This paper explores the ways in which William Faulkner portrays Native Americans and the natural environment in relation to the concept of “wilderness,” as proposed by William Cronon. The paper aims to show that William Faulkner's fiction is deeply imbued with the notions of wilderness as the fusion of the sublime nature and the frontier myth, coming together in his depiction of frontier settlements in Yoknapatawpha. His literary representation of Native Americans emerges as inseparable from the notions of frontier life and wilderness and it is highly problematic in terms of its appropriating and oppressive representation. Faulkner himself commented on the condition of Native Americans who stayed in Mississippi after the Indian Removal saying that “[t]here are a few of them still in Mississippi, but they are a good deal like animals in the zoo: they have no place in the culture, in the economy, unless they become white men” (Gwynn 1959: 43). Faulkner's literary portrayal symbolically constructs twofold Native American characters: true and degenerate, referring respectively to the idealized Indian, considered extinct in the post-frontier world, and to the eternally dispossessed Indian, unfit for the new, settler-dominated universe. These constructs were part of a broader ideological backdrop which legitimized American government policies such as that of Indian Removal, forced assimilation or disregard for past and future land claims. In order to examine these two metaphorical characterizations, it is necessary to explore the construct of wild nature into which the presence of the Indian has been inscribed for centuries in American culture.

The methodology of this inquiry relies on the ecocritical approach, that is in the area of the overlap between literary, cultural and environmental studies. The predominant theory used here was the analysis of the concept of wilderness put forward by William Cronon in his article “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” (1995). He explored the harmful impact of the ideological construct of wilderness on the treatment of the natural environment by drawing on the history of the romantic concept of sublime nature. The sublime as an aesthetic category refers to vast natural territories which are both aesthetically resplendent and, most importantly, untouched by human activity.