Faulkner and the Cavalier Tradition

S AN ELEMENT IN THE LITERATURE of the American South the ALJN cavalier myth is generally regarded as a bequest from supporters of the Stuart monarchy in seventeenthand eighteenthcentury Scotland and England. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha chronicle participates in that aspect of the cavalier heritage in two distinct ways. Most obvious, of course, is the Scottish ancestry permeating his fiction, which, while not aristocratic itself,1 nevertheless brings with it a clear devotion to cavalier ideals and patterns of behavior. A second source, not entirely unnoticed by the critics and acknowledged by Faulkner himself, is the influence of Walter Scott.2 In addition to these distinctively Scottish contributions, however, the inhabitants of Faulkner's South are inheritors of the cavalier tradition from another less obvious but nevertheless significant source. As we receive it piecemeal from various sources in the fictional canon, the early history of Yoknapatawpha County records as well an influx of cavalier ideals which is distinctively French in origin. Although the French contribution lacks the direct family ties and the dimension of literary influence, it is perhaps even more fundamental to the cavalier heritage of Faulkner's South than that of Scotland. France was, of course, the direct historical source of Western Chivalry, and as such actually spawned the tradition out

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