Burning Down the House: Racial and Architectural Deterioration of the Southern Plantation Home in Works by William Faulkner

dc.contributor.advisor Brantley, Will
dc.contributor.author Mitchell, Melissa Burks
dc.contributor.committeemember White, Laura
dc.contributor.committeemember Hollings, Marion
dc.contributor.committeemember Ostrowski, Carl
dc.date.accessioned 2023-05-19T15:18:39Z
dc.date.available 2023-05-19T15:18:39Z
dc.date.issued 2023
dc.date.updated 2023-05-19T15:18:39Z
dc.description.abstract William Faulkner found it necessary to destroy his fictional plantation homes, and their destruction mirrors that of the many grand homes in the South that have come to the same fate, whether by fire or deterioration. Built with chattel slavery, these ornate plantation homes, constructed in the Palladian style after Greek architecture, do not represent democratic ideals. In Faulkner’s works, the plantation home and its master are anything but magnificent: they are dark and monstrous. The beautiful fronts are facades that mask the horrors of the South. Faulkner’s biographical connection to grand homes and their history offered him insight into the past that he resurrects in his fiction. As his own home of Rowan Oak attests, Faulkner admired southern architecture, but he used its decay and destruction to expose the absence of true grandeur behind its walls, or in its past. Through the antebellum homes of his fictional Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner captures the angst that stems from the South’s faulty ideals, its legacy of slavery, and its fear of miscegenation. In what has become his most celebrated novel, Absalom, Absalom!, Clytemnestra, the bi-racial daughter of Thomas Sutpen, sets fire to Sutpen’s Hundred, abolishing the grand home along with nostalgia for the antebellum era and its strictures against a mixed-race society. Faulkner’s most glorious example of eradicating the oppression and repression of the past is by burning down the house.
dc.description.degree Ph.D.
dc.identifier.uri https://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/handle/mtsu/6952
dc.language.rfc3066 en
dc.publisher Middle Tennessee State University
dc.source.uri http://dissertations.umi.com/mtsu:11724
dc.subject Absalom Absalom!
dc.subject Architecture
dc.subject Burning
dc.subject Miscegenation
dc.subject Plantation Home
dc.subject William Faulkner
dc.subject English literature
dc.subject Literature
dc.thesis.degreelevel doctoral
dc.title Burning Down the House: Racial and Architectural Deterioration of the Southern Plantation Home in Works by William Faulkner
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