Content Warning: This guide contains references to slavery, racial violence, rape, incest, and suicide. The source text uses racial slurs including the n-word, which is reproduced and obscured in quotations in this guide.

One of the central themes in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! is the tragic and violent legacy of slavery in the American South. This theme is explored through the rise and fall of the Sutpen family and how individuals within the family struggle with their pasts and meet tragic ends. The novel revolves around the life and legacy of Thomas Sutpen, whose life is marked by a ruthless ambition to become the patriarch of a longstanding familial dynasty. Sutpen and his lineage(s) are depicted as victims of tragic fates catalyzed by their patriarch’s exploitative violence toward enslaved people.

Rosa, the younger sister of Sutpen’s deceased wife, Ellen—and later, Sutpen’s fiancée—is one lens into the family’s demise and how the family’s tragedies emerge from an original evil: racism within its patriarch. Rosa’s hatred for Thomas Sutpen has spanned 43 years, up to the point she relays the tale to 20-year-old Quentin Compson. Rosa speaks of Sutpen in almost mythological terms, depicting him as a violent and selfish “fiend blackguard and devil […] that every man in our armies would have to fall before bullet or ball found him” (10). This image of Thomas Sutpen as a devil recurs throughout Rosa’s narrative and is sometimes replaced with other pejoratives, like “ogre” or “not even a gentleman” (11). Rosa opens the novel with this preexisting contempt toward Sutpen, but her characterizations gain gravity and context as the narrative progresses and Sutpen’s actions are clarified. It is revealed that Sutpen’s ambitions were always rooted in exploitation and racism-fueled socioeconomic hierarchies; prior to his arrival in Yoknapatawpha County, he violently subdued a rebellion of enslaved people in the West Indies, married and impregnated a woman of African American descent, and abandoned their son (Charles Bon) once her race was revealed. At the outset, Sutpen is an opportunist motivated by racism and the violent subjugation of others, an ethos he brings with him to start his new life by building Sutpen’s Hundred.

In Yoknapatawpha County, Sutpen treats the people he enslaves with malice, forcing them to build his home and eventually partake in gruesome physical fights for his entertainment: “[H]e doubtless pitted his negroes against one another and perhaps even at this time participated now and then himself” (30). His socioeconomic ambitions are all dependent upon his personal ideal of a successful, plantation-owning white Southerner. As a result, violence and slavery are integral to Sutpen’s vision of success, and in many ways, he represents the inherent evil of slavery and enslavers.

That evil haunts and eventually destroys Sutpen’s lineage so that his ultimate dream—to establish a patriarchal, wealthy legacy fueled by plantation labor in the South—is ruined by the very thing that once made it possible. Sutpen is haunted by his own racist evils, as in, for instance, when Charles Bon—Sutpen’s son who whom he abandons out of prejudice—tries to marry his daughter, Judith, and is murdered by Henry, who has inherited his father’s deep-seated racism. Henry, Sutpen’s only acknowledged son and heir to his plantation, disappears, only to return and die in a fire that also consumes what remains of Sutpen’s Hundred. The end of the Sutpen family is implicitly linked to the racist bedrock of its patriarch’s pre-war socioeconomic success. That the Sutpen family offspring eventually all meet their own violent or tragic deaths—many of them within the vicinity of Sutpen’s Hundred, which represents racial violence and the inhumane conditions forced upon enslaved people in the American South—suggests a residual legacy of evil and eventual recompense that is perpetuated across generations.

The Southern United States became a derelict and impoverished region after the Civil War. When the plantation economy was destroyed, identities of Southern whiteness and Southern masculinity—which were fueled by slavery and plantation hierarchies—became shattered and confused. Faulkner explores what this identity vacuum looks like in a highly rural and agrarian locale like Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, using the county as a microcosmic representation of the broader decline of the American South. Further, many of the symbols and images through which Faulkner represents the decline of the American South during this period also establish Absalom, Absalom! as a key text within the Southern Gothic tradition, a genre that deals with downfalls within social systems.

The impending Civil War begins to make itself known in Yoknapatawpha County around 20 years after the marriage between Ellen and Thomas Sutpen. The rise and fall of Ellen as a character directly predicts the rise and fall of the Southern society that bolstered and supported her in the first two decades of her marriage. As the wife to the county’s wealthiest plantation owner, Ellen rises to a high social seat and revels in her fortune. Various narrators describe this period in Ellen’s life as one of shallow illusion, in which Ellen “moved, lived, from attitude to attitude against her background of chatelaine to the largest, wife to the wealthiest, mother of the most fortunate” (54). Ellen’s life is marked by trivial representations of Sutpen’s fortune: shopping, “meaningless phrases,” and eventually, a belief that her daughter will marry Ellen’s ideal image of Southern masculinity in Charles Bon. The unreality of Ellen’s convictions is revealed in pieces across the novel, but Faulkner hints at Ellen’s short-lived, meteoric illusions through hyperbolic descriptions. Quentin’s father, for instance, describes Ellen’s ethereal superiority as “the absolute halcyon of her butterfly’s summer” (58). Such language—which points to an apex from which a figure can only fall, not rise—predicates Ellen’s eventual demise.

When the prospect of Judith’s marriage to Bon falls through (for reasons unknown to Ellen but due to Sutpen’s violent past in the West Indies), Ellen experiences a complete personal and psychological collapse. Faulkner again returns to the cyclical metaphor of the butterfly to describe Ellen’s inversion: “Ellen had now served her purpose, completed the bright pointless noon and afternoon of the butterfly’s summer and vanished, perhaps not out of Jefferson […] to be seen but the one time more dying in bed in a darkened room” (61). The metaphor emphasizes the connections between Ellen’s disillusionment and subsequent death and the broader demise of the socioeconomic illusions that fueled life in the antebellum South. What was once glorified, honorable, and wealthy becomes, in a few short years, an unrecognizable shell in which the past’s comfort is incompatible with present reality. Ellen’s decline—described in eerie and somewhat mystical terms as a silent retreat into a darkened room, followed by an unceremonious death and burial—foreshadows and represents the decline of the Southern way of life.

The Southern Gothic tradition is marked by signs and symptoms of decay, descents into irrationality or alienation, and fixations on past ideals. The demise of Rosa’s father, Mr. Coldfield, parallels Ellen’s but differs slightly in that it is contemporaneous with the decline of the Southern economy, while Ellen’s decline predicates it. Mr. Coldfield, a once respected and religiously upright storeowner in Yoknapatawpha County, locks himself away in his attic to avoid joining the Confederacy. His death, like Ellen’s, is slow and reclusive, marked by loneliness and alienation from a past that was, at a distant point, characterized by success and stability. Mr. Coldfield’s shop mirrors the demise of its owner and is another representation of the region’s broader decay. The store is looted by passing soldiers and, Quentin’s father speculates, Yoknapatawpha County citizens themselves; then, it becomes a “deserted building vacated by rats and containing nothing, not even goodwill, since he had irrevocably estranged himself from neighbors” (66). Both Mr. Coldfield and Ellen represent the comfort and relative stability of white Southerners prior to the Civil War; their respective rises and falls both foreshadow and parallel the decline of the social order that made their successes possible. In a similar vein, both figures are marked by metaphorical decay—rats, dark and claustrophobic rooms, delusions, and alienation—that Southern Gothic literature uses to represent the moral or social decay of the region itself.