Women in the War

The three major female characters in William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay are extremely significant. In fact, one could make the case that the novel revolves around these women and their relationships and interactions with the men in the book and not the other way around. The women, Cecily Saunders, Margret Powers, and Emmy, though all females, are each unique in both her character and role in the novel. They each play distinct parts in the life of Donald Mahon, and they also each represent different things. Despite their differences, I found myself disliking all three of the women in the novel.

Margret Powers in the first women we are introduced to in Soldier’s Pay and the one with the largest impact on the reader. She is a smart, independent, aloof woman who engenders affection in almost every man she encounters. Julian Lowe immediately became infatuated with her, Joe Gilligan developed a deep love for her, and Donald Mahon, though he never really knew her, ends up marrying her. Mrs. Powers, though, is a mysterious and distant character. I got the feeling that I never knew exactly what her thoughts, feelings, or motives are. I could never decide if she intended all along to marry Mahon—if she loved him—or if she was simply being a kind and generous soul. Mrs. Powers is even mysterious in appearance. Faulkner constantly describes her as “black,” but he never calls her “negro,” so the reader cannot tell of Mrs. Powers is African-American of just black in ambiance. What Mrs. Powers represents is an ideal. She is the perfect post-war woman, so to speak. She marries Mahon and takes care of him, and is with him even as he dies.

Cecily Saunders is perhaps the second most important female character in Solider Pay. She is the young society girl Donald Mahon was engaged to before the war. Cecily, like Mrs. Powers, attracts the affection of many of the men she meets. She is a young, flirtatious women who believed she had not attachments, only to be shocked at the return of her war-scarred fiancé. Cecily is, in my opinion, a brat. She is manipulative and selfish, toying with Jones’ and George Farr’s emotions simply because she can. I do not like her at all. She is flaky and young, caught up in herself. Cecily is the woman who, after seeing Donald Mahon’s war-scarred visage, faints and refuses to see him again. Mahon, who was her fiancé and is seemingly back from the dead, is too upsetting to her delicate sensibilities that she cannot even bare to look at him. Cecily Saunders, to me, represents the woman before the war; she is the girl who thought she would marry a war hero or be the girlfriend of a dead soldier, able to cry at her loss but free to be young while she could. Because of this, Cecily did not know how to act when her fiancé returned. She is a post-war woman.

The third and final female character in Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay, is Emmy. Emmy is the quiet, uneducated, simple maid who lives with Dr. Mahon. She does not say much, but she is strong and independent. Emmy, we find out as the novel progresses, was in love with Donald Mahon before the war. They had been intimate, and she had imagined a happy life with him. Mahon, it seemed, also cared for Emmy, at least before he went to war. When he returned, he did not even remember Emmy, let alone the times they had had. Emmy is the least offensive of the three women. I felt sorry for her. She was kind and simple, and she did not deserve the life she had. Nevertheless, Emmy never spoke up about how she felt. She kept her feelings hidden under her strong façade. Emmy represents the non-war woman. She is the girl Mahon should have been with had there never been a war; she was the one Donald actually loved and the one who loved Donald. If there had been no war, everything would have worked out in the end.