treating interracial love, Strange Fruit (1944), attacked the sexual basis of racial discrimination in the South. Smith also transfigured the commonly held assumptions about a white girlhood and womanhood in the region to include racial indoctrination and oppression as part of the cultural constraints upon women, 'pushed away on that lonely pedestal called Southern Womanhood,' as she observed: 'We cannot forget that their culture had stripped these white mothers of profound biological rights, had ripped off their inherent dignity and made them silly statues and psychic children, stunting their capacity for under-424- standing and enjoyment…. In many ways there was a profound subservience; they dared not question what had injured them so much. It was all wrapped up in one package: sex taboos, race segregation….the duty to go to church, the fear of new knowledge that would shake old beliefs, the splitting of ideals from actions — and you accepted it all uncritically.'
Although white Southern women authors did not write prose fiction as explicitly confrontational as Smith about the debilitating racial customs and gender conventions of the region, they did engage in the discourses on race and gender within their fictional texts. Katherine Anne Porter drew small portraits of evolving awareness of how one fits into spaces and families, into history and region, and into categories such as race and gender, while attempting to grasp the meaning of memory and imagination. In 'The Old Order,' a sequence of stories in The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), Porter depicts two old women, one black and the other white, who emerge from the period of slavery to survive husbands and children. The portrait of the elderly black woman Nannie in 'The Last Leaf,' a subsection of 'The Old Order,' is significant because in it Porter subverts sentimental views of the black mammy in the South: 'The children, brought up in an out-of-date sentimental way of thinking, had always complacently believed that Nannie was a real member of the family, perfectly happy with them.' While Nannie and Sophia Jane, the children's grandmother and Nannie's former owner, are both victims of patriarchal power and hegemony, Nannie is also delimited by her racial identity. Married to another slave for the purpose of producing marketable children, she performs her duties, but as soon as she is beyond childbearing years she dismisses her husband, Uncle Jimbilly, from her life. Similarly, once she is too old to perform the duties of mammy to the children of the white family, she severs her ties with them and moves to her own house without explanation or regret: 'she was no more the faithful old servant Nannie, a freed slave: she was an aged Bantu woman of independent means, sitting on the steps, breathing free air.' Porter, however, did not develop her awareness of the links between race and gender oppression in a full-length novel.
In 'The Old Order' and several of her other stories appearing in -425- The Leaning Tower, as in Old Mortality, from Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels (1949), Porter took on issues comparable to those Lillian Smith outlined as her subject:
In this South I lived as a child and now live. And it is of it that my story is made. I shall not tell, here, of experiences that were different and special and belonged only to me, but those most white southerners both at the turn of the century share with each other. Out of the intricate weaving of unnumbered threads, I shall pick out a few strands, a few designs that have to do with what we call color and race…and politics…and money…and how it is made…and religion…and sex and the body image…and love…and dreams of the Good and the killers of the dream.
In presenting the 'dissonant strands' in 'a terrifying mess,' Smith paused to consider how she had learned 'the bitterest thing a child can learn: that the human relations I valued most were held cheap by the world I lived in,' and 'that in trying to shut the Negro race away from us, we have shut ourselves away from so many good, creative, honest, deeply human things in life.'
While white authors such as Stribling, Peterkin, and Heyward garnered contemporary recognition for their efforts on racialized subjects, they did not achieve the lasting significance of the major novelist to emerge from the American South during this period, William Faulkner, of Oxford, Mississippi, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950 and who did not follow the pattern of shutting himself 'away from so many good, creative, deeply human things in life' that Smith had observed. In assuming a racial heritage based on dominance and difference, Faulkner understood himself and his work in both racial and regional perspectives. The situating of race in his thinking was complicated by his position within a closed and traditional regional society. As a Southerner, he tapped the richness of his region for creative writing, but he also functioned under the dominant ideology of a biracial hierarchy in the South. 'We were taught,' Smith recalled, 'to love God, to love our white skins, and to believe in the sanctity of both.' For Faulkner, the hierarchy was a way of life, one that he had not instituted and one that he could not comfortably challenge from his position within the majority and dominant culture. While he struggled with the implications of a biracial society for the creative writer throughout his career, he could not -426- satisfactorily resolve the issue. At the beginning of his career, however, he acknowledged how Southern African Americans had helped to shape his fiction:
So I began to write, without much purpose, until I realized (that to make it…truely [sic] evocative it must be personal….)…So I got some people, some I invented, others I created out of tales that I learned of nigger cooks and stable boys (of all ages between one-armed Joby….18, who taught me to write my name in red ink on the linen duster he wore for some reason we both have forgotten, to…old Louvinia who remarked when the stars 'fell' and who called my grandfather and my father by their Christian names until she died) in the long drowsy afternoons. Created I say, because they are partly composed from what they were in actual life and partly from what they should have been and were not.
In fiction published between 1926 and 1962, Faulkner found the incorporation of race into his vision of subject a necessary aspect of his creation of 'people' invented or reimaged from the oral tales of the African Americans figuring in his youth. Beginning with Soldiers' Pay (1926), a first novel centering on returning World War I veterans, he utilized African Americans as part of the landscape, physical, imaginative, and moral, of his fiction. Though initially given to stereotypical representations in Soldiers' Pay, Faulkner moved farther than almost any other white Southern fiction writer of his generation in portraying people of color, African Americans and Native Americans, with a measure of sympathy and dignity. In fact, he moved away from the existing discourses on race in the South by extracting an alternative vision of life offered by Southern African Americans, in particular, as a major part of the tensions about being, existence, and place that characterized the dialectic of much of his work as a modernist and fictionist.
In both Sartoris (1929) and the uncut version of it, Flags in the Dust (1927; published 1973), and in The Sound and the Fury (1929) he portrayed African Americans as contrapuntal to white Southerners and the moral and social malaise of their lives. His portrait of Dilsey Gibson, the enduring and sustaining force for a deteriorating white family, is representative of his view of the moral superiority of African Americans who retain hope and faith in a world collapsing under the strain of moral degeneracy and cultural despair. In Light in-427- August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner treated race as the unacknowledged social construction undermining the lives of white Southerners and constricting the lives of black Southerners. Joe Christmas of Light in August, who never knows his racial identity in a society built upon racial certainty, moves outside of race until he can no longer sustain his own isolation. His literal castration and symbolic lynching culminates his acceptance of an identity as a black man. Quentin Compson of Absalom, Absalom! combines a search for himself with a reconstruction of a myth of the Southern past, and in the process confronts the racial hierarchy and abuse that shapes both the actual and the imagined historical South. In Go Down, Moses (1942), Faulkner explored the ways in which attitudes of racial superiority and enslavement functioned to destroy a family and confound its efforts to perpetuate itself. Ike McCaslin, who operates as the conscience of his family and society, ultimately discovers in old age that he can neither atone for the racial sins of his fathers nor free himself from their prejudices. Despite his initiation into the world of nature and the wilderness by the part Indian, part black Sam Fathers, Ike cannot transpose the values of the natural, primitive world to the divided racist world of civilized Mississippi. Lucas Beauchamp, who figures in Go Down, Moses as the black male descendant of the founder of the McCaslin dynasty, reappears in Intruder in the Dust (1948) as a mentor to Chick Mallison, a white youth who, like Ike McCaslin, confronts the bigotry of his society and
