tenement,” Rosa realizes that Clytie is a person, a female, as Rosa is. That is to say, not only Judith and Clytie but Clytie and herself are, in fact, “joined by that hand and arm which held us, like a fierce rigid umbilical cord, twin sistered to the fell darkness which had produced her [Clytie]” (112). Rosa’s desperate cursing:
“[t]ake your hand off me, nigger” (112) shakes off Clytie’s hand which is attempting to stop her; yet, the border between Clytie and Rosa cannot be restored, once Rosa experiences the breaking down of a shell. As Rosa’s inner cry:
“And you too? ”(112) shows,12 Clytie, appearing to Rosa as an individual with will, lets Rosa know that Clytie and Judith reject Rosa of their own volition, not Sutpen’s. But in the end, both Clytie’s hand and the breaking of the shell which follows it cannot stop Rosa’s body, which becomes an empty vessel with her determined will thwarted by rejection from Judith and Clytie: Rosa’s body keeps going in vain to Judith, knowing her rejection.
treatment of Milly. Their conversation: “ ‘[s]tand back. Don’t you touch me, Wash.’
―‘I’m going to tech you, Kernel ’ ” (151) implies that physical touch invalidates
not only deification but also the class system.
In addition, it is notable that “[w]ar is supposed to be dissolution of class system,” as Kouich Suwabe points out (385). Wash, who was not allowed to approach to the front door of the house (that reminds us of the fact that Sutpen is rejected from coming to the front door of a rich man’s house during his childhood, which summons his motivation to rise from the gutter), comes inside it because women need male hands (Absalom, Absalom! 149). More important than this is that three women, Rosa, Clytie and Judith become one “as though [they] were one being, interchangeable and indiscriminate.” Rosa narrates that there is “with no distinction among the three of us of age or color but just as to who could build this fire or stir this pot or weed this bed or carry this apron full of corn to the mill for meal with least cost to the general good in time or expense of other duties” (125).
It is interesting to note in the abnormal situation in which only one’s ability matters in order to survive the war, three women observe the mountain code which “measure[s] [a person] by lifting anvils or gouging eyes or how much whiskey you could drink then get up and walk out of the room” (183), which Sutpen followed in the place he is from. Rosa feels that she belongs to Sutpen’s house by forming a trinity with Judith and Clytie and by fulfilling a role in doing household chores.
But the return of Sutpen, a patriarch of the family, deprives Rosa of the reason to stay at Sutpen’s Hundred. Since Rosa does not want to become a burden as an aunt as she was before, marriage with Sutpen will probably give her an excellent chance to be a member of a Sutpen’s in a very natural way. In addition, it
seems that Rosa gazes at Sutpen, a war-hero, with an adoring eye, although her favorable comment to him is limited to “[o]h, he [Sutpen] was brave” (13). Rosa, who either hides or denies the fact that she feels affection for him, says that “I stayed there [Sutpen’s house] and waited for Thomas Sutpen to come home. Yes.
You will say (or believe) that I waited even then to become engaged to him; if I said I did not, you would believe I lied. But I do say I did not” (124) ; however, it is not to be denied that Rosa waits for him because she has a liking for him (although it is not certain whether she “waited even to become engaged to him” or not). In fact, the engagement with Sutpen satisfies Rosa’s desire to be gazed at and sought as a female by a man, adding to the desire to be a member of the Sutpen family.
Rosa’s desire to bloom in full glory as a female is expressed in the figures of a seed and a chrysalis, which appears before she tries to talk about, though in uncertain terms, her feelings of love of Charles Bon, her niece Judith’s fiancé.
Rosa says that her flower of femininity does not bloom at the age of fourteen but that there is a seed sleeping inside her. Let us consider the following quotation:
But root and urge I do insist and claim, for had I not heired too from all the unsistered Eves since the Snake? Yes, urge I do:
warped chrysalis of what blind perfect seed: for who shall say what gnarled forgotten root might not bloom yet with some gloved concentrate more globed and concentrate and heady-perfect because the neglected root was planted warped and lay not dead but merely slept forgot? (115-16)
Here, we notice, Rosa insists that she is one of the sisters of Eve and that she has a seed which is now sleeping but is going to blossom soon if only fertilized properly.
The quotation is important because it shows how deep her desire to grow up to be a woman, being neither a child nor a woman by half measure. We may say that the figure of urge and seed expresses her desire to have physical relationships with men and to carry a child as a female.
There is another piece of evidence to support the idea: followed by the descriptions of the seed, Rosa’s body is portrayed both as a fetus in a womb and as a pregnant woman, as I said before. Withdrawing into “a lightless womb,” Rosa is like an unborn baby, but on the contrary, she becomes a woman with child, enduring pains of pregnancy: “I gestate and complete, not aged, just overdue because of some caesarean lack, some cold head-nuzzling forceps of the savage time which should have torn me free, I waited not for light but for that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and then endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward―and then endure” (116). It is a paradox that pregnant Rosa carries not a new life, but herself, one who missed the chance to grow up as a woman. We see that a pregnant body waiting to have a caesarean operation implies a shell of a womb and that Rosa is in agony about an inner conflict over her grotesque desire, which cannot be accomplished.
Although Rosa’s love of Bon, who is incorporeal to her, plants a seed of desire into her (it is interesting to note the expressions: “[t]here must have been some seed he [Bon] left, to cause a child’s vacant fairy-tale to come alive in that garden” [117-18]), Rosa only vicariously experiences romantic feelings by following Judith or by making a wedding dress for her. But the important point to note is that the actual experience of being gazed at, touched by a hand and
proposed to by Sutpen, the man of her dreams, makes Rosa, still a child seeking for light at the age of twenty-one, as well as at fourteen, a light that flashes upon Sutpen. When Rosa narrates: “as if the barnlot, the path at the instant when he came in sight of me had been a swamp out of which he had emerged without having been forewarned that he was about to enter light” (131), she replaces herself with the sun which she has been longing for. In fact, Rosa notices that Sutpen does not love her but uses her in order to realize his ambition. Her complicated feelings about marriage with him can be seen in the following quotation:
But it was not love: I do not claim that; I hold no brief for myself, I do not excuse it. I could have said that he had needed, used me;
why should I rebel now, because he would use me more? but I did not say it; I could say this time, I do not know, and I would tell the truth. Because I do not know. He was gone; I did not even know that either since there is a metabolism of the spirit as well as of the entrails, in which the stored accumulations of long time burn, generate, create and break some maidenhead of the ravening meat; ay, in a second’s time; ―yes, lost all shibboleth erupting of cannot, will not, never will in one red instant’s fierce obliteration.
(131-32)
The extract shows that insightful Rosa correctly perceives Sutpen’s hidden agenda immediately after she feels that she is being looked at by him. Rosa’s confusion: “I do not know, and I would tell the truth. Because I do not know”
describes that after forty-three years it is still incomprehensible for Rosa that Sutpen inhumanly attempts to marry her only if she gives birth to a male child and that she was engaged with such a cruel man once, although briefly. It will be clear from the extract that Rosa’s conflict is expressed with a figure of “creating and breaking the hymen.” Here we see that Rosa is wavering between several values and emotions: (1) between her longing for marriage with Sutpen and rejection to be a sacrifice of his ambitions; (2) between a desire to have physical touch with men as a female and hatred for sexual intercourse (as we have seen before, Rosa originally bears a grudge against “the entire male principle” which cause her mother’s death); (3) between obligation to lose her virginity and hesitation to do so (it is possible to interpret her desperate cry: “some blind desperate female weapon’s frenzied slash whose very gaping wound had cried ‘No!
No!’ and ‘Help!’ and ‘Save me! ’ ” (132) as her fear of being deprived of her virginity).
But in the end, Rosa contents herself with Sutpen’s proposal (that happens before hearing his insulting suggestion which Rosa cannot tell to Quentin). The propose of “[t]hat minute’s exchanged look in a kitchen garden, that hand upon my head in his daughter’s bedroom” (132) is romantic enough for Rosa to accept it. On one hand, she says that: “O furious mad old man, I hold no substance that will fit your dream but I can give you airy space and scope for your delirium” (135-36) and is adequately aware that both his recklessness to plan to have another son in order to revive the Sutpen family and her own miserableness to offer an empty space, that is, her womb, to carry his child. But on the other hand, conversely, Rosa cannot help but repeat the phrase “I was that sun” (135);
that is to say, she treats herself as a sacred light instead of worshiping Sutpen as
a god. We can say that she experiences the second birth, getting out of the dark womb by being light by herself. However, as soon as she finally comes into being, she confines herself again in the house of shell because of Sutpen’s rejection. Rosa has been wavering between madness and serenity for forty-three years.