1. Introduction

2Although both authors, especially Faulkner, have often been analyzed in relation to Southern memory and its role in their works, relatively few scholars have examined Porter and Faulkner together. In “Gender and the Great War: The Case of Faulkner and Porter” (1986), Anne Goodwyn Jones reads Porter and Faulkner as writers who use war to interrogate traditional Southern notions of gender, particularly the ideals of the Southern gentleman and the Southern belle. For Jones, war disrupts established social and gender structures, but this disruption is temporary. Her discussion focuses on Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust (written in 1927 and first published in its restored form in 1973) and the stories “All the Dead Pilots” (1931), “The Leg” (1934), and “Crevasse” (1931) as well as Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1939). In “‘Pretty as Pictures’: Family Photography and Southern Postmemory in Porter’s ‘Old Mortality’” (2008), Sari Edelstein examines Katherine Anne Porter’s “Old Mortality” through the role of photographs as vehicles of postmemory and as instruments for transmitting ideology across generations. She argues that these memory-making devices bind “the white southern individual to common ‘memories’ of a past that often did not exist” (163). Although Edelstein’s analysis focuses primarily on “Old Mortality,” she also identifies both Miranda and Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) as figures “dominated by narratives that preceded their birth” (Hirsch 22). Building on Edelstein’s analysis, this article will show that, when read together, Porter’s “Old Mortality” and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury offer complementary perspectives on how inherited narratives of the past—particularly the collective memory of the Lost Cause—persist despite their fragmentation, continuing to shape later generations and intrude upon the present as a burden rather than a source of coherence.

3The Lost Cause was a romanticized vision of the past developed by Southerners after their defeat in the Civil War. It sought to glorify the Old South as racially and socially benevolent, to promote a distinctly Southern interpretation of the war, and to cultivate the image of a harmonious and romantic society in which slavery was portrayed as a benevolent institution protecting supposedly innocent and childlike Black people. This “project of memory” (Innes 63) gradually came to function as historical truth for many white Southerners: for them, “the Civil War had become the nation’s inheritance of glory, Reconstruction the legacy of folly, and the race problem a matter of efficient schemes of segregation” (Blight 387). Within this framework, Confederate veterans were celebrated, monuments to Confederate generals were erected across Southern cities, school textbooks minimized the realities of slavery, and the cultural ideals of the belle and the gentleman were continuously reaffirmed. During a period of rapid social change and uncertainty, “the rituals and rhetoric of the Lost Cause provided an appealing memory of white southerners’ defeated past” (Innes 60), helping to ease the transition to the New South. In this historical moment, Southerners inhabited an unsettled present shaped by profound social and cultural transformation, a condition that made them especially susceptible to constructing memory as a means of stabilizing their place in the world. As Sari Edelstein explains, “the architects of the New South and the Lost Cause mythology produced a collective memory of antebellum southern life as a way to preserve a rapidly vanishing culture” (153). This mythologized vision of the past becomes the subject of literary exploration in Porter’s and Faulkner’s works, which reveal how inherited narratives of the Old South, with their gendered social scripts embodied in figures such as the Southern belle and the Southern gentleman, function as forms of collective memory transmitted within families and internalized by younger generations, shaping their understanding of identity, gender roles, and history.

2. Collective Memory and Porter’s “Old Mortality”

4Robert Brinkmeyer notes a significant shift in Porter’s writing after 1925, when she began to explore memory more explicitly as a central theme. These later stories differ from her earlier works, such as “María Concepción,” “Virgin Violeta,” “The Martyr,” and “Magic,” three of which are set in Mexico and one in New Orleans. The first draft of “Holiday,” written in 1924 but not published in its final version until 1960, and the publication of “He” in 1927 signaled a new source of inspiration and a different direction in Porter’s fiction. Some of her strongest works followed this turn, including “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (1930), “Old Mortality” (1937), “Noon Wine” (1937), “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1939), and the sequence of stories and sketches “The Old Order,” all of which explore the connection between memory, self-knowledge, and growth. Porter’s preoccupation with memory is especially clear in a journal entry written in Paris in 1936:

Of the three dimensions of time, only the past is ‘real’ in the absolute sense that it has occurred, the future is only a concept, and the present is that fateful split second in which all action takes place. One of the most disturbing habits of the human mind is the willful and destructive forgetting of whatever in its past does not flatter or confirm its present point of view. I must very often refer far back in time to seek the meaning or explanation of today’s smallest event, and I have long since lost the power to be astonished at what I find there. This constant exercise of memory seems to be the chief occupation of my mind, and all my experience seems to be simply memory, with continuity, marginal notes, constant revision and comparison of one thing with another. (Porter, The Collected Essays 449)

5Brinkmeyer explains that Porter believed in the redeeming power of memory. For Porter, human beings possess a hidden core of identity formed and shaped by memory, and they can mature and come to understand themselves and the world only through open and free dialogue with this inner self. Brinkmeyer connects this view of memory to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a dialogic, rather than monologic, relationship with the self—one in which different voices freely interact, question, and provoke one another. (Brinkmeyer 24) As Bakhtin explains, “A dialogic approach to oneself breaks down the shell of one’s image, that shell which exists for other people, determining the external assessment of a person (in the eyes of others) and dimming the purity of self-consciousness” (Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 120) Porter similarly suggests that repressing memory limits personal growth and human potential. This idea is central to “Old Mortality,” where Miranda is constantly engaged in dialogue with her past, her memories, and her Southern heritage.

6In “Old Mortality,” one of the three short novels included in Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Porter approaches this disappearing world through the intimate sphere of the family, exploring how its myths and memories are transmitted to younger generations. The text is structured in three parts—“Part I: (1885–1902),” “Part II: 1904,” and “Part III: 1912”—each corresponding to a distinct phase in the life of the protagonist, Miranda (her childhood, her adolescence, and her early adulthood) allowing Porter to trace Miranda’s gradual confrontation with the myths and memories that shape her identity.

7Miranda, like Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, inhabits a transitional historical moment marked by the tension between the Old South and the emerging modern order. She stands, as Oana-Raisa Stoleriu observes, “at the intersection between a sublime, mythical past and a decayed, empty present” (53). Positioned between these competing temporalities, Miranda struggles to negotiate the collective memories passed down to her—she is neither fully able to inhabit the romanticized past nor entirely free to detach herself from it. In the novel, Maria and Miranda, two young girls, the final inheritors of a Southern family mythology closely aligned with the ethos of the Lost Cause, are immersed in memories that transmit the ideals of the Southern past. Although they initially find these stories captivating and romantic, the narrative gradually reveals that this inherited memory functions as a burden, particularly for Miranda.

8The opening of the novel immediately introduces its central concern: the persistence of the past and the power of memory. These memories are primarily organized around the figure of the deceased Aunt Amy, whose photograph, hanging on the wall, serves as a mnemonic object anchoring the family’s narratives and reveals “the power of photography as a technology of personal and familial memory” (Hirsch 193). Aunt Amy’s picture shapes the minds of the future generation and unites the family by fostering a connection to shared family history. From the very beginning, however, the girls sense a discrepancy between the stories they hear and the image before them: “Quite often they wondered why every older person who looked at the picture said, ‘How lovely’; and why everyone who had known her thought her so beautiful and charming” (Porter, “Old Mortality” 173). What Miranda and Maria do not understand is that their family’s history must be embellished and romanticized to be embraced by younger generations. In this sense, Porter’s depiction of family memory closely corresponds to Maurice Halbwachs’s understanding of collective memory as distinct from history. Collective memory, he argues, “retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive” (80). It does not preserve the past in its entirety, but reshapes it according to the needs and values of the present group. These narratives shape Maria and Miranda’s sense of identity even before they are able to form their own memories. As the narrator observes, “Maria and Miranda, aged twelve and eight years, knew they were young, though they felt they had lived a long time. They had lived not only their own years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born” (Porter 174). The girls do not simply learn about the past; they internalize it as part of their own consciousness.

9Moreover, Miranda’s family becomes a microcosm of the South, a region which deeply invested in preserving and embellishing its past just like Miranda’s family. The repeated invocation of the Southern belle serves as the primary vehicle through which this idealized memory is transmitted. From early childhood, Maria and Miranda are burdened not only by family expectations but also by a mythologized version of history that demands emotional loyalty and identification.

10In Porter’s novel, as in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the father emerges as a central mediator of the past and the primary transmitter of family memory, shaping the narrative through which earlier generations are remembered. Yet the girls gradually realize that the version of the past he presents is not entirely reliable. When the father insists, “There were never any fat women in the family, thank God” (Porter 174), the girls recognize that this claim contradicts reality. The narrator explains the mechanism behind this distortion: “But something seemed to happen to their father’s memory when he thought of the girls he had known in the family of his youth, and he declared steadfastly they had all been, in every generation without exception, as slim as reeds and graceful as sylphs” (Porter 174), revealing memory as selective and idealizing. The father does not consciously lie; rather, his recollection reshapes reality according to an inherited ideal. The narrative further clarifies this process:

This loyalty of their father’s in the face of evidence contrary to his ideal had its springs in family feeling, and a love of legend that he shared with the others. They loved to tell stories, romantic and poetic, or comic with a romantic humor; they did not gild the outward circumstance, it was the feeling that mattered. Their hearts and imaginations were captivated by their past, a past in which worldly considerations had played a very minor role. Their stories were almost always love stories against a bright blank heavenly blue sky. (Porter 175)

11Evidently, the father’s memories are shaped more by emotional allegiance than by factual accuracy, aligning with “the last reverberations of romanticism” (65) that Halbwachs observed in his own family’s grandparents. In “Old Mortality,” the elders’ stories did not match what the girls actually saw; the material remnants of the past often proved disappointing. The discrepancy between spoken memory and visible reality becomes especially clear in the description of the preserved objects: “Photographs, portraits by inept painters who earnestly meant to flatter, and the festival garments folded away in dried herbs and camphor were disappointing when the little girls tried to fit them to the living beings created in their minds by the breathing words of their elders” (Porter 175). Although the actual objects are disappointing, the girls remain captivated by the emotional charge attached to them:

No, Maria and Miranda found it impossible to sympathize with those young persons, sitting rather stiffly before the camera, hopelessly out of fashion; but they were drawn and held by the mysterious love of the living, who remembered and cherished these dead. The visible remains were nothing; they were dust, perishable as the flesh; the features stamped on paper and metal were nothing, but their living memory enchanted the little girls. They listened, all ears and eager minds, picking here and there among the floating ends of narrative, patching together as well as they could fragments of tales that were like bits of poetry or music, indeed were associated with the poetry they had heard or read, with music, with the theater. (Porter 176)

12Drawn into this process, Maria and Miranda assemble fragments “like bits of poetry or music,” and in doing so, they continue transforming the past into an aesthetic experience rather than a historical one. The contrast between poetic memory and everyday reality is especially visible in the girls’ attitude toward Cousin Eva. Learning Latin with Eva belongs to the dull routine of daily life, while stories about Aunt Amy belong to an elevated, aesthetic realm:

Eva was a blot, no doubt about it, but the little girls felt she belonged to their everyday world of dull lessons to be learned, stiff shoes to be limbered up, scratchy flannels to be endured in cold weather, measles and disappointed expectations. Their Aunt Amy belonged to the world of poetry. The romance of Uncle Gabriel’s long, unrewarded love for her, her early death, was such a story as one found in old books. (Porter 178)

13While Cousin Eva represents the ordinary present, Aunt Amy inhabits the aestheticized past.

14Furthermore, through these repeated stories, Maria and Miranda gradually learn what is expected of them. Aunt Amy becomes a model of idealized femininity, embodying the attributes of the Southern belle. Thus, they are taught not only whom to admire but also what kind of beauty they should aspire to. As Barbie Zelizer explains, “Remembering becomes implicated in a range of other activities having as much to do with identity formation, power and authority, cultural norms, and social interaction as with the simple act of recall” (214). Thus, collective memory does not merely preserve the past; it establishes normative standards that shape the girls’ sense of self and future possibilities. For Maria and Miranda, this ideal is both alluring and oppressive: “It was all very exciting and discouraging” (Porter 176) because of the realization that such perfection cannot be attained and gradually becomes a burden. The remembered Amy remains unattainable, for “None of them resembled Aunt Amy in the least, nor the kind of beauty they had been brought up to admire” (Porter 176). By comparing other women to Amy, the adults continually reinforce this ideal, making the original Amy frozen in perfection by memory, while living women inevitably fall short. Maria quickly recognizes this limitation and responds with practical realism: “Maria, born sensible, had no such illusions. ‘We are going to take after Mamma’s family,’ she said. ‘It’s no use, we are. We’ll never be beautiful, we’ll always have freckles. And you,’ she told Miranda, ‘haven’t even a good disposition’” (Porter 177). Maria’s realism contrasts with Miranda’s ongoing belief in the myth; however, Miranda understands that Aunt Amy’s power lies not in her historical reality but in the remembered version of her, so she does not aspire to resemble the photograph but the legend: “She believed for quite a while that she would one day be like Aunt Amy, not as she appeared in the photograph, but as she was remembered by those who had seen her” (Porter 177). Miranda’s desire is directed toward memory rather than fact because she realizes that the idealized Amy, shaped by repeated stories, becomes more authoritative than the real woman ever was.

15Additionally, the elders’ memories consistently overshadow and shape the girls’ emerging experiences. Maria and Miranda, who enjoy the theater, cannot experience it without the mediation of memory because “there was always a voice recalling other and greater occasions” (Porter 179). Thus, the present is continually displaced by a supposedly greater past. Through these narratives, Maria and Miranda are taught to perceive life itself in heightened, romantic terms:

There was then a life beyond a life in this world, as well as in the next; such episodes confirmed for the little girls the nobility of human feeling, the divinity of man’s vision of the unseen, the importance of life and death, the depths of the human heart, the romantic value of tragedy (Porter 179).

16Memory, with all its grand life episodes, surpasses ordinary experience, and Miranda, in particular, becomes deeply invested in these exciting visions of the past, seeking and privileging the dramatic and narrative aspects rather than the ethics of certain events:

But Miranda, used to tragedy in books and in family legends—two great-uncles had committed suicide and a remote ancestress had gone mad for love—decided that, without the murder, there would have been no point to dressing up and leaping to the stage shouting in Latin. So how could she disapprove of the deed? It was a fine story. She knew a distantly related old gentleman who had been devoted to the art of Booth, had seen him in a great many plays, but not, alas, at his greatest moment. Miranda regretted this; it would have been so pleasant to have the assassination of Lincoln in the family. (Porter 180)

17What matters to Miranda is whether the event becomes “a fine story.” In this way, memory not only preserves the past but aestheticizes it, transforming lived reality into material for legend.

18Although Maria and Miranda are burdened by the expectation to become belles like Aunt Amy, the stories they inherit paradoxically reveal that Amy herself resisted the role she later comes to embody in family memory. The idealized Southern belle preserved through collective remembrance stands in tension with the historical Amy, whose desires often diverged from the code imposed upon her. Amy expresses dissatisfaction with the life prescribed to her, particularly with the expectation of marriage—especially to Gabriel—and with the monotony of her social environment: Amy, looking as if she might weep, says to her mother, “Mammy, I’m sick of this world. I don’t like anything in it. It’s so dull” (Porter 188). This confession undermines the romanticized image constructed by later generations. Rather than serenely fulfilling the belle ideal, Amy experiences her world as constraining and uninspiring longing for pleasure, movement, and vitality. When she impulsively chases Harry on horseback, she later describes the experience as exhilarating and marked by narrative self-awareness: “Mammy, it was splendid, the most delightful trip I ever had. And if I am to be the heroine of this novel, why shouldn’t I make the most of it?” (Porter 189), exposing the contrast between male and female experience. While Amy remains confined to a “dull” domestic sphere, Harry’s departure for Mexico is depicted as adventurous and liberating: “Harry set out for the border, feeling rather gay and adventurous” (Porter 189); he “was having a most enjoyable exile in Mexico City” (Porter 191). Amy’s disregard for the belle code becomes especially apparent at the fancy-dress ball, where, by wearing an inappropriate costume and dancing excessively with young men, she challenges the decorum traditionally associated with Southern femininity. Her excess unsettles observers, as seen in Harry’s girlfriend Mariana’s reaction: Mariana “began to be uneasy about his sister Amy. She was entirely too popular” (Porter 186), thus opposing the notion that belles “must be passive recipients of male attention, not active seekers of men who attract them” (Tracy 76). Even the circumstances of Amy’s death are unclear, leaving the possibility that Amy committed suicide open for discussion. All this suggests that the original Amy was far more complex and unruly than the perfected figure preserved in memory. Collective memory thus erases her resistance, preserving instead a disciplined and aestheticized version of her identity. In doing so, it transforms a restless young woman into a normative model that later generations—especially Miranda—are expected to emulate.

19Moreover, the girls learn how Amy’s unruly behavior affects the entire family. Like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Porter’s “Old Mortality” foregrounds tensions surrounding female sexuality and the brother’s role as defender of family honor and protector of women. In Faulkner’s novel, this dynamic is evident in the relationship between Quentin and Caddy, while in Porter’s work, it is embodied in Amy and Harry. To uphold the Southern code of honor, both Quentin and Harry confront their sisters’ lovers. The family appears as an organic whole in which a transgression by one member affects everyone. Porter emphasizes this collective vulnerability the family experiences after Amy’s and Harry’s actions: “They sat in the twilight of scandal in their little world, holding themselves very rigidly, in a shared tension as if all their nerves began at a common center” (Porter 189). The image of shared nerves radiating from a single center closely aligns with Halbwachs’s understanding of collective memory as formed within social frameworks in which “all persons think and remember in common” (78).

20In Part II, at the Convent of the Child Jesus, Miranda and Maria’s daily existence mirrors the very dullness that Amy once lamented: “All days and all things in the Convent of the Child Jesus were dull, in fact, and Maria and Miranda lived for Saturdays” (Porter 194). However, this part marks an important development—the girls have now begun to distinguish more consciously between narrative and reality:

It was no good at all trying to fit the stories to life, and they did not even try. They had long since learned to draw the lines between life, which was real and earnest, and the grave was not its goal; poetry, which was true but not real; and stories, or forbidden reading matter, in which things happened as nowhere else, with the most sublime irrelevance and unlikelihood, and one need not turn a hair, because there was not a word of truth in them. (Porter 194)

21The girls begin to categorize experience into distinct spheres: life, poetry, and story. While poetry may be “true,” it is no longer equated with reality. This distinction signals a growing critical awareness and a gradual loosening of the hold of collective memory. Furthermore, Miranda gradually leaves behind the ideal of Aunt Amy, and her imagination shifts toward alternative identities that defy conventional femininity, signaling a break from the expectations embedded in collective memory: “Her hope of being a beauty died hard, until the notion of being a jockey came suddenly and filled all her thoughts” (Porter 196). If she cannot fulfill the prescribed ideal, she imagines stepping entirely outside it.

22The fracture in collective memory becomes even more pronounced when the girls finally meet Uncle Gabriel, previously known only through romanticized stories, which destabilizes the legend they had constructed:

Maria and Miranda stared, first at him, then at each other. ‘Can that be our Uncle Gabriel?’ their eyes asked. ‘Is that Aunt Amy’s handsome romantic beau? Is that the man who wrote the poem about our Aunt Amy? Oh, what did grown-up people mean when they talked, anyway?’ (Porter 187)

23The rhetorical question—“what did grown-up people mean when they talked?”—reveals a decisive shift and openly questions the authority of adult narration. Miranda’s blunt remark further exposes the collapse of myth: “‘Uncle Gabriel’s a drunkard, isn’t he?’ she asked her father, rather proudly” (Porter 200). She begins to see things clearly and recognizes the romantic hero of collective memory as an ordinary, flawed man, rather than accepting the embellished version transmitted by her elders. Thus, in Part II, the gap between legend and lived experience widens preparing the ground for Miranda’s later attempt to distance herself from the burden of the Southern past.

24In Part III, the process of deconstruction reaches its culmination when, on the train back to Texas for Uncle Gabriel’s funeral, Miranda meets Cousin Eva, who unsettles the carefully preserved family mythology. This encounter marks the final rupture in the structure of inherited memory. When Miranda sees Eva, she suddenly recalls a series of fragmentary remarks once spoken by various family members—by Amy, by Harry, by Eva’s mother—evoking the mechanism of associative memory, similar to Quentin’s sudden recall of numerous memories at once in The Sound and the Fury:

Miranda remembered several things at once. Aunt Amy had threatened to be an old maid like Eva. Oh, Eva, the trouble with her is she has no chin. Eva has given up, and is teaching Latin in a Female Seminary. Eva’s gone out for votes for women, God help her. The nice thing about an ugly daughter is, she’s not apt to make me a grandmother. (Porter 208)

25The remembered phrases show that collective memory has already classified Eva as a failure, unfeminine, and marginal. Miranda internalizes these judgments, demonstrating how deeply the family narrative is embedded in her consciousness. At the same time, the conversation suggests that the continuity of this collective memory is nearing its end, since, as Halbwachs observes, collective memory depends on living social groups and begins to weaken as its primary carriers disappear (82); that is, Eva’s generation is reaching its end:

‘Pretty soon, they’ll all be gone.’
Miranda said, ‘We’re left, Cousin Eva,’ meaning those of her own generation, the young, and Cousin Eva said, ‘Pshaw, you’ll live forever, and you won’t bother to come to our funerals.’ ... Miranda sat thinking, ‘Still, I suppose it would be pleasant if I could say something to make her believe that she and all of them would be lamented, but—but—[.]’ (Porter 209)

26The hesitation in Miranda’s final thought signals uncertainty and reflects this transitional moment: the generation that sustained the legend is fading, and the younger one is uncertain whether it will continue to bear it. Miranda is no longer fully committed to sustaining the collective memory.

27Furthermore, Cousin Eva adds to this by directly challenging the central myth of Amy on all fronts: she dismisses the romantic love story between Gabriel and Amy as “an eternal infidelity” (Porter 211); she attacks Amy’s reputation by claiming that some considered Amy an “impure woman” (Porter 211), and describes Amy as “wild” (Porter 211), “indiscreet” (Porter 211), “heartless” (Porter 211), and “too free” (Porter 215). She even questions Amy’s celebrated beauty, rejects the sentimentalized account of Amy’s illness, and hints at something suspicious about Amy’s death. When Miranda resists this reinterpretation, Eva responds sharply: “You poor baby, … you dear innocent, you—do you believe that? How old are you, anyway?” (Porter 212) warning Miranda to stop living “in a romantic haze” (Porter 212). Yet Miranda’s defense reveals how powerful collective memory remains:

‘If she didn’t, what happened, what happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Miranda. ‘How should I know? She was very beautiful,’ she said, as if this explained everything. ‘Everybody said she was very beautiful.’
‘Not everybody, said Cousin Eva, firmly, shaking her head. (Porter 214)

28Miranda’s repetition—“Everybody said she was very beautiful”—demonstrates the circular logic of collective memory. Amy’s beauty is accepted as truth because it is repeated; however, Eva’s insistence—“Not everybody”—fractures this unanimity and reveals the myth as contingent rather than universal. Through Eva’s testimony, the legendary Amy becomes a contested figure, no longer unified or unquestionable, yet the emotional force of memory prevents Miranda from making a complete break. To defend the inherited version of the past, Miranda instinctively retreats into the emotional warmth associated with her family home:

‘Of course it was not like that. This is no more true than what I was told before, it’s every bit as romantic,’ and she realized that she was tired of her intense Cousin Eva, she wanted to go to sleep, she wanted to be at home, she wished it were tomorrow and she could see her father and her sister, who were so alive and solid; who would mention her freckles and ask her if she wanted something to eat. (Porter 216–217)

29This reaction shows that collective memory is sustained not by argument but by emotion. Instead of countering Eva with evidence, Miranda longs for familiarity, solidity, and belonging—for her home where all those stories are accepted as truth. However, Cousin Eva concludes by directing her critique not only at Amy but at the family itself—the primary unit through which collective memory is transmitted: “Ah, the family, ... the whole hideous institution should be wiped from the face of the earth. It is the root of all human wrongs” (Porter 217), thereby challenging the entire ideological framework that shaped Amy’s legend and enabled her own marginalization.

30When the train arrives in Texas, Miranda is greeted by her father but soon becomes aware of the fracture in their relationship following her elopement and early marriage: “Miranda walked along beside her father, feeling homeless” (Porter 219). Although she physically returns home, Miranda feels she no longer fully belongs there. Feeling oppressed by her family—“who lectured and admonished her, who loved her with bitterness and denied her the right to look at the world with her own eyes, who demanded that she accept their version of life and yet could not tell her the truth, not in the smallest thing” (Porter 219)—she expresses a desire to reject their memories but also to do what she considers the worst: not to remember them. “I will be free of them, I shall not even remember them” (Porter 219).

31Halbwachs explains that as individuals become more closely involved in particular social groups, they inevitably “renovate and supplement” (73) their memories from the perspective of those groups. Miranda’s impulse, however, moves in the opposite direction: rather than deepening her participation in the family’s mnemonic framework, she seeks to withdraw from it entirely. The following pages are devoted to rejecting these memories because she needs new experiences:

They sat back and went on talking steadily in their friendly family voices ... going over old memories and finding new points of interest in them.
Miranda could not hear the stories above the noisy motor, but she felt she knew them well, or stories like them. She knew too many stories like them, she wanted something new of her own. The language was familiar to them, but not to her, not any more. (Porter 220)

32Miranda continues to vent against memories; however, the final word suggests that Miranda is unaware of how difficult it is to escape collective memories:

Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, other people’s memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic-lantern show .... Let them go on explaining how things happened. I don’t care. At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance. (Porter 221)

33Miranda, dazzled by the collective memories—the “magic-lantern show”—seeks the truth, which she believes can be found only in her own experiences. However, the final word of the passage, “ignorance,” introduces ambiguity, as Miranda is unaware of how deeply she has already been shaped by these very memories. As Janis Stout explains, Miranda is “sunk in a romanticism of her own, the Byronic exaltation of the solitary rebellious spirit” (270). However, it is worth noting that Miranda recognizes she must begin creating her own memories and forming her own identity.

3. Collective Memory and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

34While Porter illustrates how the Southern myth continues to circulate within the family structure, Faulkner depicts the collapse of the very conditions that make such transmission possible. In The Sound and the Fury, collective memory appears not as a stable system but as a fractured and collapsing structure, with Quentin at the center of this collapse. He becomes the last active bearer of the Compson family’s inherited Southern memory, as “the weight of tradition and memory that Quentin and his fellows seek so desperately to escape was already quickly disappearing—both in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and in the world of the fast-modernizing twentieth-century South” (Donaldson 7). Other family members have complex relationships with the Southern past and its values: his father deconstructs inherited ideals, his mother clings to them sentimentally, Jason and Caddy disregard them, and Benjy cannot participate in their transmission. The communal framework necessary for the continuation of collective memory is thus shattered.

35According to Halbwachs, collective memory does not require a group to remember together physically. He explains that our memories remain collective and are recalled through others, since “we are never alone. Other men need not be physically present, since we always carry with us and in us a number of distinct persons” (Halbwachs 23). Faulkner also reflected on a similar inability to separate the self from the past, which continues to shape the present through memory:

[N]o man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his or her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment. And so a man, a character in a story at any moment of action is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him. (Blotner and Gwynn 84)

36Quentin embodies this condition as he carries the memory of a disappearing community. He preserves the memory of the family’s honor, the Southern moral code, and the gendered ideals of the belle and the gentleman. It is “memory, the subjective and selective construction of a private past, that ultimately dooms [Quentin as well as other] Faulkner’s characters to fates that in retrospect appear unavoidable” (Fennell 35). In The Sound and the Fury, collective memories are not as explicit as in Porter but appear as fragments of conversations from his past and permeate his present. These memories are not merely personal memories grounded in experience, but inherited, normative memories—memories of what should be remembered—the ideologies of the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause served as a powerful project of memory in the postbellum South, reshaping the past into a moral narrative of honor, purity, and heroic defeat. By romanticizing the Southern aristocracy and codifying gender roles through the ideals of the belle and the gentleman, the Lost Cause transformed historical loss into a moral narrative of honor and purity. In the novel, Quentin functions not as a witness to the past but as a medium for collective norms. However, once the collective that sustains these norms dissolves, memory becomes pathological. The inherited code—particularly the obsession with purity and Caddy’s perceived dishonor—overwhelms Quentin’s present, flooding his consciousness and destabilizing narrative coherence suggesting that Quentin becomes, as Anne Lee Fennell observes, “inescapably caught in memory’s stranglehold” (45).

37At the beginning of Quentin’s chapter, his father gives him the watch, which, much like Aunt Amy’s photograph in Porter’s “Old Mortality,” serves as a material mnemonic object linking past and present. Yet the two objects function in fundamentally different ways. While the photograph is a static object in which time appears frozen, the watch embodies the forward movement of time, revealing the impossibility of stopping it. As Quentin’s father suggests, the saddest word for him is “was” (Faulkner 152), a term that encapsulates the irreversibility of the past. Rather than nostalgically recounting stories about the past, he warns Quentin not to attempt to conquer time:

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won, he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools. (Faulkner 71)

38While in Porter’s work Aunt Amy’s picture is fondly viewed by everyone and evokes shared memories, in Faulkner, the father, by entrusting Quentin with the family heirloom, simultaneously expresses his nihilistic and disenchanted view of history and value, describing life as “the tedious and insignificant ticking of segmented sameness” (Street qtd. in Gros 142): “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s” (Faulkner 71). Quentin ignores his father’s advice about time and, throughout his section, tries to stop the watch from ticking while repeatedly returning to the past through memory. Even when he twists the hands of the watch, the “watch ticked on” (Faulkner 74), highlighting the impossibility of restoring the lost Southern order that Quentin desperately wants to preserve. In contrast to Porter’s “Old Mortality,” where the past is partially sustained through the collective memory surrounding Aunt Amy’s photograph, Faulkner’s watch serves as a reminder that time cannot be stopped. As Herbert Schneidau observes, Quentin – like many other Faulknerian characters – resembles a “Supergatsby,” wishing “not simply to repeat the past with a new ending, but to repeal or change time altogether, to create and worship an ideal unchanging world, safe from falling into real history” (qtd. in Donaldson 7).

39In Quentin’s chapter, past and present merge without clear boundaries, as memories interrupt and overwhelm the progression of narrative time. As John T. Matthews observes, the “past [shoots] through Quentin’s present,” marking one of the most fundamental dynamics of memory in the novel (55). His consciousness is structured around a series of recurring moments: memories of his father, who imparts both the language of masculine protection and a bleak, ironic worldview; memories of his mother, who clings to the ideals of bellehood and purity; memories of Caddy, whose sexual transgression destabilizes those ideals; and memories of the men in Caddy’s life, whose presence exposes Quentin’s wounded masculinity. These fragments do not appear randomly but erupt simultaneously within Quentin’s consciousness, overwhelming his ability to control them. As Noel Polk observes, “all of Quentin’s past tries to crowd in on him at once, every painful episode tries simultaneously to elbow its way past all the others into consciousness .... Quentin’s memory is like a large fluid-filled balloon that he is trying to flatten out, to control” (“Trying Not to Say,” 149). These memories repeatedly invade his present and revolve around the intertwined issues of honor, purity, and gender roles—the ideological core of the Old South that the Lost Cause sought to preserve. Emily Innes notes, “Faulkner uses the family to construct a discourse of memory that does not venerate the past, but draws attention to the way the past can be a burden” (74), a burden that weighs on Quentin like the flat irons he places in his pockets before his death. Quentin allows memory “to harden into a final and complete voice that cannot be challenged” (Brinkmeyer 26), thus falling “prey to memory” and silencing his present “before the sacred realm of the past” (Brinkmeyer 26). Brinkmeyer’s reading of Bakhtin’s essay “Epic and Novel” (1970), in which Bakhtin characterizes this orientation toward the past as “epic,” can help us understand Quentin’s relationship to memory:

Tradition isolates the world of the epic from personal experience, from any new insights, from any personal initiative in understanding and interpreting, from new points of view and evaluations. The epic world is an utterly finished thing, not only as an authentic event of the distant past but also on its own terms and by its own standards; it is impossible to change, to re-think, to reevaluate anything in it. It is completed, conclusive and immutable, as a fact, an idea and a value. This defines absolute epic distance. One can only accept the epic world with reverence; it is impossible to really touch it, for it is beyond the realm of human activity, the realm in which everything humans touch is altered and re-thought. (Bakhtin, “Epic” 17)

40This reverential attitude toward the past often takes the form of romanticization, a tendency Brinkmeyer associates with many Southerners and one that can also be seen in Quentin’s relationship to memory.

42Dalton Ames, Caddy’s lover, becomes a central figure in these recurring memories. Quentin believes that, as a Southern gentleman, it is his duty to avenge Caddy’s dishonor, yet he is unable to fulfill the role he has internalized. When Dalton Ames places the pistol in his hand, Quentin hesitates: “And when he put Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. When he put the pistol in my hand I didn’t. That’s why I didn’t. He would be there and she would and I would. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames” (Faulkner 73). The repetition of Dalton Ames’s name reveals the paralysis at the core of Quentin’s performance. Instead of enacting the code of masculine honor, during their confrontation, he faints, and the gendered hierarchy implicit in the Southern ideal is inverted. As Daniel Singal observes, Quentin and Caddy exchange roles: while Quentin walks to the duel, Caddy rides his horse, “the perennial symbol of planter authority” (131), galloping like a cavalier only to find her brother lying on the ground, having “passed out like a girl” (Faulkner 139). What should have affirmed the continuity of the gentlemanly code instead exposes its fragility.

43Herbert Head, Caddy’s fiancé, is another figure from Quentin’s memories as he presents another challenge to Quentin’s inherited values. Unlike Quentin, Herbert does not recognize the moral seriousness of Caddy’s pregnancy. When he remarks, “I wasn’t the first or the last I was just unlucky you might have been luckier” (Faulkner 96), he reduces what Quentin experiences as a catastrophic moral breach to mere misfortune. Herbert sees Quentin’s adherence to the code as naïve: “I’m not trying to make you tell anything you dont want to meant no offense of course a young fellow like you would consider a thing of that sort a lot more serious than you will in five years” (Faulkner 96) invoking Cousin Eva’s words directed to Miranda where she implies Miranda’s naivety. Herbert shows his pragmatism by openly admitting he was never shaped by such principles as he never had a mother like Quentin’s to teach him “the finer points” (Faulkner 96) thus exposing the historical obsolescence of the gentlemanly ideal. What Quentin experiences as binding collective memory appears to Herbert as an impractical remnant of the past revealing the inherited code as socially ineffective.

44Quentin’s final attempt to enact the role of protector occurs in his interaction with the lost girl in the bakery. Addressing her as “Hello, sister” (Faulkner 109), he symbolically casts her as another version of Caddy in need of protection. Yet this performance of chivalric responsibility is misread as deviance. As Richard Godden observes, “Southern tragedy ... comes back as a Northern farce” (122): when Quentin attempts to escort the girl home, he is accused of wrongdoing and violently attacked by her brother Julio. His effort to perform the gentlemanly role thus ends in humiliation, revealing the incompatibility of the Southern code with the modern world. His friends dismiss the incident by explaining, “He’s just a country boy in school up there. He dont mean any harm. I think the marshal’ll find it’s a mistake. His father’s a congregational minister” (Faulkner 124), reducing the episode to a harmless misunderstanding and revealing how Quentin’s Southern ideals have become historically out of place.

45Across these episodes, Quentin’s memories do not simply recount personal failures; they stage the breakdown of a gendered code inherited from the Southern past. His inability to shoot, to avenge, to control his sister, or to command authority reflects the erosion of the collective framework that once defined masculine honor. As Polk argues, Quentin “cannot be a man because he cannot control his sister’s sexual life, because he cannot shoot a gun or hold a knife, because he cannot live up to a ‘tradition’ that males behave in certain ways” (“Testing Masculinity” 46). What appears as individual inadequacy is, in fact, the collapse of a normative system no longer supported by a coherent community. Quentin’s repeated returns to these moments reveal how collective memory endures within him as an impossible demand. The Southern gentleman ideal persists as a script he continually rehearses, yet each attempt to perform it only confirms its historical disintegration.

46The tension revealed in Quentin’s encounters with Dalton Ames and Herbert Head does not originate solely from the external world; it is already embedded within the Compson household, which serves as a fractured site of transmission. The parents act as contradictory transmitters of the Southern code, offering him no coherent framework in which inherited values can remain stable. The father imparts to Quentin the values of protecting women—“Father and I protect women from one another from themselves our women” (Faulkner 87)—as well as the ideals of aristocracy (his family are “high and mighty people” (Faulkner 92)) and the gender roles that dictate women should be virgins and men sexually free. However, while Quentin believes he must perform the role of the Southern gentleman, his father supports Quentin’s desire to protect women but offers a perspective on women and their sexuality that differs from traditional Southern gentleman beliefs:

In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it’s like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn’t matter and he said, That’s what’s so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he said, That’s why that’s sad too; nothing is even worth the changing of it, and Shreve said if he’s got better sense than to chase after the little dirty sluts and I said Did you ever have a sister? Did you? Did you? (Faulkner 72–3)

47Quentin’s reaction to Shreve’s vulgar remark reveals the depth of his internalization of the Southern code. When Shreve refers to women as “little dirty sluts,” Quentin does not respond with masculine bravado but with a desperate insistence: “Did you ever have a sister? Did you? Did you?”—the question he keeps asking every man in the novel. He experiences the insult not as casual speech but as an assault on the figure of the sister, through whom collective honor is imagined and preserved. This exchange shows how the collective memory passed down by the father—a gendered framework that normalizes male sexual experience and assigns men the role of protectors—continues to shape Quentin’s reaction, especially since, in his case, the roles are reversed. While the father dismisses the very concept of purity, to Quentin’s mother, Mrs. Compson, Caddy’s sexual freedom is a tragedy and further contributes to Quentin’s sense of failure as a Southern gentleman: “Done in Mother’s mind though. Finished. Finished. Then we were all poisoned you are confusing sin and morality women dont do that your mother is thinking of morality whether it be sin or not has not occurred to her” (Faulkner 91).

48As long as these values circulate within the family, they remain socially intelligible. Once Quentin is removed from that framework and displaced to Harvard, he carries a moral system no longer sustained by a living community. His ideals become a burden, unsuited to the new environment. This tension becomes explicit when Shreve, observing how Quentin’s gentlemanly code compels him to endure Gerald’s mother’s suffocating attentions, remarks, “God, I’m glad I’m not a gentleman” (Faulkner 91). Quentin continues to honor women and act as a protector—toward his sister and even the lost girl—but the Southern ideals that once shaped communal identity now exist only as internal obligations. In a modern environment defined by rationalism and pragmatism, he is seen as “just a country boy,” a figure out of place.

49Even outside the South, Quentin continues to view the world through the lens of inherited Southern ideology. His encounter with Deacon, a Black man who serves as a fixer to Southern boys at Harvard, reveals how deeply the paternalistic racial hierarchies of the Lost Cause are embedded in his consciousness. When he asks, “Did any Southerner ever play a joke on you?” (Faulkner 89) and insists that Southerners are “fine folks” (Faulkner 89), he perpetuates the myth of Southern nobility even within the modern setting of Harvard. Deacon’s reply—“They’re fine folks. But you can’t live with them” (Faulkner 89)—quietly unsettles this idealized memory. Furthermore, by entrusting Deacon with his suicide letter to Shreve, Quentin unconsciously reenacts the paternalistic racial framework of the Southern past. This gesture suggests that Lost Cause ideology survives not merely as nostalgia but as an embodied social script that continues to shape interactions even outside the South.

50The culmination of this internalization of inherited memory appears in Quentin’s final remembered conversation with his father—the longest and most psychologically charged exchange in his section, where the lack of uppercase letters and paragraphing marks the fragmentation of Quentin’s ego. As Polk notes, the final fragments of the dialogue return repeatedly to Quentin’s debate with his father “over whether death—being was—is a sadder condition than continuing to live in eternal recurrence—again …—and having to experience pain and loss over and over” (“Trying Not to Say,” 152; italics in the original). The father’s philosophy accepts transience; Quentin, however, cannot. When Quentin threatens suicide, his father dismisses the seriousness of the gesture, assuming that time will resolve it and describing his distress as merely a “temporary state of mind” (Faulkner 151). The word “temporary,” which Quentin repeats four times, underscores his growing agitation, as “one can almost hear the outrage and incredulity building with each repetition” (Fennell 45). At the same time, the conversation reinforces Quentin’s entrapment within familial obligation. The father further reminds him of his duty: “for you to go to harvard has been your mothers dream since you were born and no compson has ever disappointed a lady” (Faulkner 152). Quentin cannot simply abandon Harvard; his education has been financed through the sale of Benjy’s pasture, binding him both materially and symbolically to the family’s expectations. In this sense, Quentin is not only an individual subject but also the bearer of the Compson family’s inherited collective memory and its code of Southern honor. He thus remains the bearer of a memory he can neither relinquish nor successfully uphold.

4. Conclusion

51Quentin’s struggle with collective memory recalls that of Miranda. Both characters confront the overwhelming weight of inherited Southern myth and attempt to free themselves from its influence. Amy’s photograph looms over Miranda, and she is sustained by romanticized stories of Amy and Gabriel. However, throughout the story, she gradually recognizes the falsehoods beneath these inherited narratives. The memories begin to fracture when she and Maria notice inconsistencies in their father’s stories; this process continues when they meet Uncle Gabriel and culminates in Miranda’s encounter with Eva on the train. Like Porter herself, Miranda is always in dialogue with her past. She continually reshapes it and, in Bakhtinian terms, enters into a dialogic relationship with memory rather than allowing it to exercise full authority over her. In contrast, Quentin’s relationship to memory is not dialogic. Rather than being reshaped or questioned, memory solidifies into a fixed structure that imprisons him in the past. It overtakes his present, especially through his obsessive recollections of Caddy and his wounded masculinity. These memories reveal the burden of collective ideals that can no longer be sustained. Quentin’s parents also serve as contradictory transmitters of collective memory: his father’s views on women and sexuality differ sharply from his mother’s. Quentin’s displacement at Harvard, away from the South, further intensifies this conflict, as the ideals he has inherited no longer correspond to his current environment.

52While Miranda gradually detaches herself from the sentimental narratives that sustain Southern collective memory, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury depicts a much more catastrophic response to inherited myth. Both Miranda and Quentin occupy transitional positions; they are not witnesses to the Old South but inheritors of its myth, and their psychological crises arise from the pressure of secondhand memory. Under this pressure, Miranda attempts to distance herself from her family’s memories, realizing that she “can’t live in their world any longer ... listening to the voices back of her” (Porter 221). Quentin, by contrast, cannot escape these voices and is driven toward self-destruction. If Miranda suggests the gradual weakening of collective memory’s grip, Quentin embodies its destructive force as his reflections during his final day suggest that his suicide is “prompted not by the prospect of forgetting, but by the agony of constantly remembering” (Fennell 45).

53The comparison between Faulkner and Porter reveals that narratives about the Southern past do not simply preserve memory but actively shape cultural identity, influencing how later generations understand family history and regional belonging. Shaped by these inherited narratives – dominated by the figures of the belle and the gentleman and their ideals of honor and purity – Miranda and Quentin, as members of a later generation, ultimately prove unable to sustain or transmit these collective memories. In Porter’s narrative, Miranda gradually distances herself from these memories, while in Faulkner’s novel, Quentin remains unable to escape their hold and ultimately turns to suicide. These divergent trajectories reveal not only the persistence of inherited narratives but also their destructive potential when they can no longer be meaningfully sustained.