Compson’s comment reflects a common understanding of the women turned into ladies by the South’s aristocratic code: most understand them as symbols of a unique lifestyle, kept safe from the heavy burdens of feminine domestic labor performed by the majority of the women around them. These remarks, which establish an essential class distinction between women and ladies, also assume that the crumbling of the system on which these identities rely results in the destabilization-theeradication,even-oftheidentitiesthemselves.For the ladies who once played an essential part in the symbolic order of the Old South, life derived meaning from a system that has since been destroyed. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?” (7-8). Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. “Years ago,” he says, “we in the South made our women into ladies. Telling his son Quentin that it is his duty to listen to the eerie ramblings of an old womanhebarelyknows,Compsoncompellinglyarticulatesthedilemma facing women like the novel’s Rosa Coldfield. COMPSON MAKES A COMMENT THAT aptly characterizes the plight of the “ladies” of the novel. GRADISEK Walsh University The Eyes of the Strange: Absalom, Absalom! and Domestic Modernism EARLY IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, MR. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ĪMANDA R.
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