Rosa's Childhood

    Chapter 3 talks about Rosa’s childhood. This is interesting because it isn’t directly related to Sutpen’s story. It is however helpful to know in order to understand her bias against Sutpen. While it doesn’t give all of the details as to why she thinks he is evil, it does show some of the struggles she has had in and how she could have been given a prejudice against him.
    Her mother died during child birth so she was raised primarily by her father and aunt. Many of her views came from these two people. Her father was a very depressed man who could not forgive himself for his wife dying in childbirth and so Rosa hated him. Her aunt, who was the one who took her to see her to see her sister at Sutpen’s Hundred, disliked Sutpen and teaches Rosa to see nothing but an “ogre-face”. Her aunt tries to arrange visits only when Sutpen is gone and so it would seem Rosa hardly is able to form an opinion of her own. She only knows that he is why she can’t see her sister more and can give him the blame for everything else that is wrong in her life.
    This is particularly interesting considering the fact that in Rosa’s account, she provides a couple of occasions where Sutpen has disorderly conduct but she never provides evidence as to how he ruined her or her sister’s life. I think if we had read had these details before reading her story, we would have formed very different opinions of it. I find it interesting then that Faulkner would present these two points of view in the order that he does. I think this is to give us a bias (to emphasize that everyone has one) since even after reading the other side of the story I still have a feeling that Sutpen is bad even though I still lack firm evidence.