Gavin Breckbridge
Character Key Number:
358
Display Name:
Gavin Breckbridge
Sort Name:
Breckbridge, Gavin
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?:
Yes
Biography:
Mentioned in "Raid" and "Skirmish at Sartoris," and again in The Unvanquished, Gavin Breckbridge was engaged to Drusilla before the Civil War, which means it is almost certain that he belonged to the upper class. He never appears directly in Faulkner's fiction, but his death while fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862 marks the moment when Drusilla - as Bayard puts it in "Skirmish" and again in the novel - "deliberately tried to unsex herself" (60, 189).