, among the poor “hill folks” and a dozen negroes “that had got
free by accident” (165-170). Granny not only notes down in a heavy book what she distributes
to whom, but also makes the receivers confess what they have done with the money and how
productive the mules have been, and even redistributes the mules to other people. Thus she
becomes the matriarch of an almost communist community, which she lifts from poverty to
financial security. A central role within these proceedings is performed by the ledger in which
Granny notes down all the transactions and promises. Bayard describes it as a “big blank
account book” weighing “almost fifteen pounds” (169). The lost lock that sparked the birth of
Jefferson, and whose value was eventually “put in the book”, also weighed fifteen pounds.
This creates a link between the construction of Jefferson around 1800, and the reconstruction
of Yoknapatapwha around the end of the Civil War. This similarity indicates that it is indeed
Granny Millard who stands at the basis of the reconstruction or rebirth of post Civil War
Yoknapatawpha.
Also the First World War influences the economy of Yoknapatawpha. Especially
Flags in the Dust, but also The Town and As I Lay Dying deal, at least to some extent, with
this war. The first World War can of course not be compared with the Civil War in terms of
its impact on the South. What is however a remarkable difference in the way in which
Faulkner deals with it, is the attitude of the soldiers who return home from the war. Where
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Sartoris, Compson and Sutpen immediately turn to rebuilding their plantations and the
economy of Yoknapatawpha, most of the prominent characters who return from the European
front seem to fall outside, and obstruct, the existing economic structures. Bayard Sartoris is
arguably the most prominent example. The war, and the loss of his twin brother during that
war, affect him to such an extent that he fills his days with reckless driving and drinking. His
destructive ride through Jefferson on the wild horse and his involvement in the death of his
grandfather, the president of the Sartoris bank, indicate that after his return from the war he
poses a threat to the economic structure of Jefferson. After all, the death of Old Bayard opens
the way for Flem Snopes to become vice president of the Sartoris bank1. This means, in
socioeconomic terms, that young Bayard’s post-war recklessness enables a shift from the old
Southern code of honor, integrity and courage, which Miller attributes to old Bayard (322), to
the new individual dream of profit and wealth, as represented by Flem, within the Sartoris
bank.
Also Darl Bundren (As I Lay Dying) and Montgomery Ward Snopes (The Town)
become a hindrance to the economy, albeit in quite distinct ways that are related through
sexual taboos. During the Bundrens journey to Jefferson, Darl sets Gillespie’s barn on fire in
an attempt to burn the troublesome remains of his mother, and by doing so end the farce
which his family is going through. His arson results in his capture and dispatch to the asylum.
On the train to this asylum, Darl mentions a spy glass he got in France during the war, which
depicts a scene between a pig and a woman in an act of bestiality (241). The fact that his
thoughts turn to this spy glass during his moment of greatest insanity indicates that the spy
glass and the war, which are intrinsically connected with each other, are at least to some
extent a reason for his madness. According to Darl’s older brother Cash “nothing excuses
1
There exists a discrepancy between Flags in the Dust and The Town. In Flags in the Dust, Flem
Snopes is already vice president of the Sartoris bank at the time of Old Bayard’s death, while in The
Town he becomes vice president after Bayard’s demise. Either way, Bayard’s death either enabled or
strengthened Flem’s position as vice-president.
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setting fire to a man’s barn and endangering his stock and destroying his property. That’s how
I reckon a man is crazy” (220). By setting fire to Gillespie’s barn some time after his return
from France, Darl has become an threat to the agricultural productivity which stands at the
basis of Yoknapatawpha’s economy. Also Montgomery Ward Snopes brings sexual images
from France over to Yoknapatawpha. He opens a secret lantern show in which he shows his
pornographic cards to paying customers. One of those customers is Grover Windbush, the
town’s night marshal, who also happens to be in Montgomery’s atelier during the robbery of
Willy Christian’s drugstore, which he would have been able to prevent, or at least oppose if
he had just been on duty. Thus where Darl has become a threat to the agricultural side of the
economy, Montgomery Ward Snopes has become a threat, although indirectly, to the
commercial side.
There are several occasions in which sex is directly related to consumerism. The most
outspoken example is when Gavin Stevens says;
The American really loves nothing but his automobile: not his wife his child not his
country nor even his bank account first (in fact he doesn’t really love that bank
account nearly as much as foreigners like to think because he will spend almost any or
all of it for almost anything provided it is valueless enough) but his motorcar. Because
the automobile has become our national sex symbol. (Intruder in the Dust, 238-239)
Stevens paints a dark picture of the American consumerism, in which the automobile has
become the epitome of a culture in which spending money has become more important than
family relations. By relating love and, especially, sex to the automobile, a connection is
established between consumerism and sexual pleasure. And Montgomery Ward Snopes is,
more than any other, the character who symbolizes this. As Ted Ownby points out,
“Montgomery Ward was a large department store that began in the 1870s to distribute the
nation’s first mail-order catalogue, offering to rural people a variety of goods never before
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available outside urban areas” (116). Although the first names of the Snopeses are not always
a trustworthy indication of their economic representation, since Wallstreet Panic Snopes with
his stable and profitable grocery store belies the economic chaos which his name carries,
Montgomery Ward’s name indicates the consumerist notions which he himself promotes. He
sells his customers something without any value at all, and which will in itself never be able
to fulfill the sexual desires of his customers, which is indeed that empty form of consumerism
Stevens attributes to his fellow countrymen.
Post-war consumerism is also illustrated by Horace Benbow. He returns from the war
not long after Bayard, and although he is able to quickly return to his profession as a lawyer,
he appears to bring consumerism in his wake. Horace brings a valuable and delicate glass
blowing machine back from France, which he uses only a few times. The fact that he uses this
machine to create a vase which he names after his sister Narcissa (with whom he has an
almost incestuous relation), and refers to as “thou still unravished bride of quietude” (190191), offers once again a connection between consumerism and sex. After all, he buys the
glass blowing machine just to create an idol of his sister to put on his night table. After
marrying Belle Mitchell, Horace’s consumerism reaches decadent heights. Not only does he
make weekly walks to the train station in order to pick up a case of shrimp for Belle, who
prefers “shrimp above all foods” (Flags in the Dust, 402-403), he has also “built a new
bungalow in Kinston on borrowed money upon which he was still paying interest”
(Sanctuary, 106), even though he still owns his family home in Jefferson. Thus here we are
presented with an upper class, or at least higher middle class character who is in debt due to
his illogical and exuberant consumerism (which stems from his ‘love’ for his wife and sexual
attraction to his stepdaughter), in contrast to for example the pre-war economy of
Frenchman’s Bend, where only the poor farmers are in debt and not the middle and upper
class farmers and merchants.
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The link between consumerism and the automobile is important to keep in mind when
looking at the impact of young Bayard’s return from the war. Old Bayard Sartoris refuses to
give loans to prospective clients who want to buy an automobile with the loan (The Reivers,
30). Refusing credit is of course a strange attitude from a banker, since charging interest on
lent capital is one of the main sources of income for banks. Bayard’s refusal to provide loans
to aspirant car owners reflects his disdain for the upcoming consumer culture. He is, after all,
one of the last remnants of the old South. Young Bayard, however, immediately becomes a
part of this consumer culture after his return from the war, since he purchases the epitome of
this culture, a race car, in Memphis. The fact that old Bayard’s death is the result of near car
crash between young Bayard’s car and an approaching Ford indicates that it was consumerism
that eventually eradicated the old South.
Another World War One veteran from Flags in the Dust who embodies this transition
to a consumer economy is Caspey. He returns from France with an outspoken disdain for
work, which he already acquired during his time overseas. After all, during his military
service he only did the labor that he was not able to evade (62). However, on his return to the
Sartoris plantation his evasive behavior evolves into a downright refusal to work; “[he]
returned to his native land a total loss, sociologically speaking, with a definite disinclination
toward labor, honest or otherwise” (62). His attitude eventually clashes with old Bayard’s oldSouth mentality when Caspey answers Bayard’s order to saddle the mare with “Aint gwine
skip it, big boy”, which results in Bayard knocking Caspey through the kitchen door (87).
Eventually Caspey’s mutiny is resolved, but what is telling is the way in which this is done.
He learns to drive the tractor, and by doing so contributes once more to the economy of the
Sartoris household. A tractor can be seen, especially in the early 20th century, as the
agricultural equivalent of the car, which means that Caspey too contributes to the rise of
consumer culture. His labor is only available thanks to industrial production.
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The Sartoris’ tractor also represents the agricultural mechanization in the South
following the end of the First World War. David A. Davis points out that in Flags in the Dust,
Faulkner represents Jefferson in 1919 as a community awkwardly adapting to
infrastructural change. The traditional local economy has been destabilized by outside
investment during the war and the effects of mechanization can already be seen in the
disturbed landscape of exhausted land and tract housing. (418)
The disturbance of the landscape in Flags in the Dust is best illustrated by Faulkner’s
description of the town Horace Benbow moves to after marrying Belle Mitchell. This town
expanded, almost overnight, from hamlet to town as a result of the establishment of a
hardwood lumber factory and the lumber concern’s purchase of the nearby cypress swamps
(400). The arrival of the lumber company and the accompanying influx of money attracted
people from neighboring counties who “moved there and chopped all the trees down and built
themselves mile after mile of identical frame houses with garage to match” (400). The arrival
of lumber companies in post war Yoknapatawpha and their effect on the landscape is also
mentioned in Light in August and Go Down Moses, and embodies yet another step in the
changing Yoknapatawhan landscape. This change already started when the first white settlers
arrived in the county.
A recurring theme throughout the (post civil-war) Yoknapatawpha novels is the
destruction of the wilderness. Especially Go Down Moses and Requiem for a Nun foreground
the disappearance of the wilderness, but also in Flags in the Dust, The Town, The Mansion,
The Reivers, Light in August and Sanctuary is this change in the landscape of Yoknapatawpha
mentioned. The removal of the wilderness already starts at the birth of Yoknapatawpha. After
all, Compson, Grenier and Sutpen buy land from the Indians and remove the wilderness in
favor of farmland for their plantations. However, it is especially around the turn of the century
that the wilderness begins to disappear at such an increasingly alarming rate that this
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destruction starts to have an impact on the land and people of Faulkner’s world. One of the
first ‘victims’ of this deforestation are the disappeared Indians, since the narrator’s remark in
Requiem for a Nun that due to the deforestation all the Chickasaw marks were eventually
gone (188), indicates that the destruction of wilderness goes hand in hand with the destruction
of the Indians and their history. The Indian marks, all that was left of them after their removal
to Oklahoma territory, disappear just as the Indians themselves due to the white man’s
preference for cotton and lumber over wilderness.
The wilderness is initially threatened by cotton production, which is especially
conspicuous in Requiem for a Nun; “Cotton: a king: omnipotent and omnipresent: a destiny of
which (obvious now) the plow and the axe had been merely the tools; not plow and axe which
had effaced the wilderness, but Cotton” (195). Yet, at later time period, the role of cotton as
adversary of the wilderness is gradually shared with lumber companies. In “The Bear” chapter
of Go Down Moses, the wilderness is mainly threatened by a lumber company; and in the
words of Jay Watson, Light in August is:
extraordinarily overinvested, from nearly its first page to its last, in a material
economy involving the production and distribution of timber, lumber, and other wood
products and in a signifying economy wherein references to wood and wooden objects
are constantly working their way into the language and imagery of the text. (20)
Faulkner’s opinion about the clearing of the wilderness is double-edged, since he mentions
that it is justifiable when it is done in order to provide more food and education for people,
but when the wilderness is destroyed “just to raise cotton on an agrarian economy of peonage,
slavery” or “to give more people more automobiles just to ride around in”, then “the
wilderness was better” (Faulkner, cited in Gwynn, 277).
When we look at the way in which the wilderness is removed from Yoknapatawpha, it
seems that this is mainly done in favor of cotton and cars, and not for food and education.
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Faulkner offers the reader only one instance of land being sacrificed directly for education. In
The Sound and the Fury, the Compson’s section of land known as Benjy’s pasture is sold so
that Quentin, the oldest son, can attend university. However, Quentin’s suicide turns the sale
of the pasture into a waste. The “Delta Autumn” chapter of Go Down Moses also hints
towards a connection between education and the wilderness, when in a discussion between
Roth Edmonds, Ike McCaslin and several other hunters about the disappearance of game, the
first remarks that “better men hunted it” (244). Roth’s words hint towards a certain decay of
humanity, which has happened alongside the decay of the wilderness. However, the fact that
he later attempts to bribe a relative through Ike, and kills a doe while hunting, indicates that
he himself is, or has become, one of the lesser men. Otis B. Wheeler remarks that Faulkner’s
treatment of the wilderness has “two roles, […]. First, it is the teacher of moral and spiritual
truth; second, it is the victim of the Anglo-Saxon’s rapacity” (1-2). As Wheeler points out,
Faulkner refers in “The Bear” to the wilderness as Ike McCaslin’s “college,” and to the
legendary bear as his “alma mater” (Go Down Moses, 149). With this in mind, it is not strange
that Faulkner mentions education as one of the two justifiable or acceptable goals for the
destruction of the wilderness, since education is part of what is lost by this destruction in the
first place. However, the importance of the wilderness transcends its importance as just a
teacher. In Flags in the Dust it serves as a source of consolation for young Bayard Sartoris,
since he turns to the wilderness in an attempt to deal with the loss of his brother. And in Go
Down Moses, the wilderness is not only an essential element of Ike’s identity and personal
development and education, but is also directly connected with Sam Fathers’ life, since his
own death is connected with the demise of Old Ben, the legendary bear who is described as an
“epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and
hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear” (136-137) .
The savage struggle in which Old Ben finds his demise can be read as a microcosm of
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the destruction of the wilderness in favor of commercial exploits. Old Ben dies at the jaws of
Lion and the knife of Boon Hogganbeck . Boon is not a true hunter like Ike, neither in skill
nor in reverence for the wilderness. In The Reivers, Faulkner puts this contrast between Boon
and Ike in a highly comic perspective when Boon fails to shoot Ludus with five rounds from a
mere twenty feet distance, which results in Ike storming out of his store raging at Boon, not
for shattering a window of his store, but for missing five times from close range (14). The
main character, Lucas Priest, describes “cousin Ike” in this scene as “the best woodsman and
hunter this county ever had”. In contrast, Boon might very well be the worst hunter in
Yoknapatawpha’s history, as not only this scene but also episodes in Go Down Moses
indicate. Yet for all his lack of skill it is Boon, and not a woodsman like Ike, who kills Old
Ben, though he does so in a violent and blunt manner. What is more, it appears that Ike and
his fellow “woodsmen,” Major de Spain, General Comspon, Sam Fathers and McCaslin
Edmonds, are unable to kill Old Ben. He seems, after all, impervious to their bullets.
However, a certain amount of reluctance to kill the bear can also be attributed to Ike. When
Ike is fourteen, and already a better woodsman than the majority of his companions, he
receives a clear shot at the bear but chooses to save a brave (or stupid, since there is often a
fine line between these two in Faulkner’s work) young dog from Old Ben’s reach instead.
Boon, on the other hand, shows nothing like Ike’s reference for the bear.
The reason why Boon is able to kill Old Ben is because of his strong connection with
consumerism. The connection between cars and consumerism has already been established,
and Faulkner’s earlier remark indicates that he perceives a conflict between the wilderness
and automobiles. Of all the Yoknapatawpha characters, not one responds as strongly to cars as
Boon. In The Reivers, Lucas describes the automobile that his grandfather bought, one of the
first to ever show up in Yoknapatawpha, as Boon’s “soul’s mate,” “soul’s lily maid” and
“virgin’s love” (25, 29). Boon’s love for cars, or for Lucas’ grandfather’s car in particular,
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renders him a threat to the wilderness, since it establishes him as a prominent agent of
consumerism. This means that the clash between Old Ben and Boon is not one of the classical
meeting between the individual woodsman and his prey, but a clash between the wilderness
and consumerism in general. However, the confrontation between Boon and Old Ben
indicates the death of the wilderness not only symbolically but also quite literally, since Major
de Spain sells the section of wilderness in which they hunted for Old Ben to a lumber
company not long after the bear’s demise (225). This sale of De Spain’s wilderness to the
lumber company is already foreshadowed when Old Ben falls beneath Boon’s blade; “It
didn’t collapse, crumple. It fell all of a piece, as a tree falls” (171). The death of Old Ben not
only cleared the way for the destruction of “his” wilderness as a whole, but also indicated how
this destruction would come to pass.
The results of economic progress for the land itself are clear, but this destruction of the
jungle has in turn a great influence on those of Faulkner’s characters who are strongly related
to the land. The impact that this destruction has on Sam Fathers’ has already been mentioned,
but the disappearance of the wilderness also affects a more unlikely character, namely Darl
Bundren, the main narrator in As I Lay Dying. Darl differs from his fellow narrators through
his clairvoyance. He is the only character who narrates scenes in which he was not physically
present himself. Faulkner explained Darl’s clairvoyance through his madness (Gwynn, 113).
About Darl’s madness Faulker said;
Darl was mad from the first. He got progressively madder because he didn’t have the
capacity – not so much of sanity but of inertness to resist all the catastrophes that
happened to the family. […]. Darl couldn’t resist it so he went completely off his
rocker. But he was mad all the time. (Faulkner, cited in Gwynn, 110)
In William Faulkner and the Rites of Passage, Christopher A. Lalonde claims that “Darl goes
crazy because of the way the majority of folks, in this case most tellingly his family, looks at
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him and his actions” (89). This seems, however, to be a circular argument, since Darl’s
behavior is also the reason behind this view on him. Lalonde is right in pointing out that
Darl’s madness accumulates as the story progresses, but the locus of his craziness should be
sought elsewhere. One explanation could be that Darl’s madness originates from his military
service during the war in France. In his last narrative his thoughts turn to a spy-glass that he
got in France during the war, whereupon he answers with “Yes yes yes yes yes yes” when he
asks himself if this spy-glass is the reason why he is laughing.
They pulled two seats together so Darl could sit by the window to laugh. One of them
sat beside him, the other sat on the seat facing him, riding backward because the
state’s money had a face to each backside and a backside to each face, and they are
riding on the state’s money which is incest. A nickel has a woman on one side and a
buffalo on the other; two faces and no back. I don’t know what that is. Darl had a little
spy-glass he got in France at the war. In it it had a woman and a pig with two backs
and no face. I know what that is. “Is that why you are laughing, Darl?” “Yes yes yes
yes yes yes.” (241-242)
Although the relation between his madness, which shows itself through his laughter, and the
war, represented by his spy-glass is a plausible one, it does not offer a complete explanation
of his character and madness. It seems however, that Darl’s eyes offer a key to understanding
his insanity. In his fourth narrative, Tull feels uncomfortable when he finds Darl looking at
him after he asked his opinion about the possibility of crossing the flooded bridge;
He is looking at me. He don’t say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of
hisn that makes folk talk. I always say it ain’t never been what he done so much or
said anything so much as how he looks at you. (112)
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Tull links Darl’s madness to his eyes, and claims that his eyes offer more than anything the
confirmation of his madness. Darl’s eyes are on several occasions described by both his
father, Anse, and his sister, Dewey Dell, as “being full of the land” (31, 107), but what does
this land, that fills Darl’s eyes, look like? Anse relates Darl’s madness to the construction of
the road, claiming;
he was all right at first, with his eyes full of the land, because the land laid up-and
down then; it wasn’t till that ere road come and switched the land longways and his
eyes still full of the land, that they begun to threaten me out of him, trying to short
hand me with the law. (31)
Thus according to Anse, it is not the war that sparked Darl’s madness, but the construction of
the road. In As I Lay Dying, the retreat of the wilderness in favor of farmland is not explicitly
mentioned, not at all to the extent as in, for example, Go Down Moses and Requiem for a Nun,
but this deforestation was well underway at the time of the Bundren’s journey to Jefferson.
The faithful river that that the family has to cross is at its highest water level any living man
has seen. Even though there is no direct reference to it in the text, could it be that this highwater mark is at least partly due to erosion caused by the deforestation of the land? In any
case, this quick change in landscape means that the land in Darl’s eyes is not constant either,
but reflects this transition from jungle to farmland too. Tull’s recognition of madness in Darl’s
eyes, combined with Dewey Dell’s and Anse’s claims that Darl’s eyes “are full of the land”
indicates that his madness originates from the destruction of nature in favor of the
economically desired farmland and roads.
Darl’s final narrative also indicates that his madness is related to an economic issue.
He does, after all, not end up at thinking about his spy-glass before he has pondered over the
faces displayed on coins. And when Cash says about Darl’s attempt to burn Addie’s coffin in
Gillespie’s barn that “in a sense it was the value of [Jewel’s] horse Darl tried to burn up”
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(220), it seems that he reads an economic undertone into Darl’s arson. Lalonde points out that
“According to Cash, perverting the economic system, no matter what the reason, is how he
reckon[s] a man is crazy and what determines that “he [the insane individual] cant see eye to
eye with other folks” (90). The value of Jewel’s horse can be determined through the amount
of labor Jewel put into Quick’s land in payment for the horse. And a barn is of course also a
symbol of agricultural labor. This means that Darl’s arson can be read as the defiance of an
economy which destroys the land and wilderness in favor of farmland, since he not only
almost succeeds in burning the value of the labor that Jewel put into the land, but also the
tools and livestock that the barn contains and are needed for the continuation of Gillespie’s
agricultural production.
When Darl points out that the two men on the train with him are riding on the state’s
money, he fails to see that he too is riding on this money. In the 1920s Southern agricultural
economy, an important part of the State’s money is of course derived from agricultural
revenues and taxes. Thus the same money against which Darl revolts by burning the barn and
the value of Jewel’s horse, that money which is to a large extent responsible for the
destruction of the wilderness, is also responsible for removing him from the land and society.
In the eyes of the state, Darl and the wilderness are the same, since they both need to be
removed from the earth in the name of economic progress and stability.
Faulkner crowds the streets of post Civil War Jefferson, and its surrounding hamlets,
with out of town traveling salesmen. They are in general no more than a passive crowd that
observes the affairs of Yoknapatawpha with a fair amount of detachment. Often they merely
function as background in a scene. A typical example of this can be found in Sanctuary, when
Horace Benbow gives Lee Goodwin’s wife a lift to her hotel; “They drew up to the hotel,
where the drummers sat in their chairs along the curb, listening to the singing” (124). The
“sitting”, “listening” drummers have an air of passivity over them. This passive salesman
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reappears often in Faulkner’s world. When Jason Compson, in The Sound and the Fury,
invites a drummer to drink a coca cola with him, all the talking is done by Jason. The
drummer merely serves as an audience for Jason to vent his opinion on the corrupted cotton
market (163-164). There are however several scarce moments when a drummer escapes from
the passivity of his peers, and assumes a more active role within the narrative. One of them is
the salesman in The Hamlet who takes Eula Varner to a dance, another is the one who sells
Lucas Beauchamp the detection device in the “The Fire and the Hearth” chapter of Go Down
Moses. In both instances these uncommonly active salesmen pose a threat to the land.
In An Economy of Complex Words, Richard Godden offers a reading of Eula Varner in
which he compares Ike Snopes’ love for Houston’s cow with the desire of the male population
of Frenchman’s Bend for Will Varner’s daughter. Godden points out that Ike’s desire for the
cow is intrinsically a desire for the earth, and argues that “by association, one strand of the
hamlet’s obsession with Eula involves a desire for intimacy with the soil, focused through the
Frenchman’s place” (56). Godden does not include the drummer in his argument, but it
appears that his interest in Eula is not very different from that of the Bend’s natives. Upon his
first arrival in Frenchman’s Bend, the drummer unsuccessfully attempts to sell Flem a bill of
goods for Varner’s store. However, when he returns for a second time, after presumably
having met Eula at Varner’s house during his first visit to Frenchman’s Bend, he has lost
interest in selling his wares (147). His sole interest has changed to the conquest of Eula’s
body. However, if Eula’s sexuality is based on her relation to the land, then why would the
drummer’s attraction towards her be as strong, if not stronger than that of the local, rural
youths? After all, the salesman goes out of his way to dress as successfully as possible in
order to seduce her, despite the fact that he already “had a wife and family” (147-148). Before
we answer this question, it might prove fruitful to first take a look at the salesman from the
“The Fire and the Hearth” chapter in Go Down Moses, since the similarities between Eula
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Varner’s and Lucas Beauchamp’s drummer are striking.
The drummer with whom Lucas becomes involved shifts his focus, much like Eula’s
salesman, from selling goods to the exploitation of the land. This drummer, who also remains
nameless, like all the alien salesmen in Faulkner’s world, initially tries to sell a detection
device, but is eventually caught up in Lucas’ search for the hidden gold in his land to such an
extent that he rents the machine which he initially sold to Lucas, in order to find the gold
himself. As Richard Godden points out;
The gold may be read in two ways: first, “as a token of the plantation riches that derive
from the buried value of first slave, then tenant labor” –such a reading is introspective.
Alternatively, a projective amount might consider the cache as the hidden and
emergent meaning of the earth itself, as capital. Certainly, it draws to it a northern
machine, albeit from Memphis. Lucas expends much stolen labor time using
announcedly modern technology. The machine fails to locate the buried treasure,
implying that even as late as 1941 neither land nor labor is best characterized as price.
(75)
Godden’s second reading of the gold would suggest that the salesman is not necessarily
hunting for the value of the gold itself, but that he attempts to subtract from the earth that
which gives it its value. Eula Varner is also related to a cache of gold, since Eula’s connection
with the soil is essentially established through the Old Frenchman’s place, which is
unmistakably linked to her. After all, an essential part of the dowry that Flem Snopes receives
for marrying his spoiled bride is that piece of land. This means that from an economic
perspective, marrying Eula equals the value of the Old Frenchman’s place. And just as in case
of Lucas Beauchamp’s land is there also a legend of a treasure buried at the Old Frenchman’s
place, a legend which Flem Snopes successfully exploits at the expense of Ratliff, Armstid
and Bookwright when he tricks them into buying the place off him after he has clouded their
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judgment by putting money in the ground himself. Godden’s reading of the buried gold on
Lucas’ land can of course also be applied to the gold at the Old Frenchman’s place. Thus what
we have here in both instances is a salesman who abandons the act of selling in order to
pursuit a desire which can be directly related to the soil of Yoknapatawpha.
The attraction of the soil on the salesmen can be understood through the essential role
of the soil within the economy of Yoknapatawpha. Since the land is the backbone of the entire
economic production and consumption, the salesmen too, like the farmers or tenants, depend
on the land for their professional success. By attempting to extract a profit or currency
directly from the earth, Lucas’ salesman attempts to connect directly with what is indirectly
his source of income too. Eula’s attraction for the salesman can be explained by her
connection to the land. She embodies for him the basis of the economy in which he operates
as a salesman. His attempted conquest of her was, in this sense, just business.
Legends of buried money play an important role within the Yoknapatawphan
economy. As Charles Mallison points out in The Town, “not an old pre-Civil War plantation
house in all Mississippi or the South either but had its legend of the money and plate buried in
the flower garden from Yankee raiders” (7). These legends, however, are not just part of the
folklore, but appear to have a financial value themselves. Flem Snopes and Lucas Beauchamp
are both able to profit from their land simply because both plantations have a legend of buried
gold attached to them. Initially, Will Varner fails to understand the marketable value of this
legend. In the opening pages of The Hamlet, Varner and Ratliff discuss the old Frenchman’s
place, when the former says; “I reckon I’ll just keep what there is left of it, just to remind me
of my one mistake. This is the only thing I ever bought in my life I couldn’t sell to nobody”
(7). At the end of the novel, Varner gives the old plantation to Flem Snopes as a dowry. The
plantation itself is at that time nigh to worthless. Not only has the wooden house been a
source of firewood by the locals of Frenchman’s Bend, but even “some of the once-fertile
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fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had
hewed them” (3). It is, in other words, an economy in reverse. If nothing else, by giving it to
Flem as part of the dowry, Will Varner has increased the value of the Old Frenchman’s place
from hardly anything to the preservation of his family’s ‘good name’. After all, Flem’s
marriage to Eula Varner prevents the latter of giving birth to a bastard child. However, when
Flem accepts the Old Frenchman’s place as part of the dowry, he does not do so because he is
interested in the plantation itself. He has after all already told Will Varner’s son Jody that
there “aint no benefit in farming”. (25) Instead of the value of the plantation, Flem actually
accepts the value of the legend of the buried gold, which he later on successfully exploits at
the cost of Ratliffe, Armstid and Bookwright. As Joseph Urgo points out; “By pretending to
hunt gold and silver on the site, Flem raises the land's value. Flem's fiction is credible to the
three investors because Flem has already established himself as a shrewd businessman, not a
flighty treasure-seeker” (1). All Flem has to do in order to turn the legend into a saleable
commodity is to pretend to believe in it himself, and “salt” the land with some dollars as bait.
The result of this is that he raises the legend’s value to a mortgage on Armstid’s farm, cash
payment from Bookwright and, most importantly, Ratliff’s deed to “his half of the side-street
lunch-room in Jefferson” (393). This last component of the transaction provides Flem with a
ticket out of Frenchman’s Bend, into Jefferson.
Flem’s ‘victory’ over the inhabitants of Frenchman’s Bend in the final chapters of The
Hamlet is juxtaposed with his defeat at the hands of Tom Tom and Turl in the opening chapter
of The Town. It becomes immediately clear that Flem will find a different breed of opponents
in Jefferson, instead of the gullible Frenchman’s Bend farmers whom he was able to deceive,
quite easily, over and over again. However, what is important is not just the fact that Flem is
outsmarted, but that we are presented with a surrogate for buried money. After Flem has
achieved to position of supervisor of the Jefferson power plant, he almost instantly turns to
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stealing brass from the plant. However, his attempt to involve the plant’s firemen Tom Tom
and Turl in his scheme, in order to play them out against each other so he can uphold the
pretense of his own innocence, goes awry and they end up dumping the brass, for which Flem
by now already had to pay cash money to two auditors in order to make the financial figures
add up, in the water tower. Gavin Stevens, the narrator of the second chapter mentions in the
first paragraph;
Nor would we ever know, until the town would decide to drain the tank and clean it
and so rid the water of the brassy taste, exactly how much brass he had used one of the
Negro firemen to blackmail the other into stealing for him and which the two Negroes,
confederating for simple mutual preservation, had put into the tank where he could
never, would never dare, recover it. (30)
Thus instead of a legend of buried treasure in the soil of the Old Frenchman’s place, we now
have a legend, or at least the makings of one, of a treasure ‘buried’ in the water tank of the
power plant. The difference is however that this treasure is neither available nor marketable
even though its existence is more credible than that of the legend of the Old Frenchman’s
place. For once Flem receives a poetic justice for his cutthroat business behavior.
Flem moves to Jefferson around the beginning of the First World War. In The Mind of
the South, W.J. Cash points out that the war started a period of heavy fluctuations in cotton
prices, production and profits in the South. (254-259) In other words, farming was no longer a
stable motor of the economy. The transition from value buried in the earth to value hidden
within company property also indicates this change in the economic landscape. When Flem
told Jody that “there aint no profit in farming,” he was not just referring to the Frenchman’s
Bend’s economic system in which the Varners exploit the tenant system by suppressing and
binding the farmers to them through loans and debts. His remark also indicates that profits are
made within other lines of business. The Town embodies this transition, since the novel not
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only opens with Flem’s failed brass scam in the power plant, but also ends with Byron
Snopes’ half-Chickasaw children breaking into the Coca Cola bottling plant. If there is no
benefit in farming, then it is also more profitable to swindle companies than to cheat farmers
out of their meager earnings. Faulkner’s mentioning of this bottling plant is remarkable, since
it is one of the few moments in all of the Yoknapatawpha novels where he places an existing,
(multi)national company on the soil of Yoknapatawpha.
Lucas Beauchamp also uses the legend of buried money in his land to gain a profit, but
his plan nearly backfires, simply because he is attracted too much to the legendary money
himself. His frantic search for the gold attracts a metal detector salesman, who ends up renting
the device which he sold to Lucas himself. Neither Lucas nor the salesman is able to find the
gold. The salesman leaves empty handed, the metal detector and dollars he paid as rent
poorer. Lucas, on the other hand, nearly ends up losing his wife Molly, who attempts to get a
divorce since she cannot stand Lucas’ obsession with the legendary treasure (89). However,
before the judge can annul their marriage, Lucas changes his mind, claiming that the gold is
not his to find after all. By sacrificing the buried gold, or at least the value he attributes to the
legend of it, since it is highly doubtful that there is any gold to find in the first place, he
regains his wife. What is telling, however, is the present he gives Molly as a token of
reconciliation. “He was carrying a small sack – obviously candy, a nickel’s worth. He put it
into Molly’s hand. “Here,” he said. “You aint got no teeth left but you can still gum it” (97).
The candy that he gives to Molly is a highly loaded symbol. In Flags in the Dust, Old man
Falls receives a bag of candy after he has applied a fresh load of his black ointment on the
bump on Old Bayard’s forehead. After he has opened the bag, and established its content and
weight, Old man Falls remarks; “They was times back in sixty-three and -fo’ when a feller
could a bought a section of land and a nigger with this yere bag of candy” (248). Old man
Falls indicates a time during the Civil War when the North would gain the upper hand against
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the Confederate army. This is the time when plantation holders would start burying their
valuables in the ground. John Sartoris, after all, buries his silver in the orchard following the
fall of Vicksburg in ’63. (The Unvanquished, 18-20) It is, in short, the time in which the seeds
for legends of buried treasures are sown, but the legends themselves still have to be born.
When Lucas offers Molly the candy, the candy represents two things. On the one hand it
represents Lucas’ acceptance of the land without the treasure, while the candy on the other
hand also symbolizes Molly’s return to him. Although it would be a far stretch to argue that
Molly is Lucas’ slave, what Lucas receives symbolically in return for the candy bears a close
resemblance to what Old man Falls was able to buy for a bag of candy around the time when
John Sartoris hid the trunk with silver in his soil.
The view that Faulkner offers of Yoknapatawpha around the end of the first half of the
twentieth century is generally a pessimistic one. In the last chapter of Intruder in the Dust he
portrays Jefferson as a town completely submerged in consumer culture;
the radios had to play louder than ever through their super-charged amplifiers to
be heard above the mutter of exhausts and swish of tires and the grind of gears and the
constant horns, so that long before you even reached the Square you not only couldn’t
tell where one began and another left off but you didn’t even have to try to distinguish
what any of them were playing or trying to sell you. (236)
The automobile, which is used both tirelessly and redundantly (235), has become the
dominating feature of Yoknapatawpha’s streetscape, a streetscape entirely focused on the
blatant sale and consumption of products. It can be no surprise that this domination of the
automobile and consumer culture has come at the cost of the wilderness, since they, as
illustrated before, are complete opposites of each other in Faulkner’s work. In The Reivers,
Lucas Priest imagines a world in which the Wilderness has not only been removed from
Yoknapatawpha, but from the entire face of the world;
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by 1940 […] they – we – would load everything into pickup trucks and drive a
hundred miles over paved highways to find enough wilderness to pitch tents in; then
two hundred miles by 1960; though by 1980 the automobile will be as absolute to
reach wilderness with as the automobile will have made the wilderness it seeks. But
perhaps they – you – will find wilderness on the backside of Mars or the moon, with
maybe even bear and deer to run it. (19-20)
Here we get a rare glimpse of the future; a future in which the wilderness has completely
disappeared from Yoknapatawpha, which is directly related to the automobile. It is however
not only the wilderness that lost to Yoknapatawpha, but also the county’s identity. In Requiem
for a Nun, the narrator, after pointing out how the old face of Jefferson is being replaced with
factory made constructions and artificial lights, says;
and thus no more Yoknapatawpha’s air nor even Mason and Dixon’s air, but
America’s: the patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female vocalists, the
babbling pressure to buy and buy and still buy arriving more instantaneous than light,
two thousand miles from New York and Los Angeles; […] an entire generation of
farmers had vanished, not just from Yoknapatawpha’s but from Mason and Dixon’s
earth: the self-consumer: the machine which displaced the man because the exodus of
the man left no one to drive the mule, now that the machine was threatening to
extinguish the mule. (210-211)
According to the narrator, the very identity of Yoknapatawpha has disappeared. The county
has been swallowed up by consumer culture and technical development; instead of
Yoknapatawpha’s air we now have America’s air. Consumerism has, in the end, effaced
Yoknapatawpha.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” is one of Faulkner’s most famous lines,
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uttered by Gavin Stevens in response to his niece’s claim that the person she used to be is
dead (Requiem for a Nun, 80). Stevens is primarily talking about an individual’s past, but his
words also ring true for the economic developments present in Yoknapatawpha since the days
of Mohataha and Ikkemotubbe. Consumerism, which stood at the basis of the disappearance
of the Chickasaw has remained an ever present, ever influential force within the economy of
Yoknapatawpha, and eventually destroys the Yoknapatawphan culture and identity just as it
destroyed that of the Indians. The past is also present in the legends of buried money, which
not only represent the importance and attraction of the land for the economy, but also the
post-Civil War American Dream of salesmanship and profit as embodied by Flem Snopes.
The story of Yoknapatawpha is the story of an economy in which both the land and the people
are sacrificed in the name of consumerism and profit.
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