Dignity

In many of Faulkner's stories, a sense of dignity is portrayed as an essential component of human personality. Dignity, whether in the form of loyalty (however misplaced) or pride, is what motivates many of his characters as they seek it or try to maintain it. This kind of dignity is the all-but-forgotten dignity of the Old South, closer to a form of chivalry than anything else. In fact, many of his characters seem to have such an acute sense of the importance of dignity because of a strong ancestral memory of the humiliation and indignity brought to the Confederacy in the Civil War. In There Was a Queen, for example, a southern belle from a prominent family goes to the lengths of sleeping with a petty government official in Memphis in order to retrieve a cache of obscene mail she's received, so she can burn them and thereby...