Faulkner’s Fictional Yoknapatawpha County

by Emily Finnegan 

    Faulkner grew up in a very southern family in a very southern town in Mississippi called Oxford in Lafayette County. From the day he was born, he was influenced by the southern atmosphere, southern people, and a southern environment. Faulkner once talked about living in the south and said, “I discovered my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about, and that I would never line long enough to exhaust it”(Charters). Although Oxford was the non-fictional town where he lived, he created his own fictional county called Yoknapatawpha which was neighboring Oxford. Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha county in15 books and more than fifty stories and made it seem just as real as Oxford with many similarities. In order to understand Yoknapatawpha county, we have to explore how Faulkner viewed the south and its different geographical parts and how Yoknapatawpha County represents the south as a whole.

            To understand the South and how Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County, we have to look at two parts of the south that are distinguishable; the upland and lowland south. Some of the main differences between these two culturally different regions in the south were amounts of slavery, different geographical landmarks, and crops. In the lowland South there was a lot of slavery and crops grown such as rice, sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton which was the basis for its economy. In contrast, the upland south had fewer slaves and grew grains, raised livestock and grew tobacco in much smaller amounts. Both were very culturally different. After reviewing Yoknapatawpha county Charles Aiken says, “A superficial examination of the physical and cultural geography of Yoknapatawpha County initially leads to the conclusion that it is the South in microcosm, complete to its Upland and Lowland sections” (Aiken). Without reading further into the details of Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkners description of his imaginary county could come off this way, but Yoknapatawpha is far more in depth and detailed when taking a closer look and it accounts for a specific region of the south rather than combination of both areas. Charles Aiken explains, "Yoknapatawpha County, like Faulkner's own Lafayette County, is Lowland South. The fictional place is in the loess region of northern Mississippi, east of the Yazoo Basin and approximately eighty miles south of Memphis. Numerous evidences from Faulkner's writings can be marshalled to show that this is the location of Yoknapatawpha, but the most conclusive evidence is a sketch map that he drew in 1945 to explain why both Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians appear in his stories"(Aiken). Not only in his stories did Faulkner explain Yoknapatawpha County in detail, but he also drew multiple pictures as a better visual representation of this county. Reflecting the portion of northern Mississippi from which it was created, Yoknapatawpha possesses such distinguishing Lowland South characteristics as a plantation agricultural system, a cotton economy, and a large black population.

            Not only did his representation of Yoknapatawpha county represent the Lowland South in regards to its economy and landscape, but also the inhabitants attitudes, especially those of African Americans in his writing. "The novel, 'A Fable,' and in the short story, 'Mountain Victory,' Faulkner related his perceptions of the attitudes of the poor folk of the Appalachian Mountains and the planters and blacks of the Lowland South"(Aiken). Yoknapatawpha County also represented the inhabitants of Lafayette County. The northern and western parts of Lafayette County, as in Yoknapatawpha, are the areas with the largest landholdings and the largest black populations. Although there were mostly similarities between Yoknapatawpha County and Lafayette County and the Lowland South, one of the dissimilarities was the specific cultural difference in landscape of Yoknapatawpha County and the landscapes of older portions of the Lowland South in relation to the Civil War. These differences can be seen in Faulkner's "Go Down Moses".

            After reading about Faulkner's creation of Yoknapatawpha County I really wondered why Faulkner created this imaginary County in the first place? When asked the same thing by interviews, Faulkner reported that ," I was trying to talk about people, using the only tool I knew, which was the country that I knew"(Aiken). He also stated repeatedly that his principal purpose was to write universally about mankind. I believe that Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha as another representation of his home town Oxford and Lafayette County as exactly the way he wanted it to be. He could minus or add anything he wanted to the landscape, its inhabitants, and other specific details while also keeping it a humble representation of his home. Why do you think Faulkner felt it necessary to create a fictional place to tell stories about a real place?

           

Charles S. Aiken Faulkner's, Yoknapatawpha County: A Place in the American South.      Geographical Review, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Jul., 1979), pp. 331-348

Charles S. Aiken , Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: Geographical Fact into Fiction.      Geographical    

Review , Vol. 67, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 1-21

“William Faulkner.” The Story and Its Writer. 8th Edition. Ed. Ann Charters. Boston:       Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010. 573-585. Print