The Burden of Southern Collective Memory in Katherine Anne Porter’s “Old Mortality” (1937) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929)
This paper examines how Katherine Anne Porter’s “Old Mortality” (1937) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) represent the transmission of Southern collective memory, focusing on how the mythology of the Lost Cause is inherited by characters who lack direct experience of the Civil War...
Đã lưu trong:
| Xuất bản năm: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas, |
|---|---|
| Tác giả chính: | |
| Định dạng: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Ngôn ngữ: | Anglais |
| Được phát hành: |
European journal of American studies
2026
|
| Những chủ đề: | |
| Truy cập trực tuyến: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Tóm tắt: | This paper examines how Katherine Anne Porter’s “Old Mortality” (1937) and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) represent the transmission of Southern collective memory, focusing on how the mythology of the Lost Cause is inherited by characters who lack direct experience of the Civil War or the Old South. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory, the paper argues that Miranda and Quentin are shaped by socially mediated frameworks of remembrance. In both texts, the transmission of inherited Southern memory is structured through gendered archetypes—the Southern belle and the Southern gentleman—which serve as mnemonic structures organizing identity, emotion, and moral expectation. Miranda’s upbringing is shaped by sentimentalized family narratives that aestheticize the Southern past and impose a model of femininity grounded in nostalgia and idealization, while Quentin inherits an ethic of honor, purity, and loss that binds memory to duty and moral absolutism. Rather than providing coherence or stability, these inherited narratives generate psychological strain and moments of rupture, revealing the limits of inherited memory. The paper contends that Porter and Faulkner depict inherited Southern memory not as a source of continuity but as a burden that exceeds the subject’s capacity to internalize it. Both characters respond to this burden through forms of resistance: Miranda through detachment and the rejection of romanticized remembrance, and Quentin through an obsessive effort to preserve and arrest memory, a project that ultimately proves destructive. In this context, forgetting—or the desire to forget—emerges not as failure but as a potential form of agency, marking the point at which inherited memory can no longer be sustained. |
|---|