"Mrs. Compson" is mentioned or appears in four of the seven Unvanquished stories, starting with "Retreat," the second one Faulkner wrote. Her role is minor, but even as the plantation aristocracy is being destroyed by the Civil War, she maintains the family's class status in Faulkner's world, by virtue of the fact that it is Mrs. Compson to whom Rosa Millard, mother-in-law of Colonel Sartoris, turns for favors. "Mrs. Compson" represents the caste ideal of 'lady' consistently throughout these stories, but it's less clear which "Mrs.
The story begins with two generations of Compson in the same carriage: Grandfather, Caddy, Jason - and the narrator who is never named but whom readers of The Sound and the Fury will recognize as Quentin. Not mentioned in the story are the children's parents, which creates a contrast with the story Quentin hears when the carriage reaches the aristocratic family's county farm - about how the mixed-race Indian who lives with the farm's black tenants got the name "Had-Two-Fathers" (345).
This powerful story juxtaposes the Compsons' privileged world with the vulnerabilities of Nancy's life as a black woman. The family name never appears, but readers of The Sound and the Fury will recognize the Compsons, all of whom - parents and three children - reappear except Benjy, and who display the same personal characteristics and interpersonal dynamics, though now as seen through the eyes of nine-year-old Quentin, who narrates Nancy's story from fifteen years later but still as it happened to him as a child.
In this novel the "past" that Faulkner famously said is "not dead" is the personal, familial, Freudian past. The stream-of-consciousness narrative technique used in the first three sections of this novel vividly dramatizes the extent to which one's earlier life is always present, consciously or unconsciously. Throughout his section the 33-year-old Benjy Compson helplessly re-lives his childhood memories, when his beloved sister Caddy was "here" (3).
In The Sound and the Fury Maury Bascomb is the brother of Caroline Bascomb Compson. For much of the Compson children's early life he lives in their home and regularly partakes of their father's whiskey; by 1928 he has moved away, but continues regularly to ask his sister for money. Benjy was originally named "Maury" in his honor. He also has an affair with the Compsons' next door neighbor, Mrs. Patterson. When the affair is revealed, Mr. Patterson beats Uncle Maury - or as Benjy puts it, "His eye was sick, and his mouth" (43).
Like the enigmatic aunt of (Old) Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust, this aunt of Quentin Compson is hard to place on the family tree. She appears only, abruptly, in Absalom, Absalom! when Mr. Compson uses her to explain to his son Quentin something about the nature of women: this aunt - whom apparently neither of these males ever saw - is locked in what Mr. Compson calls one of those "inexplicable (to the man mind) amicable enmities" with "her nearest female kin" (156).
"Some of McCallum's best" - that's how Ratliff describes the moonshine whiskey he offers Ab Snopes (54). The MacCallum family first appeared in the fictions in Flags in the Dust (1929); starting with this novel Faulkner changes the spelling of their name. The man who made this whiskey could have been Anse McCallum, who appears elsewhere in The Hamlet. But we're assuming that this "McCallum" is more likely to be Henry, who in Flags is well-known in Yoknapatawpha for his moonshine.
The story Faulkner told in "Knight's Gambit" is interpolated into the plot of this last novel in the Snopes trilogy. Again Rafe McCallum sells a dangerous horse to Melisandre Harriss' son; again in the end he helps the protagonists keep the horse from becoming a murder weapon.
Buddy McCallum and his son Anse reappear briefly in this crowded novel. Anse is a violent young man, but the story includes a brief account of how his father teaches him to respect the rules by which a gentleman - or at least a virtuous yeoman - should fight.
Rafe McCallum, one of the twin sons of Virginius MacCallum in Flags in the Dust (1929), and his twin nephews, introduced in "The Tall Men" (1940), are the McCallum family members who appear in this later work. This pair of twins is merely mentioned, but Rafe plays a more consequential role in this narrative of a foiled murder plot when he willingly sells a vicious stallion to the young man who intends to use the horse as a weapon.
