Introduction

Faulkner often commented publicly on the relationship between style and reality, and especially on how a writer reduces a real terrain. Yoknapatawpha County, "the author's postage stamp of native soil", imitates and reduces a particular Southern "country", but its conceptual and social operations have much more general pertinence. For Faulkner's texts describe an entire unhappy foundation of habit, custom, and law that divides certain races - particularly those defined as "Negro" and "white" - using skin color as the prime signifier of difference. The white woman, rather than sharing the white male's dominance over society's black oppressed, herself falls victim to certain figures of division. Faulkner's women characters are desperate. The black male and the white woman, paradoxically similar, inhabit mutually remote corners. They experience similar mistreatment, because the distance between them is what, on the deepest level, segregation aims to perpetuate.