SOURCE: “The Evolution of Caddy: An Intertextual Reading of The Sound and the Fury and Ellen Gilchrist's The Annunciation,” in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, Fall, 1992, pp. 40-51.

[In the following essay, Bauer asserts that the fate of Amanda McCamey in Gilchrist's The Annunciation exhibits a more optimistic view of the future of the Southerner than the fate of Caddy Compson in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.]

Certain parallels between the works of Ellen Gilchrist and William Faulkner might suggest to the reader that the South has not changed very much during the last century, though writers apparently continue to see the need for change. A comparison of The Sound and the Fury with Gilchrist’s The Annunciation reveals that the South is still filled with individuals who have a false and often destructive sense of themselves. The bitter irony is that those who suffer the consequences are the victims of this hypocrisy rather than its supporters, and two such victims are Caddy Compson and Amanda McCamey, the central characters of these two novels. Both are strong women who choose to live according to their own value systems rather than their families’ hypocritical codes of honor and morality.

The love and courage of Faulkner’s Caddy are ultimately broken down by her family, leaving her with a destructive self image, which in turn provides the reader with a sense of her ultimate doom. For much of her life, Gilchrist’s Amanda McCamey also responds self-destructively to her family’s treatment, but she eventually saves herself by recognizing and recollecting her early strengths. Armed with a restored ability to love, she takes what Caddy was first denied and then refused—a second chance. The reader who examines the parallels between these two lives and notes the differences in their fates will realize that the fortitude of people like Amanda, who refuse to break under the pressure of discrimination and hypocrisy, is slowly helping to moderate the traditionally rigid codes of the South.

Ironically, there are two completely opposite ways to view one of the parallels between these two works. One can either see a similarity between Amanda and Guy’s incestuous relationship and that of Caddy and Quentin (although the latter is never physically consummated), or one can argue, equally soundly, from the actions of other characters in both novels that there is no incest in either relationship. Regardless of which view the reader takes, what remains clear is the absence of parental guidance and the consequences of this void. The parents’ refusal in both novels to acknowledge such a possibility as incest or their blindness to it reflects their negligence as well as their fear of scandal.

The incest in The Annunciation is a physically irrefutable fact: Amanda and Guy are first cousins (raised, in fact, more like brother and sister—Guy even calls Amanda “Sissy”), and they are lovers.¹ This latter fact cannot be denied with any fanciful reading of the text, since Amanda conceives and bears a child as a result of her sexual relations with Guy. The question of incest between Caddy and Quentin, however, has been debated since the novel’s publication. In support of the presence of incest, many critics give explanations similar to that of Lee Clinton Jenkins, who writes, “Good Puritan that Quentin is, he feels the prohibition and allure of the forbidden act so strongly that the admission [to his father] of it as a possibility constitutes its enactment” (136).

Other critics, however, assert that Quentin either avoids the subject with Caddy (since he tells his father that he did not, for fear that she would accept) or that he was ultimately unable to go through with it (even if his offering of a double suicide is interpreted as a thinly disguised sexual proposition). But John T. Irwin’s interpretation of this episode at the branch disclaims such reasoning against incest:

When Quentin puts his knife to his sister’s throat, he is placing his knife at the throat of someone who is an image of himself, thereby evoking the threat of castration—the traditional punishment for incest. The brother seducer with the phallic knife at his sister’s throat is as well the brother avenger with the castrating knife at the brother seducer’s throat—the father with the castrating knife at the son’s penis.

(46)

This view of Quentin acting as Caddy’s father is particularly interesting since readers more often comment on the motherliness of Caddy towards her brothers. Once the suggestion is made, however, one should note the significant difference between these two “parents.” Acting as a father, since Mr. Compson will not do so, Quentin attempts to punish himself, but Caddy’s motherly actions, which are intended to compensate for Mrs. Compson’s neglect, involve the nurturing and loving of Benjy. Here one finds still another means of support for the presence of incest. As Constance Hill Hall notes in the introduction to Incest in Faulkner: A Metaphor for the Fall, “in cases of sibling incest, the brother and sister are likely to be … the children of weak and neglectful parents who fail to provide a strong and positive influence” (4).²

In still further support of the incest theory, one can say that Quentin becomes more of a father to Caddy’s child than whoever the natural father may be. First of all, he feels responsible for Caddy’s predicament. As John Arthos explains, Quentin

is extremely fond of [Caddy], and her situation thrusts upon him a burden of responsibility he accepts. … He comes to believe that his own love has failed her, and in something like adolescent self-torment he thinks his guilt is equivalent to the betrayal itself. He extends his torment to the point where it is as if he himself had betrayed her through incest.

(22)

In addition, Caddy establishes Quentin as the father according to Lawrence Thompson, when she names the child after him.³ Thompson concludes from this naming that although “in the literal sense, Quentin did not father her child, … in some figurative sense he did” (43). In the same figurative sense, then, he also committed incest.

On the other hand entirely, the fact remains that Caddy and Quentin do not actually have sexual intercourse with each other and thus do not commit incest. It could be argued that Quentin does not even want to. Quentin’s reasons for contemplating and admitting to incest have little if anything to do with desire for his sister’s body. Faulkner’s description of Quentin in the appendix reveals the author’s support of this notion:

Who loved not his sister’s body but some concept of Compson honor precariously and … temporarily supported by the minute fragile membrane of her maidenhead. Who loved not the idea of the incest which he could not commit, but some presbyterian concept of its eternal punishment.

(411)

Furthermore, one can view any desires on Quentin’s part as more narcissistic than incestuous. Quentin sees Caddy as his other half.⁴ She has many of the positive qualities he lacks: for example, she is more courageous than Quentin, a fact established in their childhood when she risks punishment by climbing the tree in order to gain knowledge (ironically, knowledge of death—ironic, since, as is also noted in Faulkner’s appendix, Quentin “loved death above all” (411), and yet at that point his cowardice keeps him from knowing it). Conversely, he sees a lack in her too, of certain qualities important to him, namely obedience to certain codes of behavior. Also, he is the oldest child, but she is the chosen substitute for their weak parents because of her ability to provide “love, compassion, pity, and sacrifice” (35), all of which are usual offerings from parent to child. Thus, union of the two in Quentin’s eyes is necessary; without it they are each incomplete and thus weak.⁵ As future head of his family, Quentin will need Caddy’s strength and authority; he believes if their family line is to survive in its present state, Caddy must adopt his codes of morality.

In relation to this idea, Quentin’s reasons for contemplating a sexual relationship with Caddy may go back to some primitive reasons for incest: first, “to stabilize and unify the dynasty by limiting the peripheries of a clan”, second, “a privilege that … was reserved for royalty”, and third, an act “necessary to the survival of a race” (Hall 6).⁶ Quentin is concerned with the survival of his family, a family which he views as “royal” in the sense that they were the descendants of the aristocracy of the Old South. This elevated perception of his family allows him to contemplate incest in spite of his Puritan nature. In this light, he would view the notion of Caddy committing incest with him as more acceptable than her philandering behavior with “unsuitable” partners which could result in “unsuitable” descendants.

One can repudiate the existence of incest in Gilchrist’s novel on similar grounds—despite the child Barrett Clare, whom the reader knows to be the indisputable offspring of first cousins Amanda and Guy. Whether or not sexual intercourse took place is again not really the issue. Rather, as in the other novel, the question is, was it incest? From Amanda’s perception, the answer is no. First of all, the narrator notes early in the novel that when Amanda was a child “no one minded when they found her in [Guy’s] bed” (6); and later, “everyone on Esperanza watched it [the growing love between them] but only the black people knew what they were watching. Only the black people knew what it meant” (12). One can deduce, too, from the position of blacks on a Southern plantation, that these servants would not have spoken up about their understanding of this developing “situation.” Given the above narrative comments, one can also say that, to Amanda, a sexual relationship with Guy was a natural development, and thus not incest—incest is a taboo and no one had intimated to her any such prohibitions regarding her unconcealed feelings for Guy. To the contrary—they had encouraged it by their silence. Moreover, when Amanda does deliver her baby, it is immediately taken from her and she is told by a nun, “Now you can be a girl again” and “put it out of your mind” (20). In addition, the matriarch of the family, her grandmother, welcomes her back into the fold—if not into their home—as if nothing happened.⁷ And the ugly word “incest” is never mentioned. Both her religion and her family, then, choose to deny Amanda’s actions. And the reader recognizes that Amanda did not knowingly commit a sin.

In the relationships between both Amanda and Guy and Caddy and Quentin, the female is the stronger member. In The Sound and the Fury, this notion is illustrated in the tree episode. In The Annunciation, Amanda finds Guy cleaning some birds killed on a hunting trip: “One of the birds was so warm Guy thought it was still alive. His thumb hit a tendon and it moved in his hands. He leaned over and vomited. … Amanda stood beside a rocker watching him” (6). She is not sickened by the dead birds, only concerned for Guy.

Regardless of his weaknesses, Amanda adores Guy. Since the novel is written for the most part in limited omniscience, from Amanda’s point of view, one can credit her with the description of “Guy, who could do anything … who was afraid of nothing in the world” (9), and the belief that “there was nothing to fear when Guy was there” (11). Similarly, despite her realization of Quentin’s shortcomings, Caddy loves her older brother. Many of her own daring actions, like taking off her dress in front of her brothers or climbing the forbidden tree, are attempts to get Quentin’s attention and/or to impress him. As soon as Quentin says, “I bet you won’t” (20), little sister Caddy feels compelled to go through with her brave declarations or lose face in front of her big brother.

As I have suggested, the confusion of these four adolescents regarding the morality or immorality of their desires is particularly disturbing because of the failure of their parents to counsel them on the matter. The notorious image of the hypochondriac Mrs. Compson doing little else besides whining about being punished by God for her family’s transgressions is evidence of this neglect, as is Mrs. McCamey’s constant mourning for her deceased husband, which leaves little time to see to her daughter’s emotional needs. The attitudes Caddy and Amanda consequently have towards the idea of motherhood, although in direct contrast to each other, are both typical reactions of motherless children compensating for their loss. By attending to Benjy’s emotional needs, Caddy fills the gap she feels from her mother’s inattentiveness to her own emotions.⁸ Amanda, on the other hand, responds to her mother’s rejection with comparable rejection, as is evident in her discomfort with some baby rabbits: “Their little sucking noises bothered her, as though they might get on her and stick to her skin” (5). This reaction clearly reveals a fear of the attachment associated with motherhood.

For a while, with the help of these individual methods of compensation and the care they receive from the rest of their families, neither girl suffers excessively from being essentially motherless. However, the latter indemnity, the love of other members of their families, particularly Quentin and Guy, eventually fails them, and when this happens the former indemnity, their own personal responses to the idea of motherhood, causes certain consequences; hence, the betrayal from outside causes a betrayal from within the self. That both girls’ reactions to motherlessness lead them toward doom, despite the noted disparity between their reactions, is largely the responsibility of Quentin and Guy, who remain undeviating in their similarity.

Regarding Caddy, Baum notes:

Ironically enough, those qualities in her character that are admirable are the ones which lead to her fall: her complete selflessness, which leads her to be indifferent to her virginity and to what happens to her; her willingness to put the other person’s interests first; and her great desire to communicate love.

(38)

Such a desire leads Caddy to sexual activity, but once she becomes sexually active, Quentin betrays her love as he breaks down her strong self-image in his attempts to make her see the immorality of her actions. Paradoxically, he is acting from his religious convictions. As Amos Wilder explains it, Quentin believes in a “truncated Christian conception of guilt and retribution, severed from all ideas of grace” (125). This Puritanical perception of God is manifested in Quentin’s egotistical view of his family and prejudice against particular outsiders, like Dalton Ames, which demonstrates an acceptance of the Calvinistic concept of the elect and the reprobate. His attempts to force his convictions on Caddy, however, backfire. Once she looks at her sexuality through his eyes, she perceives it as sinful, rather than as a means of loving, and she accepts her damnation and behaves accordingly. The result is pregnancy with no knowledge of the father’s identity.⁹

Initially, Caddy’s family takes her away to hide her condition. To their seeming good fortune, they even find a husband to “legitimize” Caddy and the child she carries. But the Compson’s God is of the Old Testament, too.¹⁰ When Caddy’s husband perceives his wife’s condition and sends her home, they acknowledge her sin and punish her in the Puritan tradition: they ban her from her home. This rejection reinforces Caddy’s acceptance of Quentin’s belief in her sinful nature and she loses confidence in her capacity to be a good mother to her child. She believes, rather, that she would be a harmful influence upon her daughter and therefore allows her family to first take and then keep her child from her, despite her justified misgivings about their treatment of the innocent baby as a symbol of its mother’s sin, not to mention her first-hand knowledge of their destructiveness. According to Lawrence Bowling, this abandonment of her child is what really dooms Caddy.

She is “damned,” not because she committed fornication and bore an illegitimate child but because, living in a state of perpetual sin, she has neither desire nor hope for redemption; but, most of all, she is damned because, instead of accepting her duty to her child and being the best mother she could, she abandoned the child to the same household which had been her own ruin.

(476)

Consequently, the Compson family is doomed as well. “Had Caddy been allowed to return home to care for Quentin and Benjy and thus to fulfill the destiny of her nature, the Compson history might have been different. Instead, the tragedy of Caddy’s life is repeated by her child” (Page 66). Both Caddy and her daughter are lost to the Compsons, and since the girl Quentin is the only progeny of this generation of Compsons, this loss means the end of the family line as far as they will ever know.

Paralleling all of these circumstances in The Sound and the Fury, as long as Amanda has Guy’s attention and affection and hands-on care from the people at Esperanza Plantation, the negative implications of her fear of attachment are not so apparent, for hers is not an all-encompassing attitude against bonding. She allows herself to love Guy; it is only motherly love she protects herself against. Yet, fearing rejection from Guy, too, before he leaves for college, Amanda gives herself to him completely in order to seal their bond forever. Like Caddy, she uses sex as a means of getting the love she craves but which had been denied her in the past. Like Quentin, unfortunately, Guy ultimately fails her. He silently allows his family to send her away to have his baby, and he does not contact her at the home for unwed mothers or even after the baby is born. Rather, again like Quentin, Guy goes on with his life at college. When he does come to see her at school (at her request), he blames her pregnancy on the sinfulness of their actions: “It happened because we did things we weren’t supposed to do” (32). Clearly, Guy’s God, like Quentin’s, is the punishing God of the Old Testament.¹¹ Guy needs a God who will punish him, since his family fails to do so. He needs to pay for his sin to purge his guilt. When he tells Amanda, “I ask God all the time to forgive us” (32), he forces her to acknowledge their guilt rather than recall their love. Amanda refuses (verbally at least) to do any such thing; rather, she lashes out blasphemously, knowing that her words will terrify her God-fearing cousin: “There isn’t any God. … Only idiots believe in God. If there was a God I’d hate his guts” (32).

Upon learning of her pregnancy Amanda’s family had sent her away to have the baby. Once she had atoned for this sin—by giving up her child to make “a barren woman happy” (20)—she was absolved, according to the Catholic faith of the home for unwed mothers where she spent her pregnancy. Her family can conveniently forget her shame now, so that “she will have her chance” (21), as her grandmother selfishly desires, since Amanda is necessary to the continuation of their family line.¹² However, they do not see the effects of their actions on Amanda. Forgetting or denying is not so easy for her. Since she is not given any chances to deal with her actions, she continues to be haunted by the memory of her baby; for much of her life, she refuses to allow herself to want another child or to find and make amends with her first one. Furthermore, from the time that the baby was born, “the scar was there, and debilitating cramps when she menstruated” (37), and a doctor reports that “she’ll probably never conceive again” (41) because of her early pregnancy (although he, too, contributes to the fictions fed to Amanda at this time by not telling her so). Consequently, when she finally allows herself to think of having another baby, she and her husband Malcolm are repeatedly disappointed when they mistake her irregular menstrual cycle for pregnancy. Amanda finally gives up again, announcing to her husband that she refuses to suffer any more such disappointments, so plans to “get an IUD to regulate [her] periods,” which will, of course, also prevent conception. Thus, her family’s cover-up actually almost insures its sterility and ultimate extinction—almost in this case, since Amanda eventually regroups her strength, rejects the negative self-image she has been fostering, and decides to keep the baby she conceives when she is forty-four.

Another parallel between these two Southern novels involves further division among the critics of The Sound and the Fury. Since its four sections correspond to the four days of the Easter weekend, some critics inevitably speculate on which character is the novel’s Christ figure. Although many see Benjy as the logical choice, given his age and his suffering, John Edward Hardy names Caddy’s daughter Quentin instead.¹³ Lyall Powers calls Quentin “a second chance for the Compson family” (35), but in keeping with the myth of the crucifixion, the Compsons are not responsive to the possibility of making up for their actions towards Caddy. On the contrary, the girl Quentin is, in John Edward Hardy’s words, “betrayed … to her doom of ostracism and exile, … [and] denied the love of her people” (152). Finally, flight is, in a sense, a “resurrection” from the corrupt microcosm of the Compson home. However, as John Earl Bassett notes, although her “flight from the tomb of her house is a parodic Easter resurrection,” she “does not rise; she descends down a tree” (17). So Quentin is somewhat lacking as a Christ figure, since no glimpse is given of her new life to provide assurance that she has gone on to a better world. Without such knowledge, Caddy is never released from her guilt. She does not gain from her daughter a sense of her own potential for salvation; rather, she continues to believe in her impending damnation.

Gilchrist’s novel uses Christian mythology, too, as indicated first of all by its title. Given the circumstances of his birth, this novel’s Christ appears to be Amanda’s second child.¹⁴ However, it is the abandoned first child, her daughter, who has the potential of releasing her mother from guilt. This child, like Quentin, becomes a more significant Christ figure, especially given the family’s complete disregard of the paternity of Amanda’s daughter, Barrett Clare, the suffering this child endures throughout her life, and the fact that Amanda does not find peace until she decides to acknowledge her. Barrett Clare, then, is Amanda’s means of salvation. Furthermore, when Guy reappears in Amanda’s life, the nature of her attraction to him is revealed, within which one can find support for their child as the novel’s Christ figure.

He was the same old Guy, direct, impenetrable, true. How could [she] have been expected to love an ordinary man … after loving a man like this? … Now, because she had touched him, she came within the circle of his power, forgetting as she always did when she came near him where she began or he began.

(287, emphasis added)

In this passage, not only is Guy described in divine terms, but also the reader is reminded of Amanda’s narcissism (again, a major motivation for incest). Her earlier admission of Guy into the realm of her protected self can now be viewed not as an ability to bond with another human being, as was suggested previously, but rather as a further rejection of others. To her he is not a separate entity but part of her own self. Hence, taking him as a mate reinforces her aversion to relationships with other human beings. She even tells Guy during this reunion, “I love you as I have always loved you. Like I was loving my own self” (289). If they are two halves of the same person, then the child is the product of this unity—and therefore not a union of two people but another miracle child of one parent. It should be remembered here, too, that the nuns told Amanda she was as good as new after the birth of this child—hence the notion of a virgin birth.

Jeannie Thompson and Anita Miller Garner point out that “Barrett Clare has suffered from feelings of neglect, isolation, abandonment, and despair” (114), much like the daughter Quentin. Amanda has been carrying the “cargo (title of the novel’s first section) of this guilt since her adolescence. Although her second child gives her a second chance to be a good mother, that would only be a partial atonement for her “sin.” Her decision after he is born to seek out her lost child and make amends finally puts her at peace with herself, and the novel ends with a positive, uplifting sense of hope. Therefore, Amanda’s parody of “The Lord’s Prayer” that closes the novel is not more blasphemy. Rather, it is an affirmation of faith, faith in herself, but also faith in the value of relationships: “My will be done … My life on my terms,” she begins, adding “my daughter, my son” (353). Clearly this is a more genuine, more productive view of her life than the one forced upon Caddy Compson. Caddy loses her belief in her right to receive or give love. Amanda allows herself in the end to do both.

That the reader perceives a positive future for Amanda and both of her children contrasts distinctly with the picture Faulkner provides in his appendix of Caddy as the mistress of a Nazi officer.¹⁵ Whereas Caddy continues to live the life of a damned soul, Amanda is ready to start over. She realizes not only that it is never too late to begin anew but that one can make up for past mistakes. Second chances can be taken to improve one’s lot. One’s role in life is not as immutable as the people of the South had traditionally perceived it to be. Gilchrist’s novel, then, provides the reader with a more optimistic view of the future of the guilt-ridden Southerner.

Notes

1. A list of people one cannot marry, according to Mississippi Law, now or at the time this part of the novel is set, includes first cousins. Therefore, it is accurate to call the sexual relationship between Amanda and Guy incest.

2. Of the mother in particular (of siblings involved in incest), Hall writes, “[t]ypically she is either passive and dependent or else rigid and puritanical … not present to her family, often relinquishing her responsibilities to her daughter and sometimes abandoning he children altogether” (4). It is easy to see that this passage is an accurate description of Mrs. Compson.

3. André Bleikasten apparently agrees with Thompson’s notion when he writes that because of the name Caddy chooses for her child, “symbolically, Quentin II is … the fruit of the imaginary incest” (224).

4. John T. Irwin points out that Quentin’s narcissistic view of Caddy is particularly evident in a scene in which Quentin looks down upon Caddy lying in the water: “The narcissistic implication is that his sister lying on her back in the stream is like a mirror image of himself” (41).

5. Lee Clinton Jenkins explains this “narcissistic self love [as] that [which] seeks others only to the extent that they can be used to fortify the ego against its sense of underlying vulnerability, satisfy its self-justifying needs, and stave off the threat of its own dissolution” (149).

6. In theories similar to Hall’s, Warwick Wadlington describes “Quentin’s desperate fantasy of incest” as “a rigorous extension of the inbreeding attitude of a household that feels itself surrounded by relative nonentities” (416), and André Bleikasten explains that “[i]n sociohistorical terms, [Quentin’s] obsession with incest may reflect the panic of a declining social class which struggles for survival but refuses any influx of outside blood” (227).

7. One of the most obvious echoes of The Sound and the Fury occurs at this point in Gilchrist’s novel: just as the Compsons sell Benjy’s pasture to send Quentin to Harvard, Amanda’s grandmother sells a “sixty-acre stand of wooded land, and puts the money into an account for the next six years of Amanda’s life” (21), during which she goes to school away from home. Like Quentin, Amanda will not return home as expected to continue the family line (though she does not commit suicide).

8. In Sally Page’s explanation of “the role of motherhood,” Caddy’s maternal instinct is a positive reaction to her own motherlessness: “The role of motherhood fosters communication and self-transcendence, for child-bearing unites the woman with the ultimate purpose of nature and enables her to defy her own isolation and to create relation through the establishment of the family. The ideal of self-sacrifice on which effective motherhood is based provides mankind with an ethic that can bring moral order to the chaos of existence” (46). Caddy’s ability to love enough for both herself and her mother is quite admirable, given her circumstances.

9. As Peter Swiggart explains, “Caddy becomes a helpless victim both of her capacity for love and of her brother’s efforts to pervert that love into abstract morality. Her promiscuity reflects the self hatred which Quentin has helped to force upon her” (92).

10. Mary Dell Fletcher discusses the Puritanism of the Compsons in detail in “William Faulkner and Residual Calvinism.”

11. Guy’s belief in an Old Testament God is previously revealed when, filled with remorse in the earlier stages of their sexual experimentation, he suddenly puts an end to it, telling Amanda, “I want God to let me be good at baseball, Sissy. I want to be on the football team next year. If I do this he isn’t going to let me” (12).

12. Gilchrist, then, repeats in this novel Faulkner’s “warnings,” as summarized by Amos N. Wilder, “against fossilized religious sanctions, conceptions, or rituals, which, detached from their healthful or vital sources, become malign tools of social control, thus lending a specious absolute authority to inhuman usage” (125).

13. Elizabeth M. Kerr might also agree with the view of Miss Quentin as the Christ figure, given her notion that Caddy’s love for her daughter “might be the only means of saving Caddy” (11). And one can infer agreement as well from the connection Douglas B. Hill makes between Caddy and the Virgin Mary (35).

14. Jeannie Thompson and Anita Miller Garner discuss the Christian imagery surrounding the birth of Amanda’s second child, although they warn against too much reliance upon Christian myth in interpreting the novel. Much like Faulkner, Gilchrist “takes what she needs [from Christianity] to shape her narrative” (110, emphasis added).

15. Interestingly, Gilchrist also wrote a kind of appendix to her novel. In her fourth collection of short stories, Light Can Be Bath Wave and Particle, two of the stories continue The Annunciation. The first of these focuses on the life of Barrett Clare and her son; thus, in direct contrast to Faulkner’s appendix, we are given a sense of the continuation of the family line.

Works Cited

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