The Designs of Families in Faulkner Novels (Part One of Two)
"Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?" (12)
In this passage from William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, Mr. Compson muses with his son, Quentin, on the plight of their neighbor, Miss Rosa. A survivor of the Civil War and a witness to the fall of the House of Sutpen -- the dynasty that critic Olga Vickery calls a microcosm of the Old South (36) -- Rosa has endured, but has not prevailed. Indeed, rather than existing in the world and finding fulfillment, she has entered a line of ghosts. Clad in "the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years [following her humiliation in 1867 at the hands of Sutpen]" Rosa has lost contact with humanity, save for the resonances of her "grim, haggard, amazed voice" (7). It is this voice that Quentin, the doomed descendant of Southern gentry, listens to for hours. He continues to be haunted by Rosa's seemingly timeless and bitter cry long after it has "vanished" from her lips (8).
At the same time, he is alerted to another woman's approach to the collapse of the Sutpen dynasty -- that of Rosa's niece, Judith. Through the testimonies of his father and Rosa, Quentin learns of Judith's life-affirming strength in sustaining the remains of her father's "grand design" up through and beyond the end of the war and Henry's murder of Charles Bon. Judith's resilience and her ability to move forward, in contrast with Rosa's self-cancellation and paralysis, comprise a tension that is revisited two generations later, in The Sound and the Fury. In the part of this novel set in 1910, Quentin exhorts his sister Caddy to assume the role of Judith by holding together the remains of their own declining Southern dynasty. Caddy, however, refuses to do as Quentin desires, opting instead to subvert his design for their family by carrying on an affair with Dalton Ames. This act of defiance drives Quentin into a state of paralysis, similar to that which engulfs Rosa. Indeed, each suffers from an "impotent yet indomitable frustration," for which the only cure is death (7).
Once Rosa begins telling Quentin the story of the Sutpens, in Chapter One, her voice comes to seem both disembodied and impervious to the vicissitudes of time. Indeed, in Chapter Five and in subsequent passages of the text, her voice surfaces without attribution or apparent regard for the chronological order of events. In these ways, she comes to resemble the faceless women, who prattle on despite the call of "Please Its Time," in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (Baym, 1384). The barren, stagnant landscape evoked in this modernist poem is likewise reflected in Rosa's surname, Coldfield. As a figure of alienation and emotional paralysis, she suffers from the same sense of lost identity experienced by The Waste Land speaker, as well as by the protagonist in Willa Cather's The Professor's House. As is the case with each of these modernist figures, Rosa's identity lies buried in the past. However, her's is the past not of European antiquity or of the American West but, rather, of the equally mythic Sutpen dynasty.
Latest Articles