Quentin Compson is an interesting vessel for Miss Coldfield to pass along this story given the obvious similarities between his relationship with Caddie and Judith and Henry Sutpen’s relationship. Both Quentin and Henry love their sister in a way that goes beyond typical sibling love. Both are obsessed with the purity of their sister and trying to prevent an outsider from penetrating through the purity of their sister by taking her virginity. In Quentin’s case, he knows that he cannot stop Caddie from seeing other men. Caddie thus loses her virginity, and as if grasping for straws, Quentin tries to convince her to lie and tell the family that in fact Quentin is the only man she’s been with and is the father of her unborn child. Henry, on the other hand, has more control over Judith. Or, in another sense, Judith does not have any sense of autonomy like Caddie, and allows herself to be moved like a chess piece into a corner of the board and left to wait until she is needed again. The love triangle between Judith, Henry, and Charles Bon is an interesting one in the way that each character does not love the other two for who they are, but what they represent and replace.

Henry’s love of his sister clearly has an incestuous aspect to it. Quentin’s father recalls that, “the town knew that between Henry and Judith there had been a relationship closer than traditional loyalty of brother and sister even; a curious relationship (62).” However, it seems that Henry doesn’t necessarily love his sister so much as he is merely (like Quentin) obsessed with the idea of her purity, and the inventible act of that purity being removed by another man, an outsider. In this way, I think it is clear that Henry looks to Bon more as his ideal companion than his sister Judith. Because Henry seems to have such a close relationship with Bon, arguably a brother-like relationship, he views Bon as the clear candidate for Judith’s mate. “The brother realizing that the sister’s virginity must be destroyed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride” (77). In the first part of this quote, we can see that Henry uses Bon as a replacement for himself in his desire to be Judith’s husband, a desire he knows cannot become reality. At the same time, this second part of the quote reveals the fact that Henry is also using Judith as a replacement for himself in his desire to be “despoiled” by Bon. Henry knows that his desire for both his sister and his friend cannot be fulfilled in the society in which he lives. So instead he places both Judith and Bon in a situation in which they will be united as replacements for Henry’s dual fantasies. 

Bon has similar feelings for Henry and uses Judith as a replacement to fulfill his forbidden desire to be with Henry. “Perhaps in [Bon’s] fatalism he loved Henry the more of the better of the two, seeing perhaps in the sister merely the shadow, the woman vessel with which to consummate the love whose actual object was the youth” (86). For both Bon and Henry, Judith is a mere vessel with which to fill forbidden desires. Judith, for her part, seems to lack any desire to go against the wishes of either Henry or Bon. We learn that, “[Judith] must have seen him in fact with exactly the same eyes that Henry saw him with” (75).  They both see Bon as this outsider, a glamorous foreigner who can perhaps free them from the fate of Sutpen’s Hundred. However, Judith does nothing to change her fate. She merely waits for her future to be decided by others. After Bon writes to her and confirms their engagement, yet says, “I cannot say when to expect me” (104), we learn that Judith simply began to make her wedding gown. We do not learn if Judith anxiously waited for word from Bon, only that she waited. We do not learn that Judith was filled with joy by the proposal, only that she accepted the proposal. While Judith appears to lack desire, Henry and Bon are both consumed with desires that cannot be fulfilled, and use Judith as a replacement for the lover who they cannot have.