The Faulknerian Dream

Faulkner’s American Dream & Anti-Dream
Or: Tragic Racism
December 27, 2007
Revised From: May 2, 2006

It would be a vast oversimplification to state that all people in America have, do or ever will share one and only one desire. Nevertheless, the dreams of many Americans have common ground, frequently including such things as the ownership of property, the pursuit of happiness, and a prosperous family. Perhaps no character epitomizes these traits more than Thomas Sutpen from William Faulkner’s novel, Absalom, Absalom! Yet, the landscape Faulkner paints is also a paranoid one, a nightmarish dystopia. Something happens, something that destroy Sutpen’s family. That something is the specter of racism.

Rosa Coldfield, says of Sutpen that he
“came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land
with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation—(Tore
violently a plantation, Miss Rosa Coldfield says)—tore
violently.”

Sutpen comes from nowhere, without warning. Like the gaze of the warden in Foucault’s Panopticon, Sutpen can appear at any time, prompting the individual to act as though he were always present. Why does she emphasize the idea that he “tore violently a plantation” instead of simply saying he built one? Even if you demarcate a plantation with a fence, it cannot be said that you are “tearing” the plantation as a metaphor for building it. The verb implies an object that can be torn. Rosa argues later that, “inside of two years he had dragged house and gardens out of virgin swamp, and plowed and planted his land with seed cotton.” To Rosa, Sutpen tears the plantation out of the earth itself, out of “virgin swamp,” out of virginity itself.

The place of “strange niggers” in Sutpen’s dream, or in Rosa’s paranoia, is a precarious subject. When Thomas wrestles with “negro,” Rosa believes Ellen and the audience should be as outraged as she is. Instead of explaining her own disgust at the violence of the scene, however, she tries to embody and give voice to Ellen, believing she can speak for her and represent her. “That is what Ellen saw,” Rosa says, “her husband and the father of her children standing there naked and panting and bloody to the waist and the negro just fallen.”

Sutpen’s racism generates most of the novel’s conflict. When a young Sutpen is sent on an errand to the city, he encounters an African American there who is better dressed than he is, and that it is only because the African American, who “happened to have had the felicity of being housebred.” Following this encounter, “All of a sudden he [Sutpen] found himself running and already some distance from the house… He wasn’t even mad. He just had to think…” That Sutpen “wasn’t even mad” that a “nigger” looks better dressed than he does implies that it would be expected, and acceptable, for Sutpen to be mad, and that his lack of it—his anger over this simple distinction—is what drives him nearly to insanity. Sutpen “went into the wood” and realized “he would have to do something about it in order to live with himself for the rest of his life.” The success of the African American threatens Sutpen’s very capacity to live with himself. Sutpen’s ambition to live a good life is not a desire to be rich, but a means to be superior to African Americans.

This same racism also spawns the melodrama of the novel. Melodrama is embodied in the person of Charles Bon. Charles Bon is Sutpen’s son with Eulalia Bon Sutpen, a woman from Haiti who previously married Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen learned that Eulalia had “negro blood” and repudiated her and their child, Charles Bon. All this Thomas Sutpen left behind him when he moved to Yoknapatwpha County until Charles comes and asks for Thomas Sutpen’s daughter’s hand in marriage. On Christmas in 1860, Sutpen forbids marriage between his daughter Judith and Charles Bon. In response, Henry Sutpen, Thomas’s son, repudiates his birthright and leaves with Charles Bon. As first described in the book, “something happened.” This “something” that happens is Thomas Sutpen reaping the seed he had sown when he repudiated Eulalia Bon because of her negro blood, and abandoned his firstborn child. The reason Sutpen denies marriage between Charles Bon and Judith is not because of incest but because of race. Sutpen was convinced that all his problems had, “come from a mistake and until he discovered what that mistake and been he did not intend to risk making another one.” It is this mistake which leaves Thomas Sutpen a sonless widower.