The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The various men whom Elly kisses in the shadows on her veranda are described as "youths and young men of the town at first, but later . . . almost anyone, any transient in the small town whom she met by either convention or by chance, provided his appearance was decent" (208).

Elly's mother lives with her, her husband and especially her mother-in-law in a "biggish house" in Jefferson (208). She is a negligible figure in Elly's life, though it is her suggestion that Elly drive to Mills City to pick up that mother-in-law that precipitates the story's violent climax.

Elly's father lives in Jefferson with her, his wife, and especially his mother. He is a negligible figure in her life, dominated as it by his mother. The one time he and Elly are together, at breakfast, Elly thinks: "He said nothing, apparently knew nothing" (211).

Elly's grandmother - Elly's father's mother - lives in Elly's family's home in Jefferson, though she is formerly of Louisiana. Her given name is Ailanthia, as is that of her granddaughter, who goes by Elly. Elly's grandmother is frequently described as cold: "cold, piercing" (209), with "that cold, fixed, immobile, inescapable gaze of the very deaf," having lost her hearing 15 years before the story takes place (212). The narrator calls her an "old woman whose hearing had long since escaped everything and whose sight nothing escaped" (223).

Elly remembers this "man plowing in that field" when she and Paul returned to the car after their tryst (207). Her self-consciousness about being seen by him is clear, but nothing about him is. He could be a farmer, or a field hand, or a sharecropper. He could be white or black, but because Faulkner typically specifies race when a character isn't white, and because Elly is particularly anxious about this man's having seen her and Paul together, it seems likely that he is white.

There is a lot that is never explained about Paul's character - where he lives, for example, and what he does - but the one mystery that matters most is his racial identity. Paul visits Jefferson as a white man, but the friend who introduces him to Elly insists he is really black. As part of her proof, she recounts a story in which Paul's "uncle killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood" (209).

Eighteen years old, Elly "lives in Jefferson . . . with her father and mother and grandmother in a biggish house" (208). Elly has inherited her given name, Ailanthia, from her grandmother, a link that Faulkner uses to underscore the tension between the two generations. Elly expresses herself largely through her physicality, first using her youthful sexuality to attract suitors, and then later climbing the stairs "with the tread almost of an old woman" when she is burdened by her grandmother's censure (208). She is able to "change completely" (208), depending on her mood and her company.