Faulkner's short story "Dry September" deliberately and forcefully deals with the issue of race and racism in the American South. The repeated question of "Won't you take a white woman's word before a nigger's?", however, seemed to me to bring gender issues into the question as well. The Southern concept of the "White Goddess" is something we've encountered before in other Faulkner works: white women of the South are both perceived and maintained as creatures of the utmost virtue and delicacy. When it comes to matters of sexuality, they are helpless and utterly passive, totally innocent of any lust or longing. When white women like Caddy Compson or Temple Drake, however, recognize their own sexual prerogative, they are immediately cast out, eternal pariahs of the community.
While Faulkner clearly admires the transgressive women he writes about, especially Caddy, complete female sexual freedom still seems very frowned upon. Caddy's daughter Quentin has clearly taken ownership of her sexuality, but she is portrayed as promiscuous and hopeless. The character of Minnie Cooper is clearly dealing with her own sexual frustrations. Once the belle of the ball, so to speak, she removes herself from social life after "One evening at a party she heard a boy and two girls, all schoolmates, talking. She never accepted another invitation." This seems to mark the beginning of her frustrations with relationships between members of the opposite sex.
The conflicting feelings shared by the town about her private life didn't seem to help either. Whether she has passed marrying age and is called "Aunt Minnie" or seen with a middle-aged cashier and addressed as "Cousin Minnie," she is always "poor Minnie." She is pitied for her lack of luck with men, but the townspeople also seem determined to keep her in a state of virginity. Then again, her alleged adultery with the cashier is at the both looked down upon and encouraged because of the titillating gossip it provides. The only thing that keeps their dalliance from completely outraging the town seems to be her age. Faulkner's portrayal of the townspeople shows the Southern paradox of sexuality: there are very strong public feelings about what men and women can and cannot do, yet people are driven to obsession by tales of the sexual lives of others.
The townspeople cannot make up their minds about what is "proper" for a woman of her age and status, meanwhile Minnie is locked in a state of growing hysteria. This is not the first time a man has been accused of assaulting her purity, recalls the men of the barber shop. We never know if Will Mays actually raped her or not, but her nervous breakdown at the end of the story makes sense either way: she will only be noticed, truly noticed, by the townspeople if she is involved in some kind of sexual scandal. The body that publicly belongs to the "White Goddess," with all the sexual mores that go along with it, is also publicly speculated about in the most humiliating way. I wouldn't be surprised if Minnie Cooper was laughing at the hypocrisy of her "friends" at the end of the story.
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Your take on Minnie is extremely insightful, and it serves to reinforce the idea of Faulkner as a lesbian author. Beyond that, it is yet another example of the way Faulkner writes about women--in a strange yet fascinated way. It seems to be that Faulkner's female characters are the most complex and influential characters, always serving large and important purposes, yet they are the hardest to understand. I don't think that Faulkner himself understood the women he wrote about, and it makes me wonder if he understood women at all, even if he was a lesbian.
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