Flags in the Dust: A Continuum of Immorality Lost in a Lilac Dream

Flags in the Dust is a novel haunted by ghosts. Family ghosts and the ghosts of a decaying Southern tradition permeate Faulkner's first novel about Yoknapatawpha County. These ghosts have been transformed, their histories told and retold, with each telling enhanced and glorified, until the ghosts have been virtually deified and the Old South remembered as a sort of Utopia. The reality is that the old aristocrats of the South, embodied by Colonel John Sartoris, while displaying some admirable traits-- capacity for action, bravery, daring, resourcefulness-- particularly during the Civil War, were far from deities; they were relentlessly opportunistic men living in a time of endless opportunity. They carved out plantations in virgin territories when America was still young, amassed great fortunes, and maintained a fierce independence. However, the basis of the society they created was morally flawed: land was often unscrupulously wrested from the indigenous population (as seen in Thomas Sutpen's cheating of the drunken Indian chief to obtain Sutpen's Hundred in Absolam, Absolam!) and the subsequent economy was driven by the exploitation of slave labor. These flaws were obscured by the creation of a formal aristocratic society; and then the Civil War provided a grand stage for these land owners to defend their honor and way of life. Especially in defeat, their exploits became legendary. Their descendants looked to those valorous deeds as the last glimpse of the greatness of the South; thus, the process of idealization began—recklessness became heroism and immaturity became glorious sentimentality. This idealization further clouded the rotten core of the old system. However, the South of the survivors of the Civil War and their descendants changed dramatically. Life during the years between the Reconstruction and World War I became less and less suitable for the old aristocratic standards, as political and economic power passed from their hands to the new sectors in Southern society; but those standards were clung to by subsequent generations, and the strain of upholding those flawed standards in an environment hostile to their existence led to increasingly self-destructive tendencies by the progeny of the old South. The moral decline of these "flag-bearers" of the old southern tradition, notably Young Bayard Sartoris and Horace Benbow, is actually an exposure of a continuum of moral decrepitude that had always existed, hidden in a "windless lilac dream."