The point is that Caddy's capacity for love is every where frustrated and suppressed at home. Her leaving the house can be read at once as the result of alienation and as escape, pure and simple, to some place Other, where love can be expressed. The fact that she is haunted by the vacuum of family experience explains why the manifestation of her expression of love is as a Nazi's mistress. On the other hand, it is possible to infer that she understood that the worst thing she could do for her daughter Quentin and the rest of the family is live in the same house with them. The Jefferson librarian's interpretation of Caddy's being photographed with a German officer ("We must save her!") raises the possibility that Caddy, too, and not just Benjy or Quentin, may be having the experiences of intense, unspeakable hauntedness. She may shudder before the silence of the universe, even though she is thousands of miles away from Mississippi.This is the terror of solitude in the face of the haunting demon. It is also self-absorption, for Mrs. Compson lacks the maternal sense that could be the emotional anchor of a family. Quentin pines for a mother he has never had, so that he could go to her for comfort. How she managed to bear four children in the first place is something of a puzzle, for she has been lying in bed, dying of the same vague disease for eighteen years by the time The Sound and the Fury begins. A lady of quality, she seems to represent every pretense of the genteel and hypocritical South. Whatever the inconvenience or emotional cost to her family, Mother will keep up appearances, keep up the pretense of a social norm, insisting that the family--even Benjy--collaborate in the pretense of normality. She suppresses Caddy's nurturing instinct toward Benjy, in a mask of social pretense. "What reason did Quentin have? Under God's heaven what reason did he have? It cant be simply to flout and hurt me. Whoever God is, He would not permit that. I'm a lady. You might n |
