Faulkner wrote this additional short story about the Sartorises during the Civil War after The Unvanquished was published. Here "Mrs. Compson" is explicitly identified as the wife of "General Compson," and the lady who outsmarted the Yankees by hiding with the family silver in a place not even the Yankees would look (675).
Another old Yoknapatawpha family, the McCaslins, preoccupy Faulkner's imagination in this novel - indeed, given the way Ike McCaslin takes over the role Quentin played in "Lion" when that short story becomes part of "The Bear" in this book, we could even say that in some respects in this novel the McCaslins displace the Compsons. But two Compsons do have a place, in the big woods.
"Old General Compson" (as he is repeatedly called in this short story, 280, 284, 286, 287, etc.) appears in this hunting story as a former "brigade commander" (286) and an accomplished hunter and woodsman, though he remains a minor figure in the narrative. He is associated with another former Confederate officer and Yoknapatawpha aristocrat: "Major de Spain and old General Compson and the others" is also a recurring phrase (280, 282).
When Faulkner revised the stories Bayard narrates into the novel The Unvanquished, the passages depicting or referring to the Compsons remain almost entirely unchanged. General Compson makes a brief appearance in the final story, "An Odor of Verbena," the one story that had not been previously published. His appearance there makes it even more likely that in all but one of the stories, the "Mrs. Compson" to whom Rosa Millard turns for various kinds of help, and who offers to take Bayard and Ringo in after Rosa's death, is the General's wife.
Mrs. Compson's class status is displayed here when Bayard writes that she "and some of them" tried to have Rosa Millard's funeral presided over by "a big preacher from Memphis or somewhere" - "them" referring to the "Jefferson people" with social standing and "big" connections (156). But her compassionate side is displayed after the funeral, when she asks both Bayard and Ringo "to come home and live with her until Father came back" (158).
This final mention of Mrs. Compson in an Unvanquished story simply refers again to the accessories she loaned Rosa Millard in "Raid," though instead of a hand mirror, the hat and parasol are now accompanied by a "shawl" 84).
This story about the four Yoknapatawpha generations of Sutpens relies heavily on three generations of Compsons. General Compson, who was Thomas Sutpen's "only friend" (220), is the source for what is known about Sutpen's life before he became the county's largest land- and slave-owner. The General's son, referred to only as Father, becomes the novel's dominant voice as he passes what the General told him about the Sutpens, along with his own commentary, on to his son Quentin. And Quentin is the modern Southerner around whom the narrative organizes itself, who has "heard too much . .
In this third short story narrated by Quentin Compson, he is sixteen-years-old, on one of the annual hunting trips he's been taking to Major de Spain's camp in the big woods. Readers who know Quentin as the anguished, suiciding college student in Cambridge may wonder if this adolescent is Quentin, when they see how spiritually at home he is as a hunter in the wilderness.
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.
This is the second Unvanquished story in which "Mrs. Compson" is mentioned or appears. Again her role is minor, but again the fact that Colonel Sartoris' mother-in-law, Miss Rosa Millard, turns to her to borrow a hat, a "parasol" and a "hand mirror" (37) - essential elements in establishing or maintaining one's status as a 'lady' - makes clear the Compson's family aristocratic standing, even amid the ruins of the Civil War. "Mrs. Compson" plays that role consistently throughout these stories, but it's less clear which "Mrs. Compson" Faulkner is thinking of in each of them.
