Faulkner’s Renewal of the Figure of the Grizzly Bear in the American West: From Ancestor to Political Symbol

Abstract

The role of the grizzly bear in many Native American tribes has had a tremendous cultural, spiritual and ecological significance, which was objected by the colonisers’ anthropocentric conception of wildlife as an instrumental value to humans. Literature has been one of the main sources to find traces of this Native American conception of the grizzly bear as deity as well as the colonists’ perspective of the nonhuman animal as threat to be tamed. In this article, I will analyse some folk tales and William Faulkner’s “The Bear” (1942) in order to demonstrate the existence of this conception of the grizzly bear in the American West, as well as the importance of literature for its perpetuation.