Whitfield's Camp Meeting (Location Key)

The "camp meeting" that Cora Tull refers to in As I Lay Dying, where Whitfield "wrestled with [Addie's] spirit," is not described (166). Typically, however, in the South and other parts of rural America, a camp meeting was a Protestant - and most often a Methodist - spiritual retreat, an occasional or annual religious revival meeting. Typically too, it took place in the woods or some other area at a distance from the congregation's daily lives, and can last several days or longer. Faulkner is by no means the only American author to suggest that these emotionally charged meetings frequently provided opportunities for sex, but his Yoknapatawpha fictions also include Wesley "Actual Schoolmaster" Snopes, a "revival song leader" who like Whitfield and Addie also takes advantage of religious events (The Town, 43; The Mansion, 79).