Faulkner fashioned Henry Sutpen as more of a feeling man than thinking man with the words, “Henry, the provincial, the clown almost, given to instinctive and violent action rather than to thinking…” [AA, 76] and I think Henry was subconsciously aware of it. Henry is a strange sort of man; although he feels, he is a something of a brute. Prior to leaving for University of Mississippi, Henry had never seen the world beyond his nose. Once at Mississippi, he meets and becomes completely enraptured by the older, mysterious, and cosmopolitan Charles Bon.
Everything about Charles Bon fascinates Henry Sutpen; his manner of speech and dress, his way with women, and even his mysterious past, which he wants to know. Henry Sutpen had never been as interested or devoted to anything as he was to being Charles Bon’s comrade. This is why he wanted a marital connection between Bon and his sister, Judith; it would permanently unite the two men in an acceptable fashion, as brothers. Henry could never be Charles and if Henry never learned all of Bon’s history, then he would at least help shape and always be a part of Bon’s elegant future. If only Charles had heeded the unconscious decree Henry demanded during that four year engagement probation period, but Charles did not; the contract of his first marriage remained.
According to Faulkner, Henry’s fixation with Bon and his sister’s virginity was, “the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that the sister’s virginity must be destoryed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband…perhaps that is what went on, not in Henry’s mind but in his soul. Because he never thought. He felt, and acted immediately”[AA, 77]. Henry was not a thinking man, he was a feeling man. Around Charles and to an extent, around his sister, Henry felt despair; he could never be with Bon nor he could he become Bon. If Bon lived, then Henry Sutpen would have to spend all his days thinking about this.
I am curious about several things, the first being, how different would life have been for Henry Sutpen if he had not disavowed his inheritance and run off with Charles Bon to help the Southern cause? What would have become of Thomas Sutpen’s legacy and his land? The second source for errant thoughts is, could Henry have reconciled the possibility of his half-brother, who may have had Black ancestry, married to his White sister if no one else would ever know? Would Judith have married him anyway? Why did the possibility of this ancestry all but eradicate Henry’s longing for and despair of Charles Bon?
