Faulkner’s Myth and the ″Peculiar Institution″: Shaping Yoknapatawpha

During the 1930s, Faulkner made radical adjustments in the shaping of his mythical Yoknapatawpha country to accommodate his deepening understanding of America’s ″peculiar institution.″ That peculiar institution, of course, was slavery, and in his fiction of the period Faulkner portrays it through a radical critique of the myth of ″the Old Plantation.″Doing so meant he both had to challenge the myths about plantation slavery in which he had been raised and had to alter his own apocryphal vision of the institution that haunted America like a ghost. Replacing the Sartoris family with the McCaslin family as the family that would represent the Falkners’ in his fiction, Faulkner created a fiction better able to bear the weight of history, both the history of the South and of his own family.

During the 1930s, Faulkner made radical adjustments in the shaping of his mythical Yoknapatawpha country to accommodate his deepening understanding of America＇ s“peculiar institution.” That peculiar institution, of course, was slavery, and in his fiction of the period Faulkner portrays it through a radical critique of the myth of “the Old Plantation.” Doing so meant he both had to challenge the myths about plantation slavery in which he had been raised and had to alter his own apocryphal vision of the institution that haunted America like a ghost. Replacing the Sartoris family with the McCaslin family as the family that would represent the Faulkners＇ in his fiction, Faulkner created a fiction better able to bear the weight of history, both the history of the South and of his own family.