“The Bear”
“The Bear”
THE LITERARY WORK
A short story set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, in 1883 as well as a few years before and after; published in 1942.
SYNOPSIS
An annual bear hunt for “Old Ben” makes a man out of a boy who, upon reaching maturity, repudiates his share of the family farm
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written
William Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, around the turn of the century. In 1929 he began his famous series of novels and short stories about the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, creating a complex set of characters who together formed a microcosm of the Deep South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. “The Bear” centers on Isaac “Ike” McCaslin, grandson of a Southern planter who ravaged his human relations as well as his wilderness property.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Takes Place
Hunting in the South
Prior to and after the Civil War, hunting was a popular activity throughout the South, whether enjoyed as a pastime or employed for survival. Many Southern hunters used dogs to aid them in their search for prey and rode through the woods on horseback. They hunted to both obtain food and enjoy strictly masculine company since women as a rule were excluded. Faulkner himself joined a group of hunters every autumn to snare deer in the Mississippi Delta and partake of the sometimes drunken masculine camaraderie of the hunting camp. In his youth, he—like his main character in “The Bear”—would go hunting; Faulkner’s companions were a man known as General Stone and his friends, who told tales of a seemingly uncatchable bear called Old Reel Foot.
Abundant throughout Mississippi was the black bear, a type threatening to dogs but deadly to men only in exceptional cases. Specially-trained hounds would follow the bear and bring it to bay—that is, bark it into a position of squaring off with the hunter. If the overeager dogs pounced on the bear, it would certainly destroy them, as Old Ben does to the great hound Lion in the story. With the help of two or three other dogs as fierce as he, Lion might have succeeded—there were examples of three or four fierce fighting dogs seizing and bringing a bear down together. Such cases were rare, though. More often a bear would disembowel dogs foolhardy enough to attack it, striking them with its paws or seizing them in its arms and biting through their spines and legs. So instead of using the dogs to kill a bear, hunters would shoot their quarry once it was cornered, using rifles, shotguns, revolvers, and sometimes a knife, the way the character Boon does on the fictional Old Ben. An actual Mississippi hunter, General Wade Hampton, would—after his dogs brought a bear to bay—rush in and stab it, reaching over from behind a shoulder. He is known to have slain perhaps thirty bears this way, the largest weighing 410 pounds. There is a record of an even larger bear that roamed Mississippi, one weighing 640 pounds and a size worthy of Faulkner’s fictional Old Ben.
Part black, part Chickasaw Indian, the character Sam Fathers helps raise Isaac McCaslin to manhood in Faulkner’s story, teaching him how to hunt and survive in the wilderness. At the beginning of the 1800s, the Chickasaw, a nation inhabiting northern Mississippi, were esteemed as the Mississippi Valley’s most skilled hunters. Their favorite game was deer, followed by bear. The Chickasaw would turn bearskin into heavy winter robes and bedcoverings, the tough hide into sturdy moccasins, the dried gut into bowstrings, slabs of fat from the carcass into oil for cooking or a nutrient for their hair, and the bear’s claws into jewelry. By the time “The Bear” takes place later in the century, however, the great hunting days were over for the Chickasaw. Like other Southern nations, most of the tribe had been forcibly removed from Mississippi to Oklahoma at the end of the 1830s. There were only a few descendants—represented by Sam Fathers in the story—who could have learned firsthand the old Chickasaw ways. Sam Fathers is of mixed Chickasaw-black heritage in the story, but his background does not interfere with his being respected for his hunting prowess by the story’s white characters. Hunting provided a common ground for men in the South whether they were landed gentry, poor whites, African Americans, American Indians, or mixed bloods:
[I]n many localities certain Negroes or Indians were numbered among the expert [hunters] of the community, and their society was at times apparently courted.... [H]unting was a factor which promoted integration.
(Godhes, p. xvi)
A boy’s first hunt was commonly associated with his initial forays toward less childish pursuits; it provided a rite of passage that included the assimilation of knowledge, the demonstration of skills, and a show of courage and humility. The intensity of this rite of passage was distinctly Southern in flavor. While Northern boys regarded hunting as a hobby, most Southern boys were raised to view it as an integral part of life. In Faulkner’s story, when the young Ike McCaslin kills his first deer, Sam Fathers smears the hot blood on his face, turning the event into an initiation of sorts.
Southern folktales
Tall tales abounded throughout the rural South in the nineteenth century. The origins of the Southern folktale can be traced back to sources from West Africa, France, Ireland, and England, to name just a few. But local scenery and personality types also came to exert a major influence; the South developed its own store of anecdotes and tales that people spun about the characters and deeds of their kinfolk, friends, and neighbors.
The 1830s to 1850s was a golden period for the great folklore tradition of the South. Renowned tellers and writers of tall tales abounded; by profession these folklorists were lawyers, judges, ministers, editors, and sportsmen whose jobs required that they be skilled in rhetorical speech, or else brought them into contact with a great deal of source material.
One story to arise out of this era is a tale called “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” which inspired an entire genre of hunting tales. In many ways, the story resembles that of Faulkner’s “The Bear.” The tale, believed to have been written by Thomas Bangs Thorpe, includes a visit to the big city (New Orleans), an exceptional dog, and also an overeager hound who is killed by the bear. The characters hunt the bear over a period of several years until their prey is finally killed by the dog and a knife-wielding hunter. Whether or not Thorpe’s tale actually served as direct source material for Faulkner’s story remains uncertain; in any case, the pair of works point out the popularity of bear hunting in a wide variety of Southern literature in the 1800s and early 1900s.
Mixed-race offspring
In the pre-Civil War South, mixed-race offspring were often the product of sexual unions between a slaveholder and one of his slaves. There are different mixtures of races in Faulkner’s story. The character Sam Fathers is the offspring of a union between a Chickasaw chief and his black female slave. This same female slave, purchased from the chief by a white planter (Ike’s grandfather), later bears a few of the planter’s children in a union that mixes the black and white bloodlines. Such sexual relations between a slave owner and his slaves were not uncommon in the Old South, although they were by no means universal. In fact, those slaveowners who indulged in them were often looked upon with scorn by those who did not.
In situations in which slave owners and slaves engaged in sexual liaisons, there is evidence that suggests some of the relations came close to being a form of institutionalized rape. Often the attitude was that the slave woman on the plantation was there for the taking if the master fancied her. Not surprisingly, many young masters indulged, forming a habit that sometimes continued even as they grew older and married. Resistance on the part of the slave woman was considered futile, as the daughter of one slave intimated: “Plenty of the colored women have children by the white man. She know better than to not do what he say” (Eliza Washington in Fox-Genovese, p. 325).
With the master possessing the ultimate authority on the plantation, the possibility existed for even greater iniquities. “[Masters] might have sexual relations with the women they disciplined and who might indeed be their daughters” (Fox-Genovese, p. 315). In part four of The Bear, a sixteen-year-old Ike McCaslin discovers precisely this situation in his family’s past. He finds that his grandfather, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, had a daughter with one of his slaves and then proceeded—twenty-two years later—to conceive a child with this same daughter.
The demise of the wilderness
The pre-Civil War plantation system rested on the foundation of frontier conditions, which it did not altogether displace. The system allowed for the maintenance of a certain amount of property as wilderness for use in hunting and other activities. During and after the Civil War, the plantation system foundered, and the conservation of a certain amount of wilderness collapsed as well. There were hopes that the plantations would be divided up for the ex-slaves after the war, but in the end Southern lands became concentrated into larger holdings by even fewer owners than before the war. The end of the war also brought Northerners and Northern industries to the region to take advantage of the situation. All of this resulted in an exploitation of wilderness resources and a loss of the last traces of frontier in the Southern states. John Faulkner, William’s brother, described the local effects:
Hardwood mills began coming in and after them mills that cut almost anything that would make a board. And our wildlife retreated farther and farther into the Big Woods, the still virgin tracts of timber that cloaked the Mississippi Delta.
(John Faulkner in Utley, p. 95)
William Faulkner brooded about the destruction of the wilderness and wove it into his fiction. In “The Bear,” the white landowner Major de Spain begins logging operations on the edges of the hunting grounds, just as real-life timber companies moved into the woods hunted by Faulkner.
The Short Story in Focus
The plot
One of a series of seven stories in the book Go Down Moses, “The Bear” exists in its long form as published in the volume but appeared in a shorter form in The Saturday Evening Post. Only the book version includes a lengthy Section IV, summarized below. All seven stories in Go Down Moses concern the descendants of the fictional white planter Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (known as Carothers), who moved into northern Mississippi in the early 1800s. He purchased land as well as a part-black slave woman and her son (Sam Fathers) from a Chickasaw chief, then built a plantation and fathered three legitimate white children with his wife and two illegitimate mulatto children by his black slaves. His first illegitimate child, a daughter named Tomey, became the mother of his second illegitimate child, a son. This boy eventually became the father of three children, one of whom was named Tennie’s Jim. Meanwhile, Carothers had two white sons and a daughter in his legitimate line of offspring. One of the sons, in turn, had a son named Isaac “Ike” McCaslin. Orphaned at an early age, Ike was being raised by his cousin Cass McCaslin Edmonds and the Chickasaw-black man Sam Fathers.
When “The Bear” opens, Isaac McCaslin is sixteen years old, although the story reaches back to his tenth year and forward to well past his thirty-fifth birthday. To farmers living in the area, the bear Old Ben has become more than a menace with his hungry forays onto their farms for livestock to kill.
Section I opens in 1883 on the day of the final hunt for Old Ben but quickly digresses into the recollection of Isaac’s first hunt when he was ten years old. The month is November, and Isaac heads into the woods with Major de Spain, General Compson, Sam Fathers, Ash, Tennie’s Jim, Walter Ewell, and Boon Hogganbeck for the first time. Ostensibly, the object of the hunt is Old Ben, a huge bear with a mangled paw who has thus far eluded capture. Isaac shares a stand (a place where hunters stand in wait for game) with Sam Fathers, who serves as his mentor. In the second week of hunting, they hear Old Ben pass their stand. Not long afterward, alone in the stand, Isaac hears Old Ben pass again.
In June of the next summer, during the annual hunt to celebrate Major de Spain’s and General Compson’s birthdays, Isaac scouts the wilderness for Old Ben and eventually manages to spot the bear and observe him for a few moments.
In Section II, Isaac is thirteen and an excellent woodsman. We learn he has already killed his first buck and a bear. He sees Old Ben again but does not shoot him, despite the opportunity. Later that spring a doe and fawn are killed, and Old Ben is suspected. The culprit turns out to be Lion, a wild mongrel Airedale. Sam captures Lion and tames him. In November of Ike’s fifteenth year, the hunters—with Lion—corner Old Ben twice but fail to kill him. Boon shoots at Ben five times at close range and misses. General Compson draws blood.
Section III returns to a cold December in Isaac’s sixteenth year. The hunters are waiting in camp for the weather to warm so that Lion and Old Ben can engage in their now-annual confrontation. Boon and Ike are sent to Memphis for whiskey. The morning after their return to camp, the weather thaws and the hunters set out with Lion. They manage to corner the bear. Lion rushes at it, and it retaliates by grabbing the fierce dog with both paws, whereupon Boon jumps on the bear’s back and reaches over to plunge his knife in Old Ben’s heart. The bear dies, as does Lion—and for no apparent physical reason, Sam Fathers collapses at the scene. Most of the hunters return home. Sam Fathers dies, put out of his misery, the story implies, with Boon’s help. The others return to find Isaac and Boon sitting between Lion’s grave and Sam’s body on a raised funeral platform.
Most of Section IV is set in the commissary on Isaac’s twenty-first birthday, though part of the section flashes back a few years. In a conversation with his cousin Cass, Isaac relinquishes his title to the McCaslin farm and accepts a $30 per month pension in return. The flashback covers the time when, while poking through the ledgers at age sixteen, Isaac learned about his grandfather Carothers McCaslin’s iniquities—his fathering of illegitimate children with his slaves, and the incest committed with his slave daughter. Later in Section IV, Isaac becomes a carpenter and marries a young woman who urges him to claim his inheritance. He refuses to oblige her, so she refuses to sleep with him and he remains childless.
In Section V, Isaac returns to Major de Spain’s land on another hunt before the lumber company moves in and begins to cut the timber. It is 1885, and two years have passed since the hunt detailed in Section III. Eighteen years old, Isaac revisits the land for a final time, going to the graves of Sam Fathers and Lion before meeting Boon. At the end of the story, Isaac finds Boon
under a tree full of squirrels, futilely hammering the breech of his broken gun. Without looking up to see who’s approaching, Boon shouts not to touch the gun pieces. They are his. His preoccupation with his possession serves as a symbolic marker for the imminent intrusions of the lumber company on the forests mentioned at the beginning of the section.
Isaac McCaslin’s coming-of-age
“The Bear” tells a coming-of-age story that incorporates issues particularly applicable to the South at that time. Isaac goes through an initiation into manhood that is distinctly Southern in several ways. Firstly, his initiation centers around the rite of the hunt. Next, Faulkner gives Isaac a mentor whose ethnic mix reflects the population of the South as well as the egalitarianism among the hunting party. The partblack, part-Chickasaw Indian character, Sam Fathers, introduces Isaac to the wilderness:
He entered his novitiate to the true wilderness with Sam beside him … it seemed to him that at the age of ten he was witnessing his own birth.
(“The Bear,” p. 201)
When he discovers that Isaac has been seeking an encounter with Old Ben, Sam suggests that Isaac leave his gun behind. This advice leads, after the abandonment of two more possessions, to Isaac’s true entry into the wilderness, after which he is “permitted” to see Old Ben:
He stood for a moment—a child, alien and lost in the green and soaring gloom of the markless wilderness. Then he relinquished completely to it. It was the watch and compass. He was still tainted. He removed [them] … and hung them on a bush and leaned a stick beside them and entered it.
(“The Bear,” pp. 211-12)
After Isaac is initiated into the wilderness, it becomes the foundation around which he can orient many other things in his life, including his morality. At the opening of Section IV, in which Isaac relinquishes his inheritance, we see him at twenty-one, a man “juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land which was to have been his heritage” (“The Bear,” p. 252).
Isaac’s relinquishment of his inheritance pertains directly to two important issues in the South during the late nineteenth century, issues that were still plaguing Southerners at the time Faulkner wrote “The Bear”: first, the white man’s guilt in perpetuating slavery and the human exploitation that accompanied it, and second, the rape of the land. The white man’s guilt in perpetuating slavery and its inequities is aptly signified by Ike’s reaction to the episode of incest and mixed-race sexual relations that he uncovers in his family’s past. He finds the ledger entries that lead him to this conclusion during his sixteenth year, the same year in which Old Ben is killed. In his twenty-first year, the ledgers sit on the shelves above him, as a reminder, while he tells his cousin Cass that he will be relinquishing his share of the farm. The rape of the land through the destruction of the wilderness for profit also influences his decision. His mentor, Sam Fathers, has passed on to him the American Indian belief that land is given by a higher power to humans as a whole and is indivisible; people are meant to be stewards, not owners, and defying this truth only brings a curse on the land. At the core, the two issues—exploitation of human as well as geographical property—are inseparable. Carothers, in fact, exploits his slaves by getting them to exploit, or make selfish use of, the land:
The human beings that [Carothers McCaslin] held in bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest from [the land] and in their sweat scratched the surface of it to a depth of perhaps fourteen inches in order to grow something out of it which has not been there before, and which could be translated back into the money he who believed he had bought it had to pay to get it and hold it.
(“The Bear,” pp. 252-53)
Isaac renounces his heritage because of all this exploitation. In his own life Faulkner did not go so far as to renounce his property, but he shared his main character’s feelings. He owned two farms, Rowan Oak and Greenfield. His family lived at Rowan Oak, and he was buying more of the nearby woods to isolate his home from the world. Several black tenant families operated his farms, and he let them hold onto the profits because, in his words, “the negroes don’t always get a square deal in Mississippi” (Faulkner in Oates, p. 228).
Sources
In addition to the general influence of Southern folktales and American Indian beliefs and rituals, a great deal of “The Bear” comes from Faulkner’s recollections of his own childhood experiences in the forest:
I was taken there as soon as I was big enough to go into the woods with a gun.... The threetoed bear was an actual bear. But I don’t know that anyone killed him with a knife. And the dog was an actual dog, but I don’t know that they ever came into juxtaposition.
(Faulkner in Utley, p. 97)
Although Faulkner disclaims any basis in fact for the bear’s being killed by a dog and a knife, it should be noted that these two elements can be found in the previously mentioned folktale, “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” which the writer may have encountered at some point in his life. Regarding its setting, Faulkner’s rich and detailed Yoknapatawpha County is based on the region around Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived much of his life.
Events in History at the Time the Short Story Was Written
Jim Crow laws and World War II
Although they do not apply to “The Bear” directly, Jim Crow laws and World War II are tied to issues that recur throughout the story: white guilt over the legacy of slavery, and the misuse of the environment.
The Jim Crow statutes, or so-called “separate but equal” laws, were coming under fire increasingly in the years approaching World War II. As a result, the legacy of slavery was as much in the public eye in 1942 as it had been in 1882. The continuing industrialization of the South, coupled with the massive waste that accompanies a major war, also brought into focus the rape of the land. Following events from his farm at Rowan Oak, Faulkner worried about the survival of the wilderness in his own seemingly selfish era. He brooded too about bringing a new generation into such a racist, war-torn world; its members, he feared, could be destroyed in a Nazi-Japanese takeover.
Reviews
Two days after The Saturday Evening Post published the shortened version of his story, “The Bear” appeared in its long form in the newly released Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. (The volume was renamed simply Go Down, Moses at Faulkner’s request; he wanted the work to be read as a novel, rather than as a collection of short stories.) Faulkner’s whole repertoire of writings garnered little critical attention until 1945, when Malcolm Cowley published The Portable Faulkner—in response, as Cowley mentions in its introduction, to “the scandalous neglect of his novels” (Cowley in Faulkner, p. xxxi). After the publication of The Portable Faulkner, however, Faulkner received considerable critical and academic attention. In their critiques of “The Bear,” scholars often focused on the unconventional style of Section IV, and whether or not Isaac’s relinquishing his inheritance constituted a heroic act or an escape. Unlike the other sections of “The Bear,” which are told in third-person narration, the fourth section uses an experimental style, ignoring rules of capitalization and sentence length, for example, to establish a flow. Some critics, used to Ernest Hemingway’s often terse sentences and the works of realist writers that were popular at the time, blasted the experimental style in various writings by Faulkner. As early as 1939, however, the critic Conrad Aiken had disagreed with this assessment. He fathomed a purpose behind the style—“to keep the form—and the idea—fluid and unfinished, still in motion, as it were, and unknown, until the dropping into place of the very last syllable” (Aiken in Tuck, p. 14).
Critics were divided in their estimation of the collection of stories that included “The Bear.” “Go Down Moses,” said an article in The Saturday Review of Literature, “is a mighty wedge of ponderous writing, of Mississippi, of negroes and half-Indians, and great dogs and bears and all kinds of odd ‘Deep South’-ers.” A Boston Globe review was more appreciative, asserting “here are seven stories that represent William Faulkner at his best. Which is equivalent to saying the best we have” (James, p. 245).
For More Information
Faulkner, William. “The Bear.” In The Portable Faulkner. Edited by Malcolm Cowley. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household, Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Godhes, Clarence, ed. Hunting in the Old South: Original Narratives of the Hunters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967.
James, Mertice M., and Dorothy Brown. Book Review Digest. Vol. 38. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1943.
McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Oates, Stephen B. William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
Tuck, Dorothy. Crowell’s Handbook of Faulkner. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1964.
Utley, Francis Lee, ed. Bear, Man, and God: Eight Approaches to Faulkner’s “The Bear.” New York: Random House, 1971.