Judith Sutpen

Judith Sutpen, Thomas and Ellen's daughter, is described by Mr. Compson as "the hoyden who could - and did - outrun and outclimb, and ride and fight both with and beside her brother" (52). Mr. Compson also refers to the "curious and unusual relationship" between these siblings (79), calling them "that single personality with two bodies" (73), but on the whole the narrative emphasizes the differences in their character and their fates. Stronger than her brother, Judith is nonetheless left at home while he rides away twice - first with her fiance and next after killing her fiance. Her story is largely neglected and she herself largely silent. In her one long speech, she talks to Quentin's grandmother about the human longing to leave "something that would make a mark" to outlast time in words that are not only eloquent but recognizably Faulknerian (101), but the written words she passes on preserve her dead fiance's voice and experience, not her own. What the novel does show about Judith's life, however, testifies to her emotional and psychological strength: the girl who could stoically watch her father wrestling with his slaves becomes the woman who can keep up the failing plantation while her father is away at the war, who invites the woman she thinks was her fiance's mistress to visit the grave she made for him, and who, a "unwived widow" (110), adopts the orphan son of her murdered fiance and does the best she can to help him escape his vexed inheritance. She cannot escape hers. She dies of smallpox contracted while taking care that son inside her father's house.