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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Absalom, Absalom!, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Storytelling, Perspective, and Truth
The South
The Limits of Ambition
Social Taboos, Racism, and Inherited Trauma
Summary
Analysis
On a hot afternoon in September, Quentin sits with Miss Rosa Coldfield in Miss Rosa’s stifling, dim room. The blinds to the office have remained closed for 43 years. Miss Coldfield is dressed all in black, as she has been for the past 43 years. Nobody is sure whom she’s mourning—her sister, her father, or her “nothusband.”
The shut blinds in Miss Rosa’s office and the mourning clothes she’s been wearing for an extraordinary streak of 43 years suggest that she is stuck in the past—though the reason remains unclear. The odd wording of “nothusband” builds intrigue—was there someone she was supposed to marry but did not?
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Quentin listens to Rosa speak. Her voice sounds as though a ghost is haunting it, and Quentin’s attention wavers. Her story forces him to contend with his two selves: the Quentin who will attend Harvard that autumn, and the Quentin who is haunted despite being “still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost.” Having been born and raised in the deep South, this is the fate to which he’s doomed.
The narration immediately emphasizes storytelling and listening, acts that are central to one of the book’s main themes. It also introduces the ghost imagery that recurs throughout the novel and represents how the South’s loss of the Civil War and subsequent failure to adequately acknowledge (and repent for) the slavery that fueled its pre-war economy continue to haunt the South’s people and culture.
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Miss Rosa is talking about Colonel Sutpen, who arrived here “out of nowhere,” accompanied by “a band of strange niggers,” and constructed a plantation. He married Miss Rosa’s much-older sister Ellen and had a son (Henry) and a daughter (Judith) with her. His children should’ve cared for him in old age, but instead “they destroyed him or he destroyed them or something.” And now they’re all dead.
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Miss Rosa says she’s telling all this to Quentin because she figures he’ll pursue a career in writing—it’s what all the “Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen” do these days now that the North has left them with no other opportunities here. Maybe, Miss Rosa suggests, Quentin can write her story down and make money off it. But Quentin knows this isn’t why Miss Rosa is talking to him: it’s because she wants to tell her story.
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Quentin recalls how earlier that day, Miss Rosa Coldfield sent him a note demanding he see her. The request puzzled Quentin. Though he’s known Miss Rosa his whole life, they’ve hardly spoken. Plus, she’s an old woman, and he’s only 20. Still, he headed to Miss Rosa’s after lunch that day. Puzzling over Miss Rosa’s motivations, Quentin speculates that she wants her story told so that people she’ll never meet will hear it and understand “why God let us lose the War.” Only through the suffering and death of Southern men and women “could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth.” But immediately after thinking this, Quentin realizes that this isn’t the truth, either.
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Rosa’s family is famous around Jefferson, Mississippi (where Rosa and Quentin live). Her father, Goodhue Coldfield, was a conscientious objector who hid from Confederate soldiers in his attic and later starved to death there. Her nephew Henry served in the same company as his sister, Judith’s, fiancé. Henry later shot the fiancé at the house the night before the wedding while his sister stood waiting in her wedding dress. Colonel Sutpen himself first came to Mississippi in June 1833 and made a fortune and a family there—until his life came to a “violent […] end.”
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When Quentin returns home that evening, he asks his father, Mr. Compson, why Miss Rosa chose him to tell her story to. Mr. Compson says it’s because she’ll need a man—a young one—to “do it the way she wants it done.” And she picked Quentin for the job because his grandfather (General Compson) was the closest thing Colonel Sutpen had to a real friend. It’s her way of keeping the family secrets within the family, so to speak.
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The narrative returns to Rosa’s story, conveyed in Rosa’s own words. Colonel Sutpen “wasn’t a gentleman,” she notes. He arrived in Yoknapatawpha County with just his horse and guns, and nobody had ever heard of him before. He sought “reputable men” to protect him and a “virtuous woman” to have a child with. Ellen and Rosa’s father (Goodhue Coldfield) gave him this. Rosa doesn’t fault her sister for marrying Sutpen—she was merely a “blind romantic fool,” so young and naïve. Later she’d die “in that house for which she had exchanged pride and peace,” with the daughter (Judith) who was widowed despite never being a bride, and the son (Henry), “a murderer and almost a fratricide.” Ellen had told Rosa to “protect” Judith, though Rosa was only four years older than Judith—practically a child herself.
Rosa explains that marrying Ellen didn’t make Sutpen into “a gentleman”—not that he’d wanted to be one. He just needed the Coldfield name on a wedding license so the townspeople would be forced to respect him. The fact that he needed such “respectability” suggested that whatever he’d run away from was “some opposite of respectability too dark to talk about.” After all, a 25-year-old doesn’t go to the enormous trouble to settle untouched land, plant crops there, and establish a working plantation for no reason.
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Rosa makes no excuses for her choices, she tells Quentin. After all, she had 20 years to see what Thomas Sutpen had been up to. Not that Rosa witnessed Thomas’s schemes firsthand—the raree show he set up was kept secret from the women. Rosa saw a lot during those years, like Judith’s marriage being prohibited for seemingly no reason, and Henry “practically fling[ing] the bloody corpse of his sister’s sweetheart at the hem of her wedding gown.” Rosa explains that she can’t attribute her mistakes to youth, for nobody in the South was allowed to remain young since 1861. Many women in her position—she was orphaned at 20 and had no money—would entertain marrying the man who supported them. Yet Rosa still resents her youthful foolishness.
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Rosa asks Quentin, “Is it any wonder that Heaven saw fit to let us lose?” He says it isn’t. Rosa laments Thomas Sutpen’s choosing her family, of all people he could’ve chosen, to bring down with him. She compares it to a “curse” on both her family and on the South in general.
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Rosa laments having been too young at the time for the story of Ellen, Judith, and Henry to be more than “an ogre-tale.” When Ellen, before her death, asked Rosa to protect Judith, Rosa was too young to know that Thomas Sutpen had done enough to his children simply by “giv[ing] them life.” Now, “It is from themselves they need protection.”
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Literary Devices
Rosa will always remember the first time she saw Thomas and Ellen’s children, Judith and Henry, arrive in the carriage. She’d been three and had woken up that morning anticipating their arrival, feeling as though it was Christmas. Ellen’s face was white, as though there was no blood in it.
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Rosa remembers another time she and Mr. Coldfield went to the house to see Ellen. In this story, she is four and asks her father which room Judith is in, when she really means to ask what Judith saw when she saw “the phaeton instead of the carriage, the tame stableboy instead of the wild man.” Rosa knows as soon as she and her father walk inside the house that Thomas Sutpen isn’t here. Judith is sick in bed, and Ellen is beside her. Their father tells Rosa to go find Henry to play with. “Think of the children,” Mr. Coldfield urges Ellen, to which she exasperatedly replies that that’s all she ever does. Ellen’s facial expression is the same as when she and the children first rolled up in the carriage.
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Rosa and Mr. Coldfield go to Sutpen’s Hundred (his estate) once a year to have dinner, and Ellen and the children come to the Coldfields’ around four times per year and spend the day there. But Sutpen never accompanies them. Rosa is still young enough to believe that it’s Sutpen’s conscience that keeps him from coming.
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Rosa story continues six years after Sutpen first began holding his shows. Ellen has known about the shows from the start. One day, Ellen walks into the ring expecting to see two of Sutpen’s enslaved Black men fighting, but instead she sees her husband fighting one of the enslaved Black men. Ellen arrives just in time to hear Henry’s scream at witnessing the show, and to see a couple of Black people holding him as he screams and throws up.
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Ellen asks the spectators to leave so she and Sutpen can talk in private. Then she asks Sutpen where Judith is. He claims not to know, and he isn’t lying—rather, “his own triumph” has blinded him to all else. He insists to Ellen that he never takes Judith to see the shows—only Henry. Ellen wishes she could believe him. In the present, Rosa explains to Quentin that she didn’t actually witness this scene—she wasn’t there to see Judith and a young Black girl (Clytie) watching the fights from the loft window above.
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