William Faulkner (1857 – 1962) was a writer who came to be identified with the Literature of the South, since much of his work is set in his home state of Mississippi. After the Civil War the era of Reconstruction began in the South, but Faulkner in “Barn Burning” demonstrates his opinion that Reconstruction was a failure and that the South became mired in economic poverty. Reconstruction in the South began very well, but the white political hegemony in the southern states effectively disbanded the growing black middle class and substituted share-cropping for slavery.
In order to replace the plantation system that had depended on slavery, the share-cropping system was introduced which condemned families like the Snopes to lives of extreme poverty and subsistence only. This system was manifestly unfair and little better than slavery for the poor white farmers who were the main share-croppers and this is evident in the material poverty of the Snopes and their itinerant life style. Under the share-cropping system, Abner cannot better his family’s life – he can only ensure their bare survival. It will also show that Abner Snopes uses fire as a means of control, which is his rebellion against the instability of Southern share-cropping society, for specific reasons which are to do with his being poor and white and from the South.
Abner Snopes names his youngest son Colonel Sartoris Snopes: this naming of the child is part of Faulkner’s ironic presentation of the South and clearly supports my thesis because Faulkner uses the resonances of the name in three ways: firstly, it shows Abner’s devious nature (he chooses a name which he knows other people will be impressed by, just as he deviously commits arson); secondly, it is part of the regionalism of the story – where else but in the South would a son be named after a famous Confederate commander; and, thirdly, and most importantly. it is directly related to his arson for the following reason: Abner cannot be part of the South epitomized by Colonel Sartoris and so he destroys by fire. However, it is Abner’s actions that dominate the plot and that his youngest son rebels against at the end of the story by walking off into the woods, abandoning a way of life he recognizes to be morally wrong. It is also through Abner and his relationships with others that Faulkner presents his vision of the South. In one sense, as we shall see, Abner and his acts of arson represent the true, hidden feelings of the South in response to their humiliating defeat.
The Snopes’ family’s nomadic lifestyle is also due to Abner’s criminality. A fact which the youngest son is aware of. Sartoris thinks to himself at one point:
Likely his father had already arranged to make a crop on another farm before he... Again he had to stop himself. (Faulkner 5)
Sartoris’s unfinished thought is – before his father commits arson again, because the youngest child in the family is more perceptive than his older brother and his twin sisters. The Snopes have had to move more often because of Abner’s recourse to arson to settle perceived slights against him and to take revenge for wrongs he thinks have been done to him.
Abner cannot conform to the image of the South and his exclusion from that results in his arson. Part of the mythology of the South created after the loss of the Civil War was that of the great lost cause – a representation of Southern style and manners, politeness and honor which completely and deliberately ignored the brutalities of slavery that Southern society had been based on. This notion of Southern civility and manners was part of a regionalism created in popular fiction and eventually film. Abner,because of his social background and his status as a sharecropper, he acts deliberately coarsely and crudely in order to contrast himself with the stereotypical image. So he deliberately spreads horse manure on De Spain’s rug and commits wanton acts of arson – Faulkner uses him to debunk the myth of Southern manners, but the action also demonstrates Abner’s resentment at the social divisions of the South. By choosing to focus on the Abner family, Faulkner attacks this Romanticization of the South. Abner is crude, rude and violent. He carries a war wound and limps which shows everyone that he fought for the Confederacy – but very few know the truth, that Abner received the injury from “a Confederate provost’s man’s musket ball... on a stolen horse thirty years ago.” (Faulkner pages 3 – 4) we are later told that Abner spent four years in the woods hiding form both the Confederate and the Union army because he stole horses from both sides. Abner may limp to show the pride of an ex-soldier but the readers know that he has been a criminal all his life. This criminality is responsible for his casual acts of arson.
Part of the Romanticization of the South, the glorification of a past that had been destroyed was the habit of naming boys after famous Confederate army officers. Hypocritically (since he stole horses from both sides during the war), Abner has named his youngest son Colonel Sartoris Snopes. This detail is important. In the first court scene in the story the judge actually says to Sartoris: “Colonel Sartoris? I reckon anybody named after Colonel Sartoris in this country can’t help but tell the truth, can they?” (Faulkner 3) This is, of course, deeply ironic because at this point in the story Sartoris is thinking “Enemy! Enemy!” of the judge and is completely willing and prepared to lie for his father. It does, however, foreshadow the end of th story when Sartoris acts with the honesty of his namesake to warn De Spain of Abner’s intention to set his barn on fire.
But why arson? Why fire? In one sense, Abner’s fires represent the fires of Hell which he brings to those he resents or who have done him some tiny, insignificant wrong. Fire destroys permanent buildings and permanent buildings are the one thing that the Snopes will never own – which perhaps explains Abner’s destruction of them. He does not necessarily want to destroy people – just their possessions and he shows the same lack of respect for Major De Spain’s rug: he deliberately treads in horse dung and deliberately spreads it on the rug because he is acutely aware of his own lack of material possessions: all he owns can be carried in the wagon. Faulkner writes that the adult Sartoris might look back at his father’s arson and understand that “the element of fire spoke to some deep mainspring of his father’s being... as the one weapon for the preservation of integrity.” (Faulkner 6) in Abner Faulkner represents the true feelings of the South – jealousy and rage – which could find no expression since they had lost the Civil War, so in that sense Abner represents the primordial Southern whites who never got over the military defeat inflicted on them by the Union. There is surely further significance to the act of arson: famously, the victorious Union army put several famous southern cities to the torch in the weeks following victory. Abner is almost, one might argue, self-destructively acting out the arson of the victorious Northern troops again and again in an attempt, almost, to purge the memory of the razing of Southern cities by fire, to purge his anger and sense of injustice at the unfairness of life –as he sees it.
However, overall Abner is a bully and a thief; an arsonist whose own children and wife are afraid of him and who also cunningly uses arson because it is so difficult to prove without the detailed forensic evidence available to us now. It is also significant that the fires he lights for his own family are small: “a small fire, neat, niggard almost, a shrewd fire; such fires were his father’s habit and custom always, even in freezing weather.” (Faulkner 6) His lack of generosity towards his own family reveals his true nature. He is a mean man in every sense if the word: a liar and a criminal whose only reason for joining the Confederate Army, we are told.
A private in the fine old European sense, wearing no uniform, admitting the authority of and giving fidelity to no man or army or flag, going to war... for booty – it meant nothing and less than nothing to him if it were enemy booty or his own(Faulkner 25).
Sartoris walks off at the end of the story still convinced of his father’s bravery as a soldier, but consciously turning his back on his father’s violence and criminality.
In conclusion, we can see that Faulkner uses Abner Snope’s arson to represent deeper truths about the South as a region during the period of Reconstruction and that arson is both practical (cheap and anonymous), but also symbolic in personal ways relating to Abner himself and in a wider sense applicable to the South. In one very profound sense, in his deep urge for vengeance and his sense of wounded pride he is a representation of the true, primitive feelings of the South in the face of defeat.
