John Michael Corrigan

Scholars have long understood the centrality that the plantation house possesses as both institution and symbol in William Faulkner’s fictional world. The earliest critical investigations often approached his Yoknapatawpha County through a gothic literary lens, equating the plantation with the decline of the elite white families of the Old South—a line of inquiry often preserved by contemporary critics. Faulkner’s plantation is commonly interpreted as a type of Ozymandian warning, with the characters caught in the monumental failure of the slave economy. In Jay Parini’s words, the “haunted landscape of Faulkner’s fiction teems with houses,” the “gutted ruin” of the manor house evoking “an elegiac symbol of the plantation system itself.” Similarly, for Scott Romine, the plantation “abides as a kind of ghostly barracks—structurally haunting, if materially absent.” This conflation of the plantation with gothic ruin downplays an important aspect of Faulkner’s vision—the institutional success of the plantation system in the twentieth century and the historical violence at the foundation of this edifice. In his complex representation of the economic power exercised by elite planters, Faulkner anticipated some of the later findings of contemporary plantation studies, especially the fact that while the elite planters had “forfeited their slaves,” many of them continued to “retai[n] considerable landholdings as well as the social and political power they had enjoyed before the Civil War.” This article elucidates Faulkner’s earliest effort to write the plantation house and argues that his first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, presents the plantation not as a gothic relic of a dead past, but as a major hub of activity, part of a decisive consolidation of social and economic power that links the institution of slavery to the sharecropping economy that emerged afterward. This is not to suggest that haunting phantasms play no role in Flags in the Dust, but to acknowledge that the Sartoris plantation manor, for all its sinister atmosphere, is part of a viable commercial institution. Faulkner here presents not the decline of the elite white planter class, but rather the survival and persistence of their economic power under new material conditions. He imagines the plantation house, moreover, in terms of what I call a cognitive cartography, as a temporal compression of movement, behavior and thinking in social space, offering a model for how individual consciousness not only interacts with its external environment, but is composed of it as well. This article shows how Flags in the Dust imagines the twentieth-century plantation as both a physical and a cognitive architecture that simultaneously preserves, recreates and disseminates a violent paradigm of power. I argue that once Faulkner establishes the cognitive architectonics of the plantation house and personifies this paradigm in the figure of Colonel John Sartoris, the dead plantation patriarch, he charts this structure upon other hubs of social space. Thus, Faulkner creates the nodes and arteries of recurrent movement and behavior in his Yoknapatawpha County that indicate how an elite class of planters adapted to the large tenant plantations that emerged after the Civil War.