Faulkner plays with the concept of hiding – particularly part of one’s face by having something, whether it be Sutpen’s beard or powder on Ellen’s face to mask how that character is feeling.
On the day of Ellen’s wedding to Sutpen, Ellen wore 2 masks. The first when her face was made up with powder, “the aunt had even forced or nagged [not cajoled: that would not have done it] Mr. Coldfield into allowing Ellen to wear powder on her face for the occasion. The powder was to hide the marks of tears. But before the wedding was over the powder was streaked again, caked and channelled” [AA, 37]. The streaked, caked, and channelled face was the mask of the newly minted Mrs. Ellen Sutpen [nee Coldfield]. That second mask would come to represent Ellen’s life as a married woman. All of Yonknapatawpha County, Ellen’s spinster aunt, Mr. Coldfield, and perhaps even Ellen herself realized that a union between she and Sutpen served only to hide Sutpen behind the cloak of respectability.
When Sutpen first came to Yoknapatawpha County, his “short reddish beard was thought to resemble a disguise” [AA 24], and when he returned to Yoknapatawpha a third time, with all manner of fine goods with him and the townsfolk that wanted to arrest him were unsure what to do with him, it was partly because of Sutpen’s beard that increased their uneasiness. “It might have been a good thing that he had that beard and they could not see his mouth…it was in his face; that was where his [Sutpen’s] power lay…anyone could look at him and say Given the occasion and the need, this man can and will do anything” [AA 34-35]. Sutpen’s eyes were hard and depending on who you were and what Sutpen was up to, he could look at someone with contempt in his eyes and the receiver of such a look may not understand why he is receiving such a look, but Sutpen’s mouth could have betrayed him. His mouth could have counteracted whatever hardness his eyes conveyed, or his mouth could have indicated some sort of welcome or inquiry. The reddish beard was off-putting; it helped strengthen the mystery surrounding Sutpen, because observers could not tell what his mouth, like the rest of Sutpen was thinking.
In chapter 3, Mr. Compson tells Quentin of Ms. Rosa and how she was trained by the same spinster aunt [who had been both mother and father to Ellen and later, Rosa] to view Sutpen with that “blind irrational fury of a shedding snake and who had come to look upon her sister as a woman who had vanished not only out of the family and the house but out of life too, into an edifice like Bluebeard’s and there transmogrified into a mask looking back with passive and hopeless grief upon the irrevocable world…” [AA 47]. This is what became of Ellen’s caked, streaked, and channelled mask of years ago.
