Harvard+and+Cambridge

The second chapter in //The Sound and the Fury,// titled "June 2, 1910," is set in this Massachusetts city and narrated by Quentin Compson on the day he commits suicide by leaping into the Charles River. Through the chapter Quentin roams Cambridge, where he has come to study at Harvard, and which is filled with a cultural variety — Canadians, Italians, Kentuckians, Southern Blacks and, of course, Massachusites — that stands in stark contrast to the Compson’s relatively homogeneous hometown of Jefferson, Miss.

As Quentin’s narrative lapses into the past in the chapter, largely as he ruminates on the sexuality of his fallen sister Caddy and imagines conversations with his father in which he claims, falsely, that he has committed incest with Caddy; in the chapter’s narrative “present,” set at Harvard and in Cambridge, he visits a clock shop, discusses fishing with three boys on a bridge, goes on a picnic with friends, and visits a bakery, out of which he is followed by a little Italian girl of whom he later accused, by her older brother, of kidnapping.

Through the chapter Quentin’s perception of Harvard — described as “Where the best of thought Father said clings like dead ivy vines upon old dead brick,” (95) in customarily ambivalent tone — is clouded by a Southerner’s feelings of alienation in a northern city, along with his guilt over what his useless education deprived of others including Benjy and Jason. Indeed, in conversations with his father bubble up through Quentin’s narrative, it becomes clear that his education is a source of profound guilt. One italicized aside is loaded with ironic pride, echoing his ambivalence: As one brief passage goes, its repetition giving it a mocking tone, especially given Quentin’s distaste for other characters who gloat, “//Harvard my Harvard boy Harvard Harvard.//” (92)

Alongside Quentin, the Harvard characters briefly the novel a worldly, erudite voice, but also display a privileged pettiness absent from the portions of the novel set in Mississippi. The little girl and three boys he meets in Cambridge echo the Compson family’s one “little girl” (Caddy), and the three Compson brothers (Quentin, Jason and Benjy).
 * Notable Cambridge characters**
 * 1) Shreve: Quentin's roommate at Harvard. At chapter's beginning he runs out of their shared room, late for church. Quentin gives Shreve a letter, and gives another letter to The Deacon to give Shreve on the following day; soon Quentin sees Shreve, who reports that he has received a letter that morning. Also an outsider in Cambridge, Mrs. Bland refers to him as “that fat Canadian youth.” (106)
 * 2) Gerald Bland: Gerald is wealthy Harvard student from Kentucky whom Quentin fights after apparently confusing him for Caddy’s seducer Dalton Ames. (Gerald wins the fight.) Introduced in flannels as he rides a scull down the river, bland is something of a dandy; Quentin notes his “princely boredom, with his curly yellow hair and his violet eyes and his eyelashes and his New York clothes,” all “while his mamma was telling us about Gerald’s horses and Gerald’s niggers and Gerald’s women.” (91)
 * 3) Spoade: Another Southerner, Spoade joins the picnic with Shreve, Gerald and Gerald’s mother and the day Quentin kills himself. When Quentin is accused of kidnapping, Spoade defends him. Quentin refers to him as “the world’s champion sitter-arounder,” and a Harvard senior to Quentin’s freshman.
 * 4) The Deacon: “A mercenary and domineering servant to generations of Harvard students from the South,” as Jeffrey J. Folks describes him, the Deacon is a successful older man living in Cambridge who represents both the African-American trickster archetype and the adaptation method of survival. Folks also points out that, the Deacon is a southerner who has “secured a profitable position within the national economy,” in marked contrast to Faulkner himself, who had not. (Folks 37-38) Quentin described the Deacon as wearing a “sort of Uncle Tom’s cabin outfit, patches and all,” (97) which resonates with a broader characterization of Southernness as cartoonish.
 * 5) The Three Boys: Quentin encounters three boys making a mock bet for $25 over which can catch a famous trout that fishermen have been trying to catch for 25 years. The interaction highlights Quentin’s sense of alienation in the north, as the boys ask him whether he is from Canada. The boys argue over the fishing spot before giving up to go swim.
 * 6) The Little Girl: Quentin sees a dirty little girl in a bakery whom he helps to buy baked goods and calls "sister." Quentin's descriptions of the little girl sometimes give her innocence morbid overtones, e.g., her hands are "damn and hot, like worms," and she carries the bread as she would "a dead rat." While Quentin wrestles internally with having lost his real sister Caddy, the little girl's brother accuses him, saying "You steala my seester," (139) offering the interpretation that Quentin is trying to replace Caddy with the girl.

> The weight falls hard on Quentin, as in one moment Quentin’s italicized recollections of guilt collide with the present’s residual shame: “Going to Harvard. We have sold Benjy’s He lay on the ground under the window bellowing. We have sold Benjy’s pasture so that Quentin may go to Harvard a brother to you. Your little brother.” (94) > The chapter also references how Quentin’s failure to get the Harvard degree has also deprived his brother Jason the chance at an education. Quentin says to his father, “If you attend Harvard one year, but don’t see the boat-race, there should be a refund. Let Jason have it. Give Jason a year at Harvard.” (77) Quentin's suicide leaves the family with neither a Harvard-educated son nor its land, illustrating the Compson family's folly. > Yet to the Northerners of Cambridge, Quentin occupies a kind of placeless- and racelessness, highlighted in his interaction with the three boys, in which one asks Quentin if he is Canadian before another says Quentin “talks like they do in minstrel shows,” and “like a colored man.” (120) Verbally, Quentin’s loss of Southern heritage in Cambridge leads him to attempt to internalize a New England dialect. “Elm,” he says. “No: Ellum. Ellum,” which Ross and Polk write is an attempt to copy the rural New England dialect. (110)
 * Themes**
 * //Paying for Harvard:// Quentin’s suicide highlights on two levels the Compson family’s impending doom. First, the Compson family funded Quentin’s Harvard education by selling off a portion of the family’s land, which would to Benjy, Quentin’s mentally retarded brother. As Quentin roaming Cambridge, we see images in the future of Benjy gazing through a fence upon land that was once his and which is now a golf course. The gradual loss of land takes on Edenic resonance, as Mary Dell Fletcher writes, with Benjy’s fixation on the Compson family grounds clashing with Quentin’s travels through a larger world.
 * //Race in the North:// Life in Cambridge has led Quentin to reconsider the Southern conception of race. “I used to think that a Southerner had to be always conscious of niggers,” he says. “I thought that Northerners would expect him to. … I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.” (86)
 * //The Uses of a Harvard Education:// As Quentin walks into a hardware store to buy the flat-irons with which he will weight his feet upon jumping in the river, Quentin, holding the irons, says: “I thought again how Father had said about the reducto absurdum of human experience, thinking how the only opportunity I seemed to have for the application of Harvard; maybe by next year; thinking maybe it takes two years in school to learn to do that properly” (86) — which is to say, the only practical application for his Harvard education is that he knows how much weight he’ll need to attach to his feet to make sure he drowns.
 * //Alienation in the North:// Quentin’s Southern heritage makes him feel like an alien in the north; indeed, his relationship with Gerald, with whom he fights, writes large his distaste for displays of Southern opulence — a marked contrast in tone that is well summed up by Bland’s contention that “God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian, too.” (110) (Repeated nearly verbatim on p. 90) Dripping with irony, Quentin notes how he has been approved by Gerald’s mother because he, like Gerald, is from the South: Mrs. Bland “approved of Gerald associating with me because I at least revealed a blundering sense of noblesse oblige by getting myself born below the Mason and Dixon, and a few others whose Geography met the requirements (minimum).” (91)
 * //Role Confusion:// Quentin’s alienation in Cambridge leads to a bad case of role-confusion. As Louis D. Rubin writes, in comparing Faulkner’s work to that of William Styron, “Quentin’s failure to discover his role was inextricably connected with his failure to embody the values of a Yoknapatawpha County that no longer existed … [His] hope for stability and sanity rested in institutions, traditions, concepts of role, theological authority that no longer existed.” (102)

According to the Harvard Crimson, a plaque memorializing Quentin decorates the Anderson Memorial Bridge, which connects Cambridge to Boston’s Allston neighborhood. It reads, “Quentin Compson. Drowned in the odour of honeysuckle. 1891-1910.” The quotation resonates with Quentin's observation of Cambridge that "there were vines and creepers where at home would be honeysuckle," (133) and numerous other references to honeysuckle.
 * Memorial in the (Real) Cambridge**



–Andrew Cedermark

Works Cited

Fletcher, Mary Dell. "Edenic Images in //The Sound and the Fury.//" The South Central Bulletin, Vol. 40, No. 4, Studies by Members of the SCMLA (Winter, 1980), pp. 142-144 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/stable/3187682

Folks, Jeffrey J. (Jeffrey Jay). "Crowd and Self: William Faulkner's Sources of Agency in The Sound and the Fury." //The Southern Literary Journal// 34.2 (2002): 30-44. Print. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/stable/20078332

Rubin, Louis D. "Notes on a Southern Writer in Our Time." From //The Achievement of William Styron//. Eds. Malin, Irving, Robert K. Morris, Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia, 2009. Pp. 100-103. //Google Books.// Web.

Towner, Theresa M., and James B. Carothers. //Reading Faulkner. Glossary and Commentary//. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2006. Print.