Rosa Coldfield

Rosa Ellen Coldfield Sutpen represents the scorned woman transformed into avenging narrator, spending fifty years reconstructing the history of the Ellen Coldfield Sutpen family through the lens of her own betrayal. At the novel's opening, she is an elderly woman still vibrating with barely suppressed rage, still determined to convince anyone who will listen that Thomas Sutpen is the architect of her ruin and the ruin of the entire region. Her eloquence is undeniable; her passion is palpable; yet the reader gradually comes to understand that Rosa's version of events is deeply inflected by her own disappointed desires and thwarted expectations. She has transformed her personal romantic tragedy into an epic narrative of demonic villainy, casting herself as the victim of Ellen Coldfield Sutpen's inhuman ambition and cruelty. Yet beneath her bitter denunciations, one senses a woman who loved—or believed she loved—and who has never quite forgiven the world for refusing to grant her that love. Her black dress, her intense eyes, her relentless verbal assault on Ellen Coldfield Sutpen's memory all suggest a woman who has made her grievance the central fact of her existence, who has built a kind of terrible monument to her own pain.