Tag Archives: patriarchy

Thomas Sutpen: A Man’s Man

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Absalom, Absalom!, like Light in August before it, reflects a shift in Faulkner’s literary approach and subject matter from a focus on single families, as in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, to larger, though fragmented, communities. Thomas Sutpen, the central figure in Absalom, Absalom!, stands as the patriarchal locus of the townspeople of Jefferson that is so captivated, mesmerized and repulsed, by him. All of the novel’s narrators give voice to the obsessive nature with which the entire town observes and judges Sutpen. Albeit for different reasons (i.e. Rosa’s personal resentment, Shreve’s quest for knowledge of the South), they are each compelled to outline his mysterious and complicated influence on themselves, their families, and the town of Jefferson at large. In this light, Sutpen’s presence may be seen for the patriarchal notions he upholds.

Quentin’s narration, in particular, reflects the complex reverence, founded by fear and lack of understanding, that Sutpen’s contemporaries held towards him. Quentin, like the citizens of Jefferson, Sutpen’s neighbors, see him in light of the influence he carved out and collected for himself from that “best virgin bottom land in the country” (AA 26). More specifically, he and they, both, see this influence in light of its patriarchal domination, as is reflected by Quentin’s ponderings on the essence of fatherhood in a conversation he has with Shreve: “Yes. Maybe we are both Father . . . Yes, we are both Father. Or maybe Father and I are both Shreve, maybe it took Father and me both to make Shreve or Shreve and me both to make Father or maybe Thomas Sutpen to make all of us,” (AA 210). In Quentin’s mind Sutpen is painted as an ultimate, capital “F”, Father figure, which harks back to Quentin’s own allusions to Sutpen, based on Rosa’s first descriptions of him, as embodying a Godlike essence: “Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them . . . drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immobile and pontific, creating the Sutpen’s Hundred, the Be Sutpen’s Hundred like the oldentime Be Light” (AA 4).

This latter association is particularly interesting, considering the perspective that created it (Quentin’s) versus the one that inspired its creation (Rosa’s). In other words, the question that begs to be answered is: “What meaning lies in the fact that Quentin likens Sutpen to God based on Rosa’s continuous and explicit reference to him as a ‘demon’ and ‘ogre’?” Firstly, I would point to the different social standing each character embodies. Rosa, who describes herself as “an orphan a woman and a pauper,” holds a much lower status in the social hierarchy of the time compared to Quentin (AA 12-13). Simply because of his maleness and the respectability, declining though it is, of the Compson name he bears, Quentin is able to neutralize Rosa’s acutely negative portrayal of Sutpen into one marked by first and foremost by awe, rather than disgust. Secondly, Quentin is the direct descendant, the grandson, of Sutpen’s first friend in Jefferson, General Compson. This highlights the patrilineal aspect of Quentin’s privilege that leads him to develop such a reverent conception of Sutpen.

Sutpen himself, too, reflects the novel’s patrilineal structure and focus. His ultimate goal in life, what motivates his every action, is revealed by the “design” he refers to in Chapter 7 (AA 212). This “design,” of course, is fundamentally entwined in patriarchy and patrilineality. As he supposedly explained to General Compson, “To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife,” it becomes clear that Sutpen’s objective was about establishing a solid patriarchal footing in the place of Sutpen’s Hundred (AA 212). The money, the mansion, the slaves and plantation would serve to perpetuate power within the Sutpen lineage, or family. That Sutpen is concerned primarily with his theoretical male descendants, his patrilineage, is more than clear from his assessment of the role his theoretical wife will play into his scheme: necessary for biological reasons, but not symbolically integral to his plan, personally meaningful, or emotionally beneficial.

Narrative Identity and its effect on the construction of memory; history

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The opening narration of Absalom, Absalom!, given by Rosa Coldfield, situates the reader amidst her spiraling account of a family’s fall to ruin. The narrative voice is primarily that of a daughter, as a result of what it is defending: a father, first, whose demise came at the hands of what Rosa claims to be his drastic moral opposite: Thomas Sutpen. Behind her It seems she needs, after forty-three years, the affirmation of a younger man from her society, one who may even go on to tell the old woman’s—the daughter’s—story, both of the grave injustice to her father and family, and subsequently, of the justification of her marriage to the man (the “demon”) who had caused it (5). Her search for an explanation, then, converges between a “fatality and curse on the South” (indeed, Miss Coldfield repeatedly alludes to the land itself as dangerous, no place for play) and “on [her] family,” because the latter, unfortunately had only “men with valor and strength but without pity or honor” to defend it (14, 13).

The primacy of patriarchal progenies in the novel’s beginning is common in Faulkner’s works. The dysfunction and ruination of such patrilineages, too, is a central theme in other novels, like The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. This theme, backlighted with Faulkner’s obsession with time and moments of arrest, constructs the chief conflict Miss Coldfield passionately orates to Quentin. But as a financially dependent female, self-described as “born too late,” she has all the effective odds, besides race, against her (15). She uses her voice to express a personal struggle, but because of the patriarchal context, she may also serve as a vehicle to convey some important essences of masculinity in the South during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is important, then, to ask ourselves why Faulkner has chosen a female, in this instance, to give voice to her families’ woes. We have seen repeatedly in his works female characters that are not authorized to speak for themselves, let alone for others. So why now?

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Rosa’s narrative is not the only one to speak to Sutpen’s influence in Jefferson. In fact, a number of characters cut in to give their own portrayals, and all of them male: Jason Compson, Quentin Compson and Shreve. As these men alternate in the task of filling out the reader’s understanding of the story of Sutpen’s Hundred, the narrative is complicated by contradicting interpretations. This notion highlights Faulkner’s primary purpose: to convey the strange nature of memory and its role in the construction of history.