At the heart of Absalom, Absalom! lies an incest plot centered around three of Thomas Sutpen’s children: Henry Sutpen, Judith Sutpen, and Charles Bon. Bon is Henry and Judith’s half-brother (unbeknownst to Henry and Judith), and his mother was part Black, whereas the Sutpens are white. Bon’s Black ancestry further complicates the novel’s incest plot, adding another type of social taboo in the world of the novel: interracial relationships. When Henry brings Bon home to Sutpen’s Hundred for Christmas in 1860, Bon initiates a romance with Judith that later leads to an engagement. Eventually, Sutpen tells Henry the truth about Bon’s identity (it’s assumed, though Faulkner leaves some room for ambiguity, that Bon knows all along that he is related to the family). But rather than admonish Bon for his attempt to commit incest, Henry honors his loyalty to Bon, rejects his birthright, and leaves Sutpen’s Hundred with Bon the next morning. In fact, he ultimately gives Bon his blessing to marry Judith, justifying it on the grounds that kings and other nobility “have done it.”
However, when Sutpen reunites with Henry four years later and reveals to him a second secret about Bon—his Black ancestry—Henry revokes his support of the marriage. In short, he finds the taboo of incest more tolerable than the taboo of a mixed-race man marrying his sister—so much so that Henry murders Bon to prevent the marriage. Not only does Henry’s murder of Bon reveal the depth of his racism, but the racially motivated act sets into motion a series of events that affect the siblings and their family for the rest of their lives. In a sense, the killing haunts the Sutpens, much like the genetic consequences of incest can affect a family for generations: the murder “dooms” Judith to spinsterhood as it dooms Henry to a life of running from the law. Meanwhile, the mystery and horror surrounding the murder captivates and haunts Southerners for decades into the future, with characters like Quentin plagued by the lingering presence of ghosts he believes he has inherited against his will. In paralleling two taboos in the world of the novel—incest and interracial relationships—Faulkner symbolically compares the inherited genetic abnormalities that can result from incest with the racist attitudes that persist in the American South. In so doing, he sheds light on the rampant racism and the inherited trauma of slavery that lingered in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery.
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Social Taboos, Racism, and Inherited Trauma Quotes in Absalom, Absalom!
Maybe you have to know anybody awful well to love them but when you have hated somebody for forty-three years you will know them awful well so maybe it’s better then maybe it’s fine then because after forty-three years they cant any longer surprise you or make you either very contented or very mad.
It was a day of listening too—the listening, the hearing in 1909 even yet mostly that which he already knew since he had been born in and still breathed the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833 […].
He brought the two women deliberately; he probably chose them with the same care and shrewdness with which he chose the other livestock—the horses and mules and cattle—which he bought later on.
There was no time, no interval, no niche in the crowded days when he could have courted Judith. You can not even imagine him and Judith alone together. Try to do it and the nearest you can come is a projection of them while the two actual people were doubtless separate and elsewhere—two shades pacing, serene and untroubled by flesh, in a summer garden […].
“[…] Oh he was shrewd, this man whom for weeks now Henry was realising that he knew less and less, this stranger immersed and oblivious now in the formal, almost ritual, preparations for the visit, finicking almost like a woman over the fit of the new coat which he would have ordered for Henry, forced Henry to accept for this occasion, by means of which the entire impression which Henry was to receive from the visit would be established before they even left the house, before Henry ever saw the woman: and Henry, the countryman, the bewildered, with the subtle tide already setting beneath him toward the point where he must either betray himself and his entire upbringing and thinking, or deny the friend for whom he had already repudiated home and kin and all […].”
Now you will ask me why I stayed there. I could say, I do not know, could give ten thousand paltry reasons, all untrue, and be believed:—
I waited for him exactly as Judith and Clytie waited for him: because now he was all we had, all that gave us any reason for continuing to exist, to eat food and sleep and wake and rise again: knowing that he would need us, knowing as we did (who knew him) that he would begin at once to salvage what was left of Sutpen’s Hundred and restore it.
Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all […]
“Yes,” Quentin said. He sounds just like Father he thought, glancing (his face quiet, reposed, curiously almost sullen) for a moment at Shreve leaning forward into the lamp, his naked torso pink-gleaming and baby-smooth, cherubic, almost hairless, the twin moons of his spectacles glinting against his moonlike rubicund face, smelling (Quentin) the cigar and the wistaria, seeing the fireflies blowing and winking in the September dusk.
But you were not listening, because you knew it all already, had learned, absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and do […]
“So he just wanted a grandson,” he said. “That was all he was after. Jesus, the South is fine, isn’t it. It’s better than the theatre, isn’t it. It’s better than Ben Hur, isn’t it. No wonder you have to come away now and then, isn’t it.”
“[…] ‘I found that she was not and could never be, through no fault of her own, adjunctive or incremental to the design which I had in mind, so I provided for her and put her aside.’ […]”
There would be no deep breathing tonight.
—Yes. What else can I do now? I gave him the choice. I have been giving him the choice for four years.
Wait. Listen. I’m not trying to be funny, smart. I just want to understand it if I can and I dont know how to say it better. Because it’s something my people haven’t got. Or if we have got it, it all happened long ago across the water and so now there aint anything to look at every day to remind us of it. We dont live among defeated grandfathers and freed slaves […] and bullets in the dining room table and such, to be always reminding us to never forget.
“Yes. I remember your grandpaw. You go up there and make her come down. Make her go away from here. Whatever he done, me and Judith and him have paid it out. You go and get her. Take her away from here.”
