Solo-Women

For the women-folk in Song of Solomon, there is a common tie among the women: they are each flying solo. Though Pilate looks after her daughter and granddaughter, she is still the only one of the three like herself, and by being so she is alone. Ruth, though she has a husband, two daughters, and a son, she too is alone and without the love that she so desperately craves. Pilate and Ruth are the embodiement of two types of women, though similar, different. As mothers, they both strive to keep their own safe and make life better.

Pilate is strong, as can be seen in the passage on page 57. "She arrived with suitcases, a green sack, a full-grown daughter, and a granddaughter, and found her brother truculent, inhospitable, embarrassed and unforgiving." Yet despite her brother's obvious coldness, Pilate chooses to stay in the same town he lives in. Her strength is further shown through her past, traveling across the country and raising two girls on her own. Pilate is the strong women, the one who wants to make all the problems in the world go away, particulary for her children. However, in trying to accomplish peace, Pilate sometimes allows the girls to get into real trouble, or causes more trouble. When she helps Ruth to have a baby, Macon Jr. isn't happy and it is this child that causes Ruth pain in his loss of love for her. Ruth is the woman that wants love, in any way, she craves it. Visiting her father's grave, nursing Milkman beyond the proper age, all that she does is a cry for love; however, what she deems as acts of love are viewed as out of place, or taboo by others around her and, in the end, cause her to loose more love then she has gained.

The "plight of women" is shown in the above passage, and throughout chapter 5, through the suffering experienced by Pilate and Ruth. The form of suffering for want of love, or the need to protect those that are most important to one's self is a feeling all women are capable of understanding. For centuries women have searched for a place they belong and that they feel wanted, but also free in. The irony is that in trying to protect others you make them almost incapable of protecting themselves, and in trying to make others love you, the more they are driven away.

In Song of Solomon, even though both Pilate and Ruth want only to protect those they love and improve their lives, the pair end up pitted against each other at times, like when Hagar is trying to kill Milkman, which is the ultimate irony. No longer is the enemy the men that opressed women for centuries, for now it is none other then ourselves. Fellow women who want what all others want. We are all holding ourselves back.

The Past: Present, regretful, and shaping

Throughout Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, the reader is constantly being reminded and taken back into the Compson family's past through the three main pasts the story is told through. Each of these characters views the past, and different people, differently and have different attitudes towards events.
In Benjy's chapter, the past is the present. Everything Benjy does, sees, or feels leads him to the past, so he has no clear definition of what is and what isn't at that moment in time. He goes to the past because it is a time of safety and a time where he felt loved because of Caddy. He hides himself in the past to escape the present and the absence of Caddy.
Quentin, whose chapter takes place in the present characters' pasts as well, seems to view the past with regret. He looks at the past and sees how he couldn't help the fall of Caddy, and how, when he tried to, his efforts went for naught, and were brushed over like every other opinion or act of his. He cannot let go of the past because he is being reminded of it and time throughout his everyday life, and therefore commits suicide. The final suicidal act of Quentin's turns out to be much the same as any other act of his, purposeless.
Jason has, by far, the most sour attitude of the past. He blames all of his short comings, faults, and lack of achievements on the past and therefore everyone else. He is reminded of the past in negative ways and, therefore, only has negative views or feelings towards the past, present, and everyone involved in either.
Though each man's attitude towards the past is slightly different, each one shows how the past has undeniably shaped their present and continues to shape their futures, and how one person, Caddy, has been the unwitting orchestrator of them all.

A Southern Tale

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is a interesting book. It gives background on aspects of virtually every Southern family through the tragic tale of one family, the Compsons. The way the family's tale is told helps to demonstrate the helplessness of every person in the world. While writing in a stream of consciousness, Faulkner uses each character's individual feelings towards one character in particular to develop individual stories and one main tragedy of the family that spans over many years. By starting with Benjy, who has no fixed time or place, Faulkner gives a basic overview of what all has happened in the story, and therefore a foreshadowing of what may come to pass through the next generation of Miss Quentin. In Quentin's chapter, the reader gets a more personal and detailed look at events that had led up to Quentin committing suicide, and his relationships with various other people in his family, particularly that with his sister Caddy. In Jason's chapter, the reader is exposed to the new head of house, one who is quick to be angered and has various views of others that are less than nice. In his chapter, Jason sets up the last tragic act that a member of the Compsons commits, and shows how life has changed and things may be too late for the Compsons. The final chapter is told through a person similar to Benjy; while Dilsey sees the fall of the family, and knows what is to come, she herself is powerless to do anything to prevent it as an aging servant.
While hard to read or understand at moments, The Sound and the Fury utilizes its complexities to help the reader relate to the tale and people within its covers. Because of this, it is surly a great book on how acts of the past will affect the future, how history repeats its self, and how we as merely men, even if we see the repetition, are powerless to take any actions to prevent it.