The land for Oxford, Mississippi was bought by John Martin, John Chisom, and John Craig from a Chickasaw landowner in 1837. They intended for the area to be developed so that Mississippi might choose to establish its first university there, some sort of new intellectual capital for the old southwest was the intended effect. In order to accomplish their plans, they named the city Oxford in reference to the Oxford University of England, in hopes to bring to mind the idea of a new promise land of progress and scholastic achievement, even when in the context of the old South, seems a bit nutty. The slight psychological ploy executed on a large scale, is absurd to say the least; but whatever works! I bring this up not to poke fun of the founders, but to highlight the idea that the South's transition into modernity was anything but usual. The fleeting thought is; who is to say that Darl is insane? when the founders of a city that is home to a major public university in what you may argue to be one of the greatest countries of the world, debated upon naming the city either Oxford, Cambridge, or New New Haven. All joking aside (I'm sure there have been cities named on stranger intentions) Oxford, Mississippi became the home of the University of Mississippi, now known as Ole Miss. In 1848 the university opened it's doors to the first 80 students. The city quickly became a hub of intellectualism and commerce before the civil war took its nasty toll on what we now consider to be the center of activity in Oxford, “The Square.” Union troops literally burned down the city and it was not until many years of rebuilding were the main buildings of Oxford re-erected. Now, the influx of students and intellectuals have made Oxford a city of bustling industry and commerce. It is one of the most progressive cities in Mississippi even though Ole Miss was the sight for the 1962 Civil Rights event in which the university attempted to prevent the integration of African Americans by refusing to admit James Meredith, a African American who had won a supreme court case saying that they had violated the bill of rights and the constitution. With such a violent and nasty history of bigotry, it is interesting to note that Oxford now is a place of international attention. William Faulkner used Oxford as the home for his literature. The fictional Yoknapatawpha County, became a “little postage stamp of earth,” in which Faulkner examined the lives of individuals he created out of interpretation of the southern characters he would see in reality. Faulkner apparently made the town a little “uneasy,” as to the amount of national and international attention they were now receiving, especially after winning the nobel prize for literature in 1949. The result then, is a town in which the progression from the old to the new was nothing but turbulent, but now seems to define a progressive city, home to a lot of young students, who operate with the understanding that the history of the South is encapsulated within the writing of Faulkner and the true history of their very own town. The turbulent past defines the city by setting up the contrast and creating an image of a tough transition from the customs and rituals of the old South to the international acceptance and rebirth of a city that now houses all kinds of people interested in all kinds of things, producing a lot of good work and writing from the seat of intellectualism that the founding fathers of the city really intended upon. The insanity of it all, if we were to lay some type of understanding of the psyche of the South over the more clear image of transition that Oxford itself emanates, rests in the idea that however backward the inhabitants of the South appear to be, there was always the possibility that in the crevices of family life (the small narration of Darl amongst the backdrop of the Bundrens) someone may rise preaching the need for so profound of a change that the burning of the barn in which Addie's corpse rests, through interpretation becomes the image of James Meredith receiving his degree amongst a student body that for the most part hated him, and the town of Oxford embracing sweeping changes of modernity. The crazy thing about it all, is that the South was inevitably going to create individuals who like Darl, must continually battle with the idealistic hopes for something better and more pure (socially and in a new kind of paradise way) that without ceasing berate the actualities of the social environment of the South; a group of people not quite ready for the philosophical implications of modernity.
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