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"What Might Have Been": Miss Rosa's notlife and Other Potentialities of the Sutpen Era in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! by Donald Newman, Jr. |
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"What Might Have Been": Miss Rosa's notlife and Other Potentialities of the Sutpen Era in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! by Donald Newman, Jr. |
... in that barren hall with its naked stair... rising into the dim upper hallway where an echo spoke which was not mine ut rather that of the lost irrevocable might-have-been which haunts all houses, all enclosed walls erected by human hands, not for shelter, not for warmth, but to hide from the world's curious looking and seeing the dark turnings which the ancient young delusions of pride and hope and ambition (ay, and love too) take.
--Miss Rosa p. 109, Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
Emerging from and dwelling within an all-consuming lamentation, the characters of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! enwrap themselves in a world of hurt wherein they cannot or will not release the past. Each comes to know the tragic ends of lingering among an ever-present past while the here and now fades under fretful shadows of days gone by. As the narrative progresses. the major players in this installment of Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County grow ever more obsessed by what alternative actions different circumstances might have afforded. Trapped in his/her own notions of "what might have been" (115), Miss Rosa Coldfield's wistful, yet indignant exhortation, the historicized characters of Thomas Sutpen and Miss Rosa remain fixated by Antebellum illusions--he in a desperate effort to gain what he could not, she in bitter remembrance of what had never, but might have been.
The novel's effective narrative technique of expansion and contraction via a series of interconnected yet ever more distanced recollections, retellings. and speculative reconstructions of the Sutpen-Coldfield-Yoknapatawpha County past offers various perspectives in its chronicle of what might have been. The analytical focus here will be on Miss Rosa's phrase and its place in the multi-temporal multidimensional scope of the novel, for it is in their desire to realize that "might have been which is more true than truth" (115), which equally exposes the motivation of the characters in Sutpen's ill-fated story, and the narrative depiction of it.
In getting at Miss Rosa's might have been, consider the townspeople's propensity to speculate. In her introductory account of Sutpen, Miss Rosa says, "Anyone could have looked at him once and known that he would be be lying about who and where and why he came" (11). From the start, the townspeople of Jefferson concoct the basest notions of Sutpen's origins and business dealings. Mr. Compson tells how the town ruminated over Sutpen's time away:
[They] pictured him during [his] absence with a handkerchief over his face and the two pistols glinting beneath the candelabra of a steamboat's saloon... [or doing] something performed in the lurking dark of a muddy landing and with a knife from behind. (33)
Though some answers to the town's questions about Sutpen come in time, initial uncertainties and allegations invite the reader to participate in the guesswork as well, adding an interactive dimension to the suppositional tension which has already been initiated. Thus, the reader too can consider what might have been. But where the town comes to merely tolerate Sutpen. the reader gains access to information that fosters some degree of sympathy for him.
Consider's Sutpen's narrative (through General Compson to Mr. Compson to Quentin to Shreve) of his own life. Sutpen's family of origin--poor mountain people from West Virginia--migrates to the Tidewater North Carolina area of "the South" where his father goes to work on a plantation. Sent on an errand to the plantation owner's residence, "the big house (185), Sutpen knocks at the front door where a house-slave greets him. The enslaved servant tells him "even before he had had time to say what he came for, never to come to that front door again but to go around to the back" (188).
This seminal stage of Sutpen's misadvenurous design nurtures his resolve to bring into being (for himself?) what might have been. An awakening has occurred. About his epiphanic moment he says:
It was like... an explosion--a bright glare that vanished and left nothing, no ashes nor refuse: just a limitless flat plain with the severe shape of his intact innocence rising from it like a monument; that innocence instructing him as calm as the others had ever spoken... and when it said them in place of he or him, it meant more than all the human puny mortals under the sun that might lie in hammocks all afternoon with their shoes off... (192)
With this glaring insight, Sutpen fumbles through his mountain-born innocence to consider some sort of reciprocal action:
[For] he knew that something would have to be done about it; he would have to do something about it in order to live with himself for the rest of his life and he could not decide what it was because of that innocence which he had just discovered he had, which he would have to compete with. (189)
Deeply conflicted about his (and his family's and class of people's) position in society, he feels the following:
[T]he rich man must have been seeing them all the time--as cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity, populate. double treble and compound, fill space and earth with a race whose future would be a succession of cut-down and patched and made-over garments bought on exorbitant credit... (190)
Sutpen begins to think that "to combat them you have got to have what they have" (192). To go on with the status quo, as Sutpen concludes in a debate with himself, would be to become "some unremembered and nameless progenitor" of yet another clan doomed to languish in a "home [of] rough partly rotten log walls, the sagging roof whose missing shingles they did not replace but just set pans and buckets under" (190).
And so are set in motion Thomas Sutpen's dreams of what might have been. He will come to be no purveyor of a scene where wife/daughter/sister exhausts her days:
[P]umping rhythmic up and down above a washtub in the yard... shapeless in a calico dress and a pair of the old man's shoes unlaced and flapping about her bare ankles and broad in the beam as a cow, the very labor she [is] doing brutish and stupidly out of all proportion to its reward: the very primary essence of labor, toil, reduced to its crude absolute which only a beast could and would endure... (190-191)
He wants no more of "cabins not quite as well built and not at all as well kept and preserved as the ones the slaves lived in" (185). He now discerns an alternative on the other side of the plantation fence:
[W]here the man who owned all the land and the n[egroe]s and apparently the white men who superintended the work, lived in the biggest house he had ever seen and spent most of the afternoon... in a barrel stave hammock between two trees, with his shoes off and a n[egro] who wore every day better clothes than he or his father and sisters had ever owned and ever expected to, who did nothing else but fan him and bring him drinks... that man [who] not only had shoes in the summertime too. but didn't even have to wear them. (184)
Consequently, as Sutpen puts it to General Compson, "he went to the West Indies" (193).
If Sutpen views the life he desires as a way to somehow balance the scales, whereby success would be the greatest revenge, the implementation of his design amounts to all that might have been in his favor had it not been for his social position and upbringing. Because he has little or no control over his genetic and socioeconomic inheritances, he focuses on what he thinks he can control--his future and his fortune. Yet in failing to accept and move beyond all of his past, that which he inherits and that which he himself creates, Sutpen sets the stage for disaster.
In the essay "Behind Closed Doors: The Unknowable and the Unknowing in Absalom, Absalom!" Heberden W. Ryan notes that Sutpen's inability to shut the door on his "ignorant and provincial past" and deem for himself respectability lies in his "pathetic naiveté" (299):
Sutpen is never able to pass or open that door. Although he throws himself with pious ambition into completing the design conceived that day to vanquish the memory of that plantation owner by joining his ranks and surpassing him, he remains essentially crude and artless. He can never cross that threshold, because he never quite understands and because he continues to believe that by following a simple recipe (such as marrying into an upstanding family), he can make himself respectable. (299)
When Thomas Sutpen is turned away from the plantation door as a child, discovers life is not fair, realizes that socially all people do not have the same advantages nor do they receive an equal portion of respect from their fellow human beings, and gathers that the greatest factor in how humans treat each other seems to have a material basis (land, real estate, other possessions, money), he ignores those things which cannot simply be bought or exchanged (heredity/social class, upbringing, and to some extent religious and geographic heritage, to name a few). He then sets his sights on the attainment of a respectability based solely upon economic privilege. A teenager at the time this quest begins, thinking above all that "you got to have land and n[egroe]s and a fine horse," he departs secretly, and "never saw his family [of origin] again." For him, the West Indies held great promise as the place where "poor men went in ships and became rich" (195).
[Interestingly, young Sutpen's early musings on the life of the planter include passages on the benefits wealth would provide for his father and sisters, and though these thoughts are not enough to motivate an attempt at laying hold of these things at the time, they do show a desire for that might have been his/theirs if circumstances had been other than they were. Therefore, these youthful meanderings in some ways were anticipating Sutpen's definitive reaction to the incident at the plantation door.] After escaping the West Indies through a combination of "courage and shrewdness" and "destiny [which] had fitted itself to him, to his innocence. his pristine aptitude for platform drama" (198), Sutpen migrates to Mississippi, acquiring "a hundred square miles of some of the best virgin bottom land in the country" (26). At twenty-five years of age he begins building his estate, complete with plantation house, slaves, slave quarters, stables, smokehouses. gardens and promenades. His seeking out "incidentally of course, a wife" (212) commences the un-manifestation of Miss Rosa's own might have been.
It is no wonder Miss Rosa Coldfield has dreams of what might be. Absorbed in the xenophobic town consciousness (as her ruminations on Sutpen's possible origins and absentee activities show), Miss Rosa nonetheless mulls over her own desires for happiness. Her sister Ellen has married Thomas Sutpen and that union has produced two children--Henry and Judith (Rosa's senior nephew and niece by six and four years respectively). Then as Ellen lies dying, she asks thi young teenaged Rosa to "protect them" (14).
With Judith's engagement to Charles Bon proffering some chance of joy for the niece, Rosa's set of emotional baggage has been packed. Much has taken place with no hopes of fulfillment on Miss Rosa's personal horizon. While her fantasy of being the one to marry Charles absorbs her, the War begins, Henry eventually kills Charles, and then disappears. Sutpen comes home to Judith, Clytie, and Rosa and makes his demeaning proposal to her, whereby she goes home to brood over what might have been.
In ""Endure and then endure': Rosa Coldfield's Search for a Role in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!," Olivia Carr Edenfield discusses Miss Rosa's "frustration [as] her inability to fit into any of the roles that she should have been able to take for granted" (58). She notes that "much of the criticism about Rosa Coldfield's lack of place... centers around the fact that Rosa never marries, that she spends her life wanting to fit into the prescribed role of wife and mother." Carrying that analytical model to its furthest implication, Edenfield agrees that "part of Rosa's frustration is aimed at Thomas Sutpen," yet goes on to show how Rosa "spends her life searching for a way into the patriarchy, not just as wife and mother but also as daughter, niece, sister... aunt (58).
Edenfield recalls the Coldfield family's tendency to disparage Miss Rosa as she struggles to assimilate herself into the family unit. She notes Mr. Coldfield's emotional distance, how the young Rosa's inferiority complex senses blame for her mother's mid-life death during childbirth, how Ellen's marriage to Sutpen further compromises the already strained sisterhood, her aunt's (father's sister's) elopement, Henry's killing of Charles (whom Rosa had adolescently fancied as a prospective husband). Citing textual evidence together with excerpts of other critics, Edenfield shows how Rosa "defines herself by what she is not" (59):
This feeling of not belonging to anyone, of never being wanted or needed, frames her life, and from the beginning of her existence, Rosa is left outside of a provided role. She is daughter, as Rosa might phrase it... To say what she is would be to admit to the condition of her life, to give in to a version of herself that she fights against even at the end. (58-59)
Inasmuch as the story concludes with Miss Rosa's un-triumphant not-life un-lived out, Sutpen's much pursued glory too falls unattained. Though he gains all materially, he cannot fully achieve the end he desires. He had thought that "money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a faimily"--would get him the respect he wants. He felt these "things" would grant him what might have been, to be respected, before he dies. Arguably, Sutpen may have gained a certain amount of respect--the kind that comes with simply having money. But in return for his wealth and the choices he makes for respectability, he receives only what he does not want and becomes the sort of man he had set out to neutralize, to countermand.
From the passages out of his own narrative come evidence for many critics to rally around Thomas Sutpen's fierce ambitious innocence. This innocence pushes forward his design for realizing futile hopes and keeps him blinded even as his eyes were opened at the mansion's door. Ultimately, it relegates him, his family, and Rosa Coldfield to unfulfilled not-lives in which they yearn for what could have been.
A forlorn dreamer in her own right, Miss Rosa too embodies a bitter innocence. But her innocence is driven by a romanticism that keeps out of reach the very desires it says it hopes for. That romance underlies Rosa's dream-world is revealed in Alain Geoffroy's "Through Rosa's Looking-glass: Narcissism and Identification in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!":
Rosa's life had always been organized around missing objects of love: the mother she would never know, the father who nailed himself in his attic, the aunt who eventually ran away... her older sister retired in Sutpen's Hundred. It is little wonder then that she would eventually fall in love with somebody whose very nature was absence. (315)
[For] Rosa had been seduced by her brother-in-law the very first time she saw him, probably because his narcissistic attitude was mirroring her own... [Her] ineffable love for Sutpen followed the same rules as her imaginary love affair with Bon, for he also was always absent, as if it were an inevitable necessity... No wonder that under crucial circumstances Sutpen became the too obvious aim of Rosa's phantasms... (319)
Fearful and resentful as she is abandoned or robbed of the chance for an Antebellum picture-book life, Miss Rosa's "love" converts to "hate." Hence goes her never-ending search for what might have been. Keeping Geoffroy's reflections in mind might shed some light on Rosa's divulgence to Quentin:
Maybe you have to know anybody awful well to love them but when you have hated somebody for forty-three years you will know them awful well so maybe its better than maybe its fine then because after forty-three years they cant any longer surprise you or make you either very contented or very mad. (9)
What then are we to finally say about the might have been?
Because the Sutpen myth reaches the reader from out of the past (which is largely unknown, shaped by those who do the telling of it) reconstructions cannot (nor can they be expected to) faithfully represent actual events. What comes by way of a text can only be what might have been filtered through the teller (and listener!) based on his/her hopes, dreams. and preconceptions. In trying to relate to Shreve the essence of "the South" by recounting familial tales about Sutpen's rise and fall, Quentin prompts himself and his friend to enter their own occasional versions of what might have been.
In the wonderfully constructed section of the novel where Quentin and Shreve have merged themselves into the story with/as Henry and Charles in an effort to fill gaps otherwise left empty in the narrative, Shreve asks Quentin about his (Quentin's) meeting with Miss Rosa when she takes him to the run-down abandoned Sutpen plantation house:
What was it the old dame... told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe are and it don't matter a damn whether they are or not? (258)
Again reiterating the obscurity of the past and how one can imagine "a might have been which is more true than truth," Shreve goes on to remind us that no history is without its mythical aspects. As when he/(they?) ruminates:
[I]t might have been either of them and was in a sense both: both thinking as one, the voice which happened to be speaking the thought only the thinking become audible, vocal; the two of them creating between them out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn of what were quiet as the visible murmur of their vaporizing breath. (243)
Perhaps to conjecture on the possibilities contained within once un-lived lives is a harmless human distraction. But to waste away a lifetime moment-by-moment in a resentful harkening towards unattained dreams or alternative realities is as harmful an existence as that which accompanies the worst of abuses. Thomas Sutpen clings to his design like a king's scepter, ever consumed by his psychological need for respectability. He does not see that his staff has nightmarishly become a rattlesnake, injecting his life with the most severe of poisons. For him each bite, each strike, has been merely a briar in the path he clears to Sutpen's Hundred.
Miss Rosa's existence in not-life enables her to annul her relationships as she seeks them out. Caught in the throes of her losses, lacking any stable emotional development at 65, she remains "the spinster doomed for life at sixteen, sitting beneath this bright glitter of delusion" (59). From her seat there she sees the "might have been which is more true than truth" (115), as "the single rock we cling to above the maelstrom of unbearable reality" (120).
And so it is... if only...
Edenfield, Olivia Carr. "'Endure and then endure': Rosa Coldfield's Search for a Role in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!" Southern Literary Journal 32 (Fall 1999): 57-68.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Random House, 1936. (Vintage International Edition. November 1990).
Goeffroy, Alain. "Through Rosa's Looking-glass: Narcissism and Identification in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!" Mississippi Quarterly 45.3 (Summer 19.92): 313-321.
Ryan, Heberden W. "Behind Closed Doors: The Unknowable and the Unknowing in Absalom, Absalom!" Mississippi Quarterly 45.3 (Summer 1992): 295-312.
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