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Situated in the northwestern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County is set in the fictional Jefferson town. This county is bounded by two rivers: the Tallahatchie River in the north and the Yoknapatawpha River in the south. The word Yoknapatawpha is derived from “two Chickasaw words—Yocona and petopha, meaning ‘split land.’ Faulkner claimed to a University of Virginia audience that the compound means water flows slow through flat land” (Wikipedia, “Yoknapatawpha County,” par.5). The area was originally Chickasaw land. Around the year 1800 the white settled there. Before the Civil War, the county had several large plantations: Louis Grenier’s in the southeast, McCaslin’s in the northeast, Sutpen’s in the northwest, and Compson’s and Sartoris’s near the town of Jefferson. Later, most of them became small farms. “By 1936, the population was 15,611, of which 6,298 were white and 9,313 were black” (Wikipedia, “Yoknapatawpha County,” par.7).
The novelist’s enigmatic Yoknapatawpha—his “little postage stamp of soil,” as he referred to it—is fabricated according to the Lafayette County town of Oxford, Mississippi. It is a suffering, ruined place, haunted by preposterous and villainous Snopese and Sutpens, tinged with a muddy history of slavery and war while at the same time it is enduring and timeless, inhabited by ordinary men and women such as Dilsey Gibson, V. K. Ratliff, and Isaac Ike McCaslin who rise to heroic stature and in whom hope has not perished.
Faulkner’s legendary Yoknapatawpha County stems from his two works Father Abraham and a novel originally titled Flags in the Dust. A recent biographer suggests that Faulkner envisioned a Yoknapatawpha cycle from the start. “He had been reading Dickens and Balzac,” Fargnoli writes, “and wished to create a shelf of books that had some unity and purpose” (9). Faulkner enrolls the landscape of the County through his numerous works. In Absalom! Absalom! he traces the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a western Virginian of ambiguous origin who ventures into frontier northern Mississippi in the 1830s to fulfill a great design to attain wealth, position, and power; in Light in August, set in Mississippi after the American Civil War, Faulkner shows how racism and misogyny can endure; in The Sound and the Fury, the novelist centers on the collapse of the Compson family from around 1900 to 1928; in A Rose for Emily, a story transpiring in Yoknapatawpha, the author characterizes the morbid psychology of Emily Grierson, a necrophiliac spinster, and that of the inhabitants in a small town of Jefferson. His works are replete with vivid and unforgettable characters—too numerous to list in this brief introduction—who face the harshest conflicts and struggles.
In his Yoknapatawpha Kingdom, Faulkner searched and expressed the human spirit and the universal element of life, the expression of which endowed him with the highest artistic achievement among the southern American writers. “Faulkner catches the imagination and emotions of his readers and he can be at once serious and comic as he portrays the struggles of the human heart in conflict with itself” (Fargnoli 1). His kingdom, therefore, covers every quarter of the planet as he strives to capture and test the old verities of the past and envisions the future which one dares not look ahead into.
A highly anthologized work, A Rose for Emily has captivated a great number of critics, leading Diane Brown Jones to remark: “The critical canon of A Rose for Emily has become as bloated as the character herself” (87). A considerable number of critics are enthralled by the masterly, suspenseful structure, such as flashbacks and flash-forwards in time, which characterizes Faulkner’s consummate craftsmanship. They endeavor to create an accurate chronology of the narrated events; but most of the explorations of the story revolve around the theme and characterization (Fargnoli 243).