Trains+and+Railroads


 * Historical Background **

By the start of the American Civil War in 1861, twenty two thousand miles of railroad tracks had been laid down in the northern United States and nine thousand five hundred miles in the South. Although some of the earliest of these tracks had been built in the South, the North quickly surpassed their neighbor with its own rapidly developing infrastructure. Most of the tracks put down in the South were less than one hundred miles in length. Mainly designed to connect cotton regions with America's ports, the weak network of railroads put the South at a serious disadvantage during the war. Not only did the North have over twice the rail mileage, their railroads were constructed and maintained far more efficiently. Furthermore, the majority of factories which supplied the necessary equipment were located in the North and the Union blockade put in place during the war prevented the South from getting many essential new parts or rails.

A profound and widespread cultural ambivalence toward modern technology further delayed the growth of the railroad. The citizens of the South were accustomed to an agrarian way of life. The plantation economy that had dominated the South depended on tradition and stability and the vigorous expansion of railroads seemed the very antithesis to that. In their minds, the railroads existed to carry cotton from the plantations to the ports. The South sought out industrial endeavors and urban mobility only so far as would complement its traditional culture.

During Reconstruction, the North financed the rebuilding and subsequent expansion of railroads through the South. However, it wasn't until after 1900 that industrialization became a major force within the southern United States. As America entered the turn of the century, the New South was essentially created once the railroad map of the Old South was finally completed, connecting Southerners to the rest of their country. American rail expansion reached its peak in 1916 and continued on steadily for the next several years, the number of industry employees being well over two million people around that time time.


 * Significance in Literature (1)**

As the technology that changed the South's entire culture and, by extension, its literature, the railroad was the emblem of modernity. The Southern Renaissance saw the railroad metaphor as particularly resonant. This literary movement within the South during the first half of the nineteen hundreds was heavily concerned with the tension between the traditional and the modern. The writers who are associated with this period, Faulkner being a prime example, addressed the burden of the South's history, its strict and conservative culture, and finally, the ongoing plague of racial issues within the region. Their works explored the clash between the past and the present, the upset and disintegration of a society, and the struggle for identity within a culture that had valued family, religion, and community above all else for so many years.

The technological advances of the nineteenth century had a huge impact on the literary trends within modernism that followed in the twentieth century. The power of trains and railroads furthered the themes of disconnect and alienation which had arisen in the age of the machine and also inspired a modernist style which encouraged the use and exploration of new, artistic techniques such as fragmentation and stream of consciousness. The modernity that the American South witnessed also engendered, within the writers of the Southern Renaissance, an ambivalence toward the strict traditions of their culture which encouraged them to explore themes focused on the divided aspects of the self and society. Like the train, which defied all previous standards of mobility; these new literary devices ignored the traditional narrative mode and barreled past the evenly paced literature of the past.


 * Significance to Faulkner**

The Faulkner family made much of their money off the railroads and a number of William's earliest stories feature trains. During the Reconstruction era, Faulkner's larger-than-life great grandfather, Colonel William.C. Falkner, was an active participant in the rebuilding of northern Mississippi, eventually founding the Ship Island, Ripley, and Kentucky Railroad Company. A great deal of his energy was focused especially on the extension of the Ripley line south to the Gulf and north to the Great Lakes. A writer of novels and poems himself, Colonel Falkner's most famous book, //The White Rose of Memphis//, features a thrilling train chase from Grenada, Mississippi to the title city. It is often said that William aspired to be a writer like his great grandfather and within his novels there exist several characters based on him.


 * //As I Lay Dying//**

"//It goes round and round on the shining track. Then the track goes shining round and round… It was behind the window, red on the track, the track shining////round and round. It made my heart hurt.//" (216)

Vardaman Bundren spends the entire ordeal of his mother's death and the burying of her body, dreaming about a mechanical, toy train. "It will be behind the glass again, shining with waiting" (100). He aches at the thought of it. Just looking at it would be nice. Even though Dewey Dell promises him Santa Claus will set it aside for him, Vardaman, a "country boy," frets that a "town boy" will snatch it up before he gets his chance (66). In this instance, the train represents all things wonderful and exciting about progress and growth. Vardaman longs to see this perfect, "shining," Vardaman-sized replica of the future. It is important to note that this moment reveals Vardaman's developing self awareness. He knows that in comparison to the boys of the town, associated with modernity, he is a mere "country boy." His world of horse drawn carts lacks the connection to the progress of the future. Ultimately Vardaman is unable to attain that small piece of progress - Dewey Dell pulls him away before he can ever reach the window of the shop - but he witnesses the intrusion of the modern world first hand when Darl is carried away on the train to Jackson.The progress the train symbolizes is inevitable. "It goes round and round on the shining track." The reader then recognizes the darker side to Vardaman's vision, as it illustrates Darl's tragic fate. Darl's life is handed away. His life, his blood in essence; "red on the track." Darl is laughing and laughing, and the train goes "round and round on the shining track."

"//Darl has gone to Jackson. They put him on the train, laughing, down the long car laughing, the heads turning like the heads of owls when he passed. "What are you laughing at?" I said.// //"Yes yes yes yes yes."// //Two men put him on the train.//" (253)

In his final narrative, Darl describes being taken away to a mental asylum in Jackson on a train. He even carries on into the future, describing himself eventually "in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams" (254). He alternatively refers to himself in the first and third person as he narrates the uncomfortable ordeal which reveals to the reader that Darl has begun to regard his inner, private self as a separate identity, even entity, from his outer, social self. He seems simultaneously within himself and outside of himself. The fact that Darl is carried off to a mental asylum on a train represents the inherent conflict between the individual and society, as well as modern culture. Faulkner strips the character the reader has spent the most time with up until this point in the story of everything that the reader has come to associate with his identity. The individual is obliterated, diminished to a series of bizarre and crazed remarks. While the other Bundren children seem to eventually find ways to deal with their grief, Darl cannot move past the absence Addie leaves behind, representing the devastation the old experiences at the onslaught of the new. In the end, Darl is designated an individual unfitting for the modern world and he is carried away to Jackson on a train, the very symbol of the inevitable future. Instead of joining that progress, he will forever remain in the "interstices," the space between the real and the imagined, the traditional and the modern, past and present.

1. Millichap, Joseph R. //Dixie Limited: Railroads, Culture, and the Southern Renaissance//. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Print.