Drusilla Hawk

One of the more memorable women in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, Drusilla Hawk was born into the plantation aristocracy, where her role as a lady seemed clearly defined - until the Civil War gave her the opportunity to redefine it. After her father and fiance are killed at the Battle of Shiloh, she "deliberately tries to unsex" herself (189), according to her appalled mother, by refusing to mourn them and instead joining the Confederate unit led by her cousin, John Sartoris, in the fighting. Faulkner never describes her behavior in combat, but when she comes to Yoknapatawpha with John after the surrender, she continues to dress and act like the males rebuilding the Sartoris plantation until she herself is forced to surrender to the ladies who demand that she put on a dress and marry the man she has been fighting and sleeping beside. When John appoints her ad hoc "voting commissioner" of Yoknapatawpha, a very implausible role for a woman, she is wearing a wedding dress (210). She re-appears as John's widow and leaves to be with her younger brother Denny in Montgomery, Alabama. Before she departs, she leaves on Bayard's pillow a single sprig of verbena which has the only odor one can smell above the "smell of horses and courage" (220). In his narration, Bayard equates Drusilla with the "woman of thirty, the symbol of the ancient and eternal Snake" (228).