Themes
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 narrative switches back to Rosa telling her story to Quentin, picking up after Wash Jones tells her about Bon being killed. Rosa describes how she gathered her meager belongings and traveled in the buggy 12 miles to Sutpen’s Hundred, which she hadn’t done since Ellen died two years ago. She rode “beside that brute” who wasn’t even allowed inside the house before Ellen died, and “whose granddaughter was to supplant” Rosa from her place in Ellen’s bed (which, according to gossip, was a place Rosa coveted).
Readers should note how the tone of the story shifts as Rosa takes over as its narrator. Her striking bitterness, though perhaps warranted, casts doubt on the veracity of her accounts of the events that follow Bon’s death. Notably, this passage suggests that others spread rumors about Rosa wanting to take over Ellen’s old bed—meaning she wanted to be Sutpen’s next wife—yet Wash Jones’s granddaughter apparently took that role from her. Rosa’s defensiveness could suggest that these rumors aren’t as far from the truth as Rosa would like to claim they are, though, of course, readers have no way of knowing this for sure.
Themes
But the people who talk about her can’t describe what Rosa did once she arrived at Sutpen’s Hundred—how she approached the “rotting” place, its dilapidated, empty state somehow “more profound than ruin.” In her story, Rosa approaches Sutpen’s mansion and yells out to Henry, demanding to know what he’s done. She sees Clytie, with her “Sutpen coffee-colored face,” like that of a “sphinx.” Then Rosa calls out to Judith but receives no answer.
Rosa explicitly notes that town rumors can’t be taken as fact, either: in truth, only the people who were in Sutpen’s “rotting” mansion that day know what happened, and only Rosa knows what was going through her mind to convince her to finally move to Sutpen’s Hundred. Clytie’s “Sutpen coffee-colored face” is a nod to Clytie’s mixed-race background: she’s the daughter of Sutpen and one of his enslaved women. In comparing Clytie’s expression to that of a “sphinx,” mythological creatures known to tell cryptic riddles, Rosa implies that Clytie is withholding information, possibly about Henry’s whereabouts, or perhaps what prompted Henry to shoot Bon, or perhaps both.
Themes
Rosa starts to head upstairs, where she believes she’ll find Bon’s bloodied corpse on “that sheetless bed.” Clytie urges her to stop, and Rosa feels it is the house itself, not Clytie, talking to her. She is struck by Clytie addressing her by name—Rosa—as she’d do when Rosa was a child. Many people call Rosa that because they still see her as a child, but Rosa senses that this isn’t Clytie’s intention. When Clytie then touches Rosa’s arm, it makes Rosa stop in her tracks, shout for Clytie not to touch her, and call her the n-word. Rosa remembers how Judith and Clytie would play together and even sleep in the same bed together as children, yet Rosa never even dared touch the same toys that Clytie touched—she was taught to “shun” them and Clytie.
This scene mirrors a scene that will happen much later in the book. Readers should make note of the detail of “that sheetless bed” upstairs and the image of Clytie trying to prevent Rosa from walking up the stairs to find Bon or Henry—they’ll be important later in the story. Rosa’s discomfort at Clytie’s touch, her reluctance to touch anything Clytie touched, and her use of a racial slur for Clytie are likewise notable.
Themes
It’s at this point that Rosa realizes what she “could not, would not, must not believe,” implying that Clytie, too, is a “sister.” She feels foolish for not seeing it before, and she also feels foolish for coming here expecting to see Henry “emerge from some door” as though nothing has happened and urging her to “wake up,” as though the present situation is just a dream.
Rosa finally understands that Clytie is a Sutpen—at least by blood (Sutpen’s quest for respectability in the Old South wouldn’t allow him to claim Clytie, the daughter of one of his enslaved women, as his legitimate daughter). Another critical detail of this scene is the door symbolism: Rosa’ wish for Henry to “emerge from some door” as though nothing has happened symbolically conveys her wish to go backward in time to before Henry shoots Bon. This wish conveys her refusal or inability to acknowledge her present situation and the act of violence that Henry committed against Bon.
Themes
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Rosa, in the present, gets sidetracked by memories of the wistaria she smelled when she was 14. She describes her “barren youth” and feeling like a “man” rather than a woman or girl. She considers how memory is constructed through the senses—sight, touch, and sound—rather than through thoughts. Then she changes the subject, redirecting the story backward in time to the summer after the first Christmas Henry brought Bon home. In this memory, Mr. Coldfield sends Rosa to stay with Ellen. Sutpen is gone. Rosa has never seen Bon—in fact, she never will, not even his corpse—and only knows he exists through Ellen’s talk of him.
Rosa’s inability to tell her story through to the end without slipping into tangents like this one illustrates how difficult it is for her to tell her story. Her focus on her “barren youth” and feeling like a “man” rather than a woman or girl further suggests how stuck in time she feels: symbolically, this reflects her inability to grow, reproduce, and evolve from her past self. Like a biological man, she lacks a womb to facilitate growth and development, and so she remains rooted in place and tied to her traumatic past. This passage also reveals a rather shocking detail: for all the authority Rosa purports to have on the Sutpen saga, she’s far less central to the story than one would think. In fact, she’s never even seen Bon, despite the vivid descriptions of him she puts forth in her stories.
Themes
In the present, Miss Rosa describes her sense of Bon as “a child’s vacant fairy-tale” and insists that she “did not love him,” and if she did love him, it would be as a mother’s love for a child—not the way Judith loved him (or how everyone thought Judith loved him). She never even saw him outside of a photograph she spotted in Judith’s room at Sutpen’s Hundred—and then she suggests that she might even be misremembering that.
This odd passage reaffirms the subjectivity of Rosa’s account of the past. She speaks about Charles Bon and the Sutpens with great authority, yet here she reveals that she never actually saw Bon in person—and might not have even seen a photograph of him.
Themes
Rosa’s story flashes forward to the day she arrives at Sutpen’s Hundred following Bon’s murder. Judith encounters Rosa standing before “the closed door which [Rosa] was not to enter.” Then Judith tells Clytie that Rosa will be staying for dinner. Rosa never sees Bon’s body, and she never walks through the closed door.
Rosa’s inability to walk through the door symbolizes her inability to reckon with the past and with the significance of Henry’s choice to murder Bon, though at this point in the novel, the full significance of Henry’s choice remains unclear.
Themes
Rosa, Judith, and Clytie carry the coffin out of the house that afternoon. Judith’s face is blank and unreadable as she cooks and serves food. Meanwhile, Wash Jones and some other white man construct Bon’s coffin with planks they take from the carriage house. Later, Rosa, Clytie, and Judith carry the coffin to the graveside. Judith doesn’t even weep. Then the three women put the box in the earth.
Continuing a reading of the story as an allegory for the fall of the pre-war South, Bon’s fall from wealthy, cosmopolitan charmer to just another body buried in a clumsy, makeshift coffin parallels the decline that the South experienced during and after the Civil War. Judith’s lack of emotion is curious. It could be that she’s in shock, but it could also be that she knows more about Bon than she’s let on—perhaps she knows about the woman and child in New Orleans.
Themes
People in town will give a bunch of “paltry reasons, all untrue, and be believed” for why Rosa stays at Sutpen’s Hundred following Bon’s death. They’ll say she stays for food, though she could easily have scrounged for or grown her own food. Or they’ll say she stays to have a roof over her head, or that she wants the company. In fact, she simply waits for Sutpen to return—not to marry him, as the townspeople will say—but because for Judith, Clytie, and Rosa, he’s “the only reason for continuing to exist,” for the women know Sutpen will begin to pick up the pieces of Sutpen’s Hundred as soon as he returns from the war.
Rosa continues to recount her choice to move to Sutpen’s Hundred in a bitter, defensive tone. She accuses the townspeople of spreading rumors about all the “paltry reasons” that factored into her choice, none of which (she claims) are true. Rosa’s answer—that she, Clytie, and Judith waited for Sutpen to return because he was “the only reason for continuing to exist” gains deeper significance if one continues to interpret the story as an allegory for the Old South’s demise. Rosa is suggesting that she and the other women need Sutpen—the image of pre-war Southern respectability—to return to restore order and meaning to their lives. They don’t know how to make sense of life devoid of that familiar social and hierarchical structure (of course, one would expect that Clytie, as a former enslaved woman, has more complicated feelings about the matter, but the book doesn’t delve into that).
Themes
So, the three women wait inside the old house, surviving but taking no pleasure in life. They tend the garden, which provides most of their food, and they sleep in the same room to cut back on firewood. In the winter, soldiers begin to return, and the women feed them what they can, though they are afraid of them. They talk about Sutpen and about the war ending, and what will happen once he returns: how they’ll begin “the Herculean task” of rebuilding Sutpen’s Hundred. They talk about Henry, albeit “quietly.” They never speak of Bon, though Judith sometimes goes to clear the leaves from his grave.
Clytie, Judith, and Rosa exist in a state of limbo. Where once Sutpen’s Hundred was the embodiment of Southern success and respectability, now it is merely a shell of its former state. At this point, the women still seem willing to believe that they can accomplish “the Herculean task” of rebuilding the estate and restoring it to its former glory—they seem unwilling to admit that the social fabric that gave the estate its glory will be irreparably destroyed by the South’s loss of the Civil War, just as they are unwilling to speak of Bon’s death.
Themes
Sutpen returns in January, and he and Rosa are engaged within three months. (Rosa, in the present, gives no excuses for her behavior, though she contends that there are many reasons a woman would marry a man, from the possibility for wealth or the fear of dying alone, which people say all women have.)
Rosa continues to speak defensively of her choice to accept Sutpen’s proposal. It seems that there’s something about her relationship with Sutpen (or perhaps her genuine romantic feelings toward him) that she’s too ashamed or upset about to address directly. Once more, readers should note the unreliability of Rosa’s (and all characters’) accounts of the past.
Themes
Sutpen arrives home and greets Judith, who remains rigid and silent. The two of them speak in clipped sentences, with Judith filling Sutpen in on Henry’s disappearance following his murder of Bon. Then, for the first time, she bursts into tears. Sutpen hardly responds to the news of Henry’s murder of Bon. (This, Rosa explains in the present, was because “he himself was not there,” only “a shell of him” came back.) They were right about Sutpen’s intentions with the place: he immediately set about getting the house and plantation back in working order. That the place was in such a sorry state did not intimidate him.
Judith’s tears are curious—she hardly reacted to Bon’s murder back when it happened. It’s possible that she and Bon (contrary to Mr. Compson’s version of events) did have legitimate feelings for each other. However, as always, it’s impossible to say whose version of events gets closest to the truth: Judith and Bon are both dead in the novel’s present, and so neither can vouch for what they were feeling back then. Also important in this passage is Rosa’s description of Sutpen as returning from the war as “a shell of” the man he was before. This suggests that she’s starting to accept that it will be impossible to rebuild the estate to its former glory: the pre-war South will never be able to exist as it once was.
Themes
Rosa and the others hardly see Sutpen that winter; he’s often gone all day. It’s that season when they learn the meaning of “carpet-bagger,” and when women start locking their doors at night, fearing the “negro uprisings” they’ve heard talk about. Meanwhile, armed men gather in “secret meeting places,” though Sutpen doesn’t join them. Instead, he argues that if every man in the South set about repairing the land like he’s doing, then “the general land and the South would save itself.” Rosa watches Sutpen and realizes that he’s not fighting against the land: he’s fighting the “weight of the changed new time itself,” an impossible task.
A “carpet-bagger” (or carpetbagger) is a historical term Southerners used to refer to Northerners who traveled to the South after the Civil War to (purportedly) take advantage of the decimated regional economy and spread Republican views (which included the right of newly freed former enslaved people to vote and be elected to office). This passage makes clear that the South’s loss of the war has fundamentally altered its social, economic, and cultural landscape—despite residents’ efforts and longings to restore things to the way they were. The vague mention of “secret meeting places” seems to refer to KKK gatherings. The fact that Sutpen doesn’t participate in these meetings is curious and sheds light on what motivates his ambition. He doesn’t seem to have an innate sense of racial inequality like the other Klansmen do—he’s more invested in the idea of respectability the Old South promotes, and racism and slavery (in Sutpen’s thinking) are merely incidental to that respectability.
Themes
Then one day, while working in the garden, Rosa looks up and sees Sutpen looking back at her. (In the present, she’s adamant that he didn’t give her a look of love—rather, it was simply “a sudden over-burst of light, illumination.” And yet she sees no reason to reject him.) Sutpen proposes marriage to Rosa with no flourish, promising her that he’ll be no worse a husband to Rosa than he was to Ellen. This is the extent of their courtship. Sutpen doesn’t talk of love or marriage, only “the very dark forces of fate which he had evoked and dared” and out of which he’d made Sutpen’s Hundred. It’s as though he feels he can turn back the clock 20 years just by slipping the ring on Rosa’s finger.
Once more, Rosa assumes a defensive, rationalizing tone when speaking of her and Sutpen’s romance. It seems possible that her feelings for him were more genuine than she’s letting on in the present—and that his apparent rejection of her stung more personally and emotionally than she can admit, perhaps even to herself. Meanwhile, Sutpen’s talk of “the very dark forces of fate” which compelled him to create Sutpen’s Hundred suggests that he never reciprocated those feelings. He sees her as he sees all other people: as an opportunity or obstacle to his ultimate goal of respectability.
Themes
After the engagement, Sutpen doesn’t look at Rosa again. She feels she could have gone home, and he wouldn’t have noticed—she only fills the role that “any young female no blood kin to him represent[s].” (As Rosa, in the present, relates this part of the story to Quentin, her tone grows vengeful and more bitter.)
Rosa’s observation that she, to Sutpen, was the same as “any young female no blood kin to him represent[s]” implies her belief that Sutpen never really loved her. Instead, he was merely using Rosa (as he used Ellen before her) as a means to achieve his ambitious end: to birth an heir to continue his legacy of respectability and success.
Themes
Meanwhile, nobody sets a date for the wedding. One day, Sutpen insults Rosa, yelling for her to “come” to him—after not addressing her once since he slipped the ring on her finger.
Here, Rosa vaguely confirms that her engagement to Sutpen ended after Sutpen insulted her in some way, calling for her to “come” as though she were a dog, but the details of the insult are apparently too shameful or upsetting for Rosa to address at this time.
Themes
In the present, Rosa scornfully talks of all the rumors people in town have spread about why she left Sutpen’s Hundred and didn’t go through with the marriage. They say she couldn’t “forgive him” for insulting her or for “being dead” and that that’s why she returned to Jefferson, where she has spent the last four decades alone in her empty house.
Rosa claims that Sutpen’s insulting her wasn’t what caused her to leave Sutpen’s Hundred, yet her behavior in the intervening years—living as a shut-in and harboring a deeply bitter grudge against him—suggests there might be some truth to those rumors.
Themes
But, Rosa assures Quentin, she did forgive Sutpen for the insult. In fact, she feels she “had nothing to forgive” in the first place. For she “never owned him,” nor did Ellen, nor Jones’s daughter (who, it’s rumored, died in a Memphis brothel). It was impossible for anyone to own him, “Because he was not articulated in this world. He was a walking shadow.”
Rosa’s insistence that she “had nothing to forgive” Sutpen for in the first place gestures toward the impersonal nature of Sutpen’s cruelty. Sutpen is never cruel for cruelty’s sake—his behavior never has anything to do with other people and everything to do with realizing his ambition. He lives apart from the world and the broader human story, and that is why nobody in his life ever “owned him.” Rosa seems to find a great sadness in this fact, describing Sutpen as “a walking shadow,” the hint of a physical presence.
Themes
Miss Rosa’s story trails off as Quentin stops listening and considers how he, too, cannot walk through “that door.” He imagines the interaction between Henry and Judith when Henry told Judith about Bon’s murder. Then Rosa interrupts Quentin’s daydreaming to tell him that “something” is living “in that house.” Quentin assumes she’s talking about Clytie, but Rosa ominously corrects him: “No. Something living in it. Hidden in it. It has been out there for four years, living hidden in that house.”
The suspenseful end to this chapter features elements of the Southern Gothic genre, with Rosa’s suggestion that a grotesque presence has been hiding in Sutpen’s derelict estate for the past four years. It is not clear whether Miss Rosa’s shocking admission is true or whether she is merely mistaken—she’s an elderly shut-in who’s had minimal access to the outside world for the past 43 years, after all, so how could she possibly know what’s going on inside Sutpen’s house?
Themes
