Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

First published: 1936

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: Nineteenth century

Locale: Mississippi

Principal Characters

• Thomas Sutpen, owner of Sutpen’s Hundred
• Ellen Coldfield Sutpen, his wife
• Henry and Judith, their children
• Rosa Coldfield, Ellen’s younger sister
• Goodhue Coldfield, Ellen and Rosa’s father
• Charles Bon, Thomas Sutpen’s son by his first marriage
• Quentin Compson, Rosa Coldfield’s young friend
• Shreve McCannon, Quentin’s roommate at Harvard

The Story

In the summer of 1909, as Quentin Compson is preparing to go to Harvard, old Rosa Coldfield insists upon telling him the whole infamous story of Thomas Sutpen, whom she calls a demon. According to Miss Rosa, he brought terror and tragedy to all who had dealings with him.

In 1833, Sutpen came to Jefferson, Mississippi, with a fine horse and two pistols and no known past. He lived mysteriously for a while among people at the hotel, and after a short time he disappeared from the area. He purchased one hundred square miles of uncleared land from the Chickasaws and had it recorded at the land office. When he returned with a wagonload of blacks, a French architect, and a few tools and wagons, he was as uncommunicative as ever. At once, he set about clearing land and building a mansion. For two years he labored, and during all that time he rarely saw or visited his acquaintances in Jefferson. People wondered about the source of his money. Some claimed that he stole it somewhere in his mysterious comings and goings. Then, for three years, his house remained unfinished, without windowpanes or furnishings, while Sutpen busied himself with his crops. Occasionally he invited Jefferson men to his plantation to hunt, entertaining them with liquor, cards, and combats between his giant slaves—combats in which he himself sometimes joined for the sport.

At last, he disappeared once more, and when he returned, he had furniture and furnishings elaborate and fine enough to make his great house a splendid showplace. Because of his mysterious actions, sentiment in the village turned against him. This hostility, however, subsided somewhat when Sutpen married Ellen Coldfield, daughter of the highly respected Goodhue Coldfield.

Miss Rosa and Quentin’s father share some of Sutpen’s revelations. Because Quentin is away at college, many of the things he knows about Sutpen’s Hundred come to him in letters from home. Other details he learns during talks with his father. He learns of Ellen Sutpen’s life as mistress of the strange mansion in the wilderness. He learns how she discovered her husband fighting savagely with one of his slaves. Young Henry Sutpen fainted, but Judith, the daughter, watched from the haymow with interest and delight. Ellen thereafter refused to reveal her true feelings and ignored the village gossip about Sutpen’s Hundred.

The children grew up. Young Henry, so unlike his father, attended the university at Oxford, Mississippi, and there he met Charles Bon, a rich planter’s grandson. Unknown to Henry, Charles was his half brother, Sutpen’s son by his first marriage. Unknown to all of Jefferson, Sutpen got his money as the dowry of his earlier marriage to Charles Bon’s West Indian mother, a wife he discarded when he learned she was part black. Charles Bon became engaged to Judith Sutpen. The engagement was suddenly broken off for a probation period of four years. In the meantime, the American Civil War began. Charles and Henry served together. Thomas Sutpen became a colonel.

Goodhue Coldfield took a disdainful stand against the war. He barricaded himself in his attic, and his daughter, Rosa, was forced to put his food in a basket let down by a long rope. His store was looted by Confederate soldiers. One night, alone in his attic, he died. Judith, in the meantime, waited patiently for her lover. She carried his letter, written at the end of the four-year period, to Quentin’s grandmother. Some time later, Wash Jones, the handyman on the Sutpen plantation, came to Miss Rosa’s door with the crude announcement that Charles Bon was dead, killed at the gate of the plantation by his half brother and former friend. Henry fled. Judith buried her lover in the Sutpen family plot on the plantation. Rosa, whose mother died when she was born, went to Sutpen’s Hundred to live with her niece. Ellen was already dead. It was Rosa’s conviction that she could help Judith.

Colonel Thomas Sutpen returned. His slaves were taken away, and he was burdened with new taxes on his overrun land and ruined buildings. He planned to marry Rosa Coldfield, more than ever desiring an heir now that Judith had vowed spinsterhood and Henry had become a fugitive. His son, Charles Bon, whom he might, in desperation, have permitted to marry his daughter, was dead.

Rosa, insulted when she understood the true nature of his proposal, returned to her father’s ruined house in the village. She spent the rest of her miserable life pondering the fearful intensity of Thomas Sutpen, whose nature, in her outraged belief, seemed to partake of the devil himself.

Quentin, during his last vacation, learns more about the Sutpen tragedy and reveals much of the story to Shreve McCannon, his roommate, who listens with all of a Northerner’s misunderstanding and indifference. Quentin and his father visit the Sutpen graveyard, where they see a little path and a hole leading into Ellen Sutpen’s grave. Generations of opossums live there. Over her tomb and that of her husband stands a marble monument from Italy. Sutpen himself died in 1869. In 1867, he took young Milly Jones, Wash Jones’s granddaughter. After she had a child, a girl, Wash Jones killed Thomas Sutpen.

Judith and Charles Bon’s son, his child by an octoroon woman who had brought her child to Sutpen’s Hundred when he was eleven years old, died in 1884 of smallpox. The boy earlier married a black woman, and they had a son, James Bond. Rosa Coldfield placed headstones on their graves, and on Judith’s gravestone she inscribed a fearful message.

In the summer of 1910, Rosa Coldfield confides to Quentin that she feels there is still someone living at Sutpen’s Hundred. Together the two go there at night and discover Clytie, the aged daughter of Thomas Sutpen and a slave. More important, they discover Henry Sutpen himself hiding in the ruined old house. He returned, he tells them, four years before, coming back to die. James Bond watches Rosa and Quentin as they depart. Rosa returns to her home, and Quentin goes back to college.

Quentin’s father writes to tell him the tragic ending of the Sutpen story. Months later, Rosa sends an ambulance to the ruined plantation house, for she finally determined to bring her nephew, Henry, into the village to live with her so that he could get decent care. Clytie, seeing the ambulance, is afraid that Henry will be arrested for the murder of Charles Bon. In desperation she sets fire to the old house, burning herself and Henry Sutpen to death. Only James Bond, the last surviving descendant of Thomas Sutpen, escapes. No one knows where he went, for he is never seen again. Miss Rosa takes to her bed and dies soon afterward, in the winter of 1910. Quentin tells the story to his roommate because it seems to him, somehow, to be the story of the whole South, a tale of deep passions, tragedy, ruin, and decay.

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