How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #4
"Maybe that's why you done it: because what you and your pa got from old Carothers had to come to you through a woman—a critter not responsible like men are responsible, not to be held like men are held." (2.1.2.28)
Lucas, ready to kill Zack, says that Zack's descended from a female McCaslin and is therefore morally weak and not capable of responsibility. Interesting how Lucas uses bloodlines to judge character, when exactly this way of thinking was used against blacks to justify their horrible treatment.
Quote #5
...and now this: breaking up after forty-five years the home of the woman who had been the only mother he, Edmonds, ever knew, who had raised him, fed him from her own breast as she was actually doing her own child, who had surrounded him always with care for his physical body and for his spirit too, teaching him his manners, behavior--to be gentle with his inferiors, honorable with his equals, generous to the weak and considerate of the aged, courteous, truthful and brave to all--who had given him, motherless, without stint or expectation of reward that constant and abiding devotion and love which existed nowhere else in this world for him... (2.3.1.66)
Many critics have seen this loving portrayal as also a stereotype of the self-sacrificing, kindly, motherly African American woman, that is, a "mammy." Thankfully, Faulkner later develops Molly's character beyond this stereotype.
Quote #6
[...] so there had been only the Saturday and Sunday dice and whiskey that had to be paid for until that day six months ago when he saw Mannie, whom he had known all his life, for the first time and said to himself, "Ah'm thru wid all dat," and they married and he rented the cabin from Carothers Edmonds and built a fire on the hearth on their wedding night as the tale told how Lucas Beauchamp, Edmonds' oldest tenant, had done on his forty-five years ago and which had burned ever since. (3.1.8)
Before he married Mannie, Rider was a hard-lovin', hard-partyin' guy who lived with his aunt and uncle and didn't have to pay for food or rent. Mannie changed that overnight. He plans to spend the rest of his life with her. This idea of the woman as a civilizing influence on a man contrasts pretty sharply with the description of Isaac's wife later in this section, who tries to corrupt his ideals using sex.