The Southern Social Themes of Barn Burning :: Barn Burning Essays

Written as it was, at the ebb of the 1930s, a decade of social, economic, and cultural tumult, the decade of the outstanding Depression, William Faulkners short twaddle Barn Burning may be read and discussed in our classrooms as just that--a story of the 30s, for Barn Burning offers students insights into these years as they were lived by the nation and the South and captured by our artists. This story was first published in June of 1939 in Harpers Magazine and later awarded the 0. Henry Memorial Award for the better short story of the year. Whether read alone, as part of a thematic unit on the Depression time, or as an element of an interdisciplinary figure of the Depression 30s, Barn Burning net be used to awaken students to the race, class, and economic turmoil of the decade. During the 1930s, the Sartoris and Snopes families were overlapping entities in Faulkners sight. These families with their opposing social values spurred his imagination at a time when he wrote about the passing of a conservative, agricultural South and the opening up of the South to a new era of modernization. This depiction of the agrarian society of the Sartoris family connects Faulkner to the nostalgic yearnings for a past expressed in Ill Take My Stand, the Fugitives manifesto of 1930, a book opening the decade as yet echoing sentiments of past decades. At the start of our classroom discussion of Barn Burning, we can explain the tenets of the Fugitives, their traditional, aristocratic attitudes, and their reverence for the landed gentry life style. We can focus on the description of the de Spain home and property, with its opulence and privilege, as representative of the Agrarians version of the good life. Early we need to emphasize and discuss the attraction of the childly boy Colonel Sartoris Snopes to the security and comfort of this style, his attraction to his namesakes heritage. In his rendition of the Sartoris-like agrarian society, Faulkner acknowledges its dicho tomy the injustice, the lack of fair play, the blacks subservience, and the divisiveness within the community which empire builders like the Sartorises and the de Spains wrought. It is, of course, this rattling social inequity, the class distinction, and the economic inequality against which Sartys father Ab Snopes barn burning rails. We now can lead our students to the evidence of these social injustices within the story by identifying exemplary moments and scenes.