英语论文网

sidered honorable and gentlemanly. Quentin’s struggle to reconcile Caddy’s actions with his own traditional Southern value system reflects Faulkner’s broader concern with the clash between the old South and the modern world. Like a medieval code of chivalry, the old South’s ideals are based on a society that has largely disappeared. Just Quentin’s traditional, idealized Southern code of honor and conduct fettered Caddy. And at that time, women’s right was improving, but her thought contradicted her family，so Caddy became a promiscuous, degenerate women. And because of Quentin’s suicide, Caddy became more and more promiscuous. Another cause came from her mother and another brother Jason. Herbert Head had offered Jason a job at his bank before Caddy married him, but rescinded that offer when he divorced Caddy. Because he knew that Caddy’s unborn child was not his. This retraction left Jason no choice but to work at the local farm-supply store. However, after Caddy divorced, her mother did not allow Caddy come back home, at last, they took in Caddy’s daughter Miss Quentin, but Caddy could not meet her. During Quentin’s growing time, Jason took away the money, which Caddy gave to Quentin, as his own. In order to meet her daughter, Caddy would like to be controlled by Jason; Jason asked Caddy to pay him a thousand dollars for seeing Quentin a minute. From these things we can see that Caddy had no right since she divorced, in her mother’s eyes, she was only an exchange condition with Jason’s job. Under the backward Southern feudalism, Caddy was doomed to be a tragic person. B. Backward Feudalism and the Traditional Code After the civil war, The Northern Capitalism defeated the Southern feudalism. But there was still the residue of the feudal serf system in the South America. And there was a traditional, idealized Southern code of honor and conduct, which was a legacy of the old South, a highly paternalistic society in which men were expected to act like gentlemen and women like ladies. In The Sound and the Fury, Caddy was just expected to act like a lady and Quentin like a gentleman. However, Caddy was not a person without thought, she was eager for freedom, so she became severely rebellions. In her teenage, she became very promiscuous. However, her brother Quentin believed very strongly in the ideals espoused under this traditional code: family honor; gentlemanly virtue, strength, and decency; and especially feminine purity, modesty, and virginity. Men like Quentin, who attempted to cling to these increasingly outdated Southern ideals, sensed that their grasp was slipping and their sense of order was disappearing. Their reliance on a set of outdated myths and ideals left them unequipped to deal with the realities of the modern world. Several characters in The Sound and the Fury embodied this changing of the guard from old ideals to modern realities. Damuddy, the lone representative of the old South left in the Compson family, died before any of the other action in the novel took place. Miss Quentin, the lone member of the Compsons’ new generation, was not only a bastard child, but had continued in Caddy’s promiscuous ways without displaying any of the guilt that Caddy felt about something did wrong. But Caddy’s promiscuity broke the code, Quentin attempted to maintain his sense of order by responding in a manner he considered honorable. Thinking that suicide was the only way to salvage the family name, at last, he preferred the suici