Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon: William Faulkner’s Reimagining of Nineteenth-Century Interracial Male Bonding in Absalom, Absalom!
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This paper explores the connection of William Faulkner’s 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom! with the interracial male-bonding tradition of nineteenth- century American literature. Prevailing criticism has read Absalom, Absalom! as the story of Thomas Sutpen, but this paper attempts to read the novel as the story of Henry Sutpen and his mixed-race best friend and half brother, Charles Bon, emphasizing the central role of their interracial relationship in Faulkner’s re-examination of Southern history through the Sutpen story. I argue that Faulkner presents Henry’s tragic murder of Bon not only as a social critique of the racially unjust and intolerant white Southern culture, but also as a demonstration of why such interracial harmony as depicted in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and other nineteenth-century male-bonding texts is a literary myth. Myth and history are at loggerheads in Absalom, Absalom!, and Faulkner deconstructs Western mythologies at work in the narrative of interracial male bonding, trying to rewrite it in distinctly Southern terms. I will discuss in detail how Henry and Bon stand in stark contrast with Huck and Jim and other archetypal male pairs that appear in the nineteenth-century narratives. My particular concern in the discussion is the ways in which Faulkner employs the novel’s century-based narrators (Mr. Comspon and Miss Rosa of the nineteenth, and Quentin Compson and Shreve of the twentieth) and their different stories of Henry and Bon to represent the cultural contexts in which the classical male ideal of these racial crossings was embedded and then, ultimately, to present his own response to them.
Abstract
This paper explores the connection of William Faulkner’s 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom! with the interracial male-bonding tradition of nineteenth- century American literature. Prevailing criticism has read Absalom, Absalom! as the story of Thomas Sutpen, but this paper attempts to read the novel as the story of Henry Sutpen and his mixed-race best friend and half brother, Charles Bon, emphasizing the central role of their interracial relationship in Faulkner’s re-examination of Southern history through the Sutpen story. I argue that Faulkner presents Henry’s tragic murder of Bon not only as a social critique of the racially unjust and intolerant white Southern culture, but also as a demonstration of why such interracial harmony as depicted in Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and other nineteenth-century male-bonding texts is a literary myth. Myth and history are at loggerheads in Absalom, Absalom!, and Faulkner deconstructs Western mythologies at work in the narrative of interracial male bonding, trying to rewrite it in distinctly Southern terms. I will discuss in detail how Henry and Bon stand in stark contrast with Huck and Jim and other archetypal male pairs that appear in the nineteenth-century narratives. My particular concern in the discussion is the ways in which Faulkner employs the novel’s century-based narrators (Mr. Comspon and Miss Rosa of the nineteenth, and Quentin Compson and Shreve of the twentieth) and their different stories of Henry and Bon to represent the cultural contexts in which the classical male ideal of these racial crossings was embedded and then, ultimately, to present his own response to them.
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