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143 CHAPTER 4 “White Babies . . . Struggling” William Faulkner and the White Man’s Burden The fiction of William Faulkner is replete with images of burdened white manhood. In The Unvanquished (1938), for example, a young Bayard Sartoris is informed by his aunt of the scandal caused by his cousin Drusilla’s having dressed as a man and fought under the command of Bayard’s father during the Civil War. The only solution, his aunt informs him, is for his father and Drusilla to marry: “Bayard, I do not ask your forgiveness for this because it is your burden too; you are an innocent victim as well as . . . I.”1 In “Old Man,” the novella that composes one half of The Wild Palms (1939), the “tall convict” who is freed temporarily from prison when the Mississippi River floods and then is commissioned to rescue a pregnant woman stranded in a tree struggles at one point to convince the woman to leave the security of their small boat in order to try to reach a stretch of dry land. “Let me down!” she tells him as he resorts to carrying her. “But he held her, panting, sobbing . . . his now violently unmanageable burden . . . the burden with which, unwitting and without choice, he had been doomed.”2 In The Reivers (1962) a man recollects how, when he turned ten, he was informed by his father that it had come time for him to go to work, “to carry the burden of the requisite economic motions” and “assum[e] responsibility for . . . the space he occupied , the room he took up, in the world’s (Jefferson, Mississippi’s, anyway) economy.”3 Yet in As I Lay Dying (1930), a man who barely works at all—Anse Bundren, who makes it his life’s mission to move so little that, in the words of his daughter, he “dassent sweat”—nevertheless convinces his neighbor, Vernon Tull, that he himself constitutes an encumbrance: “the only burden Anse Bundren’s ever had is himself.”4 In keeping with the figures studied thus far in this book, these images are all of white southern men and boys. They constitute only a partial list, moreover, of the representations of burdened white manhood to be found in 144 Romances of the White Man’s Burden Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County novels. Some of these will seem familiar. Bayard Sartoris, for example, is the son of a planter and Confederate officer, and at fifteen years old at the end of the Civil War, he is almost identical in age to Henry W. Grady. A man of the “New South,” therefore, he goes on to become a banker and politician rather than simply following in his father’s footsteps. Like Grady also, however, he turns out to be an Old South revivalist when it comes to matters of race: as mayor of Jefferson during the 1890s, he “father[s] the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron,” a fact revealed in the short story “A Rose for Emily” (1930).5 Other images of burdened white manhood in Faulkner’s fiction are new. One might cite again from “A Rose for Emily” and the fact that Miss Emily herself is represented as “a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” as a result of Bayard Sartoris’s having remitted her taxes “into perpetuity” in 1894.6 Or one might recognize in Anse Bundren a white man’s burden of a different sort—a poor white man’s burden, which his “humped” back and shoulders seem to embody and about which he complains in his mutterings to himself (“Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hardworking man profit”) even as he schemes successfully to avoid physical labor.7 Or one might cite Quentin Compson, son of an even newer “New South” than Bayard Sartoris, born as he is in 1891, which is to say, shortly before Bayard’s attempts as mayor to preserve what remains of the Old South’s public image by legislating all black women into mammies. Similarly devoted to an image of the old order—and by all means a figure who seems weighed down by his heritage—Quentin nevertheless does not think of himself as saddled with the burden of uplifting African Americans or performing any of the other selfsacrificial civic acts supposed by such figures as Grady and Thomas Nelson Page to be the natal obligations of southern men...

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