The Designs of Families in Faulkner Novels (Part One of Two)

With its basic design of "a house...a family -- incidentally, of course a wife" (263) the Sutpen dynasty was rooted in the patriarchal code embraced by the Old South. Mr. Compson tells Quentin how this code endowed "ladies" -- whom Rosa admired and desired to emulate -- with a sense of identity distinct from mere "women [and] females" (109). As "the virgins whom gentlemen [and aspiring lords like Sutpen] someday married," ladies occupied a place of higher esteem than the courtesans to whom [men] went while on sabbaticals to the cities, [and] the slave girls and whores upon whom that first caste rested and to whom in certain cases it doubtless owed the very fact of its virginity" (109). Thus, under this rigid hierarchy, ladies depended on the presence of more ill-reputable women for the preservation of their honor. Such ladies therefore enjoyed less autonomy, and occupied a place in society that was more precarious, in certain respects, than their counterparts in the lower castes. Moreover, whereas courtesans, slave girls, and whores were brought up to live without constant male protection, ladies were raised for the exclusive purpose of ornamenting their husbands and of submitting to them under vows of chastity and obedience. Having their powers of self-agency restrained in these ways, they were especially vulnerable to the social upheavals brought about by the war.

In the aftermath of this great apocalypse, whose sound and fury resonate well into the twentieth century, the Old South, as represented by Sutpen's grand design, collapses. With it comes the fall of the patriarchal code. This has the effect of shattering of Rosa's dreams about becoming a Southern lady. Having romanticized such an existence, by living vicariously through her niece Judith during the latter's courtship with Charles Bon (148), Rosa is suddenly presented with far less idealistic identity -- that of "an orphan of twenty, a young woman without resources" who is ill-equipped to fend for herself "in a time when most [marriageable] young men...were dead on lost battlefields" (19). After being denied the right to marry as a virgin by Sutpen, the only man left for her to wed, she elects to retreat from the world and to carry on her hatred of him as a virtual ghost. The extent to which Rosa ends up forsaking her life and stepping outside of time is indicated in the text, not only by her haunting, invariable

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