Caddy - Faulkner’s Unheard Voice

It was not for The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner first created the character Candace Compson, but rather for an earlier short story named “Twilight.” Faulkner claimed that he loved the character of Caddy so much that he felt she deserved more than a short story, and so he made her the central character in this novel. In the novel’s style Caddy’s story is revealed in three separate narrations by her brothers, as a source of obsessive love for Benjy and Quentin and vengeful anger for Jason. While it was Faulkner’s intention to present Caddy in this structure, it leads to my frustration as the reader because I would have liked to have heard Caddy express her own story too.

By dividing the book into separate sections with different perspectives, Faulkner brings more depth to the individual brothers’ nature and motives for behavior and most importantly their distinct perceptions of their sister Caddy. Although she is the focal point for them, she never gives her point of view. In Benjy’s disjointed shifting between the present and the past, we learn of both his love for and memories of Caddy. She is more of a mother to him than Mrs. Compson who shows no capacity to love or care for her children. While she views Benjy with feelings of shame and pain, Caddy treats him with love and affection. However, we never learn of Caddy’s thoughts and feelings in these relationships. Was she angry, resentful, sympathetic or understanding towards Benjy and her mother as she served this role? We know Benjy never recovered from the void in his life since Caddy left because his thoughts reflect this loss; happy memories of his sister include her "smelling like trees," and in sad ones he moans and cries. When a golfer calls his "caddie", he is overcome by desperate yearnings for her. Caddy never gets to share her feelings and concerns for the person she mothered and then had to abandon. Nor do we learn her feelings towards her parents who disown her in her hour of greatest need.

Both Benjy’s and Quentin’s relationships with Caddy stem from the same close bond formed between siblings whose mother neglected them. Quentin’s inordinately strong attachment to his sister and jealousy of her boyfriends leads to his despair over Caddy’s promiscuity and his fantasizing about an incestuous relationship between them. However, Caddy never expresses her feelings about her emerging sexuality. The reasons and urges that lead her to engage in promiscuous relationships are also left unknown. Her brothers frustrate her efforts to socialize with boys, but we can only surmise her inner feelings toward them for their actions. Unable to adjust to and tolerate his sister’s situation, Quentin commits suicide. When he takes this fatal step, does she see herself as the cause of her brother’s death and blame herself? Does she now regret her earlier refusal to share his fate in the suicide pact he suggested? How great a guilt does she feel in not only Quentin’s suicide but their father’s decline and early death through alcoholism as a result of their actions? Why does she give his name to her daughter, the very product of the promiscuity that drove them apart?

While Benjy and Quentin long for the past relationship they had with Caddy, Jason feels only contempt for the past. His feelings of resentment and rage are reflected in his cruel treatment of both Caddy and her daughter. He blames her promiscuity, which resulted in her divorce, for ruining his chances of a job in Herbert Head’s bank. Jason’s loss serves as the justification for every sadistic and criminal thing that he does. Yet we never hear of the emotional turmoil Caddy must have gone through that pushes her into marriage with such a person who had been expelled from Harvard for cheating nor the emotional and social pain she suffers in her subsequent divorce. While we cringe at Mrs. Compson’s and Jason’s decisions and actions in regard to Caddy’s and Quentin’s treatment, we are not privy to Caddy’s thoughts of despair and helplessness. How does she live life on a daily basis throughout the many years in which she is abandoned by her family, fears for her daughter’s well-being and money, and is powerless to do anything about it.

Although the last section is assigned to Dilsey, Faulkner is the narrator, and he uses this section to imply a hope that the Compson name might be redeemed through Dilsey’s proud spirit and strong values. In choosing this more positive ending, one which reflects a sense of hope and order from decline and chaos, Faulkner purposely omits a "Caddy Section", a decision which he does amend by giving some additional information in the appendix that he wrote later on. However, the fact remains that Caddy's voice is never heard, and we never learn her intimacies and motivations. While Caddy serves as the object of her brothers’ revelations, I wonder why she is not afforded the reciprocity to share hers too.