Anthony Garritano's Analysis
of Absalom, Absalom!
Miss Coldfield's voice went
on … "He wasn't a gentleman. He wasn't even a gentleman. He came here with
a horse and two pistols and a name which nobody ever heard before, knew
for certain was his own anymore than the horse was his own or even the
pistols, seeking some place to hide himself, and Yoknapatawpha County supplied
him with it. He sought the guarantee of reputable men to barricade
him from the other and later strangers who might come seeking him in turn,
and Jeffersongave him that.
Then he needed respectability, the shield of a virtuous
woman, to make his position impregnable even against the men who
had given him protection on that inevitable day and hour when even they
must rise against him in scorn and horror and outrage; and it was mine
and Ellen's father who gave him that. Oh, I hold no brief for Ellen: blind
romantic fool who had only youth and inexperience to excuse her even if
that; blind romantic fool, then later blind
woman mother fool when she no longer had either youth or inexperience
to excuse her, when she lay dying in that house for which she had exchanged
pride and peace both and nobody there but the daughter who was already
the same as a widow without ever having been a bride and was, three years
later, to be a widow sure enough without having been anything at all, and
the son who had repudiated the
very roof under which he had been born and to which he would return but
once more before disappearing for good, and that as a murderer and almost
a fratricide; and he, fiend blackguard and devil, in Virginia fighting,
where the chances of the earth's being rid of him were the best anywhere
under the sun, yet Ellen and I both knowing that he would return, that
every man in our armies would have to fall before bullet or ball found
him; and only I, a child, a child, mind you, four years younger than the
very niece I was asked to save, for Ellen to turn to and say, 'Protect
her. Protect Judithat least.' Yes,
blind romantic fool, who did not even have that hundred miles of plantation
which apparently moved our father nor that big house and the notion of
slaves underfoot day and night which reconciled, I wont say moved, her
aunt. No: just the face of a man who contrived somehow to swagger even
on a horse--a man who so far as anyone (including the father who was to
give him a daughter in marriage) knew either had no past at all or did
not dare reveal it--a man who rode into town
out of nowhere with a horse and two pistols and a herd of wild beasts that
he had hunted down singlehanded because he was stronger in fear than even
they were in whatever heathen place he had fled from, and that French architect
who looked like he had been hunted down and caught in turn by the negroes
--a man who fled here and hid, concealed himself behind respectability,
behind that hundred miles of land which he took from a tribe of ignorant
Indians, nobody knows how, and a house
the size of a courthouse where he lived for three years without a window
or door or bedstead in it and still called it Sutpen's Hundred as if it
had been a King's grant in unbroken perpetuity from his great grandfather--a
home, position: a wife and family which, being necessary to concealment,
he accepted along with the rest of respectability as he would have accepted
the necessary discomfort and even pain of the briers
and thorns in a thicket if the thicket could have given him the
protection he sought.
"No: not even a gentleman. Marrying Ellen
or marrying ten thousand Ellens could not have made him one. Not that he
wanted to be one, or even be taken for one. No. That was not necessary
since all he would need would be Ellen's and our father's names on a wedding
license (or on any other patent of respectability)
that people could look at and read just as he would have wanted our father's
(or any other reputable man's) signature on a note of hand because our
father knew who his father was in Tennessee and who his grandfather had
been in Virginia and our neighbors and the people we lived among knew that
we knew and we knew they knew we knew and we knew that they would have
believed us about who and where we came from even if we had lied, just
as anyone could have looked at him once and known that he would be lying
about who and where and why he came
from by the very fact that apparently he had to refuse to say at all. And
the very fact that he had had to choose respectability to hide behind was
proof enough (if anyone needed further proof) that what he fled from must
have been some opposite of respectability too dark to talk about. Because
he was too young. He was just twenty-five and a man of twenty-five does
not voluntarily undertake the hardship and privation of clearing virgin
land and establishing a plantation
in a new country just for money; not a young man without any past that
he apparently cared to discuss, in Mississippi in 1833, with a river full
of steamboats loaded with drunken fools covered with diamonds and bent
on throwing away their cotton and slaves before the boat reached New Orleans;--not
with this just one night's hard ride away and the only handicap or obstacle
being the other blackguards or the risk of being put ashore on a sandbar
and at the remotest, a hemp rope. And he was no younger son sent out from
some old quiet country like Virginia or Carolina with the surplus negroes
to take up new land, because anyone could look at those negroes of his
and tell that they may have come (and probably did) from a much older country
than Virginia or Carolina but it wasn't a quiet one. And anyone could have
looked once at his face and known that he would have chosen the River and
even the certainty of the hemp rope,
to undertaking what he undertook even if he had known that he would find
gold buried and waiting for him in the very land which he had bought.