"Once a Bitch, Always a Bitch": Rereading Caddy in The Sound and the Fury

Abstract

Born on the threshold of modernity, Candice “Caddy” Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury contends with the Southern patriarchal apparatus, upending moral and social codes embedded deep within a system of white, male-dominated hegemony. Though Caddy’s character appears to the reader exclusively through the heavily mitigated narratives of four male voices, she nevertheless slips away from their control and exists as a self outside of and separate from impenetrable textual abstraction. Attempts to fix or define her character ultimately fail because, as Minrose C. Gwin states, Caddy is “the discursiveness of that space which she is but also which she speaks out of” (Gwin 35, emphasis mine). In The Willful Subject (2014), Sara Ahmed writes, “The demand for obedience is not simply a demand that the part obeys