Chapter I A Destiny Mapped Out
Absalom, Absalom! fascinates the reader with its multiple narrations. The most intriguing part concerns how each narrator brings into the interpretation of the Sutpen story his or her own understanding of the world in which they live, because as long as a man “is more or less a product of his circumstances, he is influenced by the locality, class and generation he belongs to” (Sugiyama 58).
Seen in this light, the narrators reveal a lot, at least as much about their states of mind as the Sutpen history. Among the narrators, Quentin, Mr. Compson and Shreve have all appeared in The Sound and the Fury, so a probing into their mindsets and motivations would be incomplete should we forget to leave an eye open for the circumstances that function as a determining variant in the previous novel. Therefore, there remains only one narrator to the world of Absalom, Absalom!, Rosa Coldfield, who dies at the end of the novel and can disclaim any real contact with other novels. Interestingly enough, it is to this Rosa that critics’ attention often turns in recent years.(注:Rosa has not featured as an important female character in earlier studies. From 1990s onward, there seems to be a rise in the study of Rosa as an independent voice and participant in the story of the Sutpen’s as a Southern legend. The major studies I have at hand include Patrick O’Donnell’s essay which constructs Rosa’s chaotic language as a means to challenge the order of decorous narrative perceived to mark institutionalized identity, Betina Entzminger’s essay in which she described how Quentin misses Rosa’s message of the Sutpens’ story as a mad one, and Olivia Carr Edenfield’s article stressing Rosa’s desire to find a place in her community. I am indebted a great deal to Edenfield’s observations on Rosa, and have tried to carry her argument further by pointing out what significance lies in Rosa’s viewing of both her life and the Sutpens in that manner, especially with regard to Quentin, her listener and heir.)Rosa’s construction of Sutpen as a demon has been seen as the projection of her own frustrated hopes, so passionate and vindictive that David Paul Ragan called her “the most biased, perhaps least reliable source,”(注:Actually, Ragan has gone on to assert that “the peculiar view she [Rosa] has of them [characters in Sutpen family] renders much of what she says worthless in unraveling the essential truth (or even the necessary facts to approach that truth) in the Sutpen history” (71). My opinion, however, contrasts Ragan’s because I agree with Entzminger on the point of Rosa as one of the authorities in shaping Sutpen’s legend, and that Rosa’s rambling monologue has a message that Quentin fail to notice. But I differ from Entzminger on the point of what exactly is the message.)which echoes Cleanth Brooks’ remark that because Rosa “remains rigid with horror and hate for forty-three years…in an uncomprehending stasis,” she is the only one who is “damned” (Yoknapatawpha 305).
Ragan’s judgment on Rosa misses a crucial point of appreciating the narrative powers in Absalom, Absalom!. All the narrators in the story have their bias. Faulkner’s deliberate choices of narrators contribute to the creation of each one’s own version of “truth” (Levins 35). Therefore, to hold one version in particularly lower esteem fails to realize that “as bias is balanced against bias and distorted views give way to views with different distortions…the fragments begin to fall into place…and at last they cohere in a story possessing an immediacy…” (Waggoner 80).
Even if we acknowledge the possibility of a more biased version, a closer study would reveal that probably Mr. Compson could be more biased than Rosa. Mr. Compson has a deep distrust of women, most likely a cynical fruit of his estranged relationship with his wife Catherine Compson in The Sound and the Fury. Commenting on Rosa, he says that she learns from “her spinster aunt…to see the fact of her own breathing…not only a living and walking reproach to her father, but a breathing indictment, ubiquitous and even transferable, of the entire male principle” (AA 59-60), thus as the second narrator effectively rewrites Rosa’s narration and reduces her to the status of a hysteric. Mr. Compson takes a further step describing Ellen and Judith, Rosa’s sister and niece, as escaping from reality: Ellen a “swamp-hatched butterfly” rising into “a perennial bright vacuum of arrested sun”, and Judith “dreaming…in her complete detachment and imperviousness to actuality almost like physical deafness”(AA 69-70). He seems to think that women are either vindictive, probing like Rosa and her aunt, or dreamy, self-centered like Ellen and Judith. The only perfect woman in Mr. Compson’s imagination appears to be Bon’s octoroon mistress, with “a face like a tragic magnolia, the eternal female, the eternal Who-suffers” (AA 114). This view of Mr. Compson on women, in addition to reflecting on his dreamy and impotent inner world, has revealed his deep-rooted bias of women as mute, docile, ignorant containers of male desires.
The generic level on which Mr. Compson allows his bias a free rein seems to suggest he is more biased and unreliable than Rosa, because it is quite plain that Rosa has not driven her bias at the “whole male principle.” Her long-harbored hatred of Sutpen has an unmistaken foe and is well justified since he has proposed a plan that no women with self-respect could lightly forgive, let alone Rosa, who adheres to her codes of womanhood and expects a not-too-vulgar return on Sutpen’s part. Moreover, Mr. Compson has not only lessened his hold on his personal opinions, but also let his fancy run wilder in speculating and constructing Bon’s visit with Henry to his octoroon mistress and son, based on very few known facts. When charting out the important conjectures about the Sutpens in his book William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks discovered that all the conjectures are contributed by either Mr. Compson or Shreve.(注:Of a total of 39 important conjectures, Mr. Compson has contributed 11 entries, with only one being confirmed by the “Genealogy” attached to the Modern Library edition. See Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, pp. 432-436.) Ilse Dusoir Lind also labeled the observations in Mr. Compson’s narration as having “dubious validity” (891).While some conjectures of his are probably reasonable guesses (like Sutpen telling Henry of Bon having an octoroon woman and son), other are purely imaginary constructs of his fancy (like his vision of Bon as a decadent, feminine man). With his conjectures, Mr. Compson is quite capable of misleading the reader, as can be seen by Quentin and Shreve’s effort to revise the story with their own interpretations. So to hold Rosa as a more unreliable source of information cannot meet the challenges it poses, nor is it, I believe, the intent behind William Faulkner’s use of multiple perspectives.
Brooks’ view on Rosa, however, has a ring of truth because Rosa is horrified by Sutpen’s shameless proposal, the impact of which is so great that it sends her home in an outrage and shuts her up for forty-three years. Yet Rosa cannot be said to remain in “an uncomprehending stasis”(Yoknapatawpha 305). She has tried to accomplish something on her mind, as can be judged by her summoning Quentin and going up twice to Sutpen Hundred. If she is an old maid fossilized at her youth and incapable of growth, she does not have to do anything except for calling Sutpen a demon. This is an issue to which I will turn later in this chapter.
Rather than viewing Rosa through the lens of Quentin and Mr. Compson and brushing her aside as a pathetically hysteric old maid, recent critics like Donnell and Entzminger have tried to assess Rosa as a human being in her own right with reason and intellect, to acknowledge that her narration of the events and the subsequent evaluations contain both moral and cultural undertones for the other characters as well as for the reader.
So I am taking the line of criticism that views Rosa as a much fuller being who learns, grows but is devastated by a non-supportive, indifferent environment, which sees women as objects of protection and ignores Rosa’s effort to fit in with prescribed societal roles (Entzminger 112). Rosa’s circumstance is never an inspiring one: a puritan father dying from virtual suicide, a spinster aunt who elopes abruptly, a sister married with two children even older than herself, a brother-in-law who is a merciless plantation owner, the devastating war and two horrible killings, then finally, her own engagement never fulfilled, coupled by the loss of her last kin. It is in this circumstance that Rosa is born into and destined to the end of her life, with very little opening for her. Her life could be seen as an attempt to adapt and perform the preconceived roles of daughter, niece, sister, and a wife in a Southern community (Edenfield 58). Thus in this chapter, I would argue for Rosa as a marginalized woman, marginalized precisely by the southern codes of upbringing, and her desire to fulfill the expectations as perceived by her to be honor, pity, love, and faith.
Steve Taylor, in discussing the social context of suicide, explains that “for the participant…there is both possibility (of change, development, etc.) and certainty (in that ‘outcomes’ and ‘results’ are produced)” (Durkheim and the Study of Suicide 166). Therefore, for any participant to function well in society, he must find the balance between possibility and certainty. An ill-balance of the two factors will cause the participant to lose interest in social life, so Taylor concludes
Quentin’s problem, as I will reveal it through the discussion of Rosa’s talk, is his inability to comprehend the messages in Rosa’s tragedy. To apply Taylor’s understanding here, Quentin, by the time of his meeting Rosa, has been too much “in the knowing” so that he feels no knowledge is worth “to be known.” Quentin’s childhood is so full of the names of his countrymen that they become “interchangeable and almost myriad,” something Quentin has grown weary of (AA 12). He has lost his interest in learning and prefers to see his community history as a certainty, which is “going to turn and destroy us all some day” (AA 12).
Should Quentin realize the tragic fate of Rosa as a willing bearer and victim of fossilized female honor, he might have a chance to realize his circumstances as no better than hers, that the values he is obsessed with demand the same drying up of flesh and blood in his life by turning him into a ghost of the past and blocking out of the hopes whatever there remain for a human being. Should Quentin read through the intonation of bondage and ruin in Rosa’s interpretation of Sutpen’s story and her life, he might come to learn that his effort to explore meanings within a rigid, static code system will finally come to no avail, that an obsession with the past can do no good for the future.
We have Quentin at the beginning of Absalom, Absalom! listening to Rosa’s retelling of the stories only half-heartedly, because “it was a part of his twenty years’ heritage of breathing the same air and hearing his father talk about the man Sutpen; a part of the town’s—Jefferson’s—eighty years’ heritage of the same air which the man himself had breathed…” (AA 11). Quentin has already known the story: his father has told the story before. In this case Rosa’s tale amounts to a waste of Quentin’s time, a fact that even Rosa seems to recognize and kindly reassures him by saying:
“Because you are going away to attend the college at Harvard…So maybe you will enter the literary profession as so many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now and maybe some day you will remember this and write about it. You will be married then I expect and perhaps your wife will want a new gown or a new chair for the house and you can write this and submit it to the magazines. Perhaps you will even remember kindly then the old woman who made you spend a whole afternoon sitting indoors and listening while she talked about people and events you were fortunate enough to escape yourself when you wanted to be out among young friends of your own age” (AA 9-10).
Examined as a part of Rosa’s whole story, these very first words are a very revealing piece of talk not only about her upbringing and attitude, but also about the nature of the interaction between Quentin and her in Absalom, Absalom!. There are several messages in this piece of talk which deserve our attention. The first message is Rosa’s keeping secret of her true intentions when explaining her unusual summons for Quentin, a young man who has not “exchanged a hundred words” with her up till this moment (AA 10). It adds incredulity to her words when one realizes that Rosa has summoned Quentin with a note of formal request, which cannot be so easily put aside by a casual remark of someday Quentin writing a story about it. This polite but incredulous withholding of her true motive has certainly alerted Quentin, so he gives a lukewarm answer “Yessum,” but proceeds to think “only she don’t mean that…It’s because she wants it told” (AA 10).
From the very beginning of the novel, Rosa’s narration encounters a problem: her words are subverted by Quentin’s refusal to accept her stands. This rejection has been foreshadowed even earlier through Quentin’s gaze at Rosa as a crucified child, through his senses of her “talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound” (AA 7). After criticizing Rosa’s appearance in a diminutive term and regarding her voice as a source of agitation that forbids listening, now Quentin’s distrust of her language completes his subversion of Rosa as an intelligent, trustworthy narrator. In cynical boredom, he turns to his father Mr. Compson for an explanation of Rosa’s motive, and eventually pins down Rosa as a ghost that needs the protection of a young man to go on a journey. The point here, however, is the frustration of Rosa’s attempt to communicate and reach out to someone in her community. Maybe Quentin is right in thinking “she wants it told,” but his initial success and scorn makes him ignore other messages in her words because he feels the pretense hurts him after he has dutifully obeyed her order, come all the way “through the dry dusty heat of early September” to a woman “three times his age” with whom he has spoken very little in the past (AA 10).
This first message contributes to a breakdown of communication signaling a failure of Rosa’s next-to-last attempt to find and pass any knowledge in her life, a failure from which more would follow. For the present, Rosa has already been marginalized by Quentin and his father, the former listens with a conviction of already knowing all, and the latter denies her any substance with a label of “ghost.” Through the looking glass of men in her community, her authoritative voice is negated before she even opens her mouth.
But the pretense Rosa gives for her true purpose is not a deliberate fault, because she has been drilled in a tradition to do as a lady does. In the Southern codes, it is important for women to hold back “all passions and strong feelings” (Entzminger 112), and to exercise ladylike calm and silence. Alice Ready, a Southern girl writing to her friend at the outbreak of the Civil War confessed that she felt so keenly of “dependence,” saying “I cannot do or say anything—for it would be unbecoming in a young lady” (Faust 20). Brought up with its conduct standards, Rosa learns to repress her feelings and remain silent and mute even in childhood. To her aunt’s anger at the town she lends a patient ear, to her father’s stubborn isolation she has been more maid than daughter, to her sister Ellen’s joys of family news she is a willing receiver, to the plight of her niece and nephew Judith and Henry she offers genuine help, and to Sutpen’s return she welcomes with hopes of helping him to make a home. Sadly, the Southern code of submissive silence has not helped her to fit in. It is to this end that Rosa “wants the story told,” but this is something she cannot impart explicitly to Quentin. To publicly air the frustrations and indignation at her family, her community would surely be too daring a challenge to undertake. For a Southern lady who has grown up with its manners, Rosa is accustomed to the repression of her wants and needs, and has remained so to the end of her life. This time she takes up a “proper excuse” to fulfill her purpose but, one that fails to convince Quentin and leads the latter to regard her as an old maid whom he has an obligation to obey but not the sympathy to identify with.
The next message embedded in Rosa’s words is her awareness of the decorum prescribed for a Southern lady. When Rosa tells Quentin “perhaps you will even remember kindly then the old woman who made you spend a whole afternoon sitting indoors and listening…when you wanted to be out among young friends of your own age” (AA 10), she is offering a polite apology for causing a man inconvenience. In Within the Plantation Household, Elizabeth Fox-Genoves noted, “For a Southern woman, to be ‘I’ meant to be a woman as their society defined women. Specifically, it meant to be a lady” (242). Lady, “a term central to these (southern white) women’s self-conception, denoted…privilege at the same time it specified gender” (Faust 7). Gender-specific qualities in such context imply for women modesty, subordination to men from whom they are granted “the privileges of protection” (137). In Rosa’s case, we may notice her need for protection as Quentin discover three hours later that she has meant for him to accompany her to Sutpen Hundred, which is, at least one important reason he is sent for, if not all of it. The want of a male companion at Rosa’s house is evident and Mr. Compson and Quentin have both acknowledged the necessity to comply with her wish. In return for this gentlemanly kindness and protection, Rosa has demonstrated her ladylike gratitude. She mentions the gap in age and accordingly the discrepancy in interests. She is the “old woman” and Quentin’s proper circle is “young friends”; her domain is “indoors” confined to talking and listening, and Quentin has the world “out” to experience. Rosa’s use of contrasts indicates that she understands their differences and is ready to take them into account.
Rosa’s polite apology should not be taken lightly, since her narration is the only one in Absalom, Absalom! imbued with a consciousness of others’ opinions, on which ensues her acute pain of alienation. If we compare Quentin’s and Mr. Compson’s words against hers, we will discover that Quentin’s words begin with a series of annoyed and cynical inquires:
“But why tell me about it?...What is it to me that the land of the earth or whatever it was got tired of him and turned and destroyed him? What if it did destroy her family too? It’s going to turn and destroy us all someday, whether our name happens to be Sutpen or Coldfield or not” (AA 12).
Despite his cynicism, Quentin does care about “whys.” Later we witness Quentin’s attitude change from detached boredom to one of earnest searches towards the reconstruction of the meanings in the past. By contrast, Mr. Compson’s initial words are saturated with fatalistic doom, “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” (AA 12). So we would not be surprised to find his talk concerns more with man’s follies and tragic fate.
A sensitive woman, Rosa often views her life through others’ biased eyes. She puts her life under the public scrutiny and displays a tendency to consider others’ judgment in her explication. It is perhaps not coincidental that her first words should be an example of this consciousness. When explaining her situations and the decision to marry Sutpen, Rosa elicits others’ opinions by repeating “No. I hold no brief for myself. I don’t plead youth…I don’t plead propinquity…I don’t plead material necessity… most of all, I don’t plead myself ” (AA 18-19). The “No-plead” rhetoric confines her in the public censure. It shows Rosa has fully comprehended the extent of scandalous infamy to which her decision is vulnerable. In laying out the unpleasant criticism she shows her involvement with a larger theme: the linking of Sutpen to “future hopes and past pride” after he has fought for “four honorable years for the soil and traditions of the land” (AA 19-20). Rosa’s explication points to a similarity with Quentin in that they are both concerned with the preservation of Southern values, like honor and bravery for man, sacrifice for and subornation to man whom women could count on for protection.
The last part of her monologue testifies further to her vision of the contrasts between ideals and reality. Referring to the breakdown of her engagement with Sutpen, she cites three times a slightly varying mocking rhyme “Rosie Coldfield, lose him, weep him; caught a man but couldn’t keep him” (AA 168,170-171). Once more illustrating the accusations and criticisms, Rosa reveals a profound knowledge of her marginality in addition to establishing another perspective for her evaluation. In this sense, Rosa can certainly be ranked with Quentin in the obsession of what others regard them. Quentin also confronts the problem of his failure to handle the Southern honor. On the one hand, he cares about the South so he asks questions, listens to Rosa and Mr. Compson. On the other hand, he is constantly subject to others’ words and influences. The most significant example of this is Quentin’s remembrance of his father’s words with the watch as a gift at the beginning of his monologue section in The Sound and the Fury “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire…I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it” (SF 48). Viewing Quentin’s suicide as an attempt to become “the arbiter of his own virtues,” Mark Spilka contended that “it is his father, not Caddy, who dominates his imagination, who tests and undercuts his motives, and who finally determines his suicide” (465).
While I do not endorse such a strong assertion as the determining factor of Quentin’s suicide, I believe it may not be far off the point to say that Quentin’s obsession with meanings in human existence harbors an intense awareness of his father’s nihilistic approach. Other memories of what people say and talk about him keep emerging in Quentin’s consciousness: how he makes a spectacle of himself charged with stealing the Italian girl; how later Mrs. Bland and Shreve respond to the charge; how Dalton lies about hitting him when seeing him faint. Like Rosa, Quentin feels the sharp disparity between his helplessness in others’ eyes and his desire to seek for lost certainties in the past. He alone knows that Caddy’s loss of virginity is somehow connected with his inability to defend her (Spilka 454). He is often torn by this realization and seems as ineffectual as Rosa. This sensitivity marks them out as two paralyzed souls still clinging to the old codes—the honorable man and the modest woman, not knowing their very stubbornness has denied them the access to a bearable life.
The third message in Rosa’s explanation of having Quentin come to her is her very envy and hope for young men like Quentin and her desire to impart her knowledge of the Sutpen story. She refers to Quentin as one “fortunate enough to escape” the events. Among the major narrators, Rosa is the only one to have first-hand experience with people and events in the Sutpen saga. Although her contacts with the Sutpens are limited by her age and their somewhat strained relationship, she is still the participant-narrator. By contrast, Mr. Compson and Shreve have never had any real contact with the Sutpens. Whatever information they gather is passed down through General Compson, Rosa, and even Quentin. Unlike Mr. Compson, who has a habit of letting his imagination of the Sutpens run wild as a means of self-fulfillment, Rosa recognizes the horrifying wastage of human life at the core of Sutpen’s history and comes to call it “cursed” for want of a better term. She is the first narrator to condemn Sutpen as “no gentleman”; a man who has created two children only “to destroy one another and his own line.” She declares Sutpen has “valor and strength but without pity or honor” (AA 18-20). To a great extent, what she believes holds ground. Watching Sutpen getting himself ready to offer a proposal to Mr. Coldfield, General Compson echoes Rosa’s view with the remark “Given the occasion and the need, this man can and will do anything” (AA 46). Sutpen himself testifies to Rosa’s belief in confessing later to General Compson that he “had a design.” To accomplish the design he should “require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife” (AA 263). Although General Compson seems to be moved by Sutpen’s single-mindedness and calls it “innocence,” this innocence clearly constitutes in neglecting human happiness and lives because they must serve an abstract, inhuman dream.
Even though Rosa sees through Sutpen’s nature of a man devoid of “pity or honor,” her urge as a Southern lady to fill in with some roles after she loses her nearest kinsmen is so irresistible that she renders herself up as a tool at the hands of a “villain.” Hence unfortunately falls prey to Sutpen’s manipulations. By accepting Sutpen’s proposal, Rosa knowingly places herself at his service, aware of herself not as a being “…just my existence…whatever it was that Rosa Coldfield or any young female no blood kin to him represented in whatever it was he wanted” (AA 166). Her willing submission is dashed out by Sutpen’s blunt request that they mate and marry if they have a son. It is not until this moment that Rosa realizes what Sutpen wants is not even any woman; it is a breeder,(注:Although critical opinions are divided over what sends Rosa home, I have found Olivia Carr Edenfield’s argument on this point most persuasive. See Edenfield 67.) like “a bitch dog or a cow or mare” (AA 168).
A deep blow and insult to Rosa, the world that makes sense and meaning to her seems all of a sudden to vanish before her eyes. She has endured the past insurmountable trials with submission and fortitude, each time clinging to an opening in accordance with her Southern upbringing—she professes her admiration for the traditional manly “valor and strength” by silently writing poetry for the Confederate soldiers; she learns to “fulfill the endless tedious obligations” as demanded of a woman in nursing the defeated soldiers who come back “with the ultimate degradation” (AA 157)—but Sutpen’s last breach of a fundamental propriety has annihilated her sustained illusion for this Southern man. She packs up and goes back home, realizing the “death of hope and love…of pride and principle” (AA 170).
Remaining as an old maid for the next forty-three years, she is once more, and probably further pushed to the edge of her southern community. A fact Rosa herself is fully aware and repeatedly speaks of in the second part of her story. But the forty-three years in which she spends musing and brooding alone is not the end of her life and duties. She still does the summoning of Quentin when the occasion rises, vaguely cherishing in the young man’s prospect of a future unmarred by the devastations of Sutpen’s history. Rosa’s hope, though faint and flickering, is in the young generation’s chances for a somewhat unburdened life, because young men like Quentin can go away to “attend the college at Harvard” (AA 9). The spatial relocation offers chances to cast back an obsessive history of the South, something referred to as “almost synonymous with an adoption of a ‘new life’ and a farewell to the South” (Sugiyama 61).
Conscious of this possibility, Rosa shows her good wishes at Quentin’s fortune to “escape.” She gives her summary of the Sutpen events, with a hope of imparting to Quentin the knowledge that the story of Sutpen is not only one of “madness”, but one of “death of everything save the old outraged and aghast unbelieving” (AA 168). The knowledge is a penetrating truth she discovers about the story of the South exemplified in Sutpen and Wash Jones. We learn that Sutpen comes to General Compson, because he foresees the devastation of his plan, the very thing he has had risked his life for and staked everything else upon. We learn also that Wash Jones suddenly realizes the man he has idolized all along leaves nothing for him to look up to. In both cases Sutpen and Jones finds their lives hollowed out with “the death of everything” (AA 168). Both of them reject this discovery, taking upon themselves to set the record right, leading not only to their own deaths, but that of Bon and the virtual doom of Henry, thus ending the “the old and aghast unbelief ” (AA 168).
Like the previous one, Rosa’s third message fails to impress Quentin, partly because Quentin does not consider himself fortunate enough to escape. He has grown up with Sutpen’s story when the story itself has become part of Jefferson’s tradition, “his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts” (AA 12). Quentin’s loss of his own subjectivity to an irrevocable past is clearly indicated from the beginning, if not a fact immediately established. His obsession with the family name and preservation of a gentlemanly honor partly precluded the possibility of identifying the tremendous burden in being involved in “the events.” Even if he achieves an understanding later in the story, he is not willing to face it. Therefore, Quentin’s failure to realize an alternative future as indicted by Rosa anchors him permanently in an environment that dooms both him and Rosa. In this manner, Quentin might be seen a parallel to Rosa: both of them have tried to fit into a community that repeatedly denies their entrances, that shatters the codes of honor they have sincerely upheld and wished to act upon. The marginalization of Rosa’s life would be a harbinger of what is to become of Quentin’s in The Sound and the Fury. In missing once more Rosa’s hope and knowledge for a young man, Quentin slides further into his destined life with its rigid hold on his mental state.
The last message coming through Rosa’s initial talk is her wish to be remembered as they once sit in a “happy marriage” of listening and speaking, that she can connect to some human being. This, not surprisingly, is again lost on Quentin’s mind. Bored with Rosa’s old tale and suspicious of an old woman’s authority, Quentin listens with gentlemanly respect but a wondering mind. He does not perceive, however, that beneath her outpourings of anger, bewilderment, and indignation there lurks a deep tragic fate for women in the South. It comes out in her adoption of negation on herself by repeatedly saying “I hold no brief for myself,”(注:The phrase appears nine times in Rosa’s monologue.) for Rosa’s life is one constantly being ignored, looked down upon and is thus a piece of entertaining gossip to the town.
With those family members Rosa does make a connection, it is meager and precarious, bordering on the edge of non-existence. On the few occasions of family unions, her chances of becoming close to her father and aunt are reduced by being sent away to play with her niece and nephew. Whatever knowledge she learns often has to come from listening behind closed doors and her own observations. Her father seems to neglect his duty as a male protector and ignores how his daughter manages to survive and to provide for him in a war in which food becomes “harder and harder to come by” (AA 83). Ellen is too engrossed in her family to share the little sister Rosa’s emotions, evidenced by her spreading Rosa’s words on two occasions: the first of Rosa’s offer to “teach Judith how to keep house and plan meals and count laundry” (AA 71); the second of Rosa remarking “we deserve him” on hearing Ellen’s gossip of Bon’s engagement to Judith (AA 76). Ellen may not be aware that she has turned into a childish joke Rosa’s genuine wish to offer help as a sister and aunt. Judith’s help to Rosa lies only in allowing her to stay and work in the house. Rosa’s modesty, silence and submission have not helped others to recognize her spiritual and emotional needs. When the occasion does arise to actualize her emotional urge with the role of wife and mother, it proves a worse joke than being labeled as an old, eccentric spinster. As her narration discloses, all her attempts at making a constructive human relationship within the propriety of a Southern womanhood are frustrated. She is born and grows up in negligence regardless of what she does to break it.
In much the same way, Quentin has suffered like Rosa in conforming to an honor he is obsessed with. As the oldest son, “he is expected to become the head of the family who will continue the Compson line and preserve the tradition which is central to the Southern experience” (Brown 544). Unfortunately, he grows up on the edge of a disintegrating family: an unloving mother who ignores him, a drunken father who imbues him with cynical fatalism, two brothers, one retarded and the other calculating. Caddy, the only sister capable of loving him, first betrays his pride for the family name with her promiscuity, and then marries a despicable man despite of Quentin’s protest, thus severing the emotional attachment between them. Quentin’s preoccupation with Caddy’s love drives him to contemplate various ways to approach the family dishonor and keep Caddy within his range. He attempts to kill them both but shrinks back at the very moment. He challenges Dalton who makes Caddy pregnant but cowardly faints in front of his opponent. Quentin suffers acute pain when facing his inability to carry out his fancies, subconsciously aware that he could never return to the idyllic time of childhood even if he came through with these plans.
Quentin’s sense of being cast out, of not connecting to any member in the family is a major social-psychological factor that alienates and drives him to despair. In his circle of family and friends, Quentin is ignored and marginalized in that he, despite his clumsy mistakes and weaknesses, strives to live up to the ideals that none around him sincerely care for. As a lonely soul of the same Southern ideals, Rosa can certainly claim an alliance with Quentin and ask him to remember “an old woman” (AA 9), Quentin, however, does not recognize this alliance even after listening to her story, and has continued to do so by correcting Shreve addressing her as “Aunt Rosa.” The proper title Quentin insists on is in a sense symbolic of the fact that he has restored her to the status of just any neighbor, rejecting the spiritual heritage and emotional stagnation that bonds them. The loss of this message, even Rosa might not be consciously aware of, is so far the most pitiful aspect of their communication, because in not recognizing this spiritual “aunt,” Quentin has lost a chance to understand the parallels between them and learn a lesson through Rosa’s futile struggles, hence got further estranged.
Rosa’s narration witnesses her stubbornness to hold onto the prescribed southern code for a woman and a life-time effort to adapt in order to fit in the society, but the changing circumstances have rendered all her wishes in vain. Even at the last stage of her life, she refuses to give up. She grasps the last chance and makes two attempts to try again. Her summon to Quentin reveals that she desires her knowledge to be imparted to a fellow being she can connect with despite their seeming differences;(注:Another explanation for summoning Quentin is she wants him to accompany her to Sutpen Hundred. It is a reason offered and proven later. But I would argue that it is part of her intentions, because the trip takes place in the evening, and before that she has kept Quentin in her house the whole afternoon listening to her story.)Then she makes two twelve-mile trips to Sutpen Hundred in a span of three months, first to discover what is in that house, then to help the dying Henry, “thereby creating for herself the last chance at playing out a role: this time as aunt” (Edenfield 63). If Rosa has remained only “in an uncomprehending stasis” (Brooks 305), she would not, and could not, reach out more than once after forty-three years to her kin. Doubtlessly Sutpen’s animalistic suggestion has remained a formidable obstacle to her life, but I would assert, after having gone through Rosa’s messages in her talk, that Rosa’s primary concern has always been in the preservation of Southern honor and duty, both women’s and men’s. By going up to Sutpen Hundred, she is trying to salvage what remains of a Southern family line and keeps her promise to her sister Ellen to “protect her remaining child” (AA 18). Rosa learns and Rosa acts. This time as an aunt, a duty ensued by her societal roles, her promise to another human being, as well as her belief in her right to act. That she is denied the final role naturally brings her death. An agony far greater than the anger at her broken engagement, she is driven into total despair and never recovers.
Faulkner once said “I think that as fine an [influence] as any young man can have is one reasonable old woman to listen to, an aunt, a neighbor, because they…have held families together and it’s because of families that a race is continued” (Jelliffe 70). Quentin’s sitting indoors to listen to Rosa’s story is a significant beginning to understand not just the Sutpen history, but the values of a past world that still holds powerful sway over the minds of the living. Rosa’s whole life is a living testimony to a woman’s frustrated struggle to cope with her roles. When Rosa dies, she dies with no identity for a Southern woman. She is simply “Miss Rosa” as Quentin insists. It points to the most poignant irony in the interpretation of her story: she is first edged out and then dismissed by the very men and society she wishes to serve. That Quentin should fail to detect this fact beneath her angry attack at Sutpen blocks out the final hope for him. He will soon face the same dilemma in The Sound and the Fury, when his wish to fulfill a last role as a protector of the Italian girl is mocked hideously by an arrest, a trial and a fine. It is no wonder that having gone through these final tribulations, Quentin would go quietly to his end.