The Sound and the Fury

Faulkner is writing against the backdrop of a South—in this case, within the state of Mississippi—that has been irrevocably changed by the end of slavery and the antebellum culture that accompanied it. For the Compsons, the family at the heart of The Sound and the Fury, this means a loss of wealth and status that reverberates down through the generations. On the one hand, the author depicts the decline of a family that represents the Old South and the end of its “peculiar institution” that trafficked in human beings for its wealth and power. Thus, the novel implies that this kind of family—dependent on slaves, still relying on Black servants, filled with false pride and wounded vanity—is inherently corrupt, doomed to decay and disappear. On the other hand, the author sentimentalizes certain tropes about the Old South, the grandness of the aspirations coupled with a kind of paternalistic concern toward the marginalized, as represented by Quentin. Still, Faulkner acknowledges, primarily through the portrayal of Caddy, that the world is changing and those who cling to the bygone past, like Mother, will be doomed to oblivion.

Faulkner gestures toward racial disparities, both cultural and economic, throughout the book. For example, when Damuddy dies, the young Caddy blurts out that “White folks dont have funerals”; this kind of display of mourning is reserved for Black people (38). Her resistance to this notion also reveals an underlying sensibility of privilege, even of invincibility: Caddy insists that Black people (and animals) die, but she cannot quite conceive of the fact that white people die as well. Later, Quentin muses on the differences between Black people and white people as he sees it, but it is a jumble of contradictions: First, he notes “that blending of childlike and ready incompetence” possessed by Black people, then goes on to note their “tolerance for whitefolks’ vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children” (98-99). Thus, Black people are both infantilized (“childlike”) and sentimentalized as tolerant caretakers, enablers of white people’s whims.

Musing on another memory, Quentin perpetuates the trope that Black people are fundamentally unknowable, mysteriously wise but unpredictable: “They come into white people’s lives like that in sudden sharp black trickles that isolate white facts for an instant in unarguable truth like under a microscope; the rest of the time just voices that laugh when you see nothing to laugh at, tears when no reason for tears” (195). While Quentin is arguably the most sympathetic white character regarding his views on Black people, there is no question that his position of privilege and the prejudices of his time and place cloud his vision considerably.

Obviously, there are deeply embedded—and deeply unequal—structures of power underlying all of these cultural views. While the Compson family may have lost much of its wealth and faces a rapidly fading social status, they still own property, attend Ivy League institutions (even if land had to be sold in exchange), and employ Black servants. This generational privilege contrasts significantly with their employees, and while Mrs. Compson is portrayed as a weak-willed and querulous woman whose pride renders her spiteful and prone to misjudgment, she still maintains a position of power over the more sensible and infinitely kinder Dilsey.

Dilsey is presented in regal terms with her “maroon cape and the purple gown” (332), but she also functions as a symbol of the Compson family’s fall: “She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose [...], as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin” (306-07). That is, Dilsey as an individual character only functions insofar as she reflects the Compson family back to itself. The author later highlights the economic disparity between where Dilsey works, at the Compson residence, and where she worships, at the Black church. Her journey there marks the delineation between wealth and poverty, as the paved street becomes “a dirt road” lined with “cabins whose weathered roofs were on a level with the crown of the road” (336). The systemic markers of inequality are littered amidst the landscape.

In these investigations into cultural differences, economic disparities, and socio-historical realities, Faulkner acknowledges that there are two Souths, only a couple of generations removed from slavery. The book grapples with the tensions between the values of the Old South—with its rampant racism and insidious sexism—and the newly-emerging modern world. While Faulkner takes the reader deep into the bowels of the Compson (male) sibling’s memories, he does not explore (or have access to) the inner thoughts and lives of the Black people or women who populate the story.