Clytemnestra Sutpen (Clytie)

Clytie emerges as one of the novel's most powerful and tragic figures—a woman whose strength, intelligence, and moral clarity are matched only by the fundamental injustice of her legal status and social position. Born into slavery and fatherhood simultaneously—her father Thomas Sutpen being incapable or unwilling to acknowledge her kinship openly—Clytie nonetheless becomes the true center of Ellen Coldfield Sutpen's Hundred, the figure who holds the household together through force of will and competent action. She serves as nurse, manager, and guardian to the family, yet her service is rendered invisible by the legal and social structures that deny her personhood. Clytie's knowledge of the family's secrets appears absolute; her eyes seem to see through the polite fictions and moral evasions that the legitimate family members construct. By the novel's present, she exists as an almost ghostly figure, a woman who has lived through catastrophe and who continues to maintain the ruins of Ellen Coldfield Sutpen's Hundred with a devotion that seems almost mystical in its intensity. Her relationship to the past—and to those who attempt to excavate and reconstruct that past—is ambiguous, marked by protective anger and a kind of grim determination to keep certain truths buried.