My paper will focus on the “religion” of the Lost Cause in Faulkner’s work. I don’t mean to limit my paper to just the pulpit but to expand it the mytho-religious doctrine that demonstrated the collective consciousness (and imagination) of white Christians in the post-War South. However, even as this is a religion “baptized in blood,” as Charles Reagan Wilson says, it extended to all facets of Southern life. While I have not read all of Faulkner’s prose, I will limit my range to four of his novels (see below). Through these and other sources, I will detail how white preachers were the germ spreading this delusion and how the myth of the Lost Cause became synonymous, even symbiotic, with religion.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! : the Corrected Text. Vintage international edition., Vintage International / Vintage Books, 1990.
Rosa Coldfield is the unofficial poet of the county and the Lost Cause. Through her words, which we never read but having read other Lost Cause poetry in my research, can only assume, is doggerel. Though my paper will focus more on the “religious” factors contributing to Lost Cause ideology, Rosa and her words are examples of the stubborn delusion that lingered (and lingers) throughout the Deep South. This will contribute to my point that this doctrine was largely founded in religion, but like any doctrine it is not contained by its edifice.

Faulkner, William. Light in August : the Corrected Text. Vintage international edition., Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1990.
This will be my principal Faulkner text. I will focus, as much as my word limit will allow, on how Gail Hightower completely abandoned anything resembling scripture, how he was not “called” to minister in Jefferson but rather how he chose Jefferson to live out (and outside of) his life through his grandfather’s heroic efforts in the War. I’ll also address how Hightower “killed” the church through this obsession.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury : the Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International ed., Vintage Books, 1990.
Space permitting, I’d like to discuss how this same religion is capable of the contrary of the Lost Cause, that Reverend Shegog can speak about deliverance and “unburdenin” from his pulpit while white preachers can shout the same words from the same book with a completely different ethos.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished : the Corrected Text. First Vintage International edition., Vintage Books, 1991.
There are a few points I’d like to flesh out here. One is Reverend Fortinbride, who sits in a sort of polarity to Reverend Hightower. Fortinbride was in the War, and he hardly speaks about the war. Hightower was a grandson to the War, and he can’t stop talking about it. Another point is Drusilla and “the highest destiny of a Southern woman—to be the bride-widow of a lost cause.” As Faulkner points out in the book, “the women had never surrendered.” This ties into Rosa Coldfiled in Absalom, Absalom!  and her “epic” Lost Cause poems as well. Women played a vital role in Lost Cause ideology, as “the highest destiny” demonstrates, but Louisa’s letter in this novel gets at the heart of how solemn and venerated this idea was: “But when I think of my husband who laid down his life to protect a heritage of courageous men and spotless women looking down from heaven upon a daughter who had deliberately cast away that for which he died, and when I think of my half orphan son who will one day ask of me why his martyred father’s sacrifice was not enough to preserve his sister’s good name—” This letter is marked with Christian jargon. Words like “spotless” and “martyred” demonstrate just how linked this ideology was to religion. 

Gorra, Michael Edward. The Saddest Words : William Faulkner’s Civil War. First edition., Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
For my paper, this book is a primary source for the historical, racial, social, and political elements of the South both during and following the Civil War, particularly the myth of the Lost Cause—what Gorra calls “the busy work of memory.” Gorra brilliantly and with great detail lays out the mindset of Southerners as they justify the reasons for the War and how, as Robert Penn Warren said, “in the moment of death, the Confederacy entered upon its immortality.” This book will be a launchpad for more focused points on Faulkner’s work, particularly The Unvanquished and Light in August.

Howe, Irving. “The Southern Myth and William Faulkner.” American Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4, 1951, pp. 357–62. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3031466. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.
This source demonstrates what Faulkner does with the Southern myth and collective consciousness in the post-War South. After their defeat, the South was unable, or unwilling, to participate in the growth of the new country. So, since they couldn’t look to the future, they looked to the past and told themselves the old stories with that Southern love of grandeur that apotheosized its soldiers and its cause. Howe says that “The Southern myth, like any other myth, is less an attempt at historical description than a voicing of the collective imagination, perhaps of the collective will.”

Kazin, Alfred. “William Faulkner and Religion: Determinism, Compassion, and the God of Defeat.” Faulkner and Religion, University Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 3–.
This will be a secondary source to both Wilson texts and will further demonstrate the religious climate Faulkner grew up in and was surrounded by. It also lays out the stakes for Southern Christian religions and how they differed from those in the North. “Race, slavery, poverty, and violence in which the sense of sin and redemption, far from being pale, abstract words distantly heard only on Sunday, were issues of life and death, meaning real sin and redemption were truly needed, that burned in Southern hearts and made human existence seem fraught…with the most terrible possible consequences.”

Matthews, John T. William Faulkner Seeing through the South. Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Throughout my paper, I’ll repeatedly come back to Matthews to ground the more mytho-historical and doctrinal elements of the South and the Lost Cause in Faulkner’s prose.

Watson, Jay. “William Faulkner’s Civil Wars.” The Southern Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1/2, 2013, p. 41–.
Through this text, I’ll explore how Faulkner dramatizes the War, particularly through the Sartorises in Flags in the Dust (Sartoris) and The Unvanquished and through Gail Highttower Light in August. Watson really gets at the “immediacy” of the war in Faulkner’s work and in the lives of post-War Southerners. I’ll touch on the sentimentality Faulkner seems to express for the South’s Civil War ideology (Flags in the Dust), his modernization of it (The Unvanquished), and his repudiation of it (Light in August).

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. University of Georgia Press, 2009.
This is my primary text on the nature of Southern Christianity before, during, and after the Civil War. Through this text, I will show not only the inherent delusion and racism of the doctrine of the Lost Cause but will show how Faulkner portrays this from the pulpit and how such a doctrine runs rampant like gossip or a fine sermon. As Wilson says, “Religion is at the heart of this dream and the history of the attitude known as the Lost Cause was the story of the use of the past as the basis for a Southern religious-moral identity as a chosen people… [The Lost Cause] was therefore the story of the linking of two profound human forces, religion and history.” I’ll demonstrate this through several instances and characters in Faulkner’s work, but what most concerns my current research are Doc Hines spewing his white supremacist “sermons” and Gail Hightower’s delusional romanticism from the pulpit.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. “William Faulkner and the Southern Religious Culture.” Faulkner and Religion, University Press of Mississippi, 2006, p. 21–.
This text takes the larger historical and doctrinal points Wilson makes in his book and grounds them in Faulkner’s work. Wilson covers a lot in this text but one point I will focus on is the apparent Calvinism in the Lost Cause doctrine—most importantly, the idea of predestination and the Elect. Southerners saw themselves as a chosen people, equating themselves with the children of Israel in the Old Testament, under the tyranny of the North. Wilson discusses the oral nature of the South. This will converge with my paper, as part of my point is that the Lost Cause doctrine was spread throughout the South through preachers and Sunday sermons.

In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! truth is composite. One could even say it is a cubist rendering of a quasi-truth. It is an examination of a story from many different perspectives at once. Are they all wrong? Is the image, the story they tell, spurious for its lack of singular authority? Is a composite truth a lie?

In 1958, while speaking to a class at University of Virginia, Faulkner addressed the issue of truth and perspective. When asked about which character in Absalom, Absalom! had the right view, Faulkner said:

I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it, but taken all together, the truth is in what they saw, though nobody saw the truth intact.

A reference is made in this Q&A to a blackbird, specifically a blackbird, more specifically, but not stated outright, the blackbird in Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In the poem, the speaker, presumably but not certainly, the poet, examines a blackbird in thirteen very brief sections—each section a stanza—or “looks.” No single look gives the full truth about the bird. As Stevens says in the third section, “It was a small part of the pantomime.” As with the blackbird, so with Sutpen, who is central and subject but is not the whole pantomime. The pantomime is the portrayal, yes, but it is the way of looking at Sutpen that the novel is concerned with.

Throughout the novel, the reader must hold so many different details and jumps between narrators that reading requires more than simple literary pleasure. As Stevens says in the second stanza:

I was of three minds
like a tree
in which there are three blackbirds.

The reader must have a mind of multitudinous and yet singular thought, even as the novel seems to devolve and the narrators’ authority on dialogue and events become increasingly speculative and spurious. But if the novel lacks a single authoritative narrator, Faulkner is fully aware and even reassures us that we are not alone in being curious, excited, and frustrated all at once. (If we can contain these conflicting feelings simultaneously, why can’t we hold conflicting perspectives? Each contributes to a unified end.) About halfway through the novel, Faulkner introduces Shreve, Quentin’s roommate at Harvard, who becomes, for a moment, the reader’s best friend as he summarizes the story up to this point, acknowledging the wild ride and reinforcing the reader’s excitement as they learn, hopefully, that they are not as lost as they might think.

At one point, after control of the story has been handed over to Shreve and Quentin and the two appear to have blended into one, Faulkner assures us this is the case and even says:

It did not matter to either of them which one did the talking, since it was not the talking alone which did it, performed and accomplished the overpassing, but some happy marriage of speaking and hearing wherein each before the demand, the requirement, forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other—faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed truth, or fit the preconceived. (253)

These narrators now exist in the story they’re telling. Later in the chapter:

Shreve ceased. That is, for all two of them, Shreve and Quentin, knew he had stopped, since for all the two of them knew he had never begun, since it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which hone had been doing the talking. So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry. (267)

Again, the telling of the story becomes the story. This does not get the reader any closer to the “truth” about Sutpen, but it does seem to get the narrators closer—actually, as close as they can get. This is also reminiscent of the fourth section of Stevens’ poem:

A woman and man
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

In the Virginia classroom Q&A, Faulkner attributes in passing that Sutpen was a character “a little too big” for the characters (who are presumably “a little too small”) to articulate on their own (“To see [him] all at once,” Faulkner said). “It would’ve taken, probably, a wiser or more tolerant or more sensitive or more thoughtful person to see him as he was.” Faulkner also states that he hopes there’s a fourteenth way of looking at the blackbird, and that is the reader’s image of Sutpen after having examined, experienced, exhausted, every other look.

I think Stevens sums this up as succinctly and metaphorically as any poet might:

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know. (VIII)

In the work of William Faulkner, the Lost Cause is a character all its own. It is collective memory and myth. It is the patchwork of the past that is, in a truly Faulknerian manner, not even past. It would be a book-length, Herculean task to give full attention to this perverted rationalization of a present history but for the sake of this paper, I will focus on the religion of the Lost Cause as it pertains to four novels The Unvanquished, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! I will focus on the preacher as the germ of this doctrine, but like any doctrine it oozes beyond the walls of its structures. So, not only the religion but the sermons (Gail Hightower), the words (Rosa Coldfield’s verse), that refuse to let the idea of the Lost Cause lose its vim and vigor, to let it be anything but a key, if not silent and smoldering, part of everyday life.

Preliminary Bibliography

Dobbs, RF. “Case Study in Social Neurosis: Quentin Compson and the Lost Cause.” Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 33, no. 4, 1997, pp. 366–91.

Donaldson, Susan. “Introduction: Faulkner, Memory, History.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 20, no. 1/2, 2004, pp. 3–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24908249. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! : the Corrected Text. Vintage international edition., Vintage International / Vintage Books, 1990.

Faulkner, William. Light in August : the Corrected Text. Vintage international edition., Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1990.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury : the Corrected Text. 1st Vintage International ed., Vintage Books, 1990.

Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished : the Corrected Text. First Vintage International edition., Vintage Books, 1991.

Gorra, Michael Edward. The Saddest Words : William Faulkner’s Civil War. First edition., Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.

Howe, Irving. “The Southern Myth and William Faulkner.” American Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4, 1951, pp. 357–62. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3031466. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Howell, Elmo. “Faulkner and Scott and the Legacy of the Lost Cause.” The Georgia Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 1972, pp. 314–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41396869. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Newhouse, Wade. “‘Aghast and Uplifted’: William Faulkner and the Absence of History.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 21, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 145–65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24908231. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.

Watson, Jay. “William Faulkner’s Civil Wars.” The Southern Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1/2, 2013, p. 41–.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. University of Georgia Press, 2009.

It is a shadow that appears first in Quentin’s section of The Sound and the Fury: “When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again” (76). Here Faulkner sets us up for a section replete with shadows, most importantly, Quentin’s shadow. Quentin mentions his shadow more than a dozen times throughout the lengthy section. His shadow only appears in his “present” and seems to vanish altogether at times.

Quentin’s shadow seems to be not just an extension of his body but a body itself. After recalling a memory of his mother, he starts “Trampling my shadow’s bones into the concrete with hard heels” (96). At other times he walks “upon the belly of my shadow” (96) and stands “in the belly of my shadow” (100). Since Quentin smashed his watch, his shadow becomes a way for him to slip in and out of time. In several places, he notices and then acts upon his shadow only after a clock chimes. Subsequently, it also becomes a way for him to keep time. He becomes a kind of living, as it were, sundial.

Though I don’t have enough space here to explore every appearance of Quentin’s shadow, I do want to discuss two extremes within the section. After a ship passes through the drawbridge, Quentin is standing on the bridge leaning against the railing. Several times before and after this section he mentions that he has tricked his shadow; in fact, at this point on the bridge, he says “so easily had I tricked it that it would not quit me” (90). His shadow is “at least fifty feet,” looming, “leaning flat upon the water” (ibid). He is unsettled not only by the size of the shadow but by the way “it twinkled and glinted, like breathing” (ibid). And Quentin says, “if I only had something to blot it out into the water, holding it until it was drowned” (ibid). He then sees the shadow of the flatirons wrapped up “like two shoes” (ibid). He considers the formula for measuring volume via displacement, but it’s not the scientific that’s at play here, rather the superstitious. “[They] say a drowned man’s shadow was watching for him in the water all the time” (ibid). It is the very life of his shadow, his past, his present, calling him to the bottom of the river. Drowning is the only way he knows how to conquer it. If we think of Quentin’s shadow as an instrument of time, then we can believe T.S. Eliot when he writes “Only through time time is conquered” (Four Quartets, “East Coker” l. 89). Quentin must pass through his shadow to escape the “mausoleum of all hope and desire,” the “reducto absurdum of all human experience” (TSAF 76).

The other extreme of Quentin’s shadow is its absence. When Quentin encounters the little girl in the bakery, we stop seeing his shadow. It is not until he is away from her, at several points, that it returns. She becomes his shadow. She becomes the physical embodiment of his past. She is constantly looking at him with “black” and “secret” and sometimes “friendly” eyes. She is always just behind him or just beside him. In fact, we don’t see Quentin’s shadow for nearly twenty pages once the little girl appears. When he gives her a coin and runs away, his shadow “paces” him and drags “its head through the weeds” (133). Then it is behind him. A few paragraphs later “The wall went into shadow, and then my shadow, I had tricked it again” (134). However, as he climbs and then descends the wall, the little girl appears again, and his shadow is gone. This is the last time Quentin’s shadow is noted. There is an instance after his court appearance where he and his friends are running from the courthouse and their shadows are “running along the wall,” but that’s it. Quentin’s shadow is subsumed into the frenzy of the group and is, we might believe, indistinguishable.

There are many other instances of shadow play within this section. We could take shadow far less literally and apply it to shades (ghostly) and the penumbral quality of the past. We could even make the case that the little girl is a microcosm of Quentin’s past: a chance to revisit and possibly correct what torments him so, or just a chance to relive the horror and validate his decision to die.

In “An Odor of Verbena,” when Professor Wilkins bursts into Bayard’s room, Bayard, now twenty-four, already knows the message being delivered: his father is dead. This sets in motion a series or realizations and “concomitant flashes” in Bayard’s mind as he prepares himself and rides home (214). It is in one of these moments that Bayard acknowledges that he is now The Sartoris. This is not as simple as being the man of the house, as it is often flippantly said, because for Bayard, this means taking on the role of the mythologized.

Even in name, The Sartoris sounds like a mythological figure, something from stories told to generations of children about valor, courage, and grandiosity. For much of the time we spend with Bayard in The Unvanquished his father is out of the picture, but this does not mean he is out of mind. From the first time we see John Sartoris, he’s grand in young Bayard’s mind as he rides his godlike horse, Jupiter (8). The father is mythic; he’s valorous, even if he is intolerant. In short, he’s principled. So, when Bayard learns his father’s dead, he understands “Who lives by the sword shall die by it,” a statement he knew well because his first thought when Professor Wilkins comes into his room, even before a word has been said, is “at last it has happened.” Even in death, his father is a sustained absence-presence: “I didn’t need to see him again because he was there, he would always be there” (252–253).

Bayard accepts the role of The Sartoris but does not relish it. He does, however, understand the weight of what is required of him: “At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were” (215). Being The Sartoris requires more than just a name. Bayard knows Ringo will never see him this way, for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because Ringo has already grown up so much and Bayard is slow to catch up. Perhaps Ringo is too close to Bayard to see him as anything but a colleague or companion. Myth requires distance. Ringo and Bayard are never far enough apart, in age or distance, for Ringo to see him this way.

The Sartoris is a masculine ideal, but Bayard has spent the war surrounded by women. His worldview is larger than the scope of battle. He looks up to the women in his life. In “Skirmish at Sartoris,” he posits that “maybe times are never strange to women: that it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of repeated follies of their menfolks” (194). He also understands that “the women had never surrendered” the war but the men (188). And yet, there’s a fate reserved for Southern women that is demonstrated in Drusilla which Bayard calls “the highest destiny of a Southern woman—to be the bride-widow of a lost cause” (191).

Were this story to continue, I think we would see The Sartoris continue to change from the brute masculine to a more balanced worldview. The myth would change. Wisdom and patience might overthrow intolerance and violence. Bayard tried his hand at brutal revenge in “Vendee” when he and Ringo nail Grumby to the cotton compress for killing Granny and again when they nail his severed hand to her grave (186). This is the way of the father, but Bayard, talking about Mrs. Wilkins after he learns of his father’s death, states that “she was a woman and so wiser than any man, else the men would not have gone on with the War for two years after they knew they were whipped” (215).

Masculinity is not a lost cause, it is a thing often possessed, hardly understood, and rarely practiced well; it is a thing to be constantly improved upon. It seems that even John Sartoris was on his way to changing his own masculine ideal as Drusilla shares with Bayard his father’s dream and to which Bayard considers that perhaps “his dream was not something which he possessed but something which he had bequeathed us which we could never forget, which would even assume the corporeal shape of him whenever any of us, black or white, closed our eyes” (253).

In the opening lines of The Unvanquished, Bayard Sartoris and Ringo set up a “living map” of Vicksburg: “just a handful of chips from the woodpile and the River a trench scraped into the packed earth with the point of a hoe, it (river, city, and terrain) lived, possessing even in miniature that ponderable though passive recalcitrance of topography which outweighs artillery, against which the most brilliant of victories and the most tragic of defeats are but the loud noises of a moment” (“Amuscade,” 3). This recreation of Vicksburg is a microcosm of what Faulkner does with setting in this novel. Though it is not made explicit, the reader can infer, based on the Sartoris family’s presence in other books, that this story takes place in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi.

Vicksburg is a real place where real Civil War battles were fought, but by operating withing his own imagined county, Faulkner gives himself freedom. Often writers are too close to their subject, so they tend to lack objectivity. This, in turn, restricts their creative mobility in their own art. One of my go-to quotes is from W.G. Sebald, “The greater the distance, the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity” (The Rings of Saturn, 19). Faulkner needed to create distance between himself and the South. Though his subject required him to assign realistic distances and timeframes in a fictional environment, he was able to navigate (and, yes, create) the historical minutiae of the South during one of the darkest periods in American history.

William Matthews sums it up quite well: “Personally, it was by living as an outsider within the world that had created him that he could represent the nuances of individual dramatic conflict with such authority and precision. Artistically, it was by subjecting his tradition-steeped Southern culture to the alienation of modernist methods for rendering time, language, consciousness, and history that Faulkner could figure out how to retell the stories of a place he knew too well (Seeing Through the South: Faulkner and the Life Work of Writing, 4).

Faulkner might induce the reader into a real trance when reading passages like Bayard’s description of his father on his god-like, “almost the color of smoke,” horse, Jupiter (“Ambuscade” 8), or when Drusilla tells the boys about the railroad in “Raid” (93–96), but this both is and isn’t absent from his imagined environs. Faulkner sets himself loose from the confines of a single place to make his setting a more, if I may, universal South, and in doing so gives himself more range not just to thread his story through the needle of history but to explore more deeply the qualities that make these characters so human. We are with him as he steps back and calls the rose by another name.

James Joyce once said that if Dublin “one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth it could be reconstructed out of my book [Ulysses].” Based on my reading of The Unvanquished, I do not believe this is Faulkner’s intention with the South, the state of Mississippi, or any city in that state, but he does create a thoroughly human place where all of the best and worst parts of man exist and swirl about each other, a place where imagination is the way in, the way through, and the way out.