Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)
László Dányi: Universal implications of William Styton's Southern Heritage
20 The family backgrounds of Peyton and Stingo are different. Peyton's mother and father are destructive forces in her life. Her mother longs for a timeless, unaltered state and she is damned by her obsessive piety. Her father is fallen, aged, middle-class, whose alcoholic stupor is not importantly the result of changed times. Peyton is surrounded by the conventional stereotypical props of southern belle, lady and gentleman. Stingo's devoted father, who calls himself a liberal democrat but considers Northerners as ignorant and vulgar, is supportive. He often writes letters to his son and he is his son's friend. This is the reason why this relationship between father and son can contribute to the establishment of a temporary Eden for Stingo. Stingo starts from Iiis insulated, middle-class innocence in Virginia's Tidewater. The inhabitants of this region are generous and cordial, and Stingo is closely attached to them and slavery. "I have been linked so closely in time to the Old South... my own grandmother at the age of thirteen possessed two small Negro handmaidensregarding them as beloved chattel all through the years of the Civil War,".^ The emphasis is on the word "own" in these sentences said by Stingo. He is proud of his Southern origin and his ancestors. Not only does Stingo have geographical and familiar ties to the institution of slavery, but he continues to benefit directly from that practice. His purpose as a struggling young writer is made possible financially by money he has inherited from his great-grandfather's sale of a young slave named Artiste. The two protagonists' ties to the South are expressed in the description of their houses. The LofUses' house represents Southern pride and honour. "It was a big house, Virginia Colonial style, an elegant house... a spring of ivy had begun to climb one rainspout... . Nodding there in the sunlight, this ivy seemed to lend a touch of permanence, possibly even of tradition, to the house." 1 7 But this idyllic picture is disturbed by the image of the first chapter -"... the curtains fell limp without a sound and the house, sapped of air, was filled with an abrupt, wicked heat,"^ The image of the "wicked heat" anticipates the tragic ending of the Loftis family. In these contrasting images the characters' personal doom and the social decline of the family are foreshadowed. The description of the old Southern family house appeared in SC as well. Stingo looks at a picture of the old house and he thinks "The temptation was both poignant and powerful, and it lasted for as long as it took me to read the letter twice more and to brood over the house and its homely lawn again, all of it seemingly suspended in a
