Caddy Compson and La Malinche: American Eves Trapped in the Archetypal Image of Women–AJ King

The Sound and the Fury documents the fall of the prominent southern Compson family through the promiscuity of the only daughter, Caddy, but the Compson boys also are responsible for a fare share of the tragedy. The tragedy stems from roles the Compson brothers force upon their sister Caddy, as a comforting mother figure for Benjy, a talisman of honor for Quentin, and a ticket to the big time for Jason. Each brother never allows her to be herself, but forces her to be what will best serve him in his position of a dominant male. Caddy was not given the liberty of a voice in William Faulkner’s novel; instead, her story is told from her brothers’ perspective and by Dilsey, the family’s retainer. While this was an authorial choice made by Faulkner who “adopted  here the archetypal male image of a woman who is at once mother, sister, daughter and lover, Eve and Lilith, virgin and whore, to describe [...] the other, the world outside the self,” history did not afford La Malinche an opportunity to be heard (Gray 451). Malinche is the historical figure-turned-legend who was first Hernando Cortés’s translator, then mistress, then later the villain of the Mexican people by being branded a traitor to her own people through the misogynistic concept of malinchinsmo. Her fate was to have her life interpreted in multiple ways from biographical accounts, fictionalized accounts as well as plain-out hearsay that is a product of her status in the cultural mythos of the Mexican identity. The fall of the Compson family in the South is a microcosmic reflection of the greater macrocosmic fall of the Americas to the Spanish conquistadors, illustrating how the character of Caddy Compson is an American incarnation of La Malinche, the Mexican Eve.

            The similarity of character between Caddy and La Malinche is not the only one the two women share: they also share a similarity of action that influences how each is perceived. Caddy willingly gave herself to Dalton Ames just as La Malinche willingly worked with Cortés to achieve  his conquest. Caddy tried to explain to Quentin that Dalton did not force himself upon her, but that she was compliant to the act that resulted in the pregnancy that sullied her family’s honor. She attempted to explain to Quentin by showing him that she loved Dalton. When Quentin asked Caddy, “did he make you then he made you do it let him he was stronger than you and he tomorrow Ill kill him,” she answered by holding his hand against her chest, “her heart thudding,” and when he asked her again, “Caddy you hate him dont you,” she answered again by moving “my hand up against her throat was hammering there” (Faulkner 169). Caddy’s reply was to show Quentin how much her heart was beating at the thought of Dalton, that her heart was physical proof of how much she loved him, that she was not forced against her will.  And it is during this scene that Quentin makes the correlation to the day Damuddy died, when Caddy sat down in the water in her drawers, an integral part of the image of the little-girl Caddy with stained drawers climbing the fruit tree to do the forbidden, to look in at the dead Damuddy. Along with asking whether she hates Dalton, Quentin asks, “do you remember the day damuddy died when you sat down in the water in your drawers” (170). The suggestion of Eve and the Tree of Knowledge is overwhelming in the central scene where Caddy climbs the tree in her stained drawers, “around which Faulkner said he structured the novel: ‘the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree [sometimes he remembered it as an apple tree], where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below’” (Fletcher 142).

            Whereas Caddy embodies the image of an Eve responsible for the fall of her family, Malinche is also assigned the blame for the fall of America to Spanish explorers.  Malinche is “more affectionately known as Malintzin, Malinalli, or doña Marina, was Hernán Cortés’s translator, intercultural interpreter, and mother to his child, and has been symbolically assigned the role of scored and abject mother of the Mexican people” (Taylor 818). Taylor goes on to say, “Like the biblical Eve, Malinche is the scapegoat, the ambivalent accomplice who ‘opened’ Mexico to conquest and subjugation” (818). Another aspect of Malinche as a scapegoat was contributed through Octavio Paz who called her la chingada, which  evokes “the image of Malinche as an object of pity and rage, la chingada madre, the raped Indian mother with downcast eyes and restrained body, and Cortés as the domineering and scornful European father, el chingón” (818).  

Echoes of Malinche can be seen in Caddy. Instead of allowing Caddy to love Dalton, Quentin fabricates another reality, one in which he is the one who violated his sister so that he can save her honor, and his as well as their family’s, in some twisted sense of chivalry. Along with Benjy and Jason and their mother Caroline, Quentin uses Caddy as a scapegoat like Malinche.            

            These statuses, as a fallen woman and as a scapegoat, show a similarity of reputation as an Eve and a similarity of situation with Edenic imagery. Both Malinche and Caddy were obliged to carry the responsibility that goes with the status as a cultural symbol: Caddy as a bastion of feminine purity according to the rules of Southern chivalry and Malinche as a representation of the untouched indigenous peoples before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. According to the entry for La Malinche and malinchismo in the Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico, doña Marina had a 300-year-long reign with a reputation as an indigenous woman commanding respect and power. Yet in modern times, her reputation changed. The “new depictions focused on her sexuality and condemned her role in the Conquest; the portrayals gave rise to the concept malinchismo, which may be defined broadly as the pursuit of the novel and foreign coupled with rejection and betrayal of one’s own” (Werner 353). As wide-spread as this concept is in Latin America, and especially Mexico, any woman could be accused of such a concept, and Caddy Compson is no exception. As the only daughter in the Compson family, she is expected to hold herself up to a feminine ideal created by her brothers, even if the ideal is a conflicted one in its nature or contrary to Caddy’s own personality. Caddy’s brothers cannot reconcile their conflicting paragons of femininity with the course of action Caddy has taken, namely by falling in love and bearing the child of Dalton Ames. After both Caddy and Malinche, in their archetypal Eve roles, have fallen, Caddy takes on the position of an outcast of her family and is disinherited and Malinche is vilified and blamed for the fall of the Americas. Having been held up as the unattainable feminine ideal as seen by the chivalrous Southern male and machisimo Mexican man, both have been defined by the masculine perspective. Caddy “means something different to each. For Benjy she is the smell of trees; for Quentin, honor; and for Jason, money or at least the means of obtaining it” (Vickery 1018).

            For Quentin, Caddy is a feminine ideal and an icon to him, taking on a saint-like role of the Virgin Mary, much as Malinche is often contrasted as the antithesis of the Virgen de la Guadalupe who “was the emerging Mexican people’s native version of the Virgin Mary” (Alarcón 58). In contrast with Malinche, “Guadalupe’s transcendentalizing power, silence, and maternal self-sacrifice are the positive, contrasting attributes to those of a woman who speaks as a sexual being and independently of her maternal role. To speak independently of her maternal role, as Malintzin did, is viewed in such a society as a sign of catastrophe” (Alarcón 62).

            As a Southern male with a governor and Confederate generals in his ancestry, Quentin is overwhelmed by the familial pressure to uphold a sense of chivalric honor. He does so by fixating on his sister, who had taken on a mothering role to her brothers. From this, Quentin is embroiled in an Oedipal complex to some degree. While Quentin never acted upon his urges, he used the excuse of incest so Caddy could not be held at fault for her promiscuity. He maintained that, “I said I have committed incest Father I said,” even if he and Caddy never did anything more than talk about their sexual encounters (Faulkner 96).  He cannot accept what Caddy has done, much like how Cordelia Candelaria describes the attitude of one of the writers of the early historical accounts of Malinche, Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. She writes, “It appears to me, finally, that Alva was perhaps unwilling or incapable of adjusting to the anomaly of a female’s crucial role in molding the otherwise male-shaped events” (5). When Caddy takes it upon herself to break out of the set mold that Quentin expect from his sense of the Southern chivalric code and ideals of feminine purity, his reaction is the same as Alva’s to Malinche. When Caddy comes into her own by taking her life and happiness into her own hands by seeing Dalton rather than marrying Herbert, which results in her pregnancy, Quentin cannot cope.

            Quentin’s belief of his sister’s invasion equates Caddy to Octavio Paz’s term la chingada, or the violated one. Paz “transforms Malintzin into the Mexican people’s primeval mother, albeit the raped one. To repudiate her, he argues, is to break with the past, to renounce the ‘origins’” (Alarcón 65). When Caddy loses her purity, Quentin also loses his ideals. His perceptions of the world through traditional Southern code of conduct and morality is embodied through Caddy’s virginity, and when she loses it, she brings his world crashing down. It is easier for him to designate Caddy’s promiscuity as rape. While it is easier for Quentin to categorize Caddy’s willingness as rape, so too is it easier for Paz and his contemporaries to rename Malinche la chingada. Candelaria emphasizes that Malinche “does not deserve blame for the destruction of the Aztec Empire” (6). Candelaria describes the actions of Malinche as a woman who “was bred to serve and to obey” yet was still able to make herself extraordinarily indispensable in Cortés’s service by her ability to function not only as a translator of languages, but also as a translator of cultures that proved integral to Cortés’s conquest (5).

            Quentin could not believe that Caddy would willingly giver herself to a man such as Dalton Ames, just the same as Benjy, with his frozen sense of time, cannot realize that Caddy is not going to return because “Benjy lives in a closed world where the gap between self and other, being and naming, cannot be bridged because it is never known of acknowledged. The realm outside himself remains as foreign to him as its currency of language does, and Faulkner is creating an impossible language here, giving voice to the voiceless” (Gray 451). Benjy’s hopes are ever raised and shattered by living near the golf course where the golfers inadvertently yell Caddy’s name.

            While Benjy does not understand more than the baser feelings and instincts, he knows he doesn’t have Caddy, and he knows he misses her. Benjy and Caddy have a bond in which Caddy is a nurturing caretaker for Benjy. She is one of the few who shows him compassion and does not treat him as though he were a vegetable rather than a real person, especially in the instance when she intervenes to let him go outside when he wants to. Caddy is Benjy’s means of expression, his language in a world that is full of only sensation. Just as Caddy is Benjy’s tongue, Malinche was called la lengua, or the tongue, and through her “Cortés was able to communicate two essential messages to the native they encountered during their inland trek” (Candelaria 3). Because of Cortés’s reliance upon Malinche, he and “his men and allies were saved from total destruction as they traveled” (3-4).  Candelaria wrote, “On these and other occasions, La Malinche’s presence made the decisive difference between life and death” (4). Yet “because Malintzin the translator is perceived as speaking for herself and not the community, however it defines itself, she is a woman who has betrayed her primary cultural function—maternity” (Alarcón  63). When Caddy speaks for herself, she is abandoning her mothering role to Benjy and betrays her family. Alarcón points out that “In such a setting, to speak or translate in one’s behalf rather than the perceived group interests and values is tantamount to betrayal” (63).

            Malinche made the difference for Cortés and the rest of his men during the conquest like Caddy made the difference for Benjy. With her absence, Benjy’s world is unstable, and it is a sort of death for him, tying into the central scene of Caddy as a little girl climbing the tree to look in on Damuddy’s funeral. Caddy “looks upon death, but her childhood naiveté, like Eve’s innocence, prevents immediate understanding of its implications. Finally, the strong image of the stain on Caddy’s drawers suggest not only the metaphorical ’stain of sin’ on Eve, but also the ‘unclean’ blood of the menstrual cycle which is often associated with Eve’s sin” (Fletcher 144). Caddy’s role as Benjy’s communicator to the outside world, or la lengua, is yet another mark against her. In the case of Malinche, “Those who use the oppressor’s language are viewed as outside of the community, thus rationalizing their expulsion” (Alarcón 59). When Caddy spoke up for herself by choosing Dalton, and by doing what she wanted to, as seen in Damuddy’s funeral scene with the tree, she is showing the spirit of using her own words to put into action her own ideas. And for this she is disinherited and cut off from her family, the same as “among people of Mexican descent, from this perspective, anyone who has transgressed the boundaries of perceived group interests and values often has been called malinche or  malinchista” (60). Yet while Caddy and Malinche speak for themselves through their actions, there is no recorded voice. Caddy’s story is told through four different narratives, but none are from her perspective. Alarcón writes that “notwithstanding her famed translating abilities, Malintzin has left us no recorded voice because she was illiterate; that is, she could not leave us a sense of herself and of her experience. Thus our disquisitions truly take place over her corpse and have no clue as to her own words, but instead refer to the words of the chroniclers who themselves were not free of self-interest, motive, and intention” (74). The same can be said of Caddy’s chroniclers as can be said of Malinche’s.

            When Malinche declares herself to be “la lengua,” she is embodying the “belief that literature is the intention, through the power of language, to recover memory by recovering the word and to project a future by possessing the word” (Alarcón 66). When Malinche and Caddy speak for themselves through their actions, they impel the men around them to “explode myths with countermyths, or narrative with counternarrative,” which is what Faulkner does in his series of narrators in The Sound and the Fury. With Benjy, Quentin, and Jason’s sections, the three brothers give a slanted view of Caddy as history and time has given an unreliable perspective to Malinche. The conflict appears when “‘to be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way [is] in direct conflict’ with their creativity and inventiveness, as well as with their desire to transform their cultural roles and redefine themselves in accordance with their experience and vision” (70). Not only is this a tense ideal for Chicanas and Alarcón describes it, but it is also Caddy’s conflict. This puts both Caddy and Malinche in the position to be la chingada in the truest sense as they are both portrayed as masculine victims, through ideology and reputation and their degradation of honor.

            Not only are Caddy and Malinche locked into the masculine perspectives, but also their descendants. For Caddy, it is Miss Quentin who is doomed to repeat the sins of her mother, and for Malinche, it is the Chicana desendents of “la chingada madre” and “el chingón,” the mix of indigenous and European, who will pay. Alarcón writes that for the Chicana authors González, Villanueva, and Corpi, “the forced disappearance of the Mother/Goddess leads to the daughter’s own abjection. The daughter is doomed to repeat the cycle until the ancient powers of the goddess are restored” (80). Because Caddy was banished and not allowed to live as she would (by marrying Dalton instead of Herbert), Miss Quentin is forced to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Not only does she flaunt her sexuality, but she runs away with her uncle’s money, brazenly snubbing the Southern ideals and standards that Caddy first broke. This again can be traced back to

the funeral scene whose “import may be grasped only by viewing it as a symbol that functions both thematically and structurally: to foreshadow Caddy’s moral fall and consequent alienation, which is at the heart of the story, and to foreshadow the reenactment of the tree scene by Caddy’s daughter, which establishes unity and suggests continuity” (Fletcher 142).

            Caddy’s link to Eve as a specific incarnation of a cultural mythos is the same link Malinche share with Eve in her status as a figure called the “Mexican Eve” along with her associations with Mayan myth and the Virgen de la Guadalupe that makes her prominent in the Mexican cultural mythos. These mythic statuses were important to Faulkner as “he was inclined to see that writing as shadowed by the repressed myths, the secret stories of his culture” (Gray 447). It is through this connection that these feminine figures of myth in their own localized cultures reflect a larger macrocosm as seen by “Using myth as a structure for his universe, Faulkner allows the reader, while enjoying the reality of modern story set in a small Mississippi town, to glimpse a more profound reality — one that binds him through experience to the human race” (Fletcher 144).           Malinche not only can be compared to Caddy Compson with their many similarities, but she is also part of “Mexico’s binary pair, Gualdalupe and Malintzin, reenact within this dualistic system of thought the biblical stories of our human creation and condition” (Alarcón 58).  Malinche’s place in history is important as her status has been used to create a feminine identity that challenged the masculine view of the Mexican-American woman, which Faulkner also tried to do with Caddy as she challenged her brother’s views of the way a proper Southern woman should act. Faulkner did this through “his own determining conviction that any identity anywhere is indelibly stamped by history” (Gray 448). 

Works Cited

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Candelaria, Cordelia. “La Malinche, Feminist Prototype.” Frontiers: a Journal of Women Studies 5 (1980): 1-6. JSTOR. Prescott Memorial Library, Ruston, LA, 18 February 2009 <http://            www.jstor.org/stable/3346027>.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Random House, 1957.

Fletcher, Mary Dell. “Edenic Images in ‘The Sound and the Fury’.” The South Central Bulletin 40 (1980): 142-144. JSTOR. Prescott Memorial Library, Ruston, LA, 18 February 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3187682>.

Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Taylor, Analisa. “Malinche and Matriarchal Utopia: Gendered Visions of Indigeneity in Mexico.” Signs 31 (2006): 815-840. JSTOR. Prescott Memorial Library, Ruston, LA, 18 February 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844370>.

Vickery, Olga. “The Sound and the Fury: A Study in Perspective.” PMLA 69 (1954): 1017-1037. JSTOR. Prescott Memorial Library, Ruston, LA, 18 February 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/459766>.

“La Malinche and Malinchismo.” Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico. 2001.