Rosa Coldfield as Daughter: Another of Faulkner's Lost Children

ROSA COLDFIELD AS DAUGHTER: ANOTHER OF FAULKNER'S LOST CHILDREN Linda Wagner-Martin University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill The dungeon was Mother herself she and Father upward into weak light holding hands and us lost somewhere below even them without even a ray of light. . . .' Throughout William Faulkner's fiction, the pattern of children uncared for—ignored, isolated, used, abandoned—is relentless. Readers for more than half a century have felt inexorable pity for the Compson and Bundren children and for Joe Christmas, Gale Hightower, Isaac McCaslin, and the countless other characters Faulkner defined as orphaned or born late to parents who cared little about them. Similarly, in the first chapter of Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner presents the character of Rosa Coldfield as a diminutive child, feet dangling from her chair; and he reinforces the pathetic image of the Southern poetess by using a narrative form that reflects the chronology of her life. In the first chapter, part of her narrative occurs when she is three; part when she is four; and another segment six years later, when she is ten. In the fifth chapter, part of her story occurs when she is fourteen, and more when she is nineteen. This combination of the narrative charting of her life with the author's visualization of Rosa as childlike , or somehow stunted, forces the reader to see that Rosa was never allowed to be a child. Part of the looming tragedy of Faulkner's novel is that Rosa's emotional growth was both restricted and exploited through her experiences. Faulkner gives the lengthy first and fifth chapters oí Absalom, Absalom! to this portrayal; these chapters are the reader's point of entry to the Sutpen story and to Rosa's own increasingly important narrative.2 What such an emphasis on Rosa's childhood means for the reader is a shift in perspective from the story of Thomas Sutpen and his surreal creation, Sutpen's Hundred, to the more generalized tale of the Southern white patriarch. For Rosa's story is only partly that of Sutpen. Much of her narrative, both in Chapters 1 and 5, is that of the Coldfield family and its acquisition of place and power as well as its denouement. Even though some of her narrative deals with her role as Sutpen's beloved, more of it charts her role within the Coldfield family as youngest daughter, beholden to and thoroughly dependent on her remaining parent, her father.3 By casting Rosa as child, by forcing the reader to see how terrorized her life was not only by Sutpen but by her father's uncaring and naive responses to both her and to 2 Linda Wagner-Martin life and war, Faulkner underscores the tragedy of the misuse of parental authority. Absalom, Absalom! becomes the story not of the quasi-heroic Sutpen, claiming accomplishment as he wrested power from poverty, but the story of various white males who destroyed families, particularly the women and children of those families, in their rapacious pursuit of what they defined as "success." Fifty years of criticism added to the innate difficulty of Faulkner's choices in point of view. Trained to look for the Southern myth, the fall of the genteel white culture to encroaching materialism, readers sometimes overlooked the fact that Rosa's narrative provided the heart of the novel. For all Mr. Compson's, Quentin's, and Shreve's attempts to rewrite Rosa's story—to embroider, invent, and graft on new segments of her story—the force of Rosa's disinheritance should have carried through the later over-writings of her text. That it has not shows much about the kind of reception given to his fictions that attempt to move beyond codified themes.4 Following Faulkner's directive about Rosa's "place" in the narrative —her unquestioned role as the only living participant-narrator in the telling of the Sutpen legend—the modern reader must choose to see everything besides Rosa's narrative as further evidence of the complicit cultural support for the collusion that ensures Sutpen's "success." The way in which Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve take over Rosa's story echoes the way both Sutpen and...