SutpensInW

When the Sutpen family appears in the short story "Wash," there is nothing to distinguish them from other slave-owning plantation aristocrats. Sutpen himself seems godlike to Wash as he "gallops about the plantation" on his fine "black stallion" (538). His one unnamed son is "killed in action" during the Civil War, in "the same winter in which his wife had died" in Yoknapatawpha (538-39). While her father is away fighting in Virginia as a Confederate Colonel, and earning "a citation from the hand of General Lee," the unnamed Sutpen daughter remains on the "ruined plantation," where Wash helps her to subsist (539). There is no other mention of her in the story. After the war, Sutpen has one other child - an illegitimate daughter born to Wash's teenage granddaughter. This birth, however, not only does not give the Sutpens a future; ironically, it leads to the family's extinction.