Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The McCaslin Family edited by Arthur F. Kinney (review)

Studies in American Fiction119 description can be given to the works of the two English writers who come into view in Fogel's study as son and daughter of Henry James. James—and Woolf and Joyce and Faulkner—were all engaged in the reconstruction of something that Woolf thought needed a new name, and still has not found it, the "modern" novel, the novel of the early twentieth century. Boston UniversityMillicent Bell Kinney, Arthur F., ed. Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The McCaslin Family. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. 292 pp. Cloth: $40.00. This critical anthology mainly concerns William Faulkner's 1941 novel Go Down, Moses, in which the McCaslin family plays a central role, and pays lesser attention to Intruder in the Dust and The Reivers. Professor Kinney has gathered into this collection photographs, plantation journal entries, newspaper articles, and other historical documents and sources, in addition to thirteen critical essays (five written for this volume) and book excerpts to provide a critical and historical context for understanding the McCaslins and the fiction in which they appear. The book is divided into four sections: Professor Kinney's introduction; an assortment of historical sources; two essays on the Indians of Yoknapatawpha County; and a substantial group of essays and book excerpts on the McCaslin clan. An appendix, which includes genealogy , character index, and chronology, and a useful index round out the volume. Professor Kinney's introduction regards Go Down, Moses as a study in the Southern burden of slavery and racism, a view which the remainder of this volume enforces. Perhaps because of this initial emphasis, he tends to underemphasize the other important dimension of the novel, that of the hunt and the receding wilderness, a dimension linked closely to the themes of slavery and American expansionism. A more disturbing tendency, though not a pervasive one, is his compulsion to speculate about sources. In a detailed discussion, Professor Kinney attempts to identify models for various characters and events from the novel. He persuasively demonstrates the historical authenticity of the world of Go Down, Moses, but his apparent conviction that Faulkner drew often and literally from actual models is not well founded. He otherwise provides a useful introduction to the novel, concluding with a discussion of secondary sources which should be of interest to students. The second section, entitled "Resources," is intended to document and to some extent explain the North Mississippi world portrayed in Go Down, Moses and the other McCaslin fiction. This section would be most useful for readers unfamiliar with Faulkner or with Southern and American history. Most of the included items focus on race relations in the South of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Excerpts from a plantation journal, a Charles Chesnutt story, W. E. B. Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk, Booker T. Washington's autobiography, newspaper accounts of two lynchings in Oxford, and reminiscences by Faulkner relatives and by Willie Morris round out the section. Faulkner's early sketch "Sunset" is also included. The remaining sections make up the bulk of the volume. They present a wide range of critical commentary on Go Down, Moses and the other McCaslin fiction, ranging from articles treating the Yoknapatawpha Indians to detailed discussions of Isaac McCaslin and other members of his family. Kinney's introduction shows a familiarity with a wide range of criticism on the McCaslins, and he remains as appreciative of traditional critics as he does of more recent ones. However, most of the 120Reviews articles and excerpts presented here are less than two decades old and can be said to represent the current critical opinions on the McCaslin fiction. The most important items in this anthology are the essays by John R. Cooley and Mick Gidley on the Indian forebears, and the three essays about the McCaslin-Beauchamp-Edmonds family relationships authored, not surprisingly, by Thadious M. Davis, Eric J. Sundquist, and Panthea Reid Broughton. Several other interesting essays also appear, including Annette Bernert's "The Four Fathers of Isaac McCaslin" and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's corrective study of women in Go Down, Moses. One gathers from this volume that Go Down, Moses is now largely regarded as a study of Southern race relations...