Setting in Modernist Literature
Modernist literature has a strong sense of place. As writers from around the United States found
popularity, the center of American literature shifted away from New England and towards the rest of
the country. One of the most important writers who explored the regional South was William Faulkner.
Faulkner was born in Mississippi in 1897. He attempted to join the Army during World War I but was
rejected because he was too short and thin. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote complex
fantastical works that revolved around the South. Your textbook author writes:
Faulkner found his great theme: The American South as a microcosm for the universal themes
of time, the passions of the human heart, and the destruction of the wilderness. Faulkner saw
the south as a nation unto itself, with a strong sense of its noble past and an array of myths by
which it clung to its pride, despite the humiliating defeat of the Civil War and the enforced
acceptance of the distasteful values of an industrial North.
Faulkner studied a South that had embraced the Lost Cause ideology – the idea that the South, though
defeated in the Civil War, had defended a justifiable cause and their traditional, honorable way of life.
Postwar Southerners romanticized the prewar Southern nobility who had a strict code of honor,
chivalry, and Christian kindness. They maintained that the Civil War was not fought over slavery, but
rather as a defense of a distinct and unique Southern culture. The “Lost Cause” was the idea that the
South was doomed to lose from the beginning of the war because the North had overwhelming
strength—not because they were justified.
Many in the Postwar South who believed in the Lost Cause—especially people who had been wealthy
before the war—attempted to reinstate the prewar social structure. Elite white women were delicate
and refined creatures that needed men to protect them. Slavery had been a useful and beneficial
institution because African Americans were naturally inferior to whites and wished to serve them.
Even free African Americans were loyal and faithful to their white masters, who in turn cared for their
black servants like children.
Faulkner’s fiction had a complicated relationship with the Lost Cause. On the one hand the ideology
was an integral part of the South, and worthy of tribute. On the other hand, Faulkner believed the Lost
Cause was misguided and outdated. But the Lost Cause was critical to Southern culture, and therefore
an important part of Faulkner’s Southern setting.
“A Rose for Emily”
In the space below, list four features from the reading that you think are important to creating a
believable Southern setting. You will track these features as we read Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”
Feature of
the South
Quotes/Details from Text
What the Details Contribute to Setting