History, Fiction, Autobiography: William Faulkner’s ‘Mississippi’

ABSTRACT

This essay considers issues of history and memory, and autobiography and fiction in William Faulkner’s ‘Mississippi’ and considers Faulkner’s position as a writer and historian of the South. It interrogates the moments in which Faulkner’s representation of his family, his history and his memory slips between the personal and the historical or collective. It further argues that Faulkner’s experience of memory and race as a white Southerner complicates his representation of his family, his identity and particularly, his relationship with his family’s black domestic or Mammy, Caroline Barr, revealing his implication in Southern mythmaking in his fictional and autobiographical writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• American literature
• William Faulkner
• autobiography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lucy Buzacott is a Research Manager at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. She currently manages the ARC funded project Investigating Literary Knowledge in the Making of English Teachers as well as contributing to projects related to national literatures, literary knowledge, and English curriculum. She has a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Queensland. Her PhD explored the intersection of race and gender in the work of William Faulkner. Her current research interests include Australian and American literature, critical race and whiteness studies, and secondary and tertiary English education.

Notes

1 Yoknapatawpha is the fictional Mississippi county where much of William Faulkner’s work is set. The region is based upon the real Lafayette County, Mississippi. The name ‘Yoknapatawpha’ derives from two words of the local Native American Chickasaw language (meaning ‘split land’) (Gradisek 2016).

2 The concept of collective memory was first introduced by Maurice Halbwachs in La Mémoire Collective (1992), but has been developed and refined by Olick, Erll, and others. See Olick 2003; Erll and Nunning 2008; Assmann and Czaplicka 1995.

3 William Faulkner’s brother John was also an author who wrote novels as well as a memoir about his childhood and Jack (Murry) Faulkner similarly penned reminiscences on his childhood and family.

4 William Faulkner’s family name is actually Falkner. There are multiple and contested stories regarding the reason for the change, including a typographical error, a deliberate change to a more ‘British’ spelling after his rejection from the U.S. army, or as an assertion of independence from his family. This change is interesting to note alongside Faulkner’s mis-remembrances in ‘Mississippi’ and elsewhere.