William Faulkner’s Environmental Awareness in His Go Down, Moses

AIJOSH | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Vol. 3 No. 1 (2021) Andalas International Journal of Socio-Humanities ISSN: 2715-601X (Online) Available at: http://aijosh.lppm.unand.ac.id/index.php/aijosh/index DOI: https://doi.org/10.25077/aijosh.v3i1.18 Article William Faulkner’s Environmental Awareness in His Go Down, Moses Suciati Agustin* & Eva Najma Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Andalas, Indonesia Article Information Abstract Received : April 21, 2021 This article analyzes William Faulkner’s novel entitled Go Down, Moses. The aim of this research is to scrutinize the author’s environmental awareness which he expresses through Isaac McCaslin (Ike), the main character of the story. The data is analyzed through qualitative method, and the result is presented using descriptive method. The source of primary data is Go Down, Moses novel and the sources of secondary data are books, journal articles, speech and interview scripts related to the topic of the research. The writer applies ecocritical theory specifically Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic. The findings shows that there are three forms of William Faulkner’s environmental awareness that he expresses in this novel. They are Understanding the equality of human and nature; loving and respecting nature; and being aware of nature protection and preservation. Revised : June 25, 2021 Accepted : July 2, 2021 Published : July 15, 2021 Keywords environmental awareness; William Faulkner; nature *Correspondence INTRODUCTION Environmental issues have long been a dominant topic of discussion in the world. The rapid growth of the human population accompanied by an increase in the need for land has an unfavorable impact on the mother earth. It is getting worse due to the massive exploitation of natural resources necessary for the manufacturing of industrial products. Human behavior that does not consider the balance of nature causes damage to the environment; Eco-disasters are inevitable. Various studies and regulations have been conducted and implemented to find solutions to minimize the adverse effects of environmental damage. Many organizations and environmental activists have done extensive campaigns to raise public awareness of environmental issues. However, the effects of all these programs have not made significant improvements. The exploitation of nature is still occurring, even increasing over time. For that reason, we need to find a better approach to solve the problem. Relevant to this agenda, as one of the moral teaching sources, literature has a role to play. In his book, An Introduction to the Study of Literature, Hudson (1913) stated that literature is a vital record of what men have seen in life, what they have thought and felt about those aspects of it which have the most immediate and enduring interest for all of us. It is then fundamentally an expression of life through the medium of language (p. 11). This means that literary works are not merely the result of the author's imagination but also views on life phenomena that are considered important and interesting to be conveyed to readers. One of the issues that gets authors’ attention is the phenomenon of environmental damage. “For novelists, 38 AIJOSH | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License Vol. 3 No. 1 (2021) poets, and essayists from Cooper, Emerson, and Thoreau to Jeffers and Faulkner, the imaginative influence of nature has been of major significance” (Myers, 2013, p. 648). Go Down, Moses (1942) is considered as "one of the most significant American novelsif not the most - that deals with wilderness and environmental themes" (Wittenberg, 2019, p. 3). Written in seven separate stories, this work was originally known as a compilation of stories under the title Go Down, Moses and the Other Stories. Though published as a short story collection in the first edition, William Faulkner, the author, considered the book to be a novel and asked the publisher to omit "and the other stories" for the next editions' cover. The novel, which is set in Yoknapatawpha (a Faulkner's fictional county), consists of multiple characters connected to the twists and turns of a large extended family, McCaslin. This novel depicts the interaction of slaves with their masters, their interaction with nature, and social changes in Mississippi bringing it to the modern era. The central figure in Go Down, Moses is Isaac McCaslin, well known as uncle Ike. He is the heir to the entire land and slaves belonging to the McCaslin family. However, Uncle Ike has a different perspective from his predecessors and those around him regarding nature and land tenure systems. For him, land and people are in an equal position and there can be no claim of ownership between them. He also argues that it was human control over land that was the forerunner of slavery and other arbitrary actions that ultimately brought a curse on the McCaslin family - a relationship of incest and endless conflict. To that end, he decided to relinquish his inheritance and move to a small hut as a carpenter. He kept hunting and camping until very old age when most of the Mississippi forest had been cut down and replaced by agricultural land. William Faulkner is a prolific American writer concerned a lot about environmental issues in the American South, as seen in his criticism on the ignorance of Southern societies through his speeches and interviews. Faulkner also conveyed this criticism through his works including Go Down, Moses. As James Seay (1934) in Rubin's book The American South: Portrait of Culture emphasizes that Go Down, Moses has the events and patterns which symbolize the real history. The historical fact overwhelmed the virgin forest in the South which provides one ideal model to examine the changes in the Southern landscape and the violence behind those changes. In addition, the attitudes and views of the main character of the story towards the environment also have many similarities with William Faulkner's attitude and views that he conveyed in various events. METHOD The writers believe that Go Down, Moses novel reflects the author's environmental awareness which he expressed through the main character of the story, Isaac McCaslin. Brehm, et. al (2013) defines environmental awareness as people's understanding and awareness of the environment and the related issues. It is elaborated as behaviors that consider the sustainability of nature. In this research, the writers examined the depiction of environmental awareness in Go Down, Moses. The analysis was conducted using ecocritical theory specifically Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic. RESULT AND DISCUSSION Land Ethics is a branch of ecocriticism which is used to understand the relations between human and nature as akin to the interrelationship between humans. In his book A Sand County Almanac (1979), Aldo Leopold exp (...truncated)