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Jefferson, Twelve Southerners, and the Agrarian Ideal
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20645 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
5,506 Words |
| Author
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Walter Sullivan
Walter Sullivan, a novelist and literary critic, is professor
of English and director of the program in creative writing at
Vanderbilt University. His most recent novel is The War the
Women Lived: Voices From the Confederate South (1996). |
Here is a scene from William Faulkner's novel The Hamlet. The time is around 1900; the place is a Mississippi crossroads settlement called Frenchman's Bend. On a warm evening in spring, farmers have gathered in the front porch of Mrs. Littlejohn's boardinghouse to talk about crops and the weather and wild horses newly brought from Texas that will be offered at auction the next day. In a field near the porch where the farmers sit, the horses cavort uneasily in the moonlight. They run to the fence and paw the ground, whinny and run the other way. They are too small for farm work and would be too fractious for it even if they were broken to harness, which they are not. They have come to Mississippi fresh from the wild, and no one sitting on Mrs. Littlejohn's porch has the skill to induce one of them to endure a saddle, much less pull a buggy or a plow. They will be worthless as farm animals, or worse, liabilities, a danger to ordinary horses and mules and to people. Every farmer present knows this, but knowledge is scant defense against temptation. They may be light for plowing, the farmers tell each other, but you won't need to get much work out of them if you don't pay much for them.
There is a voice of conscience present, a sewing machine salesman named Ratliff who, in an effort to warn them against what they are about to do, repeats with greater emphasis what the farmers are telling each other: The horses won't do for farm work. The farmers resist persuasion. The next morning they buy the horses. When they attempt to claim them from Mrs. Littlejohn's field, the horses escape. One runs through Mrs. Littlejohn's house, confronting the sewing machine salesman in his bedroom. Others tear up gardens, knock down clotheslines, upset wagons, injure people. This seems to be--and is--a comic parody of the Fall of Man in which the farmers lose a part of their innocence.
But think of the scene in another way. The farmers are not so much reprising the story of Eden as allowing themselves to be lured out of their agrarian practicality into the consumerist psychology of the modern world. With the advent of the horses, a spirit of competition develops among them. When the sale of the horses begins, what the horses can or cannot do becomes unimportant. Each farmer must have a horse not because he will work it or ride it but because everybody else will have one. A familiar psychology is operating here. Until, now, the members of the Frenchman's Bend community have lived in harmonious acceptance of their unequal lots in life. Some have more land than others. Some are more industrious than others, some are better farmers, some have more luck, some are more careful managers. I do not mean to imply a world free of envy and pride, but
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