Absalom, Absalom! Study Guide

Regarded as one of the most celebrated American writers and a leading figure in Southern literature, Faulkner is known for his experimental writing style, use of stream of consciousness, and works set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner would move with his family to Oxford, Mississippi in 1902, where he would live for most of the remainder of his life. As a child, Faulkner listened to his family tell him many stories about their experiences in northern Mississippi, and these greatly influenced his writing. He later attended the University of Mississippi at Oxford but dropped out in 1920 after only three semesters to pursue a writing career. He worked odd jobs for a time before moving to New Orleans, then a popular spot for bohemians and artists. In New Orleans he shifted his focus from poetry to prose and developed the modernist style that would define his later works. He published his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, in 1926, a work that was heavily influenced by his mentor, Sherwood Anderson. He wrote Flags in the Dust, his first novel set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, in 1927. Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury, one of his most famous books, in 1929. His first short story collection (These 13) was published in 1931 and contains most of his most widely read stories, including “A Rose for Emily” and “That Evening Sun.” Absalom, Absalom! was published in 1936 to mixed critical reviews, though in 2009 a panel of judges for the Oxford American would deem it the best Southern novel of all time. Faulkner would go on to receive the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. He began work on his final novel, The Reivers, in 1961. Faulkner died in 1962 after sustaining a serious injury from falling form his horse; he is buried alongside his family in Oxford.

Absalom, Absalom! takes place before, during, and in the aftermath of the American Civil War and traces the cultural and economic transformations the region underwent in the aftermath of the war. Prior to the Civil War, agriculture was at heart of the South’s economy, and wealthy plantation owners profited mightily off the labor of enslaved Black people. President Abraham Lincoln’s issue of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863 changed the legal status of the country’s 3.5 million enslaved people: the executive order liberated enslaved people who escaped their owners and managed to flee to Union lines or who lived in areas taken over by Union troops. Following the Confederacy’s loss of the war and the subsequent emancipation of enslaved Black people, the South was in a state of ruin; most banks and railroads were bankrupt, former plantation land was seized and redistributed to former enslaved people, and the average income in the South dropped to nearly 40 percent of that in the North. But through a process known as Reconstruction (1865–1877), President Andrew Johnson returned this land to the prewar landowners. The only conditions were that the landowners had to remain loyal to the Union, honor the Union’s abolition of slavery, and pay off war debt. Other than this, Johnson—an advocate of states’ rights—gave the former Confederacy the liberty to rebuild on their own terms. In response, many Southern states created discriminatory laws called “Black codes,” which restricted Black people’s economic activities and limited their freedom. Reconstruction in Mississippi (where Absalom, Absalom! is set) was particularly radical, employing codes called “vagrancy” laws to control the movement of Black people throughout the state and punishing them for failure to adhere to so-called “Old South” etiquette. In Absalom, Absalom!, Sutpen’s failure to acknowledge his mixed-race son, Charles Bon, may be read as an allegory for the South’s failure to adequately repent for its legacy of slavery and acknowledge the civil rights—and humanity—of its newly freed Black population.

Most of Faulkner’s novels (including Absalom, Absalom!) are set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional county Faulkner created based on Lafayette County, Mississippi. Another of Faulkner’s works set in Yoknapatawpha County is The Sound and the Fury (which also features one of Absalom Absalom!’s main characters, Quentin Compson). Like Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury examines the legacy of slavery in the American South and follows the tragic arc of a dysfunctional Southern family, the Compsons. Faulkner’s novel Light in August is also set in Yoknapatawpha County. Like Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, it is told in an experimental, modernist style, and it examines in the American South during the interwar period. Absalom, Absalom!, and Faulkner’s writing as a whole, falls under the genre of Southern Gothic literature, which (as its name suggests) contains Gothic elements with a focus on the American South. Other notable authors writing in this genre include Flannery O’Conner, who is best known for her short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find and her novel Wise Blood. Another notable author of Southern Gothic literature is Eudora Welty, who is best known for her short fiction and her novel The Optimist’s Daughter.