Absalom, Absalom! takes place in Mississippi before, during, and after the American Civil War. Thomas Sutpen’s rise and fall throughout this time may be read as an allegory for the American South in a broader sense, examining how the South’s legacy of slavery continues to haunt the region in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Confederacy (comprised of Southern states that seceded from the Union) experienced great economic decline following its defeat in the Civil War, in part because slavery—which drove the South’s agricultural economy—was abolished. But almost immediately after, a period called Reconstruction effectively allowed former Confederate states to rebuild themselves on their own terms. This led to a series of racist, discriminatory laws against the region’s Black population aimed at restoring the South’s pre-war culture and thriving economy—while simultaneously failing to atone for or acknowledge the legacy of slavery that sustained that culture.
In the novel, Sutpen’s rise and fall mirror the South’s stubborn commitment to its old, racist ideals and inability to acknowledge the legacy of slavery. Sutpen’s life centers around his “design,” an ambitious plan he comes up with as child after an enslaved Black man disrespects him (or, at least, this is how Sutpen interprets the incident). His plan is to build a dynasty and amass respect and wealth. Sutpen ultimately moves to Mississippi and succeeds, achieving the quintessential vision of respectability as a Southern plantation owner. His success is spurred by a feeling of superiority over Black people, and it relies on a white supremacist culture and the institution of slavery. In this sense, Sutpen’s personal “design” is an allegory for how his society—that is, the pre-Civil War South—was structured.
But Sutpen makes one critical “mistake” along the way: he rejects his first-born child, Charles Bon, after discovering that Bon’s mother, Eulalia, has Black ancestry. When Charles Bon later reappears in Sutpen’s life, Sutpen rejects him because Bon’s Blackness has no place in Sutpen’s design—that is, within the racially discriminatory hierarchy of the Old South. Ironically, though, Sutpen’s rejection of Bon triggers a series of events (most notably, Henry Sutpen’s murder of Bon) that dooms Sutpen and his family to failure and despair. In this way, Sutpen’s loyalty to Southern ideals is his undoing, and its consequences continue to haunt his family for decades to come. Symbolically, then, Sutpen’s entire trajectory parallels the South’s defeat in the Civil War and its inability to come to terms with its legacy of slavery.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The South ThemeTracker
The South Quotes in Absalom, Absalom!
Then hearing would reconcile and he would seem to listen to two separate Quentins now—the Quentin Compson preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts, listening, having to listen, to one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old ghost-times;
His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.
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.
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.
I mean that he was not owned by anyone or anything in this world, had never been, would never be, not even by Ellen, not even by Jones’ granddaughter. Because he was not articulated in this world. He was a walking shadow.
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.”
“His trouble was innocence. All of a sudden he discovered, not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his life […].”
“[…] ‘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.
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.”
“[…] Now I want you to tell me just one more thing. Why do you hate the South?”
“I dont hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
