Bathing Place in River (Location Key)

In "A Courtship" the Chickasaw "girls and women" go to the river "to wash" themselves (362). It's a curious aspect of the landscape in the fictions that only female characters wash in the rivers or branches of Yoknapatawpha. When Caddy Compson (in The Sound and the Fury) and Narcissa Benbow Sartoris (in "There Was a Queen") go down to the water, they seem to be self-consciously performing a symbolic act, trying to purify themselves. There is no hint of such overtones in the reference to washing in "A Courtship."