Chapter 5 Summary

Rosa remembers the summer after Bon's first Christmas visit to Jefferson, when she was fourteen. Looking back, she sees this as a formative period in her growth, when she lived for a time with her sister at Sutpen's Hundred, at the same time as Ellen began to encourage her daughter to accept Bon. The old Rosa looks on this summer as a time when she began to feel that she should have been born male. She describes how she imagined Bon in detail, and invented a kind of obsession with him, having secretly gone into Judith's room to look at his picture. She explains how she fantasized that she herself was Bon's lover, as a way of providing what she felt was lacking in Judith's attitude to Bon.

According to Rosa, Sutpen's servant, Wash Jones, came to tell her what had happened at...