Eula Varner

Eula Varner is the sixteenth and final child of Will Varner. Her initial appearance in The Hamlet emphasizes her premature sexuality. She is "a soft ample girl with definite breasts even at thirteen and eyes like cloudy hothouse grapes and a full damp mouth always slightly open" (12). Faulkner accentuates Eula's early womanly maturation, writing that "she was already bigger than most women and even her breasts were no longer the little, hard, fiercely-pointed cones of puberty or even maidenhood" (105). Her blooming sexuality suggests, moreover, "some symbology out of the old Dionysic times - honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof" (105). Her incorrigible laziness is at first confused as "mental backwardness" (108) until the family grasps her utter indifference to the world about her, an apathy so profound that, "even in infancy, she already knew there was nowhere she wanted to go, nothing new or novel at the end of any progression, one place like another anywhere and everywhere" (106). She has no female friends or attachments but, at fourteen, becomes the fixation of Labove, her teacher, whom she eventually spurns with a blow to the face. She is pursued by many suitors, losing her virginity to Hoake McCarron, who abandons her when he learns she has become pregnant as a result. Her father, Will Varner, seeks to solve the problem of her pregnancy out of wedlock by marrying her to Flem Snopes. The bride and groom honeymoon in Texas, where she bears a daughter.