William Faulkner Research Paper

From what George says, one must assume that in the natural state man holds only as much land as he can use. No man pays rent or plays the part of the tenant, for no man controls land for which he has no immediate use. All of man’s labor, in the natural state, returns to him as food, clothing and shelter; none is taken from him. In this natural condition, therefore, no one actually owns land, he merely occupies and employs it, has tenure upon it. No one, generally, is without the means of life, for all have equal access to the land, the foundation of life. When one person, however, devises a method of controlling more land than the share he uses for his family’s support, then destiny becomes perverted, evil stalks the earth, for natural law has been violated

Faulkner seems to see the South as cursed by the origins of its land titles and by the fact that the land is owned at all. According to Robert Coughlan, Faulkner has been attempting to explain this curse all his life. Socially and economically the Faulkner family had fallen in prestige by the time of William’s birth as compared to its status in the earlier nineteenth century, and he was anxious to know why it had done so. “Looking around him at other Oxford families William Faulkner could see that this was not unusual, that what had happened to the Faulkner’s evidently was a part of a larger socio-historical event. To a considerable extent, his books seem to be an attempt to grope through to an explanation of this phenomenon.”8 Coughlan says Faulkner, in his groping, found a philosophy centered around the land. “ People don’t own the land,’ one of his characters says,’ ‘It’s the land that owns the people.’ If Faulkner has a philosophy, this may be its distillation; although it is less a philosophy than a mystique, a religious