Evolutionary Theory in Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy

Evolutionary Theory in Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy Gail Mortimer University of Texas at El Paso Since their first appearance in his fiction, the Snopeses have troubled Faulkner's readers. These comic, perverse figures who come to dominate Jefferson, Mississippi, in the Snopes trilogy stand out among Faulkner's more familiar characters, the introspective intellectuals or brooding misfits and the good-natured, naive country people whom we are used to finding in his stories. We usually see them, moreover, through the distinct narrative distance of Gavin Stevens' or V. K. Ratliff's interpreting consciousness, and as a consequence, even the more fully depicted Snopeses remain alien and somehow one-dimensional. Both the narrative modes through which we encounter them and the bizarre circumstances characterizing so many of the episodes in which Snopeses appear have led to critical confusion and to a paucity of commentary that successfully ties the Snopeses to Faulkner's larger fictional concerns. Typically, critics have seen the Snopeses as allegorical figures symbolizing various, usually Northern, intruders into a pastoral Southern countryside.1 Because of their cunning and prosperity, they are assumed — like Homer Barron in "A Rose for Emily" — to represent the carpetbaggers, speculators, and industrialists who radically altered Southern life following the Civil War. The natives of Frenchman's Bend and Jefferson seem helpless victims vis-à-vis the sometimes insidious cleverness and amorality of Snopeses, and the latter's threat to Southern values is a major one, as Stevens and Ratliff declare at length in the Snopes novels — The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion. Yet there is another dimension to the Snopeses — their caricature of the processes inherent in Darwin's theory of natural selection — whose comic/tragic implications help to clarify Faulkner's ambivalence toward the South and its disintegrating myths and to enrich our understanding of many of the peculiarities of the Snopes stories. Darwin's evolutionary theory, embodied in The Origin ofSpecies (1859) and The Descent ofMan (1871), found wide public acceptance by the early twentieth century except where it encountered its fiercest opponents, the Fundamentalists. Their literalness in interpreting the Bible insisted on an image of man as having been created by the direct intervention of God, instantaneously, as the pinnacle of creation. The most intransigent Fundamentalists were those of the American South, whose emotional commitment to destroy the influence of the "infidels" culminated in 1925 in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee. The South was in an uproar for months during and after the trial as its intellectuals and writers sought 187 188Rocky Mountain Review to respond cogently to the issues raised by the trial and by the intellectually forceful Darwinian argument. Their need to articulate their beliefs was urged by the trial itself and by the caustic, sometimes hilarious accounts of it and of ostensibly Southern cultural values published nationally by such social critics as H. L. Mencken.-' As Fred Hobson expressed it in his important study of the South during this period, in many ways, the Dayton trial was a prototypic event, the single event that more than any other of the 1920s brought to the surface all the forces and tensions that had characterized the post-war South, the even* that most forcefully dramatized the struggle between Southern provincialism and the modern, secular world; and, finally, the event that caused Southerners to face squarely the matter of the South and their own place in it. Virtually every thoughtful Southerner had some response to the occurrences at Dayton. (148) Hobson goes on to describe the various responses to the image of the South emerging from the tria!, including a denial that Dayton was representative of the South (being, rather, an aberration), severe self-criticism, and a defense of the Fundamentalist South entitled I'll Take My Stand (148-56). Many felt a need to defend valuable dimensions of Southern culture from the insensitivity of such as Mencken. Donald Davidson expressed, for many, "how difficult it was to be a Southerner in the twentieth century, and how much more difficult to be a Southerner and also a writer" (40). The Scopes trial, then, occasioned a serious challenge to the myth of the Old South, and it was within the...