Reply #104: You raise an interesting point. [View All]

It just happens to relate to the dissertation I am writing now. Wow--a chance to talk about it!

Not to go into a lot of detail, but Faulkner identified strongly with both the plantation aristocracy and the oppressed blacks of the South. Big contradiction there, right? Faulkner resolved it, as other Southern conservatives have done, by mythologizing a South in which racism was the exclusive monopoly of the poorer whites, like the Snopeses, and the people who owned the plantations, controlled the Jim Crow legislatures, etc. were actually the great friends of the black man.

Historian Joel Williamson calls this theory of Southern race relations "the grits thesis," and it explains why Faulkner, although a brilliant novelist, should not be treated as a sociologist or historian.

It's also worth pointing out that the last novel in which a Snopes appeared was written a half-century ago. A lot can happen in that time.