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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 5 page paper which examines the general standard of behavior expected of middle-or upper-class Southern white
women, Miss Rosa Coldfield in Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!", Mrs.
Caroline Compson and Miss Quentin Compson in William Faulkner's "The
Sound & the Fury." Specifically considered will be how these standards
compare and contrast with the way they actually behave in their individual lives, as influenced by their personal capabilities and/or temperaments. Bibliography lists 7 sources.
Page Count:
5 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TG15_TGwflady.doc
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
be of middle- or upper economic class. Patriarchy reigned supreme before, during and after the Civil War, and conduct was dictated according to gender (Entzminger 108). Margaret Mitchell
detailed how a proper middle and upper-class woman was expected to behave in her classic novel, Gone With the Wind, and as if caught in a time warp, expectations changed
little in the South from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. A Southern woman herself, Mitchell noted, "It was a mans world... The man owned property, and the
woman managed it. The man took the credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness. The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in
his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him... Women were always kind, gracious and forgiving... the tradition of great ladies, which had taught... to
carry... burden and still retain... charm" (Mitchell 52-53). Simply put, women were expected to be genteel male appendages whose worth was determined by their roles as wife and mother.
Rosa Coldfield, narrator of William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom!, was a woman very much affected by her lifes personal tragedies. Her mother had died in childbirth, so from the very
beginning, she lacked that all-important female role model. From the moment of her birth, Miss Rosa has been incapable of fitting into the conventional Southern female mold (Edenfield 57).
Near the end of her life, she recounted her story to Quentin Compson, and observed that her mothers death imbued her with a tremendous guilt that she was "was
never to be permitted to forget" (Edenfield 57; Faulkner 59). Like her feminine contemporaries, Rosa learned at a very early age that her primary function was that of a
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