Our fathers' footsteps: Family myths and the Southern heroic tradition

This study proposes that twentieth-century Southern characters engaged in quests for personal fulfillment embody the romantic myth of the "American Adam" suggested by James Fenimore Cooper and described by R. W. B. Lewis, while the fiction in which they appear describes the opposing neoclassical social myth outlined in the antebellum writings of William Gilmore Simms, including The Yemasee, Woodcraft, and Poetry and the Practical. The modernist protagonists, studied here are posed at some threshold that engenders self-discovery and demands self-definition, and all struggle with the legends of their forefathers at this crucial period in their lives. In a twentieth-century Southern society that has become primarily and foremost industrialized, mechanized, and individualized, William Faulkner continues to uphold the heroic ideal established in Simms's foundation myth in characters like Charles Mallison, while simultaneously deploring its lapses and failures through the characters of Quentin Compson, Bayard Sartoris, and Isaac McCaslin. Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Rhea, Walker Percy's Binx Bolling and Will Barrett, and Eudora Welty's Laurel Hand define the future courses of their fives based on what they have learned searching through their pasts, and in particular from. their attempt to understand the characters and lives of their fathers. In this respect, the protagonists' relationships with their fathers symbolically represent Southerners' perception of the traditional Old South values, their conflicts and disagreements with it, their sense of alienation from it, and their determination to pattern their lives as antidotes to the perceived failures of their fathers. But this freedom from and complete rejection of the systems of their fathers results in similar psychological problems, including: a surreal quality of suspended animation in ones life; a sense of isolation within the self and an inability to communicate with others; a lack of purpose, direction, or meaning to one's life often manifested in an inability to choose or stick with a profession or an inability to conceive of one's future; a gnawing malaise and dispiritedness from which suicide seems an appealing escape; and an inability to grapple with fundamental questions of the nature of reality and the truths of existence.