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Chapter 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Absalom, Absalom!, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Storytelling, Perspective, and Truth
The South
The Limits of Ambition
Social Taboos, Racism, and Inherited Trauma
Summary
Analysis
The narrative switches back to Rosa telling her story to Quentin, picking up after Wash Jones tells her about Bon being killed. Rosa describes how she gathered her meager belongings and traveled in the buggy 12 miles to Sutpen’s Hundred, which she hadn’t done since Ellen died two years ago. She rode “beside that brute” who wasn’t even allowed inside the house before Ellen died, and “whose granddaughter was to supplant” Rosa from her place in Ellen’s bed (which, according to gossip, was a place Rosa coveted).
Readers should note how the tone of the story shifts as Rosa takes over as its narrator. Her striking bitterness, though perhaps warranted, casts doubt on the veracity of her accounts of the events that follow Bon’s death. Notably, this passage suggests that others spread rumors about Rosa wanting to take over Ellen’s old bed—meaning she wanted to be Sutpen’s next wife—yet Wash Jones’s granddaughter apparently took that role from her. Rosa’s defensiveness could suggest that these rumors aren’t as far from the truth as Rosa would like to claim they are, though, of course, readers have no way of knowing this for sure.
Themes
Literary Devices
But the people who talk about her can’t describe what Rosa did once she arrived at Sutpen’s Hundred—how she approached the “rotting” place, its dilapidated, empty state somehow “more profound than ruin.” In her story, Rosa approaches Sutpen’s mansion and yells out to Henry, demanding to know what he’s done. She sees Clytie, with her “Sutpen coffee-colored face,” like that of a “sphinx.” Then Rosa calls out to Judith but receives no answer.
Rosa explicitly notes that town rumors can’t be taken as fact, either: in truth, only the people who were in Sutpen’s “rotting” mansion that day know what happened, and only Rosa knows what was going through her mind to convince her to finally move to Sutpen’s Hundred. Clytie’s “Sutpen coffee-colored face” is a nod to Clytie’s mixed-race background: she’s the daughter of Sutpen and one of his enslaved women. In comparing Clytie’s expression to that of a “sphinx,” mythological creatures known to tell cryptic riddles, Rosa implies that Clytie is withholding information, possibly about Henry’s whereabouts, or perhaps what prompted Henry to shoot Bon, or perhaps both.
Themes
Literary Devices
Rosa starts to head upstairs, where she believes she’ll find Bon’s bloodied corpse on “that sheetless bed.” Clytie urges her to stop, and Rosa feels it is the house itself, not Clytie, talking to her. She is struck by Clytie addressing her by name—Rosa—as she’d do when Rosa was a child. Many people call Rosa that because they still see her as a child, but Rosa senses that this isn’t Clytie’s intention. When Clytie then touches Rosa’s arm, it makes Rosa stop in her tracks, shout for Clytie not to touch her, and call her the n-word. Rosa remembers how Judith and Clytie would play together and even sleep in the same bed together as children, yet Rosa never even dared touch the same toys that Clytie touched—she was taught to “shun” them and Clytie.
Themes
It’s at this point that Rosa realizes what she “could not, would not, must not believe,” implying that Clytie, too, is a “sister.” She feels foolish for not seeing it before, and she also feels foolish for coming here expecting to see Henry “emerge from some door” as though nothing has happened and urging her to “wake up,” as though the present situation is just a dream.
Themes
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Rosa, in the present, gets sidetracked by memories of the wistaria she smelled when she was 14. She describes her “barren youth” and feeling like a “man” rather than a woman or girl. She considers how memory is constructed through the senses—sight, touch, and sound—rather than through thoughts. Then she changes the subject, redirecting the story backward in time to the summer after the first Christmas Henry brought Bon home. In this memory, Mr. Coldfield sends Rosa to stay with Ellen. Sutpen is gone. Rosa has never seen Bon—in fact, she never will, not even his corpse—and only knows he exists through Ellen’s talk of him.
In the present, Miss Rosa describes her sense of Bon as “a child’s vacant fairy-tale” and insists that she “did not love him,” and if she did love him, it would be as a mother’s love for a child—not the way Judith loved him (or how everyone thought Judith loved him). She never even saw him outside of a photograph she spotted in Judith’s room at Sutpen’s Hundred—and then she suggests that she might even be misremembering that.
Themes
Rosa’s story flashes forward to the day she arrives at Sutpen’s Hundred following Bon’s murder. Judith encounters Rosa standing before “the closed door which [Rosa] was not to enter.” Then Judith tells Clytie that Rosa will be staying for dinner. Rosa never sees Bon’s body, and she never walks through the closed door.
Themes
Rosa, Judith, and Clytie carry the coffin out of the house that afternoon. Judith’s face is blank and unreadable as she cooks and serves food. Meanwhile, Wash Jones and some other white man construct Bon’s coffin with planks they take from the carriage house. Later, Rosa, Clytie, and Judith carry the coffin to the graveside. Judith doesn’t even weep. Then the three women put the box in the earth.
Themes
People in town will give a bunch of “paltry reasons, all untrue, and be believed” for why Rosa stays at Sutpen’s Hundred following Bon’s death. They’ll say she stays for food, though she could easily have scrounged for or grown her own food. Or they’ll say she stays to have a roof over her head, or that she wants the company. In fact, she simply waits for Sutpen to return—not to marry him, as the townspeople will say—but because for Judith, Clytie, and Rosa, he’s “the only reason for continuing to exist,” for the women know Sutpen will begin to pick up the pieces of Sutpen’s Hundred as soon as he returns from the war.
So, the three women wait inside the old house, surviving but taking no pleasure in life. They tend the garden, which provides most of their food, and they sleep in the same room to cut back on firewood. In the winter, soldiers begin to return, and the women feed them what they can, though they are afraid of them. They talk about Sutpen and about the war ending, and what will happen once he returns: how they’ll begin “the Herculean task” of rebuilding Sutpen’s Hundred. They talk about Henry, albeit “quietly.” They never speak of Bon, though Judith sometimes goes to clear the leaves from his grave.
Themes
Sutpen returns in January, and he and Rosa are engaged within three months. (Rosa, in the present, gives no excuses for her behavior, though she contends that there are many reasons a woman would marry a man, from the possibility for wealth or the fear of dying alone, which people say all women have.)
Themes
Sutpen arrives home and greets Judith, who remains rigid and silent. The two of them speak in clipped sentences, with Judith filling Sutpen in on Henry’s disappearance following his murder of Bon. Then, for the first time, she bursts into tears. Sutpen hardly responds to the news of Henry’s murder of Bon. (This, Rosa explains in the present, was because “he himself was not there,” only “a shell of him” came back.) They were right about Sutpen’s intentions with the place: he immediately set about getting the house and plantation back in working order. That the place was in such a sorry state did not intimidate him.
Themes
Rosa and the others hardly see Sutpen that winter; he’s often gone all day. It’s that season when they learn the meaning of “carpet-bagger,” and when women start locking their doors at night, fearing the “negro uprisings” they’ve heard talk about. Meanwhile, armed men gather in “secret meeting places,” though Sutpen doesn’t join them. Instead, he argues that if every man in the South set about repairing the land like he’s doing, then “the general land and the South would save itself.” Rosa watches Sutpen and realizes that he’s not fighting against the land: he’s fighting the “weight of the changed new time itself,” an impossible task.
Themes
Then one day, while working in the garden, Rosa looks up and sees Sutpen looking back at her. (In the present, she’s adamant that he didn’t give her a look of love—rather, it was simply “a sudden over-burst of light, illumination.” And yet she sees no reason to reject him.) Sutpen proposes marriage to Rosa with no flourish, promising her that he’ll be no worse a husband to Rosa than he was to Ellen. This is the extent of their courtship. Sutpen doesn’t talk of love or marriage, only “the very dark forces of fate which he had evoked and dared” and out of which he’d made Sutpen’s Hundred. It’s as though he feels he can turn back the clock 20 years just by slipping the ring on Rosa’s finger.
Themes
After the engagement, Sutpen doesn’t look at Rosa again. She feels she could have gone home, and he wouldn’t have noticed—she only fills the role that “any young female no blood kin to him represent[s].” (As Rosa, in the present, relates this part of the story to Quentin, her tone grows vengeful and more bitter.)
Themes
Meanwhile, nobody sets a date for the wedding. One day, Sutpen insults Rosa, yelling for her to “come” to him—after not addressing her once since he slipped the ring on her finger.
Themes
In the present, Rosa scornfully talks of all the rumors people in town have spread about why she left Sutpen’s Hundred and didn’t go through with the marriage. They say she couldn’t “forgive him” for insulting her or for “being dead” and that that’s why she returned to Jefferson, where she has spent the last four decades alone in her empty house.
Themes
Literary Devices
But, Rosa assures Quentin, she did forgive Sutpen for the insult. In fact, she feels she “had nothing to forgive” in the first place. For she “never owned him,” nor did Ellen, nor Jones’s daughter (who, it’s rumored, died in a Memphis brothel). It was impossible for anyone to own him, “Because he was not articulated in this world. He was a walking shadow.”
Miss Rosa’s story trails off as Quentin stops listening and considers how he, too, cannot walk through “that door.” He imagines the interaction between Henry and Judith when Henry told Judith about Bon’s murder. Then Rosa interrupts Quentin’s daydreaming to tell him that “something” is living “in that house.” Quentin assumes she’s talking about Clytie, but Rosa ominously corrects him: “No. Something living in it. Hidden in it. It has been out there for four years, living hidden in that house.”
Themes
Literary Devices
