Beyond the Door of the Big House: Slavery and Poor Whites in Faulkner and the Slave Narratives

A comparative analysis of Faulkner’s fiction and African American slave narratives, this essay by Andrew B. Leiter addresses the relationships between slaves and lower-class whites. Faulkner frequently depicts antipathy between poor whites and African Americans as a product of poor white resentment specific to their economic and social displacement. Contextualizing this presentation within the historical record and the slave narratives, this essay reverses traditional critical considerations of poor whites and slavery in Faulkner’s fiction. Those traditional considerations address what the slave economy means for the condition of poor whites in the antebellum South. They do not, however, address how the poor white presence defines Faulkner’s construction of slavery. The overt political implications of the slave narratives not only reveal the limitations of Faulkner’s slave world but they also reveal how the poor white presence mitigates the conditions of slavery in Faulkner’s fiction by displacing the brutalities of slavery with poor white suffering.