There Was a Queen

“There Was a Queen” by William Faulkner depicts the triumph of the New South and the fading away of the “Old South”. This depiction is paralleled to the young Bayard wife, Narcissa, and the last “true” Bayard woman, Miss Jenny. Miss Jenny is the last blood true full blooded member of the Satoris family and she herself is close to death. In direct opposition to Miss Jenny is Narcissa the young wife of the last dead Bayard. Miss Jenny represents the fading South, while Narcissa represents the new age of the South, which is full of change.
Miss Jenny is the Queen referred to in the title. She has been reigning over the family land and slaves ever since the death of the rest of her relatives. As she continues to age, times are drastically changing during this post Civil War period; however she, like most Southerners deeply rooted in their own mindsets, is stubborn to change. Even the house servant Elnora notices this change with the coming of Narcissa and she does not like it either. With much disdain and disgust, Elnora declares that Narcissa is unlike the Sartoris family and has no business attempting to fit in. “I ain’t got nothing against her. I just say let quality consort with quality, and unquality do the same thing.” (734). Elnora (and Miss Jenny) recognizes and feels that Narcissa is unlike the Sartoris family in many ways and she does not have a good feeling about the future changes that may come along with her presence.
Despite her resilience to the changes, she and Elnora must endure them through Narcissa. Narcissa is disrupting Southern traditions as she changes the food they eat. No longer is cornbread or biscuits a normality at the dinner table, but rather they eat sliced bread. Most true old Southerners are willing to shout their love for biscuits and cornbread at the top of their lungs, however with Narcissa representing the “New South”, she is already breaking with once firmly traditions. Narcissa persists in doing things atypical of a normal Southern woman as she brings a Jew home for dinner. Miss Jenny had done well with holding her tongue up until that point. “…she knew at once he was a Jew, and when he spoke to her her outrage became fury and she jerked back in the chair like a striking snake, the motion strong enough to thrust the chair back from the table.” (736). She just could not under any circumstance tolerate a Jew at her dinner table, which is completely understandable, because those were the beliefs steadfastly lodged in her brain. Northerners were the enemy and a Jew was even worse.
As all of these changes continue, Miss Jenny is slowly dying and fading away to the background. The final straw that sealed the fate of the New South completely overtaking the Old South was when the new of Narcissa’s sexual encounter to retrieve old love letters was revealed. Receiving love letters from a man that was not your husband, was in itself bad enough, however to sleep with a man to obtain some sort of “treasure” in return, for whatever reason, was completely unacceptable and uncommon in the Old South. Miss Jenny could not take it. This news was too much for her and she herself realized that this battle was lost. Narcissa was too much for her to combat alone in her old age and fragile state, thus she faded away into death. She placed her bonnet on her head in despair and denied access to the light: “…a slender, erect figure indicated only beside the window framed by the sparse and defunctive Carolina glass.” (742).