Word: virginias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...many monologues which weave throughout the novel, Styron has Nat think in an eloquent, clear, 20th-century style. But in conversation, Nat employs a number of dialects which only a Virginia-raised craftsman like Styron could create...
...revolt occurred in Virginia, not in the brutal Deep South. He himself rarely encountered harshness and was the product of an ideal master--he was educated, promised freedom, more or less, and refined in the white man's house...
Samuel Turner looked upon Nat as an experiment to destroy the myth of the Negro's inferior intellect. He exhorted Nat and gradually gave him responsibilities. Styron bases Samuel Turner on John Hartwell Cocke, who was a leading spokesman for emancipation in the Virginia legislautre of the early 1880's. (Ironically, Samuel Turner's efforts to educate and "housebreak" Nat ultimately resulted in the revolt that doomed the growing movement for slave emancipation in Virginia.) Styron takes the philosophy of Cocke and puts it directly into Samuel Turner's mouth. Turner's discussion with two ministers are, word-for-word...
...became Nat's obsession and divine mission to kill all the white people in Southampton, Virginia. Styron, with historical justification, isolates Nat from his murderous followers and portrays the man's pure hate; it is calm, intelligent, and unrepentant. Others, says Styron, "hate but with a hatred which is all sullenness and impotent resentment, like the helpless, resigned fury one feels toward indifferent Nature throughout long days of relentless heat or after periods of unceasing rain." Nat, however, had known the white man and had been cultivated...
...within the mind of the doomed slave and yet present the poignancy of the recent massacres and the impending execution. Styron is a great stylist and a perfectionist, but he certainly is not guilty of trying to present a cosmic view of the South or the declining prosperity of Virginia Tidewater. Criticisms of Styron's use of Nat's memory to describe landscapes are unfounded. The author's sensitivity towards the setting adds much richness to the novel. In the end, the reader is only exhausted by the many and deep experiences in Nat Turner's mind. Styron has achieved...