Our Enslaving House

Abstract Part II of the book, “Great Houses in Anglophone Literature of Empire and Slavery,” opens with Chapter 7, “Our Enslaving House: Faulkner and Welty,” which begins an inquiry into the great plantation house as master signifier, so to speak, in slavery fiction. Over against the romance of the plantation house that once reigned in the literature of the Old South, white Southern writers William Faulkner and Eudora Welty offer a counter-plot in which full consciousness of their own people’s responsibility rises to the surface when fictional plantation houses are haunted by the atrocious crimes of slavery. In this body of work, tortured plots of cross-race familial and household betrayal unfold inside great houses that emblematize not the U.S. nation but its rebellious Southern half. The plot of burning slavery’s house to the ground becomes the inevitable stroke of justice in this powerful strain of American Gothic.