Caddy+Compson

====**Candace “Caddy” Compson** – The only daughter and second oldest child of Jason Compson III and Caroline Compson née Bascomb. Caddy is a strong-willed, independent child whose sexual promiscuity during her teenage years affects not only her own life, but that of her entire family. Caddy is a central fixation in all three of her brothers’ narratives in //The Sound and the Fury//, though her name is never mentioned in the book’s forth and final section. ====

====The central image of //The Sound and the Fury// is that of Caddy climbing the pear tree in her “muddy drawers” in order to peer through a window at her grandmother’s funeral while her three brothers look up at her from beneath the tree. In 1933, four years after the novel was published, Faulkner described this scene as “the only thing in literature which would ever move me very much” (//Introduction// 227). Caddy’s act of defiance (climbing the tree) and the striking image of her muddy underwear foretell much of her actions throughout the rest of her life, and the image of the three brothers watching their sister climb the tree – an act that they themselves refuse to do –is a sign of their own powerless fixation over their sister’s independence and sexual promiscuity. ====

====Throughout Caddy’s time in the Compson household, she acts as Benjy’s primary caretaker and protector. More than any other member of the Compson family Caddy communicates with Benjy and is concerned for his safety. In the novel’s first mention of Caddy, Benjy recalls a memory in which Caddy helps Benjy crawl through a fence: “Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through” (4). Because Caddy is the only member of the Compson family who truly cares for Benjy, he becomes attached to her. More than any other character, Caddy is able to calm Benjy down when he panics. Often, Benjy panics as a result of Caddy’s absence. In the novel’s opening scene, Benjy becomes upset at hearing the golfers yelling for their caddies, as he assumes they are calling out his sister’s name (3-4). ====

====Benjy’s fixation with Caddy revolves around her scent. As a young girl, Caddy “smells like trees” (6, 9, 19, 42, 43, 44, 48, 72), a scent that comforts Benjy. He later becomes upset when Caddy first wears experiments with perfume - a sign of her burgeoning interest in her femininity, sexuality, and maturity – and again on her wedding day: “Caddy put her arms around me and her shining veil, and I couldn’t smell trees anymore and I began to cry” (40). Caddy appears to view Benjy as the only innocent member of the Compson family. She makes every effort to calm and protect him, going so far as to take off the perfume and present the bottle to Dilsey as a gift. “We don’t like perfume ourselves,” Caddy says, calming Benjy once again (43). Caddy also protects Benjy from Charlie, an aggressive early suitor. Charlie becomes upset when Benjy interrupts their romantic rendezvous on the swing. “‘Call that nigger.’ Charlie says. Caddy tries to send Charlie away, but he comes back, angry. "He came back. I cried louder and pulled at Caddy’s dress.’” (47). Caddy leaves with Benjy after Charlie becomes aggressive, and Benjy is finally comforted. “So I hushed and Caddy got up and we went into the kitchen and turned the light on and Caddy took the kitchen soap and washed her mouth at the sink, hard. Caddy smelled like trees” (48). Benjy associates Caddy’s natural scent, “the smell of trees” with their youth, a time when Caddy was innocent, pure, and assumedly spent more time paying attention to and caring for Benjy. ====

====Quentin’s fixation with Caddy revolves around the idea of purity and virginity. He is disturbed and later haunted by Caddy’s pre-marital sexual promiscuity, to the point where he tries to convince her to run away with him and tell everybody that he is in fact the father of her unborn child, and that she had only been with him sexually: “well have to go away amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame Ill make you say we did Im stronger than you Ill make you know we did you thought it was them but it was me” (148-9). Quentin wants to keep the family pure and insulated from any outside contamination. This image of the clean flame represents this burning or cleansing of Caddy and the tarnished reputation of the Compson family, if only Caddy will run away with Quentin and avoid marriage with Herbert Head (or any other man). Caddy, in turn, feels sorry for Quentin. “Poor Quentin, you’ve never done that have you,” she says to him, and also agrees with him in a way that seems flippant, as if to calm Quentin down in his manic state: “yes Yes Yes yes” (149). It seems pretty clear that Caddy already has one foot out of the Compson household during her teenage years, while Quentin’s main concern is keeping the family together by any means necessary. ====

====While Caddy’s feelings for her brother do not match the intensity as his do for her, it is clear that Quentin is a very important figure in her life. After all, Caddy decides to name her child after Quentin regardless of its sex. Caddy is more of a realist than Quentin, however. She knows that all of his fantasies could never work out. “I’ve got to marry somebody,” she says to Quentin, a statement that both illustrates the precariousness of her situation and eliminates Quentin as a possible mate (113). The Compson family may blame Caddy for the family’s fall in stature (it’s clear that at least Quentin and Jason feel this way), but Caddy is more forward-thinking. She sees the traditional southern aristocratic family unit crumbling around her, and takes whatever opportunity she has to escape. ====

====Jason has a tendency to blame everybody but himself for his own troubles. When Caddy returns to Jefferson to attend her father’s funeral and try to reconnect with her daughter, Jason is quick to remind her that she cost him a job opportunity. Three times he mentions it: “I reckon you’ll know now that you cant beat me out of a job and get away with it…You already cost me one job…I reckon you’ll think twice before you deprive me of a job that was promised me” (205-6). It’s no surprise that Caddy spends much of her life running away from Jefferson, when a return trip only reminds her of the pain she has caused her family. ====

====While Caddy clearly does not have as close a relationship with Jason as she does with Benjy and Quentin, Jason's narrative allows us to hypothesize on Caddy’s life between 1912 and 1928. In that time, Jason has essentially extorted thousands of dollars from Caddy that he promises to give to Quentin. Where is Caddy getting all of this money? “You’ll get it the same way you got her,” Jason suggests, referring to her daughter, Quentin (209). With Faulkner’s 1945 appendix, we are able to fill in the gap of 1920-25, a time when Caddy is married to a mid-rate Hollywood producer. However, that leaves a big span of time in which Caddy is essentially M.I.A. We can assume that Caddy is able to consistently send money to Jason through various relationships with wealthy men, or even perhaps prostitution. This is the price that Caddy pays to escape the toxic home in which she was born. This is the price Caddy pays in order to try and give her daughter a ‘normal’ life, to “[have] things like other girls” (210). Caddy of all people, however, should know that Quentin can never have a normal life in that home. ====

====1910 (February) – Caddy becomes pregnant, decides to name the child Quentin regardless of its sex. Dalton Ames is possibly the father (Appendix). ====

====1910 (April) – Caddy marries Herbert Head, a man that she and Caroline had met while vacationing at French Lick the previous summer (Appendix). ====

====1912 – Caddy resumes contact with her family following her father’s funeral. Her previous whereabouts are unknown. Caddy leaves town again after making arrangements with Jason for her to send money to Quentin (202-210). ====

====1943 – A former classmate and current librarian in Jefferson happens upon a photograph of Caddy in a “slick magazine.” In the photograph, Caddy is riding in the passenger seat of a sports car being driven by a Nazi general – “the woman’s face hatless between a rich scarf and a seal coat, ageless and beautiful, cold serene and damned.” The librarian shows the photograph to Jason. He initially laughs in recognition of his sister, but then denies that it is indeed Caddy in the photograph once he realizes that the librarian means to help her. She then brings the photograph to Disley, who is now blind and thus unable to see the photograph (Appendix). ====

**Caddy in Popular Culture **
====Actress Margaret Leighton played Caddy in the 1959 film adaptation of //The Sound and the Fury//, directed by Martin Ritt. In a New York Times review of the film, critic Bosley Crowther refers to her performance as “a role Margaret Leighton plays as if she were the Blanche DuBois right out of a stranded road company of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire."” ====

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====<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Crowther, Bosley. "[|Screen: Down South; 'Sound and the Fury' Opens at Paramount]." //New York Times//. 28 March 1959. Web. 28 September 2013. ====

====<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Faulkner, William. "An Introduction for //The Sound and the Fury//." ed. James B. Meriwether, //The Southern Review 8// (N.S., 1972): 705-710. Web. 30 August 2013. ====

====<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Faulkner, William. "[|Appendix: Compson: 1699-1945]." //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Community High School District 155 //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">. Web. 27 September 2013. ====