Philosophical Frontiers

Abstract

In charting the determination of postbellum reactionaries to stabilize the economy of man with their idealized concept of the economy of nature, Go Down, Moses foregrounds environmental concerns to a greater extent than Faulkner’s previous novels. The supposed preclusion of miscegenate practices by the second of these economies was crucial to conservative tenets. Southern womanhood must remain unsullied. Antebellum patriarchs had consoled themselves with the knowledge that internal miscegenation accounted for the greatest share of interracial sexual incidents, but Reconstruction fostered a change in attitude. Namely, the patriarchal South began to equate manumission with external miscegenation under the auspices of African American men. In Mississippi, the legislature acted to protect their women. Interracial marriages, state sanctioned since 1870, were outlawed. Other states followed suit with the United States Supreme Court upholding this form of prohibition in the 1883 case of Pace v. Alabama. Ironically, because the criteria demarcating hybrids from African Americans were so contestable, inveterates now wrestled with the notion of miscegenation like never before. A biased perspective on census figures was an additional factor.

It is a central part of Faulkner’s unflinching insight—and here his achievement through fiction—to show how every character in Go Down, Moses is to some degree victimized by his or her cultural heritage, by custom and tradition that have taken impervious root and fossilized over time.

Arthur F. Kinney, Go Down, Moses: The Miscegenation of Time (122)