Revising the Southern Myth: Persephone Violated in Faulkner’s Sanctuary and McCarthy’s Child of God

Abstract

Faulkner' Journal Chad M. Jewett Revising the Southern Myth: Persephone Violated in Faulkner’s Sanctuary and McCarthy’s Child of God N urtured by the neoclassicism of Thomas Jefferson and the classics education ofearly Southern colleges, the mythology ofthe South has been marked by a distinctly Hellenic imagery. The agrarian South­ ern mystique, based on the classical ethos of the agricultural calen­ dar and a yeoman closeness to the land, established an undercurrent of ancient Greco-Roman imagery throughout the Souths artistic production and cultural sensibility well into the twentieth century. Indeed, several contributors to I’ll Take My Stand (1930), the Agrarians’ programmatic compilation ofessays, note a predilection for classical ethos and imagery as a key facet of Southern excep­ tionalism. The seasonal calendar may have been historically adapted to Christs birth and passion, but the myth of the agricultural cycle, to many Southern in­ tellectuals, was steeped in the classical. The Southern idealization of the classics rose throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. According to Wayne K. Durrill, Southern promotion of the classics was intended to “produce a coherent ruling elite in a developing plantation society” in which classical education “qualified students for member­ ship in a very select group” (470, 471). As John Hardin Best notes, education in the classics became a way for the elite to assert their status and to “hold in place generations of a lower-class white population” through the cultivation of an exclusive culture (49). The classical sensibility persisted in the New South, enhanced by the privilege ofeducation at schools like Ole Miss. The genteel dif­ ferentiation of the Agrarians, based at the elite Vanderbilt University (itselfthe site ofa respected classics department), could easily be seen as indulging in this sort ofgentlemens club ofclassical affectation. The idealization ofclassical ethos is central to the agrarian program, which centered the South on the Hellenic yeoman farmer of Jefferson’s imaginings. The agrarian movement ofthe 1920s reasserted this marriage of the South with Hellenic agricultural values and became a template for some important Southern novels during and after the Southern Renaissance, such as William Faulkners Sanctuary (1931) and Cormac McCarthy’s Child ofGod (1973). These two works are especially salient as Faulkners novel comes at the beginning of a Southern transformation (from rural to town based, from New South to newer South, from populist to solidly conservative), of which McCarthy depicts the 77 78 Chad M. Jewett Persephone Violated in Faulkner and McCarthy stark conclusion. In the case ofboth Faulkner and McCarthy, Hellenic imagery is used for acerbic parody of the pretensions attached to these classical arche­ types, specifically the Hellenic seasonal myths.1 The precedent of the agrarian ethos, and its apparent distaste for and sublimation ofSouthern realities, is pur­ sued and assailed in Sanctuary and Child ofGod. Faulkner takes these imagin­ ings at their word, resetting Yoknapatawpha as a stage for Greek myth and the novel’s characters as figures in the Persephone legend. McCarthy adopts and alters the Hellenic pastoral, juxtaposing the beauty of the Tennessee woods with the violent Hades he inserts there. Both novels adapt thematic elements of the Hellenic Persephone-Hades myth, in which a precedent for the agricultural seasons of ancient Greece is established. Faulkner uses this Persephone archetype to two ends. The author marks the moral distance between the rural South (and its tenants) and the town-bound aristocrats who cling to the old Arcadian images. Faulkner bases his satire on the aristocratic icon of the Southern white woman as well as the Grecian acropolis ofthe Southern town, focusing on the upper-class hypocrisy and willful ignorance of the growing violence and discord of the New South hidden behind this neoclassical facade. McCarthy, an heir to Faulkner in both style and subject, presents a harsher, more radical version of Faulkner’s Perse­ phone myth, devoted to a stark appraisal of New Southern dispossession from the land. McCarthy steeps his classical novel in a satire of sacred violence and native chivalry that W. J. Cash posits as a traditional characteristic ofthe Appa­ lachian backwoods, itself another Southern Arcadia, that provides the setting for Child ofGod (73). Indeed, McCarthy’s ambiguous Southernness is answered by the overtly Southern concerns...