Faulkner presents Rosa Millard, or Granny, as the motherly presence for the Sartoris family and the clear matriarch, especially in John’s absence. Yet her character is more complex than simply that, as her charitable nature is somewhat obscured by underlying power dynamics. Rosa is the de facto head of a land-holding, slave-owning family after all, and so the implications of this may play a role in how she is viewed as a character by the reader. This does often play a factor in her charity and in her displays of concern for others, as her identity informs just how she approaches certain instances of charity and empathy. In her eulogy, Brother Fortinbride tells those assembled of said qualities: “And I reckon that God has already seen to it that there are men women and children, black white yellow or red, waiting for her to tend and worry over” (Faulkner 158). His words invoke God, associating her with the divine, and functions to emphasize her indiscriminate care for others. But besides Fortinbride’s attempt to construct (as most eulogies tend to do) a post-mortem idea of Rosa, how true does his statement hold, considering what Faulkner has shown of her?  It is difficult to question Rosa’s caring nature, especially considering she has given away much of the profits of her scam (138). But even here, providing charity, she still operates in a position of power, as she acts as a sort of judge, cataloguing her charity, attempting to control how it is used. This is not the only instance of her providing charity from a position of power, as the situation is similar when she comes across the free woman and her baby whilst traveling in the carriage. She is empathetic towards the woman, however the power dynamic is clear. Not only is it clear visually, as Rosa is perched up on the carriage and the woman standing on the ground, but also through dialogue. Rosa asks her, “‘Who do you belong to?’” (84). This immediately sets a tone for the interaction, as Rosa has categorized the woman as property and not a person. She proceeds to act with care and empathy, giving the woman a ride on the carriage and food to eat, but not without imploring her to return to her life of bondage. This is where the complexity of Rosa Millard is most apparent. She acts with compassion, yet also as a slave-owner. There are these contradictions within her character, which makes it difficult to distinguish her as one or the other. She is both, which creates this grey-space that obscures the reader’s ability to construct a definitive image of her. She is not unlike her son-in-law John who is similarly inscrutable. This demonstrates a true capturing of human complexities and contradictions on Faulkner’s part and may even inspire philosophical ponderings concerning this idea of the slave-owner’s ability to possess morality.

After Bayard and Ringo avenge Granny’s death in “Vendée,” Bayard’s disillusionment with male violence inspires a series of observations about the distinctions between men and women. This time of reflection and introspection suggests a leap of maturity and self-governance for Bayard, but also betrays his lingering childlike need for heroes and the inherently paradoxical nature of these gallant figures.

The first notable comment is made at the very beginning of “Skirmish at Sartoris.” Bayard is remembering how, on Election Day, the women and men were oriented like opposing armies, and he begins to dissect the reasons why that might have been the case. He begins by analyzing the men involved, positing that they have simply gotten used to behaving as a military unit. He then takes his reflection a step further, wondering if the danger and violence of conflict are not just the unfortunate consequences of men’s militaristic tendencies, but the innate draw: “…men have been pacifists for every reason under the sun except to avoid danger and fighting” (188), says Bayard in what is perhaps a newly percolating criticism of the violent culture into which he was born.

His thought finally turns to the women on the other side of the metaphorical battlefield as he considers their position during the war: “…all the women in Jefferson were actually enemies for the reason that men had given in and admitted that they belonged to the United States but the women had never surrendered” (188). Bayard is imbuing this group of women with the force of an army, and rather than framing them as defeated or powerless to the superior male army that speaks for them, he characterizes them as the only southern militia that has not yet surrendered.

Later in “Skirmish at Sartoris,” Bayard once again reflects on the female experience while taking a jab at southern male behavior: “…they were strange times then. Only like I said, maybe times are never strange to women: that it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks” (194). In this imagining, women are no longer an emboldened army, but rather a transcendent body that observes their male counterparts like an omniscient God watching his creatures scurry about down below. Bayard, soon after, subtly mocks his father, who belittles women for their lack of political acumen: “…like Father said, women cannot believe that anything can be right or wrong or even be very important that can be decided by a lot of little scraps of scribbled paper dropped into a box” (204). Bayard is distinguishing what he says from what his father says (“like I said” vs “like Father said”)—and considering the ways Bayard has borne witness to Granny’s acute awareness of the power of little scraps of scribbled paper, he is starting to resist the latter in favor of the former.

There are markers of growth in this new pattern of questioning and resisting the narratives of authority figures. And yet, Bayard is still approaching this internal revolution childishly—reducing women to a monolith and lionizing them as a replacement for the men that have disappointed him. His reductive beliefs, however, find themselves in clear contradiction in “An Odor of Verdena.” He explains that Mrs. Wilkins refrains from offering him a horse and pistol “because she was a woman and so wiser than any man” (215). And yet after Drusilla hands him a pair of pistols and kisses his hand—a clear endorsement of violence—he still holds fast to his claim that “they are wise, women are—a touch, lips or fingers, and the knowledge, even clairvoyance, goes straight to the heart without bothering the laggard brain at all” (238).

These constantly shifting (and clashing) images of women as simultaneously militaristic and sublime—peacemakers and warriors—show just how unsettled Bayard is in his beliefs and his view of the world around him. Drusilla’s madness may be the thing that finally breaks these two-dimensional illusions and leads to his nuanced final act of concomitant courage and pacifism.

I can’t remember who asked about the piece I mentioned linking Faulkner’s work with Du Bois’s *Black Reconstruction*, but I’ve put it in the Library: >OPTIONAL/INTERESTING > UNVANQUISHED. The author is Graham.

Great work tonight, all!

From “Ambuscade” to “Riposte in Tertio”, Faulkner’s protagonist Bayard moves through the Civil War and the collapse of southern ideals as a young boy. Where much of war literature is directly violent, either through flashbacks of said violence, or present lived dialogue and action, Faulkner writes about the Civil War in a way that a child moves his plastic soldiers across a map. More so than the egregious brutality of the white south slave owners, or the ghastly ferocity of man vs. man in battle, we hear of stolen mules and cut-free cattle. Where the violence of men is unavoidable, Faulkner writes instead of the “sound like somebody had shut his hand over his mouth” (70). I believe that this is a very purposeful stylistic choice. Speaking through the Bayard, Faulkner needs to be able to account for the war from a place of a child’s understanding of violence and trauma. The result of this normalized trauma from the child’s perspective is either a complete avoidance of said violence (i.e., when Granny apologies for her sins, and the world has fallen apart around her, Bayard focuses on the “hickory branch just outside the window, turning yellow; when the sun touched it, the leaves looked gold” [147]) or the reconfiguration of said experience, say, by surrealism. 

This ‘Southern Surrealism” is apparent from the very first line of The Unvanquished, where Faulkner writes “Behind the smokehouse that summer, Ringo and I had a living map” (3). Where Faulkner is quick to note that “Vicksburg was just a handful of chips from the woodpile…”, he intentionally places the ‘living map’ image at the forefront of the novel. Placing this surreal suggestion that the two boys held a living map centers the audience in the childlike perspective that will continue to situate the civil war throughout much of the book.

The surrealism continues to flourish as we move forward the different short stories, Bayard describing Loosh as “hanging there against the lighted doorway like he had been cut out of tin in the act of running,” or Louvinia’s toenails as “faintly soiled feathers on the floor about a foot below the hem of her nightgown as if they were not connected,” Joby with “his mouth hanging open and his eyes like two eggs,” the sky as if “the whole rime of the world was full of horses running along the sky,” the soldiers with “peaceful expressions…like so many dolls,” the railroad as “a long empty gash cut through the trees,” and Brother Fortinbride with “bones looking like they were coming right out through his face,” as some of many. 

It should be noted, though, that the surrealism begins to fall shorter in “Riposte in Tertio”. I believe this is likely because Bayard, at the age of 15, is beginning to understand the severity of war beyond what his childlike perspective had previously allotted him. Faulkner includes Bayard’s reflection on weather, “maybe it was because you are not conscious of weather until you are fifteen,” to illustrate this coming-into-awareness (147). Additionally, we begin to see what is perhaps the most direct violence thus far, when Granny is killed by Grumby. The correlation of violence and surrealism is made rather clear through these chapter progressions. 

A question I still have is why much of the surrealism centers around Faulkner’s Black characters specifically. I have considered that it is (1) because Faulkner, writing from as a white man, must lean into the fantastical to understand experiences that are not his own or (2) because much of the violence and evidence of violence occurs in Black people rather than White people, and so, as demonstrated above, the level of surrealism would surely rise. However, I’m not sure if that is a fully fleshed out answer, and I’m curious about looking into this more.

There is a lot of movement in The Unvanquished‘s chapter “Raid”. Granny, Ringo, and Bayard looks for the family’s chest of silver, freed slaves journey seemingly without direction (they turn and go back to Mississippi as a new group headed by the unlikely trio), southern soldiers on horses resemble the fading grandeur of the south, and the ripped up railroad is a specter over it all.

Bayard’s fantastic account of his father on horseback captures his coming of age story in a symbol. At this point in The Unvanquished Bayard and Ringo (the latter ironically) are still enamored with the Confederacy and Colonel Sartoris. Bayard’s description of his father on horseback shows how Bayard believes his father is a hero and by extension the confederacy is heroic: “Then Jupiter shot out from between us; he went out exactly like I have seen a hawk come out of a sage field and rise over a fence” (66). On Jupiter’s back, General Sartoris seems like he is flying in the eyes of Bayard. He is a predator that Bayard views magically: “I could see a sky under them and the tops of the trees beyond the hill like they were flying” (66). Between the hawk metaphor and the hyperbolic flight, General Sartoris represents a confederacy that is flying. This is a confederacy that is successful, on the hunt rather than the hunted, and flying into the future.

The symbol fills the imagination of Bayard, who later considers his vantage point of a child: “There is a limit to what a child can accept, assimilate; not to what it can believe because a child can believe anything” (66). Bayard is squarely in his belief phase. He believes in the heroism and a southern future. What is it that he cannot accept? The potential for a southern loss and the moral implications of a side that is fighting to protect slavery. Bayard’s description of the horse adds a new state of movement: “I was still a child at that moment when Father’s and my horses came over the hill and seemed to cease galloping and to float, hang suspended rather in a dimension without time in it” (66). The image of the horse suspended in the air, floating eternally, is also Bayard’s understanding of the Confederacy’s status. It is here and here to stay. To the child there is now way that the father can fall from grace and along with it his army.

As I read this week’s chapters of The Unvanquished, I analyzed Faulkner’s motives behind the structure and formulation of his narrative. To briefly summarize what we have read thus far, we are being told a series of stories from the perspective of Bayard Sartoris as he recalls his experiences living in the Antebellum South during and after the Civil War. In each chapter, Faulkner efficiently, yet also somewhat ambiguously, sets the stage for a particular phase in Bayard’s life as he begins to navigate the obstacles of growing up during a period of uncertainty and tragedy. Faulkner incorporates vivid imagery and significant interactions between the characters in the form of a stream of consciousness. But this stream of consciousness develops a particular pattern in terms of motives. We see Bayard grow resilient towards feelings of nostalgia and sadness as he reflects upon his childhood. As a first-time Faulkner reader, this pattern of narrative motives allows for me to have a somewhat easier time following along on Bayard’s journey, along with growing anxious as to how everything that we have learned about his life thus far will all come together in the end.

We are lightly introduced to the motive of nostalgia in the novel’s very first chapter titled “Ambuscade.” Bayard places a high value on family life, especially in terms of his relationship with his grandmother, Granny Rosa Millard. There is one particular moment in which he begins to recall the types of stories she would read to him and his best friend Ringo. Although it can appear to be a form of nontraditional storytelling, Granny would sit and read recipes from a cookbook to the boys (19). The placement and structuring of this moment are one that symbolize a breather from all of the tense, yet also slow-paced scenes that we have already read about. This scene only takes up half of a page, but it showcases the type of matriarch that Bayard viewed Granny as. She provided him with the most normal childhood possible, even if the outside world was in a state of chaos, tragedy, and uncertainty.  Nostalgia begins to trickle in due to how Bayard makes a connection between a coconut cake and a past family Christmas celebration. Faulkner writes, “We had had some that Christmas before it started and Ringo had tried to remember whether they had had any of it in the kitchen or not, but he couldn’t remember.” (19). When looking at the phrase “before it started” in this line, we grow an understanding that Bayard placed a higher significance on memories that occurred before the war began. For him, it was a happier time, and there was an everlasting sense of familial and emotional stability. Once the war began, however, these elements of his childhood were slowly taken away, causing him to increase his fondness of his memories with both his grandmother and other family members.

The motive of sadness inflicted by tragedy gains dominance. We see this idea become fulfilled further in the end of Chapter 4 titled “Riposte in Tertio.” After Granny is tragically killed by Grumby’s Independents, Bayard expresses his regrets about not saving her from them. He explains, “I was just fifteen, and for most of my life her face had been the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night, but I could have stopped her and I didn’t.” (153). It is clear that Bayard wants readers to understand how his grandmother’s death symbolizes a major turning point for him at this point in the novel. From this point forward, he is going to have to navigate the world around him alone, and there would be no parental figure to guide him. He also comes from a place of sadness in this section of the chapter, as there is more of a tragic undertone behind his words. Granny’s death hits Bayard the hardest due to how she was his primary caretaker, and Granny even questions his sadness before she passes away. She says, “’So we will have something when John comes back home. You never cried when you knew he was going into a battle, did you?’” (152-153). This absence of emotions for Bayard towards his father going into battle showcases how he expressed his love for both him and his grandmother differently. Since his father was consistently absent and was always focused on the war, the ways in which they bonded was unlike your traditional relationship between father and son. Instead, it was more of a “I’ll see you when I see you” type of bond, as there was more of an emphasis on making sure that Colonel Sartoris can focus on becoming victorious every single time he stepped out onto the battlefield. War was the primary emphasis of these two men’s relationship with one another, causing the sadness that Bayard once felt to be more of a numbing feeling as opposed to an upset feeling.

In The Unvanquished, William Faulkner revisits the American Civil War from the perspective of the Sartoris family, underscoring the contradictions and anxieties that shaped the social landscape and values of the antebellum South. From the opening scene, the themes of equality, solidarity, and freedom emerge against the troubling backdrop of slavery, white supremacy, anti-black racism, war, and violence. The notion of unity beyond race, although complicated and paradoxical at times, appears in the novel through the friendship and brotherhood between Bayard and Ringo. Although the two friends cannot escape the legacy of slavery within their family and the consequences of race ideology on American society at large, their coequal dynamic implicitly subverts the hierarchical relations that uphold the institution of slavery in the war-torn South. 

From the beginning of the novel, the friendship between Bayard and Ringo highlights the ways in which the Civil War causes a rift in antebellum Southern thought, revealing its internal contradictions. For example, when Bayard reflects on the urgency of the war and its implications for enslaved Black people such as the ones who work for his family, he goes on to describe his friendship with Ringo in poetic, sentimental language: “Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny ‘Granny’ just like I did, until maybe he wasn’t a n—r anymore or maybe I wasn’t a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer: the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane (Faulkner 7). Despite the oppressive power structure between the enslaver and the enslaved, Bayard and Ringo enjoy a friendship based on a form of equality and unity that transcends racial difference and hierarchy. Growing up like twin brothers, the boys are one and double, mirror images on the one hand and foils on the other. Through the acknowledgement of their relationship as equals and copartners, Bayard explicitly challenges notions of racial identity that separate them into binary positions (i.e., white/black). In such turbulent times of warfare and violence, the pair are instead described as two moths, two feathers searching for a state of freedom above the hostility and chaos around them. 

Despite this idealistic tone, the social conventions of the antebellum period and the reality of the civil war interrupts these emerging notions of freedom, friendship, equality, and cross-racial solidarity. In the scene following this reflection, Bayard stands in one stirrup with his father while Ringo holds the other and runs beside the horse (Faulkner 8). Their social positions, defined by racial and class hierarchies, are ever-present and subtly impact how the two individuals move in this scene. However, the text oscillates between these two contradictory positions, and for the most part, questions and subverts this hierarchical system. For instance, Bayard admits that “Ringo was a little smarter” than he was, and eventually, taller and more mature as he works with Granny (Faulkner 81, 126),  Although there are inherent structural limitations to Ringo’s character and position as an enslaved person, these instances implicitly challenge white supremacist and racist ideologies that lie at the heart of slavery as an institution, one that dehumanizes enslaved black people, and relegates them to an inferior position in relation to white people. In his reflections, Bayard refuses to see Ringo as a commodity despite the racial hierarchy and power structure in place. Throughout the text, he suggests that they are companions who protect and support each other: “I caught Ringo and held him as he slipped off and then a little later Ringo caught and held me from slipping before I even knew that I had been asleep” (Faulkner 60). In this manner, the social “omnipresence” of racism and hierarchical relations is constantly challenged by the recurrent themes of cross-racial solidarity, unity, and friendship based on mutual respect and equality. 

Therefore, in the first half of the novel, the friendship between Bayard and Ringo is suggestive of a form of racial justice, a sense of freedom from the shackles of a dehumanizing and oppressive institution that permeates the nation and sows divide. That being said, however, Bayard himself appears conflicted with this understanding of race and freedom amidst the backdrop of a civil war. This conflict is highlighted in his thoughts on the symbolism of the railroad as a means of motion and movement: “It was as if Ringo felt it too…the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people” (Faulkner 81). Although Bayard first describes this impulse as “reasonless” and delusional for enslaved African Americans, his stream of consciousness reveals a certain shift by the end of the thought. He comes to the conclusion that the impulse to leave the familiarity and security of the known in hopes of freedom and the unknown, is an experience that is universal to all humans, regardless of race. Despite his reservations, Bayard humanizes the struggle for freedom, an understanding that, in many ways, is made possible through his friendship with Ringo.