Not Even Past: Faulkner, Ward, and the Afterlives of Slavery

This thesis reads William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1942) and Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) alongside one another as two studies of the afterlives of slavery in Mississippi, written seventy-five years apart. Rather than treating Faulkner as mere precursor and Ward as corrective, this project draws on the Plantationocene, Rebecca Evans's concept of geomemory, and Saidiya Hartman's theory of slavery's afterlife to argue that both novels resist treating slavery as a closed historical event, instead depicting it as a structure that continues to shape land, kinship, institutions, and bodies long after emancipation. The two novels diverge, however, in how they route that inheritance: Faulkner traces the plantation's afterlife through denied bloodlines and contested kinship, while Ward routes it through the incarcerated body and the carceral state, centering her novel on Parchman Farm, the plantation-turned-prison that Faulkner's text only gestures toward. Three chapters develop this comparison. The first examines fragmentation and narrative form, arguing that Faulkner's short story cycle repeatedly defers to white perspective at its most critical junctures—performing the very archival erasures it depicts—while Ward's polyvocal structure distributes knowledge across multiple voices to build toward a fuller, more recoverable record of trauma. The second turns to haunting, contrasting Faulkner's abstract "curse," which displaces accountability onto something beyond human agency, with Ward's ghosts, who arrive with names, histories, and killers, insisting on specificity rather than evasion. The third examines Parchman itself, tracing how an institution kept at the margins in Faulkner's novel becomes, in Ward's, the clearest site through which the plantation's persistence into the present can be seen. Taken together, these chapters argue that Faulkner and Ward are engaged in a shared inquiry into what it means for the past not to pass, but that they differ fundamentally in their relationship to the work of confronting that inheritance. Faulkner's fiction leaves history fragmented, deferred, and unresolved even as it gestures toward the necessity of fuller narration; Ward inherits that open question and answers it, allowing those most harmed by the plantation's afterlives to narrate them. Reading these two novels together thus illuminates not only the persistence of the Plantationocene across nearly a century of Southern literature, but also a broader shift in the tradition itself towards historical accountability and recovery.