Unnamed Sexual Partners of Caddy

Quentin asks his sister Caddy about her sexual experience - "Have there been very many" - she replies, "I don't know too many" (115). Although we know it is Dalton Ames with whom she loses her virginity, among the other males she is associated with before Ames are the fellow Quentin contemptuously identifies as the "town squirt" (134) she kisses, the "pimple-faced infant she met at the field-meet" (92), "the town squirts that Father was always teasing her about" (174), and Charlie, the boy she is with in the hammock when Benjy finds her. There is no way to know how many other men she has sex with after Ames, though her answer to Quentin may reflect her guilt and shame rather than her experience. For an unmarried young woman of her race and class in Mississippi at that time, one sexual partner would certainly be "too many." (In the "Appendix Compson" that Faulkner wrote 16 years after the novel, he refers to Miss Quentin's father simply as "another man.")