Essay --

William Faulkner began what would be an extensive exploration of his southern world of what he named Yoknapatawpha County (really the area of New Albany, Mississippi) with the short story A blush for Emily in 1930. At this point, Faulkner was 33 years old, having grown up in the smothering and genteel small township atmosphere he uses as the cathode-ray oscilloscope for this work. On one level, this is the tragedy of one person who was stifled and pushed to a monstrous crime, while on a larger scale, the story is a fiction for the way in which the Old South refused to come to terms with the 20th century and the new demands of American society. The Civil War looms large over Jefferson, from the ostentation that the community takes in the battle that raged nearby to the graveyard full of honored dead and the very elderly men who still wear Confederate uniforms to funerals. The towns mayor uses the title Colonel Sartoris all his life, and it seems as if the war was a breaking poin t past which families like those of the Griersons just couldnt get past, as if they were frozen in time. The experience ...