Quentin Compson's Grandmother

The wife of General Compson, "Father's mother" (225) and Quentin's grandmother, plays a minor role in Absalom!. At the time of her marriage she is "a stranger in Jefferson" who is left "in hysterics" after a visit from Rosa's aunt; in a comic variation on the theme of the continuing presence of the past, "even twenty years after that day" she refuses to discuss what happened (42). She is mentioned again as the source from whom her son learns about the way the slaves at Sutpen's mock Wash Jones during the Civil War (225) - perhaps because as a woman she remains in Yoknapatawpha after most of the men, including her husband, are away at the war. And because Judith Sutpen gives her the letter that Charles Bon wrote near the end of the war, this Mrs. Compson is the source of the one authenticated document from the story that is being reconstructed in the novel as a whole: from her hands through her son's that letter is passed on to Quentin and to us.