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• W346985609 abstract "When Styron's first novel, Lie Down In Darkness, came out in 1951, critical acclaim greeted it from a reading public already used to the Southern fiction of such authors as William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. In their depictions of the underbelly of Southern politics and family/community values, Faulkner and Warren, among others, created fiction out of an historical perspective. The moral fiber that had made the South strong from its first settlement at Jamestown in 1607, through a war that used the South as battleground and a reconstruction that attempted to destroy or pillage anything left, seems, in the twentieth century, to be self-destructing. Southern writers, in particular, sought out the reasons for this moral degeneration, and readers eagerly awaited answers from a new generation of Southern writers. William Styron was among the first of these. In his 1951 novel, Styron points to a moral or lesson for the modern South; his characters, though believable as real people, are also allegorical in this parable. While he owes a debt to his predecessors, especially Faulkner, Styron's viewpoint is different in his first novel. He does not write out of the historical perspective that finds moral breakdown a natural consequence of a weakness in the foundation of Southern society--family, community, and religion, Styron's point-of-view is more personal; his microscopic examination of the new society finds it lacking in the personal responsibility, community consciousness, and religious dedication of which it was once so proud. For this he creates the town of Port Warwick in Tidewater Virginia--not only a place rooted in the society's founding, but also Styron's birthplace, familiar to him, he says, like part of my bloodstream (This Quiet Dust 291). Though based on real people Styron knew, he invents the Loftis family--Milton, Helen, Maudie, and Peyton--as a modern family in the twentieth-century South, and the Rev. Mr. Carey Carr and Daddy Faith as opposite poles of modern institutional religion. If Styron does not choose an historical purpose for his novel, he, nonetheless, insists on a sense of family continuity. In an essay about the writing of this novel, Styron reveals the impetus for the story as a letter to him in New York from his father in Virginia, telling me of the suicide of a young girl, my age, who had been the source of my earliest and most aching infatuation.... She had grown up in a family filled with discord and strife (TQD 290). Though shocked and haunted by the news, his imagination attached itself to that family filled with discord and strife, and he turned to reading Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men before he could to write. Warren's novel about the sins of the fathers helped Styron project an outline for his own work. While his focus was on the young girl, his subliminal question seemed to be, What kind of family and society could have driven her to this act? Many critics see the central character in Lie Down In Darkness as the younger daughter Peyton Loftis. The blurb on the first page of at least one paperback edition states, is the eloquent story of Peyton Loftis, the beautiful, desperate daughter of a wealthy Virginia family, and the tragic consequences of her intense search for love and understanding (np). This idea is erroneous; Peyton Loftis is not the protagonist of the narrative, but is, rather, the catalyst that sets in motion the entire work that is an investigation of a family and the society out of which that family comes. Indeed, Peyton Loftis is dead at the beginning of the novel. Her funeral procession, reminiscent of Faulkner's funeral journey in his mock-epic As I Lay Dying, forms the frame for the retrospective narrative of the Loftis family. Styron says that as he formed the outline of writing about a young, twenty-two year old girl who had committed suicide, he decided to begin the story as the family in Virginia assembled for the funeral, awaiting the train that returned her body from the scene of her death in New York City (TQD 291). …" @default.
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• W346985609 date "1995-09-22" @default.
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• W346985609 title "William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness: A Parable" @default.
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