Unnamed Spinster Aunts

In an aside in The Reivers to his grandson about "that Cause" - i.e. the Civil War - Lucius refers to "your spinster aunts," and differentiates his idea about the War from theirs (228). Elsewhere in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, such women are identified with a refusal to surrender the 'Lost Cause,' to admit either defeat or the flaws of the Old South, but what these aunts stand for here is not clear.