Poor Minnie?

Faulkner’s prose is almost profoundly clear and digestible throughout the whole story. Its paratactic structure makes use of nearly every kind of sentence. Lengthy cumulative ones, highly suspensive ones filled with prepositional and qualifying phrases, and occasional short pithy sentences as well. It’s curious that in a work deeply concerned with shifting its point-of-view for effect, the sentences themselves frequently do their own sort of shifting via strong verb style and prepositional phrases. “Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass---the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.” (Section I). There’s something about his account of action that reads like stage directions—quickly uttered and to the point, especially when he’s writing live action. “The barber went swiftly up the street where the sparse lights, insect-swirled, glared in rigid and violent suspension in the lifeless air. The day had died in a pall of dust; above the darkened square, shrouded by the spent dust, the sky was as clear as the inside of a brass bell. Below the cast was a rumor of the twice-waxed moon.” (Section III). His expository moments are marked by careful details that are somehow positioned specifically in space—either through, above, or below something else. The overall structure is customized accordingly with the subject matter.

The scenes with the men noticeably thrive off of the dialogue, differently from the descriptive moments that spend time portraying Minnie Cooper and her feverish temperament. The true action plays out within the conversational disputes of the men. On a basic level, we know that some of them adhere to Southern etiquette, like Mr. McLendon, whereas others, like the barber, have mercy on the alleged criminal. The first section is probably the only place in the story in which we can understand how these people are thinking, the weight of the situation, the characters involved, the latent cultural mentality of the time, and so forth. We can see how harsh and stubborn McLendon is whenever he comes up because he is allowed to move around, respond to people, and eventually freak out.

Contrarily, there’s very little said about the inner-workings of Minnie. We learn through lengthy descriptions of her haggard appearance, her socioeconomic status, her age (mind you, Faulker has a weird way of dodging specificity with this and with other things. Why doesn’t he know if she’s 38 or 39? Or whether she has 3 or 4 voile dresses? He knows plenty of other specifics—why not these?) and we also learn a limited amount about what has happened to her. The only implication of her thoughts is in her hysteria, or her fever. We can assume that, affected by both illness and a potentially traumatic rape incident (one that is never proven true) she’s probably gone mad. Laughing really loudly throughout a movie is atypical behavior. Still, while she was traumatized by the rape, there is something about her character as it is described by Faulkner in the narrative that is so blindingly mysterious and inaccessible. It’s interesting that he spends the most time describing her as she appears to society. It seems to say something about the sort of damaged woman she always was in the eyes of others, an old maid hiding behind colorful dresses. The incident, whatever it truly is, sparked something unusual in her, but we don’t have access to it. All we see are the reactions of others, the “Shhhhhhhh”s and the “Poor girl! Poor Minnie!”