Because the first three sections of The Sound and the Fury are given from the perspective of the Compson brothers and because the fourth starts with Dilsey the black servant of the family, but also indirectly centers upon Caddy through Jason‘s obsession with his niece Quentin and even his mother, the narrative neglects to bestow Caddy with a first person account. And throughout the novel, naming, description, allusion by the women themselves are actually always mediated through the narrator‘s and other characters‘ voices.
Reduced to silence, Caddy sheds light on the issue of womanhood and woman‘s status in Southern society. Seen from the outside, from her brothers‘ perspectives for the most part, she is first presented as Benjy‘s comforter in times of anxiety. Caddy, for instance, reassures Benjy that she is not going to run away. Later, she washes off her perfume and gives the rest of it to Dilsey in order to reassure him. Even when she has agreed to marry Herbert Head, she tries to ―bind Quentin to a promise of seeing that Benjy‘s life is not further distorted by his being committed to a mental institution‖ (Vickery, qtd. in The Sound and the Fury 283).179
She is also at other times her mother‘s pacifier and in most cases, she even takes upon herself the parental role as the following passage for instance emphasizes:
‗Let them mind me tonight, Father,‘ Caddy said. ‗I won‘t,‘ Jason said. ‗I‘m going to mind Dilsey.‘ ‗You‘ll have to, if Father says so.‘ Caddy said. ‗Let them
177 Robert Dale Parker, ―Sex and Gender, Feminine and Masculine: Faulkner and the Polymorphous Exchange of
Cultural Binaries,‖ Faulkner and Gender: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1994, eds. Ann J. Abadie and Donald M. Kartiganer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996) 73-96.
mind me, father.‘ ‗I wont.‘ Jason said. ‗I wont mind you.‘ ‗Hush.‘ Father said. ‗You all mind Caddy, then. When they are done, bring them up the back stairs, Dilsey‘ (16).
Caddy, as the female descent of a declined Southern aristocratic family, is burdened here with the myth of Southern ladyhood, a myth which in the tradition of Southern family romance, caught the Southern woman in a double-bind: toward the men—her brothers and father—she is supposed to be submissive and meek and in the management of the household, she is supposed to display initiative and energy (King 35).180
The lack of motherhood in the scene is correspondent with the disembodied status of womanhood throughout the novel. Mrs. Compson—the female head of the family—is also portrayed from the outside, from her sons‘ perspective. On first acquaintance, Mrs Compson seems to be the one defending the family from disgrace, protecting the males of the family from the threatening immorality of the Southern rebels/belles of Caddy‘s generation. Deprived of inner monologue, her text is registered through her sons, as in Quentin‘s memory of ―[a] face reproachful tearful an odor of camphor and of tears‖ in one of her scenes with Caddy‘s fiancé Herbert Head: ―You needn‘t be jealous though it‘s just an old woman he‘s flattering a grown married daughter I cant believe it‖ (61). The only roles Mrs. Compson can play are what Philip Weinstein reads as ―premarital coquetry or post-maternal grief‖ (431).181 Like Eva Birdsong in Glasgow‘s novel, The Sheltered Life, between her ―childless adolescence and her child-complicated middle age,‖ no other viable script has become, it
179 Olga W. Vickery, ―The Sound and the Fury: A Study in Perspective.‖ 1959. Rpt. in The Sound and the Fury
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1987) 278-89.
180 Richard H. King, "A Southern Renaissance," A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
181 Philip. M. Weinstein. ―If I Could Say Mother: Construing the Unsayable About Faulknerian Maternity,‖ The
Sound and the Fury, ed. James B. Meriwether (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1970) 89-101; rpt. David Minter, ed., The Sound and the Fury (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1987) 430-442.
seems, available to her. As Weinstein remarks, ―Mrs. Compson literally has nothing else to say‖ (qtd. in The Sound and the Fury 431).
Yet, it is important to notice that the mother is actually far more concerned with the superficiality of propriety than with the affection and supervision most often associated with her nurturing role. Mrs Compson, for instance, chides Caddy for trying to carry Benjy, but not only on the grounds that ―he‘s too big for you to carry,‖ or because ―you‘ll injure your back‖ but because ―all of our women have prided themselves on their carriage‖ (40). Weeping and mourning, or ritually heading for the cemetery throughout the novel, she registers her marital and maternal experience as a curse that makes a mockery of all her training. She has turned to the extreme opposite, ―a hypochondriac who uses her supposed frailty and illness to impose guilt on those around her, [. . .] the Southern damsel in distress [who] cleverly manipulates the men to fuss over her needs‖ (Shumeyko 15).182
More dangerous, the weakness that she professes detracts from her ability to guide her family from a mother‘s position. Her problem, however, is not only her inability to be an effective mother, but also—like General Archbald in The Sheltered Life—the recognition that she does not truly want to assume this position. For instance, the mother continuously tries to assert her status as the last lady in her family name. In doing so, she manages to separate herself from the Compson name, from the guilt associated with this name, as well as from her own daughter. She says to her son Jason, ―We, Bascombs need nobody‘s charity. Certainly not that of a fallen woman [. . .] I‘m a lady. You might not believe that from my offspring, but I am‖ (220, 300). She adds:
I was unfortunate I was only a Bascomb I was taught there is no halfway ground that a woman is either a lady or not but I never dreamed when I held her in my arms that any daughter of mine could let herself (103).
182 Amelia Mari Shumeyko, ―Gender Within Stream of Consciousness: To the Lighthouse and The Sound and the Fury.‖ (MA. Thesis, Boston College, 2008) http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations
As Caroline Compson flirts with Caddy‘s fiancé Herbert, drawing on the social model of the Southern Belle, her son further registers her absence from the Compson family but also her maternal absence from his life. Indeed, and as exemplified by Benjy‘s memories, the man who is most on mother‘s mind is not her husband, but her womanizing brother Uncle Maury. In Quentin‘s section, Uncle Maury even appears more as a father than Mr. Compson himself. In this sense, as Weinstein justly remarks, her brother Maury serves as her way of remaining a Bascomb, of ―refusing to consummate her entry into Compsonhood‖ (432). Mrs Compson is thus portrayed as an absent provider, both for her children and for her husband, a position which ironically allows her to remain outside of conventional gender roles, yet at the same time to interrogate the unified normative practices guaranteeing men‘s domination over women.
Deserted by an ineffectual mother and responsible for her brothers‘ needs, Caddy‘s presence throughout the text translates as a daughter, a sister, or a surrogate-mother. Denied any individual consciousness (and called upon to deny her emotions as well as all erotic appeal), Caddy becomes disembodied of herself, an absent center, as Brooks calls her, one that is observed from the outside and one toward whom all eyes, all memories and also all (male) approving gazes are directed (325).183 She has become, like her mother and yet in a
quite different manner, the absent provider for the family.
She provides, for instance, for Quentin‘s attachment to the chivalric concept of honor when the latter tries to rescript Caddy‘s love affair with Dalton Ames in terms of his own preconceptions. Whereas Caddy initially refuses to say that she did not want to have sex with her lover, refuses to say that she hates him, that is refuses to play along with the male-written narrative of Southern womanhood, she eventually accepts. The dialogue between Quentin, the director of the conversation, and Caddy, the actor, reads as follows: ―Caddy you hate him
don‘t you don‘t you [. . .] Caddy you hate him don‘t you [. . .] Yes I hate him and I would die for him Ive already died for him I die for him over and over again everytime this [the rapid beating of her heart] goes‖ (95). In this scene, Caddy submits to Quentin‘s authority while being threatened by ―the point of [Quentin‘s] knife at her throat‖ (96). Of course, in this scene, readers may understand very well that ―in Caddy‘s romantic rhetoric, hate is merely another word for love and death is a euphemism for sex [and that] [t]his is decidedly not the heroic resonances of these words that Quentin means to invoke‖ (Breu 114).184
As a consequence, the voiceless female in this scene is far from being disempowered, as she turns her forced or imposed silence into accepted (and highly subversive) silence, one that actually dismantles the very source of the narrator‘s authority. Despite the explicit privileging of men‘s definition of women in this scene, Faulkner‘s silences install a significant and potentially subversive dissymmetry between the voiceless female and the male narrator of female experience.
Faulkner never explained why he adopted such treatment except that ―Caddie was ... too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on,‖ and that ―it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else's eyes‖ (Faulkner in the University 1).185
Women, like Caddy, Faulkner seems to suggest, can difficultly be free from the men's eyesight. As a result, the matter of identity formation, in Caddy‘s case, will have to take into account not only her silence but also the other‘s gaze. Caddy actually never exists in the same way in the different textual productions of her brothers. On that note, the recurrence of the mirror motif reinforces the defocalized figuration of Caddy who appears fighting in the mirror
183 Cleanth Brooks. ―Man, Time, and Eternity,‖ William Faulkner, the Yoknapatwapha Country (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1963) 325-48.
184 Christopher Breu, ―Privilege‘s Mausoleum: The Ruination of White Southern Manhood in The Sound and the
Fury,‖ Southern Masculinity, Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction, eds. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2004) 106-128.
185
Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1965; the University Press of Virginia, 1959; reprinted 1977): 1-3.
with Jason (64) as seen through Benjy‘s eyes whereas Quentin sees Caddy and Dalton Ames not as people but as silhouettes against the sky. Glenn Sandstrom and other critics relate the mirror to narcissism, convinced that all the difficulties and conflicts situated around Quentin can be explained, for example, in terms of a replaced and transformed desire of narcissism.186 In this view, Dalton is understood as Quentin‘s double, his mirror image. Seen in this light, such matters which concern gender representation only refer to the problems of narcissistic males. Because she arises from the consciousness of every perceiver, Caddy would thus exist but essentially in the domain of male desire; man being represented as a seeing subject while the object to be seen is described as feminine. As Diaz-Diocaretz recognizes, ―Caddy as a bounded text [and image] illustrates that each woman is a product of interpretation [. . .] Caddy is structurally speaking a tale told by a man‖ (269).187 Understandably, Caddy‘s role
can only be grasped from inside—inside the text (and its attendant silences) and inside the image.
The reductive account of The Sound and the Fury to narcissistic fixation, however, may overlook one important critical aspect of the mirror motif. Whereas the narcissistic relation to mirror images appear as primary motifs in The Sound and the Fury, since Quentin the observer, for instance, is at the same time, inside and outside the imaginary circle, the scene does not here dramatize the interplays of gaze as rather binominal relations but actually features the exchange of glances into a triangular relationship: the viewer breaks through the self confinement of both Caddy/Jason or Caddy/Dalton whom he sees in the mirroring image. Faulkner seems to suggest that the formation of masculinity does not so much take place only within a narcissistic imaginary self-relation, as it already comprises external determination to
186 Glenn Sandstrom, "Identity Diffusion: Joe Christmas and Quentin Compson." American Quarterly 2.1 (1967): 207-223.
187
Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, ―Faulkner's Hen House: Woman as Bounded Text,‖ Faulkner and Women, eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986): 235–69. Doreen Fowler
be able to form a generalized gender representation. Moreover, by running ―right out of the mirror, out of the banked scent‖ (49), Caddy not only expresses her desire for un- representation, but also confines Quentin in a self-referential relation of the mirror. In looking at the mirror, Quentin might discover his own image, instead of Caddy‘s. A few pages later, Quentin reasserts Caddy‘s ability to escape definition as ―she ran out of the mirror like a cloud‖ (52). The mirror has turned on narcissus. In this instance, Caddy shows the fundamental instability of binary relations such as men/women and of a masculine subjectivity based on the exclusion of the feminized other.
Whereas Caddy‘s silence becomes a resistance to the monological authoritative discourse of the male narrators, Caddy‘s voice also reveals that the power of individuation—if it is anywhere to be found—resides in the feminine voices in the novel. Indeed, a strong character, Caddy adamantly refuses, on several occasions, to remain constrained by male (or even female) discourse. Breaching her father‘s command, she symbolically climbs the pear tree to spy on her grandmother‘s funeral and learn the forbidden knowledge of death (Seidel 133). Her insurgency in this scene is emphasized, by comparing her to Eve in the Garden. She also repeatedly refuses, for instance, to suppress her emotions for the sake of propriety and defies her mother‘s orders in showering Benjy with affection. Carrying on like a man who displays sexual prowess, she does not hesitate to seek out sexual relationships and from an early age, when kissing a boy for the first time, explains defiantly to Quentin: ―I didn‘t let him. I made him‖ (84). Her instinct for rebellion is probably nowhere more apparent than when she disobeys her parents and gets her dress wet. ―I don‘t care whether they know or not,‖ she tells Quentin. ―I‘m going to tell myself‖ (13). Through Quentin‘s memories, also, Caddy exchanges roles: ―[s]he never was a queen or a fairy,‖ Quentin remembers, ―she was always king or a giant or a general [ready to] break that place open and drag them out and [. . and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Faulkner and Women: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1985 (Jackson: University Press
.] whip them good‖ (109). Caddy here breaks with the stereotypically feminine patterns of queen and fairy. In this instance, she suggests that she can and wishes to take on a role that is not typically reserved to the ―feminine‖ sphere. Yet, if that role is not a feminine one—in the sense of being reserved for the females of the children-enacted play—it is not even a masculine role as Faulkner seems to suggest, since none of the males in this little play could ever assume—even if they wanted to—the responsibility of being a king, nor even fit in such a costume. In her reported assertion that a little girl can become a king, she asserts a self- created identity and thus, breaks with the traditional patterns that have, for centuries, reinforced the immutable (almost transhistorical) active-male vs. passive-female dichotomy. Caddy has become, to use Michael Millgate‘s words, ―a principle and a symbol of social disruption‖ (95). Quentin and Caddy, as Singal remarks, also unmistakably exchange sexual roles when Quentin walks to his duel with Dalton Ames while Caddy rides up later on Quentin‘s horse, ―the perennial symbol of planter authority‖ (131). Galloping like a cavalier, Caddy eventually finds her brother lying on the ground, having ―passed out like a girl‖ (103). If Caddy eventually recognizes her transgressive nature and admits to her wrongdoings, by exculpating her brother Quentin, when saying: ―I am don‘t cry Im bad anyway you cant help it, [. . .] theres a curse on us its not our fault is it our fault‖ (100), her daughter Quentin appears as one of Faulkner‘s most subversive female characters since she does not find reason to accept the blame that her mother so readily shoulders. After Jason yells at what he considers licentious behavior, the female Quentin tells him: ―Whatever I do, it‘s your fault; she says, ―If I‘m bad, it‘s because I had to be. You made me. I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead‖ (162). Thus doing, (Miss) Quentin throws the blame not onto nature, but onto nurture. Mrs Compson indirectly supports this view by adding that her granddaughter ―has inherited all the headstrong traits. Quentin‘s too. I thought at the time,
with the heritage she would already have, to give her that name, too. Sometimes I think she is the judgment of both of them upon me‖ (163). Although Miss Quentin has not been raised by her true mother, Mrs. Compson seems to argue that the girl has inherited all the aspects from her mother and uncle without having been socialized by them, thus calling into question the system of categorization used for self-definition. It is not sexuality per se, or knowledge, which brings about the fall; it is rather, as (Miss) Quentin suggests, society‘s denial of its women‘s strength and curiosity (Seidel 133).188
In appealing to death as a way to salvation, (Miss) Quentin, in the above instance, also foreshadows the words of Father (in Quentin‘s section) when the latter defines death as the only ―state in which the others are left‖ (50). Nothing but death will make it possible to avoid the gaze of the other. Only death may allow one, either male or female, to remain truly authentic in the face of incessant cultural strain. Ironically, Quentin is, to some extent—at least metaphorically—dead, for she is performing gender through ontological invisibility. Indeed, she is presented as a queer being because she lacks most of the things that determine an average gender formation: she has no father; is raised by a misogynist uncle; her mother has also been forced to leave her and she carries the (masculine) name of her diseased uncle.