CompsonsInSAS

Here "Mrs. Compson" appears with her husband. As in the other three Unvanquished stories where she appears alone, here too she represents the aristocratic ideal of 'lady' even as the Old South seems to have been vanquished by defeat. But if in the other stories it seems obvious that the absent "Mr. Compson" is the Confederate General who is Quentin's Grandfather and the mostly frequently recurring Compson in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, this story refers to her husband as having been "locked up for crazy a long time ago" after he began entertaining himself by shooting potatoes off the heads of enslaved children (62). No Compson of this kind appears anywhere else in the canon, but we can speculate that the General's father, elsewhere referred to as a Governor of Mississippi, may have ended up this way. Whoever this is, however, adding someone like this to the Compson family tree calls the greatness of the family's past into a question that wasn't even implicitly posed in its earlier representations.