Identity Dilemma Of The South: Cultural Crisis Presented In William Faulkner's Works

William Faulker (1897-1962) is a famous writer from the American South. In his life, he accomplishes more than ten works, including The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom! Absalom!, etc. When he was young, he lived in Paris for some time where he met T. S. Eliot and Sherwood Anderson and accepted Modernism. These writers depicted the wasteland in modern people's mind in their works. To Faulkner, the psychological void could not only be found in urban, but also in rural countryside.In his works, according to his family life, Faulkner creates a kingdom for us in which people living in the Deep South cling to their tradition, especially those white upper-class gentries who used to enjoy high social status and honor. The past lingers on in their mind though they live in reality. At the historical crossroad of the Old South and the New, they still worship the past ethics and code, which have been smashed to pieces. They cannot rewind time, nor can they melt into the New South. They have to fill their present with the past, and meanwhile, try to withdraw themselves from the changing world. They are a group with only the past, but no present and no future. Yet the present keeps impinging on their mind, and they are split by the past and the present. Bewildered, they hover between the Old and the New. They are pathetic, for their clinging is doomed to fail. Therefore, their identity is unidentified. This thesis intends to explore the cultural crisis in the South from the perspective of socio-culture.In addition to introduction and conclusion, this thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One deals with cultural identity, and in the meantime, analyzes family honor and religion, which support the Southern identity of those land-gentries, namely, those "good people", presented in The Sound and the Fury and A Rose for Emily.Chapter Two proves the cultural crisis and disintegration of the Old South through males and females' descriptions in Faulkner's works compared with the images of them in tradition from the angle of cultural identity. Although males enjoy power in the Old South, their outmoded life cannot adapt to the reality in the New South. Some women awaken to seek their subjectivity deprived in the Old South, however, their struggles in the end develop in another direction when their family members oppose their behavior against the tradition.Chapter Three analyzes the nostalgia of "good people" according to Bergson's theory of psychological time. The nostalgia causes their suspension of time and dislocation of identity. They mourn the past and are terrified by the matching of time.This thesis finally comes to a conclusion that those land-gentries' insisting on their tradition fails their search for identity, which is reiterated to prove the decaying of the Old South.