The House/Home Faulkner Built

Abstract

This thesis examines how house/home as a central trope expands the spatial and temporal boundaries of William Faulkner’s 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom by (un)knotting the American South, the United States, and the Americas. While knotted as separate, independent regions sharing the same geographical boundaries, the three regions reveal that their knot, when seen from a three-dimensional topological view with the study of house/home, is actually made up of a single, undivided line, allowing the South, the U.S., and the Americas to converge. Through repeated depictions of the suffocating air and ominous decay of Sutpen’s Hundred and Miss Rosa’s house, Faulkner’s novel first presents the memory-ridden antebellum South, in which the residents are physically constrained and psychologically stifled. Meanwhile, Quentin and Shreve are united by the “geologic umbilical” in their New England house/home while retelling the old stories from Yoknapatawpha. In doing so, they show the entangled history of the U.S., from its first settlement to the great expansion of the Louisiana Purchase to the formation of the U.S. after the Civil War. Moving beyond the national border, Faulkner’s house/home ultimately reaches the Americas. Sutpen’s Hundred shows its close association with the West Indies, and the family tree of the disowned, Haiti-born Charles Bon circles back to Yoknapatawpha, linking the Caribbean to the American South. Unveiling the deeper link between the (un)knotted regions of the South, the U.S., and the Americas, the nexus of house/home corroborates the power of Faulkner’s words. Reflecting the dilemma of an author who wanted to stand both inside and outside the American South, the house/home in Absalom, Absalom places the distressed characters at a hemispheric crossroads, whose relationship to their house/home demonstrates the endless human effort to fight, endure, and prevail.