Indiana (Location Key)

3 different places in Indiana are mentioned in 4 different texts - but always in connection with 2 different illegitimate children. It's tempting to see a pattern here, perhaps revealing something about the associative way the human imagination works. In any case, the first child is the one Caddy Compson gives birth to in The Sound and the Fury. Because she is pregnant, she allows her mother to take her to French Lick, Indiana (with its own entry in this index). At French Lick Caddy meets "an extremely eligible young Indianian" ("Appendix Compson," 332) named Herbert Head, whom she marries without telling him about her pregnancy. In the novel the invitation to their wedding says they will be living in South Bend, where Head is from, after their honeymoon; so they are presumably in Indiana when the child is born and he disowns both her and his wife. The second child is born out of wedlock in "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses. The father is Don Boyd in the first text, and Roth Edmonds in the second. In neither text is the child's mother named - or married - but until shortly before she had the affair she "lived in Indianapolis," the largest city in Indiana, with her father (278, 343).