"Once a Bitch, Always a Bitch": Rereading Caddy in The Sound and the Fury

"I must begin by saying that I do not believe in Caddy Compson's silence"

—Minrose C. Gwin¹

"if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme."

—Virginia Woolf²

Born on the threshold of modernity, Candice "Caddy" Compson in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury contends with the Southern patriarchal apparatus, upending moral and social codes embedded deep within a system of white, male-dominated hegemony. Though Caddy's character appears to the reader exclusively through the heavily mitigated narratives of four male voices, she nevertheless slips away from their control and exists as a self outside of and separate from impenetrable textual abstraction. Attempts to fix or define her character ultimately fail because, as Minrose C. Gwin states, Caddy is "the discursiveness of that space which she is but also which she speaks out of" (Gwin 35, emphasis mine). In The Willful Subject (2014), Sara Ahmed writes, "The demand for obedience is not simply a demand that the part obeys the whole but is willing to become part of a whole. Willfulness would be a diagnosis of unbecoming parts" (Ahmed 97–8). For Ahmed and in Caddy, willfulness disrupts, acting as both interlocutor and dissident to will. Similarly, the idea of will—or rather, unwill is examined by Judith Butler in Giving and Account of Oneself (2005) as she explicates an argument originating in Levinas regarding the human "experience of being imposed upon from the start, against one's will" and the self's responsibility to respond to the imposing other, which is defined by Butler as "belonging to an idealized dyadic structure of social life" (Butler 99, 90). Butler's use of "unwilled" productive in thinking the stakes of defining Caddy as a character resistant to being made subject to how her brothers, and even Faulkner himself, address her against her will (85). Caddy is never permitted to give an account of herself in the novel under the same circumstances in which her brothers account for her, nor is she granted access to a self separate from the persecution inherent in and prior to her own sense of being in the world. Born a woman on the threshold of a new century at the dawn of a new American south, Caddy experiences an instantaneous violence in the expectations of her selfhood and the descriptions subsequent to her refusal of them. Nevertheless, Caddy certainly communicates, making intelligible a separate self from the iterations built by her brothers and eluding the ad hoc femininity endowed upon her. In disrupting the repressive wills with which she is expected to participate as a mere part, Caddy effectively negates her position as a viable or significant human being therein.

In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf writes that "[w]omen have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size" explaining that men have historically written women as inferior for the sake of constructing the man as superior (Woolf 35). The woman is necessary, Caddy is necessary; for the the Compson men and Faulkner himself to explain themselves they must explain Caddy—and she must never be permitted to explain herself "[f]or if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished" (36). Modernist literature abounds with women speaking truth from within certain social sepulchres: Nella Larsen's Helga Crane, Elizabeth Bowen's Portia Quayne, Jean Rhys's Antoinette Cosway, Zora Neale Hurston's Janie Crawford to name a very few—women who appear and disappear, who both speak and who remain silent against the wills of the enclosures in which they find themselves, making room for the veracity and identities of women who will come later, despite the very real consequences of their rebellious choices. Caddy Compson is in luminous company among...