Absalom, Absalom!: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Miss Rosa’s rather scornful remark about the North’s limiting the professional opportunities for “Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen” speaks to the immense economic decline that the South experienced in the aftermath of the Civil War. Quentin’s speculation that Miss Rosa simply wants to tell her story further emphasizes the importance of storytelling. It also reinforces the idea that Miss Rosa—like the South as a whole—is stuck in the past and has old grievances or issues she must repent for or make peace with.

Quentin’s theory about Miss Rosa’s motivations for telling her story suggests an insider-outsider dynamic between the South and the North. Though the country has reunified following the Confederate states’ (which included Mississippi, where much of the novel takes place) secession from the Union, the South remains culturally distinct from the North, and Miss Rosa seems to think that Northerners don’t appreciate the complexity of suffering the South experienced during and after the Civil War.

By setting many tragedies that Rosa’s extended family has suffered against the backdrop of the Civil War, Faulkner symbolically positions the war as a turning point for the Coldfields and for the South as a whole—one marked by loss and violence. That Sutpen, too, met a “violent […] end” reinforces this point, though it remains unclear how he died. Curses and fate are recurring motifs throughout the book, and here, in listing all the tragedies that have befallen a single family, the narrative subtly hints at the idea that they—and, if one takes the Coldfields as symbolic of the typical Southern family, the South as a whole—are cursed.

Mr. Compson’s comment about Miss Rosa needing a young man to tell her story “the way she wants it done” is rather vague, but it seems to gesture toward the idea that the only hope for the South to move forward and survive in the aftermath of  the Civil War is for the younger generation to take over and reform the region’s culture and identity. At this point, Miss Rosa is scornfully clinging to her long-held grudge against Sutpen, just as the South is stubbornly clinging to its old, racist ideals—ideals which have no place in the post-war, post-emancipation world of the novel’s present.

Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional region of Faulkner’s invention, but it is based off (and closely resembles) Lafayette County, which is in the north of Mississippi and where Faulkner lived much of his life. Here the reader gets a better sense of Miss Rosa’s disdain for Colonel Thomas Sutpen, who she’s clear to state “wasn’t a gentleman” and implies used her family’s good reputation around town to achieve the respect he couldn’t gain on his own. Miss Rosa seems to distrust Sutpen due to his being an outsider—the fact that she is suspicious of him for not having any roots, rather than admiring him for his ambition, gestures toward the novel’s theme of the limits of ambition. Finally, note the important—and confusing, and perhaps also troubling—detail of Rosa describing Henry as “a murderer and almost a fratricide.” Given that readers already know that Henry killed Judith’s fiancé, and given that there has been no mention of Judith and Henry having another brother, Miss Rosa seems to be suggesting that Judith’s fiancé was her and Henry’s brother—or “almost” their brother. This detail is the novel’s first explicit mention of the social taboo of incest, which appears throughout.  

Sutpen’s driving goal to become “a gentleman” squarely situates his ambition and the “respectability” he needs to achieve his goals within the culture of pre-war Southern plantation culture. The language Rosa uses to express her skepticism about Sutpen’s mysterious past—a past she claims is “too dark to talk about”—could allude to Sutpen having some history of illicit behavior in his professional or personal life, but it also has racial undertones, gesturing toward the idea that “dark” subjects—and dark-skinned (i.e., Black) people—are incapable of achieving “respectability” in the pre-war South (or in the post-war South of the novel’s present, which stubbornly clings to its racist, pre-war ideals).

Rosa is vaguely alluding to some mistake she made in her past; her unwillingness or inability to describe it outright hints that she’s ashamed of it. Many interpret the novel as an allegory for the South—specifically, how its decline following the Civil War was the consequence of its failure to acknowledge or face consequences for its history of slavery and racism. From this perspective, then, Rosa’s lingering shame about her past behavior symbolizes the South’s repressed sense of guilt or responsibility for slavery. The detail of nobody in the South being allowed to remain young since 1861—the year the Civil War began—gestures toward the burden of inherited history that Southerners bear in the aftermath of the Civil War. A “raree show” is a peep show—a type of exhibition or performance that audiences view through a small hole.   

The recurring motif of curses and doom features in this passage, in which Rosa links the tragedies that befell her family with the setbacks the South incurred during and in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Rosa explicitly draws attention to the possibility of her story misrepresenting the past—though she is a degree closer to Sutpen than Quentin is, she was only a child when many of the events she now describes took place. They were but “an ogre-tale” to her even at the time, and this fact greatly compromises her ability to present the past objectively and accurately.

Ellen’s pale face suggests that she is physically—and perhaps also spiritually—unwell. It seems her marriage has taken a toll on her. Readers should also note that the detail of three-year-old Rosa equating her sister, niece, and nephew’s arrival to Christmas reinforces her youth at the time the events took place—and, therefore, the unreliability of Rosa’s narrative in the present.

Once more, the details that Rosa is describing to Quentin here are based on memories of early childhood. In light of this fact, readers must take into account the degree to which Rosa’s youth—and her enduring hatred for Sutpen—makes her an unreliable narrator. Still, taken at face value, Rosa’s story portrays Sutpen in a negative light. Mr. Coldfield’s vague suggestion to Ellen, “Think of the children,” suggests that Sutpen’s home is not a good environment for them to be in.  

Adult Rosa, in her telling of the story to Quentin, suggests that her younger self was willing to give Sutpen (and his apparent disinterest in his family) the benefit of the doubt in ways she no longer can. It’s clear that Sutpen did something to shatter Rosa’s positive image of him, though the details of what he did remain a mystery at this early point in the novel.

This scene sheds light on Sutpen’s worldview, particularly regarding racial difference. The detail of his fighting the enslaved Black man suggests that he sees himself and the people he enslaves as equals (though, of course, Sutpen is choosing to fight the man, whereas the man must do whatever Sutpen orders him to do). If he truly does regard Black people as equals, it complicates his choice to enslave them, suggesting perhaps that Sutpen’s enslaving Black people stems not from his inherent racism but rather from his desire to achieve so-called “respectability” in the plantation culture of the pre-war South.

This passage emphasizes how Sutpen’s “own triumph” is more important to him than protecting the welfare of his children. That is, his ambition to appear powerful in the culture of the Old South (reinforcing the racial hierarchy by forcing his enslaved men to fight one another and then fighting them himself) is more important than shielding Judith and Henry from witnessing such violence and injustice. Of course, Rosa’s admission that she didn’t actually witness this scene calls her claims into question.