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Chapter 1
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
The summer air smells of wistaria. It’s twilight, and Quentin sits outside with his father, Mr. Compson, waiting for it to be time to listen to Miss Rosa. Mr. Compson describes to Quentin the occasion of Colonel Sutpen’s arrival. In Mr. Compson’s telling, Sutpen arrives in town on a Sunday morning in June. The bells ring as everyone exits church. From across the village square, men gathered around Holston House, the town inn, to see a stranger’s arrival. They whisper his name to one another: Sutpen.
This passage, which is told form Mr. Compson’s perspective, portrays Sutpen in a more positive light than the passages told from Miss Rosa’s perspective in the previous chapter. Mr. Compson depicts Sutpen as an enigma of mythic proportions—he romanticizes Sutpen for his mysterious past where Rosa condemns him.
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Sutpen is 25 when he arrives in Jefferson, but this is impossible to tell, as he’s so thin and ill-looking. He has a room in the Holston House and leaves early each morning, though nobody knows where he goes. He never drinks at the Holston House bar, and it’s only years later that General Compson (Quentin’s grandfather) learns that this is because he had no money to pay for drinks. The only place the townspeople can interact with Sutpen is in the lounge.
Sutpen is a mystery to the people of Jefferson, and they hold this against him. They don’t know his age, where he comes from, or what he does all day. That he arrives in Jefferson thin and ill-looking, and the fact that he doesn’t drink at the Holston House because he cannot afford to, suggests that he comes from modest means—at this point, he’s a far cry from the wealthy landowner Miss Rosa knew him to be. Thus, Faulkner establishes the Sutpen saga as the story of a man’s ambition and determination to make a name for himself—and, it seems, given Rosa’s earlier allusion to Sutpen’s “violent” demise, the limitations of that ambition to ensure his success.
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Later, the townspeople find out that Sutpen has bought 100 square miles of untouched land in town from a Chickasaw Indian agent, which he paid for with Spanish coin. Not long after, he leaves town and returns with a man with a “harried Latin face,” an architect he’s hired to build the house who apparently comes from Martinique. The man survives on venison and lives in a tent for two years, as Sutpen doesn’t pay him.
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Stories about “Sutpen’s wild negroes” spread after people observe a band of Sutpen’s enslaved men, who speak no English, chase a deer into a swamp. The men were desperate for a meal after going days without food. General Compson once told his son, Quentin’s father, that Sutpen didn’t raise his voice to his enslaved men—instead, he controlled them by “forbearance rather than by brute fear.” It takes Sutpen and his 20 enslaved men two years to complete the mansion, which is located 12 miles from Jefferson in a grove of cedar and oak trees. The house remains empty and unpainted for three years, puzzling the townspeople.
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Not long after, Sutpen starts to invite men to his land, Sutpen’s Hundred, to hunt, drink, play cards, and camp out in the empty rooms of his mansion. On rare occasions, he orders his enslaved men to fight, sometimes participating in the fights himself. This goes on for three years, during which Sutpen also plants seed cotton, which General Compson loaned him. General Compson also offered to lend Sutpen money for furniture for the mansion, but Sutpen declined the offer. The women in town guess what Sutpen’s next goal will be: finding a wife. They start to assess the young women around town to predict which woman’s dowry Sutpen will covet to achieve the “respectability” that Miss Rosa believes is his main goal.
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Sutpen begins the next “phase” of his plan three years after the mansion’s completion, walking into the Methodist church and selecting Goodhue Coldfield as someone he can use to successfully complete his next project. The decision shocks the town at first, as Mr. Coldfield is a merchant of modest means and seemingly has little to offer Sutpen. Then they remember that he has a daughter of marriageable age, Ellen, though the villagers find it hard to “think of love in connection with Sutpen.” From that day forth, no more hunting parties gather at Sutpen’s Hundred. Now, they only see Sutpen around town, and he’s no longer “loafing, idling.” Instead, he visits Mr. Coldfield’s store.
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Sutpen then abruptly leaves Jefferson for the second time. However, things are different upon his second return, which happens a few months after his departure: now, he returns as “a public enemy” due to the many luxury goods he brings with him. Through rumors, they hear that he acquired these things through shady business dealings.
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One day, the sheriff and a group of men head to Sutpen’s Hundred to arrest Sutpen, figuring he must have made his fortune illegally. On their way there, they encounter Sutpen headed into town. They accompany Sutpen into town and confront him on the village square. Sutpen removes his new hat and uses it to gesture grandly in the posse’s direction. Then, with a bouquet of flowers in hand, he marches inside Mr. Coldfield’s house and remains there for a long time. When he emerges, he’s no longer carrying the flowers. He proposed to Ellen, but the crowd arrests him on the spot and so doesn’t learn this detail until later. General Compson and Mr. Coldfield go to the jail later to pay Sutpen’s bond and free him.
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Ellen and Sutpen’s wedding takes place in the Methodist church in June of 1838, exactly five years after Sutpen first arrived in Jefferson. Sutpen’s arrest was the direct result of business dealings in which Mr. Coldfield joined him, though Coldfield pulled out once his “conscience refused to sanction it” any longer. Still, Mr. Compson stresses in his telling, Mr. Coldfield allows his daughter to marry this man of whom he doesn’t approve.
Ellen cries at the wedding. It’s a grand affair, something “the aunt” convinced Mr. Coldfield to fund. Sutpen didn’t ask for a big wedding but welcomed it, wanting everyone to see “the stainless wife and the unimpeachable father-in-law” he’s gained. Still, on the outside, he feigns disapproval, and in the end it’s Ellen’s tears and the aunt’s persuasiveness that make Mr. Coldfield agree to fund the elaborate affair.
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The night before the wedding, the aunt goes to every house in town and demands that the townspeople attend the wedding, hysterically daring them not to come. The next day, a large crowd gathers outside the church, but only 10 people enter to attend the ceremony. Ellen pretends not to notice—perhaps out of pride.
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After Ellen exits the church, people throw clumps of dirt at her, and the crowd watches as she “shrink[s] into the shelter of [Sutpen’s] arm.” Sutpen leads Ellen into the carriage. Nobody throws anything else. Mr. Compson, in the present, suspects that Ellen likely erased her memory of that evening with all her tears.
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