Caddy, la puella eterna. Una revisión con perspectiva de género de la novela El sonido y la furia, de William Faulkner

Ana María Velázquez Anderson

doi:10.58479/almanaque.2024.19

Authors

Ana María Velázquez Anderson Universidad Metropolitana de Caracas (Venezuela)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.58479/almanaque.2024.19

Keywords:

literature, review, feminism, gender, north american

Abstract

William Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury can be reviewed today from a gender perspective. Among its female characters, complex, troubled, guided by a strong sense of compliance with traditional gender roles, appears Caddy, the only daughter of the Compson family. The image of the feminine presented by the author was ahead of the writing proposals with a gender perspective at a time, 1929, in which to speak of female freedom was a bet on tenacious criticism. The author, with a unique sensitivity to the problems of women, subject to family atavisms, thus joined the nascent feminist critique of the patriarchal roles imposed on women of his time.

Caddy Compson embodied the only redeemable part of a dysfunctional family that was spreading pain from generation to generation. She was the "soul" who refused to participate in the degeneration of the clan and who made her own way in the world. Although, as the author rightly states, Caddy will always look back to watch over her own. She refers to the eternal puella, a feminine archetype based on the eternal young woman, the woman who finds it hard to grow and mature and who will always live depending on the gaze of the other, on her, either to validate her or to castrate her inner growth.

The woman appears in The Sound and the Fury as a figure who must accept the projection of others and must comply with certain predetermined roles, that is why she is depersonalized: she is changeable, variable, loving, promiscuous at times, mature and wise at other times, depending on each one's experience with the feminine. In the end, through a long and painful process of transformation, the woman can assume her feminine freedom. Caddy abandons the role of the puella and goes into exile in Europe, freeing herself from the conflicts and family complexes of a family in the south of the United States that did not accept the changes and feminine needs. Neither did they accept the social changes that were taking place after the economic crisis of 1929, caused by the "Crash" of the New York Stock Exchange and before that, the rupture of the old way of life of the southern landowners due to the loss in the American Civil War in 1965. Sinking in their disconnection with the new female roles, only Caddy can save herself from catastrophe.

Author Biography

Ana María Velázquez Anderson, Universidad Metropolitana de Caracas (Venezuela)

Professor Ana María Velázquez Anderson was honored with the Lyezer Katán Academic Award for Research and Intellectual Creation for her study titled "The Female Image as Falsification in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's." She has also published the short story Cerrada está la casa and her poetry collection Blackout.

The researcher holds a degree in Literature from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) and a Master's in Gender Studies from the University of Barcelona (UB). She credits El hogar del samán (The Home of the Saman Tree) with providing her the opportunity to develop her academic work, which began in 2006 as a professor of Greek Mythology. Later, she joined the Department of Humanities, where she currently teaches literature, and since 2008, she has focused her research on Women's Literature.

"Since then, I’ve had the chance to present papers at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Ecuador, the University of Vienna, and the National University of Cuyo in Argentina, as well as to publish academic essays and book chapters in Venezuela and Mexico. In 2007, I began publishing as a writer; my first book was Con los ojos abiertos. In 2008, I started publishing academic essays, beginning with La escritura de la vida en un solo día, on Anna Kazumi Stahl’s novel. In 2014, I completed my Master’s in Gender Studies, with my thesis published by the University of Barcelona, which focused on the autobiographical works of Afro-British author Doris Lessing. To date, I have published around twenty essays and articles, as well as five creative books in Venezuela and one in Colombia. Currently, I am teaching a new seminar, Women and Contemporary Society, at the School of Liberal Studies."