Faulkner was both a realist and a romanticist and was positively Gothic: an artist can view life from various perspectives if his vision is sufficiently comprehensive and penetrating. Faulkner loved his land and his people too much to reject them in their everyday aspects, without romantic or Gothic makeup and lighting, and some of his characters share his love of the ordinary. He was enough of a romanticist to feel keenly the difference between the reality he observed and what his land and his people had been at their best, between the sometimes nightmarish present and the fine dreams they had cherished.

Faulkner achieved the fusion of dream and reality in his Yoknapatawpha novels…. By assuming many points of view and imaginatively sharing the experiences of many diverse characters, by showing the outer world as it appeared to the mentally deficient, the psychologically disturbed, or the romantic idealist, Faulkner revealed the inner worlds of dream and nightmare and the razor's edge which separated them. As the omniscient author or through a rational, humanistic central intelligence or narrator, he showed a world of everyday experience, cherished in its multiplicity and uniqueness. The scope provided by this fictional world, despite its short history and limited boundaries, accommodated a variety of approaches, within a single novel or within the Yoknapatawpha cycle. In this cycle, only As I Lay Dying, The Town, and The Reivers are more in the romance vein than some version of Gothic novel or romance. (Although As I Lay Dying has a macabre quality and a partially Gothic effect, I deal with it in my article as an ironic version of quest-romance.) For Faulkner, it is apparent, Yoknapatawpha was essentially a Gothic realm. (pp. 220-21)

Faulkner never abandoned the advantages of the omniscient author but tried various limitations of omniscience, always with the purpose of getting inside a character and involving the reader as fully as possible. With an inarticulate character or one of limited awareness and self-knowledge, such as Mink or Joe Christmas, the style must be the author's. The restriction or the relinquishment of authorial omniscience, however, had great advantages in securing reader cooperation and involvement in a Gothic tale. The most difficult and successful experiments with multiple points of view, with interior monologue or soliloquy, came early, in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. Faulkner's predilection for the oral tradition, strong in The Hamlet and dominant in The Town, in much of The Mansion, and in all of The Reivers, is perhaps the most original feature of narrative method in his Gothic novels and the closely related romances. By never telling a Gothic tale in the first person from the point of view of the hero or heroine at the time of the action or in retrospect, Faulkner dissociated himself from the multitude of run-of-the-mill writers of Gothic romance.

In Yoknapatawpha the equivalents of the Gothic castles, symbols usually of past splendor and present decay, appear in most of the novels: the Sartoris plantation house in Sartoris and Sanctuary; the ruins of the Old Frenchman's place in Sanctuary and The Hamlet; the Compson house, in a state of dilapidation, in Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury; Sutpen's Hundred in Absalom, Absalom! from creation to destruction; Miss Burden's house in Light in August; the McCaslin plantation, still a going concern, in Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust; the Backus plantation in decline in The Town and as transformed by Mr. Harriss in "Knight's Gambit" and The Mansion; the old De Spain mansion as transformed by Flem in The Town and The Mansion. All these "castles" represent the plantation days of the past, and all of them had or have neighboring slave or servant quarters. Only one novel, Intruder in the Dust, lacks a "castle": the Mallison house is a comfortable middle-class residence in which the family live happily and usefully in the present. Although Will Varner's house, the only two-storey one in Frenchman's Bend, was scarcely a "castle," it housed a princess, Eula Varner, the Helen of Frenchman's Bend.

The scenes of enclosure, the "other rooms," in these "castles" or in other buildings, signify isolation, whether captivity or withdrawal or self-imprisonment…. External nature ranges from the waste land despoiled by man, in The Hamlet and Sanctuary and Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, to the pastoral and elegiac views of nature in The Hamlet and The Mansion, respectively. Productive plantations in Sartoris and Go Down, Moses, small farms in Sartoris and The Hamlet, and worn-out sharecroppers' or tenants' acres in the Frenchman's Bend area epitomize the agricultural economy and in context may be either Gothic or realistic. The most extended views of the natural scene in Yoknapatawpha are Gavin's panoramic survey from Seminary Hill in The Town, in which nature is least often a setting, and Chick's observations of his land and his vision of its place in the continent in Intruder in the Dust. Both Gavin and Chick show the romantic sensitivity to nature which is typical of Gothic fiction, but neither lives close to the land. Conversely, Ike McCaslin, despite his mystique of the land and the wilderness, shows little feeling for the areas which provide a living for man. (pp. 226-28)

[We] not only find all the traditional Gothic character types, but we find them in every novel, played straight, ironically inverted, or parodied: the Romantic, Byronic, or Faustian heroes and, for good measure and medieval flavor, the courtly lovers; the tragic villain-heroes, the revenge villain-hero, the rational villains, the villain seducer, and the archvillain of melodrama. The heroines, who may or may not be Persecuted Maidens, are less prominent than the heroes—in The Sound and the Fury Caddy appears only as a memory. What with adolescent heroes and heroes who can do without women, heroines would sometimes be as extraneous as in a horse opera. There is no traditional heroine in the action of Intruder in the Dust or Go Down, Moses. And Snopes makes do with two real heroines in three volumes, Eula Snopes and her daughter Linda, but they come closer to being romantic or romantic-Gothic heroines than do any other female characters. Evil Women or Temptresses are less numerous than villains and sometimes are disguised as heroines, like Narcissa, or beneath a bawdy exterior conceal a heart of gold, like Miss Reba. Snopes seems to lack a female villain until, at the end of The Mansion, Linda appears to qualify.

The parental figures who produced many of the heroes, heroines, and villains may be tyrannical or benevolent, but rarely were they successful as parents or grandparents…. In the record of ineffective or unloving parents, emotionally crippled children, and broken lives in Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner directly continued the Gothic tradition into the new American Gothic in which, Irving Malin said, "almost every work in the canon contains family terror."

The grotesques, which are the most easily recognizable of Gothic character types, appear in all the Yoknapatawpha novels, in part because Faulkner was both a Gothic and a comic novelist and combined the horror story with the comic tall tale…. The fact that Faulkner's grotesques, except those who are willfully or insanely evil, are presented with sympathy distinguishes them from those of some other Gothic writers and suggests the influence of Dickens in this as in other aspects of Gothicism.

Visible grotesqueness may or may not indicate psychological abnormality or sexual perversion, but characters who display such deviations from normality usually are indicative of themes typical of Gothic fiction, especially southern Gothic…. Narcissism, homosexuality, incest, and miscegenation are the specifically sexual themes in Yoknapatawpha which reflect the southern concept of upper class white women. (pp. 228-30)

The strongest theme in this group is that of incest, involved in some characters … with narcissism and homosexuality. (p. 231)

The recurrence of these Gothic themes in Yoknapatawpha points to a basic weakness in the society, an inability of its members to enter into harmonious, vital relationships in family and social groups, which is confirmed in other Gothic themes. One group of themes deals with individual problems and the attempts to solve them. Isolation, alienation, and lack of love appear [in many of the works]. (p. 232)

In contrast to the themes of individuals but not necessarily irrelevant to them are the extremely Gothic themes of family relationships and family heritage, often a heritage of doom. Only rarely does the positive and un-Gothic aspect, a heritage of love and fidelity, occur…. In the Yoknapatawpha novels the Gothic theme of family and social heritage signals the doom of those who look to the past and glorify the dead and implies Faulkner's abiding concern for the continuance of the family by those who have love, vitality, and courage to face the future.

Transcending individual concerns are themes based on the community, such as the theme of Negro-white relationships in The Unvanquished, Go Down, Moses, and Intruder in the Dust. The theme of truth recurs in various aspects: the themes of truth and justice (Sanctuary), of the truth of history (Absalom, Absalom!) of life-saving and spirit-saving truth (Intruder in the Dust), of essential human truth (The Town and The Mansion). When these themes involve a search, it is not primarily self-centered or self-seeking. (p. 237)

The extent to which Faulkner retained essential Gothic elements is impressive. He also transformed the Gothic mode in significant respects: by reducing it, by inverting it, and by parodying it. In Sartoris he undercut the Gothic effect by counterpointing the story of young Bayard with that of old Bayard and by using Aunt Jenny to deflate the Sartoris vainglory; both these effects are stronger in Sartoris than in Flags in the Dust, where the romantic-Gothic and grotesque-Gothic characterizations of Horace and of Byron Snopes divert attention from the Sartoris story. In The Sound and the Fury Faulkner provided a cheerful present scene in Benjy's and Quentin's sections and substituted psychological horror and pathos for mystery and suspense; the deaths take place offstage.

Omission of horror scenes is a favorite device with Faulkner…. In Sanctuary after the omission of the rape and the understatement of the two murders, the lynching scene is a devastating shock. Similarly, the omission of the actual murder of Joanna Burden in Light in August leaves the reader unprepared for the retrospective account of Joe's death in horrible detail…. The murders in Intruder in the Dust are distanced and understated, but the state of mind of Chick provides tension to lend Gothic suspense and mystery to setting and characters which in themselves are not Gothic. In Snopes the combination of Gothic and non-Gothic narrative sequences serves to modify the Gothic effects. Mink's two murders, of Houston and of Flem, admirably illustrate the two extremes of Faulkner's method, completely Gothic treatment and ironic understatement of violence.

In addition to diminishing some of the Gothic horror by such devices, Faulkner frequently, extensively, and significantly used ironic inversion, wherein characters and action are the reverse of what the Romantic or Romantic-Gothic tradition leads one to expect. This is done most completely in Sanctuary, to satirize the values and actions of respectable society…. (pp. 237-38)

Closely allied to ironic inversion is parody, which is inherent in Gothic romance. Parody is more comic in effect than irony, which may be bitterly satiric. (p. 239)

In addition to the ways in which Faulkner transformed or modified the Gothic elements he used are the ways in which he added new elements. First of all, he based the setting and characters on actual places and contemporary times or the relatively recent past, in an interrelated series of novels. He added individual characters which are not derived from traditional Gothic types…. In his experiments with point of view Faulkner covered all levels of intelligence, from speechless idiots to highly intelligent, sensitive, and articulate characters…. These are additions to the basic ingredients, as it were. Other additions are related to new purposes to which Faulkner adapted the Gothic.

These new purposes were rarely achieved in a single novel; the limited area and society made realistically possible the recurrence of characters, the repetition of incidents, the allusions to local legend, and the continued development of accounts of families and related themes…. The Gothic novel which deals with the more or less remote past or with a very limited scene and society in the present and with characters who are oriented to the past cannot attempt such a broad view as Faulkner's of social change and its impact on successive generations. (p. 240)

Of all the failures and weaknesses with which he dealt, Faulkner seemed most concerned with the failure of the family and society to preserve and observe meaningful rituals by which to initiate the young into mature life…. One of the great strengths of Faulkner's characterizations in his Gothic novels is his intense sympathy with and understanding of young people; his indictment of families and society is that they have failed to give their children love and emotional security or to instill in them by precept and example sound moral and ethical principles, truths to live by.

By great good fortune Faulkner had at his disposal what the original Gothic novelists, and even those of the generation before his, had lacked: the insight into the unconscious provided by Freud. Thus, in dealing with the irrational and instinctual aspects of the psyche, Faulkner was able to combine the subjective techniques of modern fiction with knowledge of depth psychology…. To pour into a whole row of old bottles of Gothicism a new wine fermented by a powerful creative imagination, stimulated by technical knowledge, and irradiated by intuition, this was Faulkner's distinctive achievement in Gothic characterization.

The Gothic revival of interest in the irrational side of man's consciousness tended to undervalue the rational side which had been too exclusively the concern of the age of reason. This lack of balance Faulkner could avoid because the scope of the Yoknapatawpha cycle allowed him to include characters who combined imagination and sympathy with reason and whose lives were more satisfactory and useful than those of either the irrational or the too rational characters…. Such characters are naturally rare in Gothic novels but can be accommodated in the Yoknapatawpha cycle because, first, the ample scope permits non-Gothic elements, and, second, the point of view of normal characters under stress involves multiple levels of consciousness and irrational phenomena which serve to illuminate the dark and secret areas in man's psyche. (pp. 241-43)

As the omniscient author, Faulkner could express his moral and ethical convictions, or he could use normal characters as spokesmen or reflectors…. He could always convey his meaning through the narrative events and thematic ideas. Instead of the good-evil polarity that Gothic romance often took over from medieval romance … Faulkner represented evil as white…. The same principles, Faulkner showed, apply to all men, black or white, and human dignity must be respected, regardless of caste or class. Intruder in the Dust dramatizes both the American Dream and the American Nightmare by revealing the unconscious reasons for and the conscious reactions to race hatred which violates these principles. No more serious new purpose could be conceived for revitalizing the Gothic tradition. (p. 243)

Faulkner belonged naturally to the tradition that accepts change and will not be held in bondage to the past. By choosing the Gothic mode, he was recognizing that man's "moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream." He recreated the motivating dreams of the past in a specific region and showed how its society was destroyed by what was wrong with its dreams or by its failure to attain and maintain what was right. (p. 244)

The influence of Faulkner is not necessarily the chief source of Gothicism in later writers; but his work, like that of Dickens, contributes significantly to the Gothic tradition and to its capacity to accommodate the dreams and nightmares of modern civilization…. (p. 248)

Elizabeth M. Kerr, "From Yoknapatawpha to the World: Faulkner's Gothic Bequest," in her William Faulkner's Gothic Domain (copyright © 1979 by Kennikat Press Corp.; reprinted by permission of Kennikat Press Corp.), Kennikat, 1979, pp. 220-48.