The Past is never dead, it’s not even past” – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (1951) What role does memory play in the mythos of the ‘Old South’’ Holly Thompson - AM-218 ‘There are few areas of the modern world that have bred a regional mythology so potent, so powerful and diverse, even so paradoxical as the American South’. 232 This view, expressed by George B. Tindall brings to focus the ultimate conundrum when extracting the south from its myth and its reality. The South has held on to its traditions and idealistic values of the Old South right up to the present day, making the truth of the region difficult to grasp. Memory has always been the starting blocks of exploring history, however just as it is praised it also has its limitations. The South’s focus on memory has clouded the vision of the South, leaving behind a foggy history of the Old South but a clear myth of the pre- Civil War era clear. To detach the two you must look at three main focus points of how this intermingling of memory and reality came to be intertwined. Through studying how memory was originally used to create a myth, the popular cultures use of the myth and the true history of the era, we can uncover how significantly memory plays in retaining, and continuing the myths of the Old South. Residents of the South have always been firm believers of the myth of the American South. As Frank E. Vandiver suggests, ‘the idea of the south… belongs in large part to the order of social myth’. 233 With the collapse of the confederacy 232 George B. Tindall, Myth and Southern History: The New South , ed, Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989) p.2. 233 Frank E. Vandiver, The Idea of the South , (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1964) p.1.
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