Faulkner’s “Poetess Laureate”:

Rosa Coldfield’s Narrative Authority and Confederate Verse in Absalom, Absalom!

“By its end, [Absalom, Absalom!] has activated an Aristotelian sense of history versus
poetry (that is, a fragmented, local sense of events versus a panoptic view that extracts
general principles), of catharsis, and of allegory…”1

Framing Absalom, Absalom! (1936) as a labyrinthine history that “just does not explain,” William

Faulkner develops a narrative complexity that demolishes dichotomous constructions of the

American Civil War South.2 Although this “Aristotelian sense of history” broadly fits within the

novel’s generally perplexing pseudo-historical timeline and Faulkner’s use of four narrative

voices (Quentin, Shreve, Mr. Compson, and Miss Rosa), its juxtaposition with “poetry” is

nonetheless intriguing. Declaring in his 1950 Nobel Prize Banquet speech that “the poet’s voice”

serves not only as “the record of man,” but also as “one of the props, the pillars to help him

endure and prevail,” Faulkner inherently claimed that to be a poet is to possess historical or socio-

cultural authority.3 Curious then, given his abundant faith in the poet’s acumen (and the

antagonistic relationship between poetry and the very history he attempts to construct), is

Faulkner’s decision to imbue Miss Rosa Coldfield, the bitter spinster in Absalom, Absalom!, with

the passion for verse. Dubbing her (mock-heroically) Yoknapatawpha County’s “poetess

laureate” (11), Faulkner describes Rosa as a Confederate poet of Dickinsonian prolificacy –

creating for herself a space to voice support for the soon-to-be-Lost Cause; yet, as feminist

scholars (who critically ignore Rosa’s poetry) routinely proclaim, that same grasping voice is

clearly marginalized and “shut up.”4 Why then does Faulkner give Rosa the authority over her

own voice in poetry, while utterly silencing her (as Minrose Giwn and others insinuate) within the

1 Stephanie Merrim, “Wonder and the Wounds of ‘Southern Histories,’” Look Away! The U.S. South in New World
Studies, eds. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (London: Duke University Press, 2004) 313.
2 William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (London: Vintage, 2005) 100. Henceforth referred to with internal citations.
3 Horst Frenz, ed., Nobel Lectures, Literature: 1901-1967 (Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969) 443.
4 See Minrose C. Gwin, The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference (Knoxville: The University

of Tennessee Press, 1990). Gwin argues that Absalom, Absalom! represents a bisexual space, “a struggle between the
male desire (Quentin’s, Mr. Compson’s, Shreve’s) to make Rosa disappear (or at least to make her shut up) and her
narrative desire to speak madness, to say the feminine difference within a masculinist culture” (64).

1
male dominated text? Rosa’s poetry (and as I will show, the poet herself) embodies the

aforementioned black and white “panoptic view that extracts general principles” – the Old South

is valiant; the Cause is noble; the men are brave. The withered woman alone in her tomblike

house, Rosa is the personification of the Lost Cause; the other narrators “shut her up” not solely

because she is a woman, but because she encapsulates the regional past. This essay will analyze

Faulkner’s recapitulation of the Lost Cause story through the lens of Rosa and her poetry,

aligning her with (largely absent) Confederate literary history, the notion of the “Other,” and the

loss of the (poetic) homogenous southern viewpoint during the cultural crisis of the American

Civil War and its aftermath.

According to Maxwell Geismar’s Writers in Crisis, Faulkner employs women as

scapegoats for his vitriolic hatred of the cultural forces dismantling the Old South.5 While

Geismar rightly points to Faulkner’s preoccupation with the dismemberment of antebellum

culture, it seems wholly inaccurate (and outdated) to pigeonhole his women into such an

unforgiving category – especially when Rosa is incontrovertibly a zealous symbol of antebellum

values. Faulkner’s characterization of Rosa (and indeed, nearly all of his female characters) has

generated a steady torrent of feminist criticism since the 1960s, with Absalom’s leading lady

consistently garnering more admiration, disdain, and questioning than any other woman in his

prodigious canon.6 As overanalyzed as Rosa appears to be, the critical attention never strays far

from her position as the subject of the male discourse and voyeuristic gaze. Consequently, as

argued, the female narrative in Absalom, Absalom! offers not Rosa’s own voice but the masculine

rephrasing of her words. Although it is Rosa who initially summons Quentin to attention, asking

him to serve as auditory witness to her mythopoeic Sutpen story (“Without Rosa,” Joseph Allen

5 Maxwell David Geismar, Writers in Crisis: The American Novel, 1925-1940 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1942) 154-169.
6 Coleman Hutchison, Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America (Athens, GA:

University of Georgia Press, 2012) 201.

2
Boone remarks bluntly, “there would be… no novel for us to read”7), Quentin allows her words to

“just vanish” (8), nodding every once in a while but clearly blocking out her “grim haggard

amazed voice” (7). Similarly demeaning, as Gwin notes in The Feminine and Faulkner, is

Shreve’s constant dismissal of Rosa’s narrative authority by “misnaming her… at various times”:

“this old dame” (176); “this old gal, this Aunt Rosa” (176, 216); “the old dame, the Aunt Rosa”

(322, 362); the mythologizing Shreve, pondering Quentin, and unreliably worded Mr. Compson

largely usurp Rosa’s voice even as she is speaking.8 Undeniably, the analytical support for Rosa’s

silencing is persuasive, her narrative authority proved nearly inexistent; what needs reworking is

the reason for this usurpation – a shift from the feminist focus on patriarchal narratives to a

cultural causation (that inherently incorporates gender hierarchies) based on twentieth-century

conceptions of the South. Although “placing the South in the story of modernization” is not a

radically new phenomenon, this essay’s emphasis on poetry expands the conceptualization of

Faulkner’s unique adaptations to modernism while simultaneously advocating literary history as

an explanatory factor in morphing nationalisms.9

If Rosa’s narrative reinforces her own impression of inferiority, with “little power to

create voice and language,”10 then this power draining originates with Rosa’s personifying

connection (as the only active participant-narrator in the Sutpen story) between the Civil War

experience and the twentieth-century narrative present. Far from inducing the Old South’s

dismantling, as Geismar anachronistically proposes, she is rather the poetic historian who (at a

moment of great hope in a fledgling nation) unwittingly documents its decline. As early as 1963,

Douglas Miller astutely observed: “In the broadest sense most of Faulkner’s fiction is concerned

with the defeat of the South or the effect of that defeat,” and Rosa’s narrative silence is certainly a

7 Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1990) 319.
8 Gwin 117.
9 Michael O’Brien, Placing the South (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007) 4.
10 Linda Wagner-Martin, “Rosa Coldfield as Daughter: Another of Faulkner’s Lost Children,” Studies in American

Fiction 19 (1991): 8.

3
manifestation of this as well.11 Writing Absalom, Absalom! compelled Faulkner to negotiate the

clash between the “comfort of the nineteenth century with [its] literal definitions of Southern

identity” and “the faltering of such coherent images under the fragmenting influence of

modernism.”12 Emphatically swaddled in the former “comfort” of the autochthonous southern

viewpoint (which, in actuality, was always a fiction), Rosa represents the archetypal, virginal

woman for whom men in the antebellum South raised their wine glasses in salute. Anecdotally

postulating the significance of Gone with the Wind in southern culture, Faulkner recalls his

“maiden spinster aunts which had never surrendered,” one of whom saw the film version of

Margaret Mitchell’s classic and “as soon as Sherman came on the screen she got up and left.”13

Eriq Sundquist, in Faulkner: The House Divided, comically notes that Miss Rosa would have

“done just that.”14 With both feet firmly planted in her archaic stances, imprisoned by history and

embodying what Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith articulate as “the white southern fetishization of

the lost cause,”15 Rosa not only fixates on the Confederacy’s collapse, but also personifies that

defeat in every fiber of her shrunken being. Contemplating Absalom, Absalom! in the 1930s,

Faulkner was undoubtedly influenced by attempts to return to that mythic, pre-War South. Only

six years before the novel’s publication, in fact, did the Southern Agrarians publish their

regionally focused manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. Imagining Rosa into being, then, Faulkner

possessed a definite picture of those nineteenth-century remnants that trickled into the twentieth.

Often beginning with loss, Faulkner’s texts first display a driving need to demonstrate

absence before passionately relating the desire for the lost.16 From the first pages of Absalom,

Absalom!, Faulkner shrewdly alerts the reader of these intentions, as he situates this demonstrable

11 Douglas T. Miller, “Faulkner and the Civil War: Myth and Reality,” American Quarterly 15 (1963): 200.
12 Michael O’Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941 (London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979)
xv.
13 James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962

(Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1968) 34.

14 Eric Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) 111.
15 Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, “Introduction: Uncanny Hybridities,” Look Away! The U.S. South in New World

Studies, eds. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (London: Duke University Press, 2004) 3.
16 John T. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) 59-60.

4
absence within the deceased Mr. Coldfield’s study – his daughter wearing “eternal black” (7).

Here, Faulkner’s portrayal of Rosa’s poetry as “lost” (to be examined subsequently) mirrors her

dingy, physical being. Her attire – her dark garb and “unmoving triangle of dim lace” (21) –

signals not only her spinsterhood, but adroitly conveys a perpetual state of mourning for the

Confederacy; she dresses for an allegorical funeral that, given her disintegrating appearance,

occurred before the turn of the century. Indeed, there is “something” of Freud’s uncanny

(unheimlich) in the Coldfield house.17 Eternally still, like a corpse in “black which did not even

rustle” (11), she is death – and furthermore, the death of the Old South – incarnate. “The dim hot

airless room” (7), with blinds tightly closed and doors locked, is Rosa’s tomb.

While it is perhaps fruitful to read, as Gwin does, Rosa’s uncanniness as the repressed

female within the patriarchal narrative, I would argue that she is instead the repressed South

within the newly reconstructed American nation, reflected chiefly by her absent poetry and the

allegorical illustration of her childlike appearance and barren womb. When Quentin first arrives

in Rosa’s tomb, she sits in her “too tall chair” like “a crucified child” (8), her legs dangling “clear

of the floor… like children’s feet” (7). The diminutive Rosa’s initial depiction is dually read as

the image of a poet (commonly associated with children and birdsong)18 and the epitome of a

stunted life, never maturing like the twice-bloomed wisteria in her yard (7). According to Linda

Wagner-Martin’s influential essay “Rosa Coldfield as Daughter: Another of Faulkner’s Lost

Children,” Rosa’s father suppresses her childhood, demanding her to take care of others instead

of herself. This stagnation and loss at the beginning, as I will later examine, correlate with the

South’s fledgling attempts at nationhood – specifically in relation to its literary efforts.

Weaving an image of emptiness, Faulkner additionally situates the post-War South’s

barrenness directly within Rosa’s womb. As John Duvall rightly argues in Faulkner’s Marginal

Couple, male discourse in Faulkner’s novels pinpoints women into one of five categories: “virgin,

17
See Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (London: Penguin, 2003).
Elizabeth A. Petrino, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820-1885 (London:
18

University Press of New England) 6.

5
wife, prostitute, adulteress, and spinster.”19 Neither wife nor mother, one of many “war widows

who were never brides at all,”20 Rosa exemplifies the unfruitful spinster who, instead of marrying

a suitable husband and procreating, is “[i]rrevocably husbanded” to “an abstract carcass of

revenge” (180). The word “carcass” is particularly poignant, encompassing both hollowness and

demise. Smoldering in “that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and then

endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward – and then endure” (144), Rosa lives a

dejected half-life, breathing the hot air of her father’s study yet “enshrouded by the signs of

death.”21 Her lack of fecundity – everlastingly hollow in womb (empty even of the son that

Sutpen desired) – signifies what Freud terms the “death drive.”22 Bearing children reflects man’s

desire to “perpetuate his name,”23 and as a spinster who births no progeny, Rosa denies the

“reproductive futurism”24 that would carry her into the present. Faulkner’s clever use of the word

“impotent” to describe Rosa’s “indomitable frustration” is remarkably telling (7), referring to not

only her weak ineffectiveness, but also meaning “wholly lacking in sexual power; incapable of

reproduction.”25 With no hope for children, her marriageability in the past (as reflected by her

bitter narrative), she is quite literally a “ghost” (12).

One can plainly see why Faulkner associates Rosa with the Lost Cause – the South

sacrificing its national futurity during the Civil War, and Faulkner pondering that sacrifice during

modernism; yet it is not immediately evident that this connection extends to her poetry. One must

ask: what of Rosa writing herself? Perhaps, as Erica Plouffe Lazure compellingly postulates, “she

achieves motherhood in the only way she can, which is literary motherhood.”26 Although Lazure

refers to Rosa inseminating Quentin with her Sutpen story, not with her poetry, this idea of

19 John N. Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1990) 120.
20 Sundquist 112.
21 Sally R. Page, Faulkner’s Women: Characterization and Meaning (De Land, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1972) 102-103.
22 Freud 1.
23 Duvall 121.
24 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004) 2.
25 "impotent, adj. and n.," OED Online, December 2012, Oxford University Press, 12 March 2013

<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/92646?redirectedFrom=impotent>.
26 Erica Plouffe Lazure. “A Literary Motherhood: Rosa Coldfield’s Design in Absalom, Absalom!” Mississippi

Quarterly 62.3-4 (2009): 479.

6
“literary motherhood” is nonetheless intriguing. A woman who “becomes creative in response to

loss, who is herself deconstruction and production,” 27 Rosa exercises her creative energies to map

the soon-to-be destruction when she herself symbolizes the Old South’s dismemberment.

Not a “scapegoat” for this dismantling but a representative of the loss, Rosa is

undoubtedly the “Other” within Absalom, Absalom! As Barbara Ladd observes in Resisting

History, “Freud places women among civilization’s discontents, no more trustworthy than poets.

Women, like poets, know that something is missing; the regular run of manhood does not.”28

Freud’s, and consequently Ladd’s, implication is that women are intrinsically linked to poets as

outsiders, both comprehending the world from a peripheral perspective. Coupled with Jennifer

Greeson’s claim that, especially until the turn of the century, “the South is not a fixed or real

place” but “an internal other” and “an ideological juxtaposition” compared with the rest of the

American nation, Ladd’s argument equates women, poetry, and the South through a collective,

ostracized experience.29 Southern women writers’ “shared consciousness of exclusion from a

[male] constructed center,” along with their alienation as inhabitants below the Mason-Dixon

line, allows them to illustrate the outsider’s viewpoint effectively, and poetry provides the outlet

to do so.30 Although Rosa’s “othering” is perhaps a manifestation of the patriarchal master

hierarchy, Faulkner employs this marginalization to align her with the South – itself an “other”

and never more so than after its loss in the Civil War. Arguably, this mirroring revolutionizes the

view of Rosa and her poetry; Faulkner makes her a poet, the very voice of the Confederacy, only

to silence her – an allegory for the Confederate defeat. When the South metaphorically turned to

ashes after the War, who could better articulate antebellum southern history than “Dixie’s

diadem,” those who embody its externalization and decline?

27 Gwin 20.
28 Barbara Ladd, Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and
Eudora Welty (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007) 3.
29 Jennifer Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (London: Harvard University

Press, 2010) 2.
30 Mab Segrest, My Mama’s Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1985) 20.

7
 A tangential question that naturally arises from this argument is: why employ poetry

specifically, instead of novels or journals, to document the Confederacy, its dissolution, and its

subsequent alienation? Besides the historical popularity of Civil War women’s verse, a quick way

to show support for soldiers that was both easily distributable and relatively inexpensive to

reproduce, the implicit nature of poetry begs further exploration. In the introduction to the aptly

titled Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South, Daniel Cross Turner

begins to reflect on the cultural importance of verse in New World studies, asserting:

Poetry is deeply connected to the circumstances of its cultural production precisely

because of its intensive focus on the form of its message, and by extension, on the
shaping forms of our lives and histories… In its emphasis on symbolic compression and
lyrical value as well as its lineated form, poetry has a propensity to make words appear to
count more than in narrative fiction and dramatic dialogue.31

By focusing on its form and symbolic value, Turner reasons that poetry – on the surface – offers

an uncomplicated version of history. As opposed to lengthy fiction or drama, poetry’s close

attention to word choice and rhythm allows compactness, generating a clearer consolidation of

meaning. It is understandable why this form appeals so much to Rosa, whose “indomitable

frustration” (7) with the Sutpen myth stems not only from her personal involvement in the

narrative, but also from the story’s lack of finite explanations. Even as she attempts to consolidate

its actors into defined categories – heroes and “demon[s]” (186) – she cannot achieve the black

and white, generalizing simplicity that poetry allows;32 her inability to explain verbally a

narrative that “just does not explain” (100) frustrates her clear-cut sensibilities.

Although The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner classifies Faulkner as a

sometimes “regional” author, Absalom, Absalom! dismantles any homogenous sense of strict

regionalism, refusing the generalization that Rosa craves.33 Not a self-hating southerner as Cash

31 Daniel Cross Turner, Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 2012) xix.
32 Rosa refers to Sutpen as a “demon” twenty-three times within Absalom, Absalom!
33 André Bleikasten, “Faulkner from a European Perspective,” The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed.

Philip M. Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 75.

8
insultingly suggests in his legendary The Mind of the South,34 but an author working through and

assimilating shifting ideological notions of his homeland, Faulkner intimately acknowledges –

unlike the regionalist Agrarians – the South’s abundant, disparate voices. As Michael O’Brien

surmises in his ironically titled The Idea of the American South 1920-1941, the South is a

multitudinous ideological construction rather than a regional categorization; he rightly postulates,

“there [is] no idea of the South, merely ideas about the South.”35 A nod to New World studies,

rather than eliding diverse demographics to create a homogenous reading (the southern “myth”),

O’Brien’s claim recognizes the cornucopia of voices (and ideas) that frame and total the South.

Again, adducing that Faulkner dismantles antiquated, autochthonous constructions of the South is

nothing phenomenally new. However, what O’Brien’s quote further highlights, and perhaps more

importantly distinguishes for the purpose of this paper, is the distinction between ideas of the

South (an “Aristotelian sense of history”) and an idea of the South (poetry) – what I contend is

the difference between the South as ideology and the South as temporality. To understand this

dichotomy is to begin to grasp why Faulkner illustrates Rosa composing verse. Her decisive

viewpoints (cut and dry, black and white) harmonize with poetry, an opposition – and yet an

integral part of – the sense of history Absalom, Absalom! designs.

As Quentin muses about Rosa’s mythopoeic narrative in the early pages of the novel, “if

she had merely wanted [her story] told, written and even printed, she would not have needed to

call in anybody” (11). In fact, as Joseph Allen Boone correctly notes, “Rosa is the only published

writer” in Yoknapatawpha County,36 and her fountain-like prolificacy is astounding: “the first of

the odes to Southern soldiers in that portfolio which when [Quentin’s] grandfather saw it in 1885

contained a thousand or more, was dated in the first year of her father’s voluntary incarceration

and dated at two oclock in the morning” (83). Here, one learns that her poetic career appropriately

34 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Random House, 1941) 386-387. Cash speaks of contemporary
southern writers, including Faulkner, as writing with “the exasperated have of a lover who cannot persuade the object
of his affections to his desire” (387).
35 O’Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941 xiii.
36 Boone 319.

9
began in 1861 – the first year of the American Civil War. The Yankee-sympathizing Mr.

Coldfield (Rosa’s father), evading Confederate service by nailing himself within the womblike

attic, is the ideological opponent of his daughter, who fiercely supports the Confederate cause and

is desperate (yet disallowed by her father) to witness the men ceremonially marching off to

enemy lines – or even to catch a glimpse of passing soldiers. From the war’s onset, Rosa and her

father quarrel over political loyalties, displaying a “gender role reversion between father and

daughter.”37 At “the very time” her father locked himself in the attic, Rosa was “accumulating her

first folio [of poetry] in which the lost cause’s unregenerate vanquished were name by name

embalmed” (6). Quite provocatively, only after she assumes a masculine role does Rosa begin

writing poetry liberally. As Paulua Elyseu Mesquita conjectures, “the same war that condemned

her father to immobility and silence endowed her with agency and a voice.”38 While masculine

and feminine inversions will be later considered, it is first necessary to address Mesquita’s claim

that Rosa was miraculously endowed with “agency and a voice.”

The question of how seriously Faulkner himself takes Rosa’s writing begs answering.

Undoubtedly, Quentin sees her as a trifling, “scribbling woman,” having “established herself as

the town’s and the country’s poetess laureate by issuing the stern and meager subscription list of

the county newspaper poems, ode, eulogy and epitaph, out of some bitter and implacable reserve

of undefeat” (6). Writing about a not-quite-vanquished narrative present, she volunteers herself as

a soon-to-be-Lost Cause warrior, wielding a pen instead of a sword. The words “stern and

meager” devalue her as a womanly soldier, as it seems that few read these lists anyway. This

description falls neatly in line with nineteenth-century discourse that sought to discredit or

marginalize the female poet. Immediately, the connection between Rosa Coldfield and Emily

Dickinson (although a northern poet during this same time period) is blatantly obvious – both

isolated spinsters in their shut-up rooms, producing copious poems in solitude. Composing verse

37 Paulua Elyseu Mesquita, “White Women and the War in Absalom, Absalom!” Faulkner and War: Faulkner and
Yoknapatawpha, 2001, eds. Noel Polk and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004) 58.
38 Ibid. 60.

10
for men whom she will never know, Rosa is often chastised for her remoteness; for example, both

Lynn Gartrell Levins and Deborah Carfield separately claim that her poems, like her fiery love

for Charles Bon (a man whom she never met), miscomprehend reality – representing what Levins

deems: “the dreamer’s limited knowledge of make believe.” 39 This misappropriation of her

poetry based on her livelihood (or lack thereof) links heavily to Dickinson’s history. The Fugitive

Poet Allen Tate, for example, bluntly claimed that Dickinson “could not reason at all,” citing not

only her revolutionary poetic styles but also her personal isolation.40 Like the masculine

assumption in Absalom, Absalom! that Miss Rosa is hysterical, many considered Dickinson

strange, mad; one may recall John Cody’s 1971 study, which spends 538 pages arguing that

Dickinson suffered from psychosis.41 Dickinson’s editors, Todd and Higginson, amended her

“madder lines,” thus reconstructing her texts based on earlier conventions.42 As Virginia Jackson

has argued, readers now consider Dickinson’s poetry lyrical because it was editorially constructed

as such, 43 and this editing and appropriation lucidly mirrors the male narrative voices that usurp,

refigure, and hush Rosa’s voice. Although Faulkner may not have intended his bitter spinster’s

intimate association with the northern poet, it is nevertheless imperative to consider the value

attributed to emotional lyricism over cultural historicism, which effectively undermined the

authority of nineteenth-century women’s verse.

“History is a male preserve,” Fred Hobson rhetorically assumes in The Southern Writer in

the Postmodern World (1991); “southern women are to be ‘Dixie’s diadem,’ not its historians.”44

Trading on the nineteenth-century notion that women possess less intellectual and more

emotional faculties than men, Hobson’s quote corresponds with the prevailing assumption that

39 Lynn Gartrell Levins, “The Four Narrative Perspectives in Absalom, Absalom!” PMLA 85.1 (1970): 36. Also see
Deborah Carfield, “‘To Love as ‘Fiery Ancients’ Would: Eros, Narrative and Rosa Coldfield in Absalom, Absalom!”
The Southern Literary Journal 22.1 (1989): 63.
40 Sabine Sielke, Fashioning the Female Subject: The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore, and Rich (Ann

Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997) 21.

41 See John Cody, After Great Pain: The Inner Life of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press

of Harvard University Press, 1971) 2-13.

42 R. W Frankilin, The Editing of Emily Dickinson: A Reconsideration (London: The University of Wisconsin Press,

1967) 25.
43 See Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).
44 Fred Hobson, The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World (London: University of Georgia Press, 1991) 78.

11
successful women’s poetry in the Civil War South (but also by extension in the North, which

abided by similar anachronistic Victorian ideals) should be a manifestation of spontaneous

emotion. The profusion of coinciding “emotional” claims about Absalom’s poet is staggering.

Doreen Fowler, for instance, insists that Rosa’s repetitive telling of the Sutpen story offers “the

acrimonious outrage of a woman scorned,”45 concluding that the italicization of the fifth chapter

is merely the typeset of her “impotent yet indomitable frustration” (7) – the expression of “her

overwrought emotional state.”46 Another critic alleges that Rosa’s Gothic narrative has “the most

affective influence on the feelings of the reader” (italics mine), Rosa’s language possessing a

“hallucinatory tone” of “heightened intensity.”47 What these characterizations seek to attenuate is

the historical value of Rosa’s voice, pigeonholing her as purely emotional and consequently

trivializing her words.

Unsurprisingly, her poetic efforts are consistently ignored and belittled throughout the

text – largely by the author himself. Though Rosa evidently produced “a thousand or more”

poems, Faulkner provides no samples of her verse, and minus a few scattered attempts to

determine “the poetry of her language” based on her rambling italics, the quality of her work is

left undetermined.48 When scholars discuss Rosa’s verse (which rarely occurs), the consensus

seems unanimous: it wasn’t worth reading in the first place. For example, in his 1970

Shenandoah essay titled “The Poetry of Miss Rosa Coldfield,” Cleanth Brooks – one of

Faulkner’s most ardent readers – brazenly excuses the author from his blatant omission.

Professing that Faulkner “wisely refuses to provide the reader with any examples of her verse,”

Brooks (with perhaps an air of haughtiness) declares: “it is all too easy to imagine the banal and

hackneyed quality of Miss Rosa’s verse tributes” to Confederate soldiers.49 Similarly, in his

revolutionary study of Confederate literature, Apples and Ashes, Coleman Hutchinson contends

45 Doreen Fowler, Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed (London: University of Virginia Press, 1997) 105.
46 Fowler 105.
47 Levins 36, 37.
48 Laurel Bollinger, "That Triumvirate Mother- Woman': Narrative Authority and Interdividuality in Absalom,

Absalom!" LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 9.3 (1998): 205.

49 Cleanth Brooks, “The Poetry of Miss Rosa Coldfield,” Shenandoah 21 (1970): 199.

12
that by excluding Rosa’s poetry yet highlighting her narrative, her verse is “apparently…

irrelevant.”50 The analysis usually ceases there; it is enough to silence Rosa, to deem her poetry

frivolous, more emotional than historical, and generally inconsequential to the overarching plot of

Absalom, Absalom! If anything, contemporary feminists scholars passionately maintain, the

exclusion of her verse represents yet another woman’s failed search “for a way into the

patriarchy” in the antebellum South.51

However, an examination of poetry and the history of publishing during the Civil War

period may prove otherwise. In fact, with the exception of the Charlestonian Henry Timrod, the

wealth of successful Confederate literature largely flowed from the pens of women. The

Confederacy’s “single publishing achievement” during the Civil War period, Hutchinson asserts,

was Augusta Jane Evans’s novel Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice (1864), and Margie P. Swain’s

seventy-six-page poem Maria; or, A Romance of the War (1864), Margaret Junkin Preston’s

sixty-four-page poem Beechenbrook; A Rhyme of the War (1865), and Susan Archer Talley’s

ballad “The Battle of Manassas” (1861) were all widely circulated and reprinted.52 Similarly, in

Inventing Southern Literature, Michael Kreyling discusses the writer Sarah Elizabeth Dorsey

(1829-79) who –like Rosa Coldfield – “venerated Confederate warrior-priests” and whose work

served “the myth by serving the chief makers of it.”53 What is striking here is the number of

women who, in the absence of males during wartime, found alternate modes of social

organization and self-expression. Faulkner took a remarkable interest in women’s wartime roles54

and must have known that – although writing was ostensibly part of the male nineteenth-century

southern tradition – the Civil War “sprouted a profusion of [women’s] diaries, poetry, and

50 Hutchison 201.
51 Jaime Harker, “‘And You Too, Sister, Sister?’: Lesbian Sexuality, Absalom, Absalom!, and the Reconstruction of the
Southern Family,” Faulkner’s Sexualities: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2007, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J.
Abadie (Jackson: University of Press of Mississippi, 2010) 39.
52 Hutchison 16, 106, 107, 118.
53 Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998) 102.
54 Don H. Doyle, “Faulkner’s Civil War,” Faulkner and War: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2001, eds. Noel Polk and

Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004) 11.

13
prose.”55 White women’s stories, poems and cartoons habitually appeared in popular magazines

and weeklies, suggesting that: “white women’s war-related experiences constituted authentic

participation in the war – and ‘the imagined community’ of the nation” – men in battle and

women writing on the home front equally participating in nationalism.56 As many have argued,

Absalom, Absalom! problematizes masculinity and femininity, eliding gender roles. Through

poetry, far from Mr. Compson’s description of Rosa as “a breathing indictment… of the entire

male principle” (60), she aligns herself with man’s cause (the War Between the States) and

simultaneously the cause of nationalism. If Rosa’s poetry represents communalism instead of

failed patriarchal acceptance, Faulkner undoubtedly intended a historical impetus alternative to

gender prejudice for his elimination of her verse. More likely, the portrayal of her absent poetry

intentionally emulates the expunged literary history of Confederate verse during and after the

Civil War.

Furthermore, the introduction to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1865 edition of The Poetry of

War endeavors to convince that: “there has been a great deal of good readable verse, and some

genuine poetry written during the past four years, under the inspiration of the times through

which we have passed,” but others passionately disagree.57 In his iconic 1962 study of American

Civil War literature, Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson condemns the “immense amount” of

southern poetry produced during the conflict – and he was certainly not the first to do so.58 As

early as 1863, George W. Bagby remarked in his Southern Literary Messenger: “We are

receiving too much trash in rhyme.”59 Emphasizing the quantity over quality of Confederate

poems during the War, these studies thoroughly correspond with Rosa’s prolificacy; in fact, the

quality of her verse (but not the verse in itself) is perhaps irrelevant. Poets were encouraged to

55 Mesquita 61.
56 Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North & South 1861-1865 (London: The University
of North Carolina Press, 2001) 2.
57 Fahs 1.
58 Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1962) 99.

59 Elizabeth Muhlenfeld, “The Civil War and Authorship,” The History of Southern Literature, eds. Louis D. Rubin, Jr.

et al. (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985) 182.

14
structure their verse rigidly around the Confederate cause, and their hasty outpourings were of a

provisional nature – products of a literary culture “written for a vanishing present” with a

“steadfast orientation towards the future.”60 Once the new nation (which never was to be) was

unrestrained politically, the South genuinely believed that it would grow a uniquely national

literature, “producing a classical age with the war itself inspiring great epics, poems, and

romances.” 61 Confederate leaders envisioned what Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities

describes as national unification through a shared print culture, except southerners surely meant

“region [where] Anderson means… nation or imagined community.”62

This hope of a uniting, classical age soon imploded. Even the materiality of Confederate

literature during the war was fleeting and quickly vanquished. In 1863, hampered by a scarcity of

equipment, ink and paper, the notable southern publisher S.H. Goetzel was “routinely [printing]

books in wallpaper covers,” and by the war’s end, the state of the presses mirrored the economic

and social condition of the Confederacy – both in shambles.63 To the victor goes the (literary)

spoils, and such was the case with the American Civil War and its aftermath. Verse history during

this period emphasizes few outstanding actors: notably, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and

Emily Dickinson – all of whom supported the Union. As part of a failed attempt at national

literature, Confederate verse produced during the Civil War is unacknowledged, scorned – as was

the position of the South within the new (northerly dominated) American framework. Faulkner’s

image of Rosa as a stunted child, hollow in womb, thus echoes the state of Confederate print

culture at the war’s end, with its lack of futurity – her absent poetry a microcosm of the South’s

loss in general and expunged literary history in particular.

By abolishing Rosa’s verse within Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner intentionally emulates

Confederate literary history in order to simulate metaphorically the sanitization of the

60 Hutchison 13.
61 Muhlenfeld 180.
62 Smith and Cohn 3.
63 Muhlenfeld 180, 183.

15
autochthonous southern viewpoint. Although Rosa’s narrative voice (read: authority) and her

poetry are both implicitly and explicitly silenced within the text, it is that very silence that causes

us to take notice – to examine why her silence is more poignant than the words inscribed in ink.

Faulkner mutes Rosa to acknowledge the shifts in southern autonomy and the South’s cultural

place in the twentieth century, and this absence inherently confesses that silence itself is entirely

crucial to Absalom, Absalom! Much like Caddy Compson’s between-the-lines presence in

Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (with the obvious distinction that Caddy’s narrative voice is

wholly excluded), the gaping void Rosa’s absence leaves only seeks to draw more inquiry. As an

allegory for the South’s defeat, her lost poetry – punning on the Lost Cause – is thus of grander

importance than critically recognized.

Lacking a strictly regionalist print culture to promote unity and without slavery to consolidate

identity, white southerners spiraled downward after the Civil War. As Mr. Compson tells Quentin

in Absalom, Absalom!, “Years ago, we in the South made our women into ladies. The War came

and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them

being ghosts?” (12). Although feminist scholars generally read this prolific passage as the

patriarchal dismissal of the feminine voice, and to a certain extent it is, Mr. Compson’s words

hold a dual implication. While these women, products of the Civil War’s destruction of southern

identity, seem (according to Absalom’s men) to prattle on irrelevantly, they are also narrative-

makers, desperate to be heard in the present. In the final pages of the novel, Faulkner offers a

direct contradiction to Mr. Compson’s assertion; Shreve fervently tells Quentin: “You dont know.

You dont even know about the old dame, the Aunt Rosa… You dont even know about her.

Except that she refused at the last to be a ghost” (362). Surely, because of her silencing, Rosa is at

last unknowable outside of her uncanny alignment with the Lost Cause, but one must ponder both

Mr. Compson’s and Shreve’s conclusions in relation to her poetry. Is Rosa ultimately Mr.

Compson’s “ghost,” or Shreve’s once-ghost?

16
 O’Brien’s The Idea of the American South is instructive in this regard. As with the Civil

War and the abolition of slavery, O’Brien contends:

With each social change since 1800, there have arisen cries that the South must vanish
when a particular revolution was complete… Each time, when the dust settled, the South
had not consented to vanish with its defining institutions. This perseverance gives rise to
the real possibility that “the South” has taken on a psychological reality, not entirely
distinct from social reality, but capable of fastening on to successive regimes.64

This “perseverance” implies fluidity, an acceptance of the South as a constantly mutating

ideological construction – a conception that Rosa’s (absent) poetry fundamentally resists.

However, by dragging Quentin to Sutpen’s Hundred and unwittingly initiating the main house’s

burning, Rosa appears to refuse ghostliness (the perception of herself as a figure incapable of

acting in the present). What then does Faulkner intend to illustrate with Rosa’s final

transformation? One may recall the author’s Nobel Prize speech in the opening of this essay,

where he claims that “the poet’s voice” is “one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and

prevail.” Rosa’s poetry, a reflection of her desire for southern homogeneity, epitomizes “self-

preservation in the face of terror,” which “is certainly an appropriate form of aggression and may

well be the central authorizing scene in and for modernism” (italics original).65 Faulkner’s

characters defensively respond to loss and trauma by exerting control upon “the dissolution that is

the normal state of things,” reflecting this push and pull between control and helplessness.66

Admittedly, the sum of these images seems immediately contradictory – Rosa as simultaneously

the stagnant voice of the past and the voice of perseverant endurance. However, Faulkner designs

this paradox to instruct about the South’s position in the New World, indicating his movement

“from metaphysical themes of destruction and loss toward social, historical themes of change and

differences.”67

64 O’Brien, The Idea of the American South xiv.

65 Ladd 11.
66 Gail L. Mortimer, Faulkner’s Rhetoric of Loss: A Study in Perception and Meaning (Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1983) 4-5.

67 Richard C. Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

1990) 4.

17
 Rosa is therefore concurrently Mr. Compson’s Civil War “ghost” and Shreve’s once-

ghost, “not [consent] to vanish,” mirroring her remarks about the Sutpen myth: “That was all. Or

rather not all, since there is no all, no finish” (150). Her statement implies coinciding perseverant

futurity (“no finish”) and stagnant emptiness (“no all”), which is like Rosa herself – ghost-yet-

not-ghost. The (silenced) poet and her (absent) poetry encompass both the clutching struggle to

drag the anachronistic nineteenth century into the twentieth (the will to endure), and the cultural

exclusion of those aspirations that, in all their efforts, barely transpire. The penultimate paradox,

though, is Rosa’s poetry. By placing her zealous, Confederate loyalties within the framework of

verse, Faulkner indicates that Rosa can only effectively illustrate her antebellum attitudes through

cerebral production, compounding Wagner-Martin’s claim that “Rosa has… no physical location

except her imagination and her narrative.”68 In her personal battle against ideological

constructions and for temporal “realism,” Rosa ironically embraces a weapon (poetry) that is both

entirely ephemeral and wholly cerebral. Not literally mapping the South topographically with

pencil and compass, her poetical compositions transform her into one of the multitudinous

“psychological realities” that O’Brien relates. By providing contradictory images (Rosa as both

dead and resurrected, her poetry a pointed irony), Faulkner signals the constant transformations

and rebirths inherent in the ideological construction of the South. Ultimately, the reader is left to

comprehend Rosa and her verse as Faulkner’s take on the anachronistic past’s interaction with the

ever-changing present, the hope for homogenous consolidation vanquished within the New

World.

Although her poetry is lost, the fact that we are still questioning its absence is

undoubtedly significant. After a thorough analysis of Faulkner’s portrayal of Rosa and the history

of Confederate verse during the American Civil War, the profundity of her poetry (and lack of

poetry) within Absalom, Absalom! becomes clear. By identifying Rosa with “the white

fetishization” of the South’s defeat, and furthermore demonstrating her as the bodily

68 Wagner-Martin 7.

18
personification of the Lost Cause (childlike and hollow in womb with no futurity), Faulkner

poignantly illustrates Rosa’s consolidation of her identity into a harbinger of the past yet a

noticeable “ghost” in the present. As noted in this essay’s opening quote, Rosa’s poetry “extracts

general principles” from the heterogeneous past, castigating the multitudinous “Aristotelian sense

of history” that Faulkner anticipated would dominate New World studies in the modern era.

Aligned with Confederate verse, she is invariably marginalized within the text, recapitulating the

excluded literary history of the Confederate South. Writing for the preservation of a dichotomous

identity, one with oversimplified reductions of right and wrong, Rosa is dually blighted by a

failed national literature and the collapse of a fledgling nation. As a woman and the obvious

“Other” in the narrative, she is perhaps most acutely suited to document the Civil War history of

the South, itself an “internal other.” Altogether, Faulkner employs Rosa and her poetry to

highlight objections to the changing faces of modernism – the loss of the (poetic) general,

temporal southern viewpoint – and thus to implicitly and explicitly suggest that history (even in

the South) is less homogenous (and more Aristotelian) than Rosa would have us think.

19
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