Celia Cook
Text:
Character Key:
Display Name:
Celia Cook
Sort Name:
Cook, Celia
AKA:
Cecilia Farmer
Unnamed Jailer's Daughter
Race:
White
Gender:
Female
Class:
Upper Class
Rank:
Minor
Vitality:
Alive
First Mentioned:
Other Texts:
Biography:
Celia Cook lives on South Street in Oxford. She is "a young girl" who, at an early stage in the Civil War, entertains romantic ideas about the Southern soldiers (15). In this account of her, she scratches her name on a window pane "with a diamond ring" while watching Nathan Bedford Forrest ride past her house (15). Faulkner retells this girl's story, with revisions, in two later novels: Intruder in the Dust, where she is not named, and Requiem for a Nun, where her name is Cecelia Farmer. (This story is supposedly based on a real-life incident in Oxford: according to local lore, Miss Taylor Cook, supposedly stood on her porch and derided the retreating Confederates for cowardice.)
Note:
CUT: They were retreating from the advance of Union cavalry under the command of another name that resonates in this novel: Colonel Lyle T. DICKEY. Miss Cook later is said to have married the son of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Reference: Don H. Doyle, <em>Faulkner's County</em> (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001) 202-3, 414.
Individual or Group:
Individual
Character changes class in this text:
digyok:node/character/9957