Chapter 2 - Slow, Sweating, Stinking Bumpkins

Summary

The second chapter explores how middle-class Americans responded to the modernist battle cry “make it new!” not only by embracing new technologies, fashions, and aesthetic forms but also, and more simply, by representing poor white people as antiquated—a practice intended to throw into relief middle-class modernness. I argue that William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930) interrogates ideas about poor white southerners’ backwardness set forth by eugenics and other modern movements. Faulkner deployed the structural forms and stylistic techniques that define modernism in response to the challenge of fictionally representing the ideas and experiences of rural poor white characters in new ways. Signal modernist devices like stream-of-consciousness narration allow poor white speakers to articulate sophisticated thoughts that their somewhat narrow lexicons would otherwise make it hard to voice.