With his first three novels, William Styron established himself as a distinctly southern novelist. Lie Down in Darkness (1951) is a family saga in the Faulknerian mode, presenting a family burdened by its eroding belief in its history and its destiny and featuring individuals, equally Machiavellian and melodramatic, whose respectable lives belie passionate compulsions and obsessions that often seem intimations of madness. Specifically, the novel reconstructs the life of a young woman whose death and prolonged burial paradoxically emphasize how distinctive and yet how representative a personality she has been. Set at a North Carolina army base, The Long March (1952) is a military novel in the mode of Gore Vidal’s Williwaw and Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, weird tales equally martial and Freudian. Like McCullers’s novel, Styron’s seems to be as much about the South as about the military. Set This House Afire (1959) is a murder mystery within a southern gothic frame. Although it is initially set in New York among the dissolute offspring of wealth and privilege, the novel’s action moves to South Carolina. There, all sorts of ready contrasts present themselves between the commercially dynamic and socially profligate lifestyle in the northern metropolis and the mannered and more circumspectly decadent lifestyle in the still patrician South. With its mix of professional and artistic character types, scientific investigation and superstition, Set This House Afire is a prototype for such later novels and films as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994).
Treating the largest slave rebellion in the history of the antebellum South, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1971) is, of course, a novel that is set in the South and that addresses the issue that has most defined southern history. But it is not a novel in the conventionally southern, or southern-gothic, mode. Styron has much greater ambitions than working within that mode had allowed him to achieve in his previous novels. Paradoxically, in attempting to reconstruct a largely undocumented historical moment and to enter into Nat Turner’s consciousness, Styron is trying to transcend the conventional historical, cultural, and literary assumptions about slavery, about the South, and about America. Thus, in treating a topic that might seem to be of rather narrow, regional interest, Styron is reaching for the big book, for the great American novel.
Framed as Nat Turner’s reflections as he waits to be executed, the novel provides a thorough exposition of the conundrum that has bedeviled Nat Turner and his compatriots. In the white view, a slave’s unwillingness to accept enslavement is evidence of not just rebelliousness but of evil. For all of the social, political, and spiritual institutions of the antebellum South have thoroughly defined slaveholding as not only a practical necessity but also a moral necessity. Slavery has been rationalized as a benevolent institution, through which slaves are cared for materially and spiritually in a manner that would be impossible if they were suddenly freed without any means to sustain themselves. On the other hand, most slaves have been conditioned intellectually and emotionally to acquiesce to their enslavement. So most of the slaves to whom Nat Turner appeals as he attempts his rebellion are too fearful or too uncertain to join him. Styron tries to establish that however extraordinary the rebellion may have been, it would not have been possible without an equally singular effort by Nat Turner to step intellectually as well as emotionally outside his condition. In effect, Styron is defining that effort as an existential assertion of self.
Indeed, some critics have charged that despite Styron’s efforts to represent authentically the historical realities of slaveholding in the antebellum South, down even to the smallest details, he ultimately superimposes some more contemporary philosophical concerns onto the story. Yet by far the most controversial aspect of the novel has been the charge that it represents a subtle but pernicious sort of racism. For Styron, a southerner, assumes that he can enter into the consciousness of an African American, a slave in whose oppression his ancestors were at some level complicit, if only by acceding to its continued existence. In the politically charged era of the Civil Rights movement, Styron seemed to many to be presumptuously co-opting African-American history and seemed to some even to be advancing his own career by creating a sensational literary event out of a story to which he had no moral, never mind literary, right.
The novel itself turns on two paradoxes that readers of any race may have difficulty coming to terms with. First, Nat Turner does recognize that he is, in many ways, superior to the average African-American slave. Thus, the very qualities that permit him to conceive of and to carry out the rebellion may ultimately cause it to fail. For Nat Turner is in many ways an African American whose consciousness exists in the largely nonexistent territory between enslavement and exclusively white privilege. In addition, much of his sense of superiority has resulted from his having been singled out by his white masters for accomplishments that they have found extraordinary in an African American. So if he is an elitist, it is an attitude that at least in part has its source, ironically, in the worst kind of racial condescension.
Second, once the rebellion begins, Nat Turner cannot control and, in fact, does not wish to control the violence against whites. The terrible violence that the rebellion will demand for it to succeed also requires a purity of motive. But, almost from the start, the rebellion becomes less a crusade than an orgy of bloodletting, some of it fueled by drinking. Ironically, Nat Turner discovers that he himself is incapable of the kind of arbitrary, merciless brutality that a rampage involves. Although this incapacity clearly represents a failure in his leadership, he cannot accept that it represents any sort of compensating humanity of spirit. Moreover, Nat Turner’s earlier violent sexual fantasies involving white women would seem, at least narratively, to justify the white demonization of African-American men who do not acquiesce to their oppression. (Political, economic, and cultural oppression is thus crudely linked to sexual repression or a lack of sexual projection.) If those fantasies suggest that Nat Turner cannot step entirely out of the condition that oppresses him, they may be the best evidence that Styron is trying to present his protagonist as a complex personality whose motives and emotions defy neat classification. Unfortunately, in treating a topic as controversial as this novel’s, an author also has to recognize that critics are going to seize on such emotionally charged details. Almost inevitably, there may be as little chance of subtlety in the responses to such a novel as there was in the responses to the rebellion itself.
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