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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

American fiction--Southern States--History and criticism; American fiction; Southern States; Criticism, interpretation, etc;

Abstract

After relative inactivity in Southern letters, there occurred what is called. the Southern Literary Renaissance. Critics have since tried to account for it. One effort is the attempt to identify basic themes in the works. One persistent theme is that of religious or moral conflict, involving a stern Calvinism and a pervasive sense of guilt. Noticed too is the element of paradox as an outstanding characteristic of the South a.nd of the Southern character. w. J. Ca.sh, in his book The Mind of the South, presents an interesting theory regarding the paradoxical nature of the Southerner. He states that the Southerner suffers from a psychical split due to two incompatible tendencies in his character, hedonism and Puritanism. Ca.sh believes that these exist in the Southerner with a minimum of conflict. This investigation lm.S to determine if this hedonismPuritanism split is as all-pervasive as Ca.sh maintains and whether the Southern writers have recognized and ma.de use of it. The works of the five authors discussed represent a productive span of some twenty-two years, from 1929 to 1951. Geographically, they represent an area of the South from Virginia, to North Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi. These representative works include two written by Southerners who remained in the South, William Faulkner and Eudora. Welty; two by writers who left the South and did not return, Thomas Wolfe and William Styron; and one work by an author who alternately left and returned, Robert Penn Warren. These writers do assign important roles to the Southerner's hedonistic and Puritanistic tendencies. Their treatment, however, suggests that they do not regard the schism between them to be as wide 2 or as effectively maintained as Cash's theory indicates. Whenever they exist in a single individual or society, the conflict is usually intense. In William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Puritanism is a part of the degenerate codes and principles inherited from a once more honorable plantation era which clash with the hedonistic new era. The hedonism-Puritanism split dominates Thomas Wolfe's The Web and the Rock, which dramatizes the struggle within an individual who inherits hedonistic tendencies from a Northern father and Puritanical tendencies from a Southern mother. Eudora Welty explores the dichotomy in her book The Golden Apples in two short stories, "Shower of Gold" and "Sir Rabbit." She shows man in the transitional state between pre- and postlapsarian morality and his moral condition once innocence is lost and the schism between hedonism and Puritanism has widened. William Styron assigns a tragic role to hedonism and Puritanism in his novel Lie Down in Darkness, as a hedonistically-oriented husband is confronted by a Puritanicallyobsessed wife. Finally, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men presents the two forces as determiners of moral behavior. This investigation shows that it is more than a literary strategy when the Renaissance writer turns to religious and moral themes. The conflict between the Southerner's hedonistic-Puritanistic nature serves as his metaphor for universal man's struggle against the forces of evil.

Year of Submission

1971

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Educational Psychology and Foundations

First Advisor

Gordon J. Rhum

Second Advisor

Edward Amend

Third Advisor

George F. Day

Comments

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Date Original

1971

Object Description

1 PDF file (125 leaves)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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