Unnamed Woman in Red Dress
Character Key Number:
1925
Display Name:
Unnamed Woman in Red Dress
Sort Name:
Unnamed Woman in Red Dress
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?:
No
Biography:
Among the people attending Red's funeral in Sanctuary, this "woman in a red dress" deserves to be singled out. She plays a role that recurs in Faulkner's fiction: the agent of chaos. Just as the crowd "grows quiet" listening to the orchestra play a hymn, she enters "unsteadily"; her first word is "Whoopee" (245). Later, her demand that Joe "get that damn stiff out of here and open the [crap] game," accompanied by "a burst of filthy language" (248), sets off the violence that brings the funeral literally crashing to an end.