Faulkner's The Unvanquished

An excerpt from Collected Essays on William Faulkner

William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished is a greatly undervalued novel. Set on the Mississippi home front during the Civil War and Reconstruction and published (in 1938) near the end of a decade in which American civilization seemed to many to be on the verge of collapse, it dramatizes the need for every generation to examine the traditions of the past within the currents of the present—and to weigh both in the scales of universal truth and justice.

The novel traces the coming of age of Bayard Sartoris, the son of Colonel John Sartoris, a legendary Yoknapatawpha hero. The heart and climax of the novel is the final chapter, “An Odor of Verbena,” which is frequently printed as a separate story and is hence all too often treated out of its context in the novel. Set in 1875, “An Odor of Verbena” dramatizes the inner conflict of Bayard, a 24-year-old law student, as he contemplates his response to the murder of his father by a former business partner named Redmond. As Bayard well knows, one part of the historical tradition that has nurtured him requires that he avenge his father’s death. However, another part of his tradition, based on the biblical assertions “Thou shalt not kill” and “Who lives by the sword shall die by it,” argues against revenge. In deciding which part of his tradition he will obey, which voice he will heed, Bayard must not only examine his own heart and motives but also scrutinize the character of his father.

In order to experience the full impact of Bayard’s moral dilemma, the reader must recall the relationship developed between Bayard and his father in the earlier sections of The Unvanquished. At the opening of the novel Bayard remembers the time when he was twelve years old and his father was away fighting Yankees. Bayard describes the moment when he and his black companion, Ringo, had stood in front of the house and watched his father returning home from battle:

Then we could see him good. He was not big; it was just the things he did, that we knew he was doing, had been doing in Virginia and Tennessee, that made him seem big to us . . . He stopped two steps below [Granny], with his head bared and his forehead held for her to touch her lips to, and the fact that Granny had to stoop a little now took nothing from the illusion of height and size which he wore for us at least.

From his adult perspective Bayard realizes that this larger-than-life view of his father is an “illusion.” But, as he constantly reminds the reader in this section of the novel, “I was just twelve then.”

 This heroic view of Colonel Sartoris is further con­firmed in Bayard’s innocent eyes when the colonel almost single-handedly ambushes and captures a group of Yankee soldiers. As The Unvanquished progresses, however, and as Bayard grows older, another, less-heroic view of Colonel Sartoris emerges. This shift of characterization is quite evident in the chapter entitled “Skir­mish at Sartoris.” In this section, set during the Reconstruction era, Colonel Sartoris opposes the blacks and carpetbaggers who now threaten the old order of Southern society. His methods are highly arbitrary, though hardly surprising during the unsettled pe­riod that Bayard calls “strange times.” On election day, when a freed black, Cassius Q. Benbow, is a candidate for the office of marshal in Jefferson, Colonel Sartoris shoots two Missourians who are orga­nizing the blacks to vote, confiscates the ballot box, and conducts the election at his own house. As Bayard recalls:

They set the box on the sawchunk where Louvinia washed, and Ringo got the pokeberry juice and an old piece of window shade, and they cut it into ballots. “Let all who want the Honorable Cassius Q. Benbow to be Marshal of Jefferson write Yes on his ballot; opposed, No,” Father said.
     “And I’ll do the writing and save some more time,” George Wyatt said. So he made a pack of the ballots and wrote them against his saddle and fast as he would write them the men would take them and drop them into the box. . . . It didn’t take long. “You needn’t bother to count them,” George said. “They all voted No.”

Colonel Sartoris’s violent and dictatorial actions are scarcely ame­liorated by his remark that he let the carpetbaggers shoot first and by his insistence that he post bond following the killings. “Don’t you see we are working for peace through law and order?” he says. The irony of this statement may have escaped Colonel Sartoris, but it is obvious to most readers.

What Bayard, who was fifteen years old at the time, comes to think of his father’s actions on that election day is not disclosed until the next, and final, chapter of the book, “An Odor of Verbena.” Nine years have passed, and Bayard, now a law student at the Uni­versity of Mississippi, has received word of his father’s death at the hand of Redmond. As suggested earlier, Bayard’s decision as to what he will do in response to his father’s murder forces him to examine contradictory impulses in his native tradition.

Drusilla, Bayard’s stepmother, becomes the dominant voice ad­vocating the code of vengeance. Riding the forty miles to Jefferson, Bayard foresees Drusilla waiting for him, wearing a sprig of ver­bena, her symbol of courage, and offering in her outstretched hands the two dueling pistols.  However, as the reader soon learns, Bayard has already determined that he will refuse the weapons. He will face his father’s enemy as the revenge code, and his own integrity, demand, but he will go unarmed. There are two primary reasons for Bayard’s startling decision.

For one thing, Bayard as a 24-year-old has long since outgrown the hero worship which characterized his youthful attitude toward his father. Faulkner employs several details to demonstrate how Bayard’s perception of his father has altered significantly since boy­hood. For example, there are Bayard’s feelings about his father’s killing of three men. Drusilla argues that the shootings were moti­vated by the colonel’s dream of a rebuilt and unified South. “He is thinking of this whole country,” Drusilla says, “which he is trying to raise by its bootstraps. . . .” The end justifies the means, Drusilla implies, since all people—black and white, rich and poor—stand ultimately to benefit from the colonel’s actions.

Even if Bayard could manage, as Drusilla does, to rationalize the killing of the carpetbaggers, he would still be left with the question of his father’s killing of the third man. Of this latter incident Bayard recollects: “the dead man was almost a neighbor, a hill man who had been in the first infantry regiment when it voted Father out of command: and we never to know if the man actually intended to rob Father or not because Father had shot too quick . . . .” Bayard’s recognition that this victim had been a member of the regiment that voted Colonel Sartoris out as commander and that “Father had shot too quick” obviously suggests that a desire for personal re­venge, and not some idealistic scheme for saving the South, may have led to the death of the hill man. Beyond these nagging ques­tions about the three killings, there is also Bayard’s knowledge that his father had frequently and mercilessly taunted Redmond, his eventual assassin, for not fighting in the war, for losing control of his railroad, and for futilely opposing the colonel’s election to the state legislature. Concerning this abuse of Redmond, Bayard ac­knowledges that his father was wrong and believes that his father, too, had realized his mistake but, “just as a drunkard reaches a point where it is too late for him to stop,” was unable to quit bad­gering Redmond.

But it is not merely realistic and honest assessment of his father’s errors that leads Bayard to resist the demands of the revenge code. Perhaps more importantly, he has drumming in his mind other voices than Drusilla’s, these others advocating the principle of nonviolence. One such voice is the generalized New Testament tradition admonishing him to turn the other cheek. Another is that of his iconoclastic Aunt Jenny Du Pre, with her admonition, “No bloody moon, Bayard.” Still another voice advising non-violence, ironically, is none other than his father’s, remembered by Bayard from their last meeting together, just two months before his father’s death. In that conversation Colonel Sartoris had said it was time for “a little moral housecleaning” in his life. “I am tired of killing men,” the colonel said, “no matter what the necessity nor the end. Tomorrow, when I go to town and meet Redmond, I shall be unarmed.”

Like so many of Faulkner’s plots, the ending of The Unvanquished turns on a series of paradoxes. We recognize, for instance, the ambivalence of Bayard’s feelings for his father. While he ac­knowledges that his father’s character was tragically flawed, Bayard still loves his father very much, as his actions beside the casket clearly demonstrate. We are also made aware that Bayard, by facing Redmond unarmed, has rejected the violence of the revenge code, but he has retained and acted upon that part of the same code which insists upon personal courage and family honor. Moreover, in adopt­ing the stance of nonviolence he is following in part the advice of a man whose hands, Bayard believes, are stained with “needless blood.” And he is, after all, a law student, being schooled in the use of law rather than violence in settling disputes.

Such paradoxes serve to underscore what Faulkner perceives to be the complex relationship of every individual to his or her inherited tradition. Bayard does not—indeed, cannot—divorce himself from that tradition; instead, he immerses himself in it, judges it, and adopts as his own those parts of the tradition that best serve his own per­sonal code.