Literature Review Essay 4 pages

AMANDA R. GRADISEK W alsh U niversity

The Eyes of the Strange: Absalom, Absalom! and Domestic Modernism Early in A bsalom, A bsalom!, Mr. Compson makes a comment that aptly characterizes the plight of the “ladies” of the novel. Telling his son Quentin that it is his duty to listen to the eerie ramblings of an old woman he barely knows, Compson compellingly articulates the dilemma facing women like the novel’s Rosa Coldfield. “Years ago,” he says, “we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the W ar came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?” (7-8). These remarks, which establish an essential class distinction between women and ladies, also assume that the crumbling of the system on which these identities rely results in the destabilization—the eradication, even—of the identities themselves. For the ladies who once played an essential part in the symbolic order of the Old South, life derived meaning from a system that has since been destroyed. Mr. Compson’s comment reflects a common understanding of the women turned into ladies by the South’s aristocratic code: most understand them as symbols of a unique lifestyle, kept safe from the heavy burdens of feminine domestic labor performed by the majority of the women around them. The actual plight of the average white woman, even across class boundaries, was characterized by a vexed relationship to domestic labor and this oversimplified Southern ideal of femininity. W ith the Civil W ar came the destruction of the South that had created the idealized, iconic “lady,” and while most women never lived free from the burdens of domestic labor, their place in the devastation that followed the war left them redefining their relationship to domesticity, its labors, and traditional feminine roles.

Mr. Compson’s striking characterization of the South’s ladies, which foregrounds the drastic change in the lives of women in nineteenth- century Southern society and the haunting effects that linger into the early twentieth century, is the point of entry for my analysis of Absalom, Absalom!. It also establishes some terminology for an examination of

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how this change connects to domestic labor and an evolving understanding of femininity in the novel. One among many stories of the book, the tale of the displacement of the Southern lady as icon and of the real-life women of the novel is one that appears bleak at first glance. In this context, Mr. Compson’s understanding of the women of the novel as “ghosts” shows not only a pattern of undervaluing and misunderstanding women’s domestic labor, but it also shows the significance of the loss of symbolic value these women experienced after the Civil War. Here, I will specifically consider the displacement of Judith Sutpen and Rosa Coldfield, as represented by their changing relationships to domesticity and clothing. Miss Rosa, the forgotten daughter of a storekeeper, never has female figures in her life to teach her any traditional relationship to womanhood or roles coded as feminine and must learn to participate in domesticity on her own terms. Thomas Sutpen intended for Rosa’s niece, Judith, to be the iconic Southern plantation lady, but this plan’s failure begins long before the Civil W ar’s destruction of this way of life. As her hands get dirty metaphorically and then literally, Judith’s destruction as a symbol of Old South values is most striking when she can no longer occupy her symbolic pedestal and must take up the domestic labor that defined the existence of her female contemporaries in the lower classes. In his portrayal of Rosa Coldfield’s and Judith Sutpen’s definitional changes, William Faulkner suggests that domestic labor can provide new possibilities for women who undertake a more modern and subject- centered approach to labor. While tales like Gone with the W ind allow readers to envision a more romantic idyll of the South, Faulkner’s portrayal of these women challenges the iconic Southern belle image and suggests compelling possibilities for women who move from a life with an ambiguous relationship to domestic labor to a determined involvement in the work of the Southern household.

The vexed relationship between modernism and the domestic is central to my understanding of Faulkner’s portrayal of Southern ladies in Absalom, Absalom!. Because the modern man is often defined as the urban individual free from “familial and communal ties” (2), as Rita Felski has argued, the domestic is more commonly associated with the traditional and the antiquated than the new and modern. Defined as a site in which patriarchal values, colonialism, or other domineering cultural forces are enacted, the domestic is often ignored as a site of

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literary modernism’s engagement with the complex forces of modernity.1 But to write off the domestic realm as only the site of these coercive cultural forces neglects to consider the complicated relationship the women of the South—particularly its ladies—have to domesticity. While existing theories account for the experiences of many women whose lives have been restricted by gendered domestic obligation, I am interested in the experience of white women of the Southern middle to upper classes as depicted in Absalom, Absalom!, their lives once defined by a relative privilege in relation to domesticity rather than simply by the labor they had no choice but to perform. My focus centers on those women whose lives were once largely understood in relation to their freedom from certain kinds of labor and domesticity and who, in the sweeping changes of the Civil War, find themselves with the opportunity to create new, productive relationships to domestic labor. To use Mr. Compson’s term, the “lady” has occupied a role in Southern history that is far from simple. While she could be defined by her social status or birthright, in the context of Mr. Compson’s understanding, the lady is a woman who once occupied an essential symbolic role in Southern culture but finds herself bereft after the devastation of the Civil War. Before the War, the lady was often considered the “designated work of art” (Roberts 2) on the plantation, understood to be strong in virtue but delicate in body, combining “the images of belle and warrior” and representing the “religious, political, and gender discourses of the Civil W ar” (Roberts l).2 Once the symbolic representation of the “plantocracy,” the Southern lady was displayed on a symbolic pedestal

'in The Gender o f Modernity, Felski defines modernism as a specific form of artistic production, serving as an umbrella term for a melange of artistic schools and styles which first arose in late-nineteenth-century Europe and America. Characterized by such features as aesthetic self-consciousness, stylistic fragmentation, and a questioning of representation, modernist texts bore a highly ambivalent and often critical relationship to processes of modernization. (13)

2Her idealized position, far from the violence and abuse of slavery and war, justified the cruelty and exclusion that stratified her society. Or, as Barbara Ladd has suggested, while the power structures of the South were not unique, they “were made explicit and instrumentalized in a slave economy that subjected Southern women (black and white, rich and poor) and African American men to a disciplinary regime in which some were spiritualized and others imagined as animals” (13).

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as justification for a lifestyle many Southerners died to defend.* * 3 As an essential part of a system based on negative definition, rationalization, and resistance to progress, the Southern lady had to be understood as a desirable ideal in order to justify the binaries that maintained established power structures. And while many of these ladies may have actually played active roles in the management of family, slave labor, and plantation life, their status as pure and virtuous symbols of a lifestyle worth protecting was essential to Southern ideology. Domesticity was an important part of this identity, not only in terms of the labor that the women actually performed, but, perhaps even more importantly, in regard to their maintaining a symbolic distance from such labor.4

A modernist novel that focuses on characters who must adapt to radically altered life after the Civil War, Absalom, Absalom! foregrounds the effect of the lady’s loss of symbolic value and the female characters’ subsequent turn to domestic labor. In Grotesque Relations, Susan Edmunds argues that modernism is “marked by a broken or alienated relation to the favored subject matter and representational modes of an

According to Kevin Railey, the structure of the South was a “plantocracy,” in which the money and power were held by a small group of white men who owned land, plantations, and the slave labor necessary to maintain them. The idealized white ladies of the South became “the most potent symbol of white male supremacy, and their protection became a potent rationalization and justification” not only of white male supremacy, but also of a violently classist and rigidly structured society (16). But as Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues, while white women were a key piece of this Southern iconography, they were not expected to be “mere ornaments, but were to fulfill duties commensurate w ith male prestige” and to both “show courage and to remind men of their marital, protective duties” (51-52).

4Many accounts of the American South misrepresent the experience of the Southern woman or lady. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese suggests that most histories of women are guilty of w hat she calls the “New Englandization” of the Southern lady (40): rather than accurately representing the experience of plantation mistresses, these histories instead mistakenly assume that the “separate spheres” that kept New England women freer from physical labor applied to the seemingly privileged lives of the mistresses of Southern plantations. Ann Firor Scott has argued that “work” is a fluid term, with different meanings for different stations of life. In the South, she writes, “women of leisure were hard to find” (28). Or, as Anne Goodwyn Jones writes, “each element of the image— leisure, passivity, dependence, sexual purity, submission, ignorance (with the possible exception of piety)—failed to correspond to the reality of women’s lives” (28).

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earlier era” (3).5 Modernism, she writes, “teaches us to regard the world with startled eyes, to question the unquestionable, to find the ordinary strange” (3).6 These “eyes of a stranger” reveal the modernist moments in the domestic scene; they enable “us, the ones who stayed home, to see our own lives as startling” (4).7 This concept seems particularly compelling when applied to Absalom, Absalom!, a novel in which the female characters are acutely displaced and redefined by the devastation of the Civil War. The relationship between modernism and domesticity comes into sharp focus when considering the characters through the eyes of the strange, the ghostly perspective of the Southern women who find themselves reanimated by the opportunity to see the world around them as transformed. Despite the fact that the modernist aesthetic relies on definitional structures that exclude domesticity, the Faulknerian fallen Southern lady may provide the point of intersection between these two concepts, enacted by the striking perspective of modernist alienation. At this junction, Faulkner’s “ghosts” of the past reclaim and refashion the duties of domestic labor, showing that turning to this employment long considered as outside the lady’s realm allows for a new and liberating relationship.8 No longer trapped in the gilded cage of ladyship, Judith and Rosa find a way to survive that makes use of both traditional

5Michael North’s The Dialect o f Modernism, Michael Levenson’s A Genealogy o f Modernism, and Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic o f Late Capitalism all advance theories of a break from the past that characterizes the modernist aesthetic.

According to Chiara Brigand and Kathy Mezei, in substituting the public for the private, modernist domestic novels suggest that the “experimental modernist techniques” of more canonically modern texts are only one way of participating in literary modernism (1). Victoria Rosner argues that the intricacies of the domestic realm “compose a kind of grid of social relations that shifts and slips, often upending the individuals who traverse it” (2). Modernist attention to the domestic, it follows, allows for laying bare the constructions of identity, routines, and assumptions about daily life that structure reality.

7This language calls to mind Joseph Conrad’s famous intention of making us “before a l l . . . see ” something fundamentally unexpected in modernism itself (147).

8The idea of the ghostly has appeared in the work of other scholars of Southern literature. Patricia Yaeger, for example, considers the ghost in relation to Southern literature and race, suggesting that the concept applies to individuals who have been made nearly invisible by the structures of Southern society.

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understandings of femininity and new modes of labor that domestic modernism articulates.

Absalom, Absalom! traces the disintegrating social status of the novel’s upper-class white women through their evolving relationships to labor w ithin a domestic feminine sphere largely represented through clothing and aesthetic objects. Visibly representing social status, clothing is an integral part of the readable system that denotes and maintains privilege in a society organized by visual signs. And while some of the novel’s women labor as an attempt to maintain the status quo, this performance changes into a seemingly energized participation in the labors of not only the home, but also of subsistence on the farm. In its exploration of these changing roles, the novel suggests that these ghosts—the women, as well as their interests and labor—are an integral part of the story of the American South.

Beginning with Miss Rosa Coldfield, one of the primary storytellers of Absalom, Absalom!, the novel foregrounds the perspective of a character who has just the sort of alienated approach to domestic labor that shows its modernist potential. Born twenty-eight years after her sister Ellen, four years after her own niece, and at the time of her m other’s death, Rosa is a nearly forgotten child, a girl who cannot help but grow up to be a ghost of a woman. Torn by the “vicarious” desire inspired by her niece’s impending wedding (61), Miss Rosa turns to one of the oldest of feminine pastimes to stake her claim to a piece of the Southern story—she begins to sew and make clothing herself. This sewing, inept as it may be, serves as a means by which she saves herself from an unhappy, unfulfilled life like that of Ellen, a woman who no longer has any symbolic value as a lady after the Civil War.

This project is especially strange in that Rosa, a lasting relic of the ethos of Southern ladyship, has no practical skills because, as a child, she had been taught that “she was not only delicate but actually precious” (65).This mindset was not only a luxury but a necessity, as the entire Southern plantocracy relied on the lady to represent the feminine “precious,” the delicate, and the frailty valued by this system. While the Coldfields, as storekeepers, are middle-class merchants rather than aristocrats, their name holds cultural value in Jefferson as a marker of respectability. Sutpen recognizes the value of Ellen’s good name when

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he marries her, and while Rosa has largely been forgotten by this system, she has been raised to abide by its rules and maintain its rituals. Thus, when she believes Judith will be married, Rosa asserts her role in the event. W ithout any instruction in sewing, Rosa undertakes “secretly making garments for Judith’s trousseau” (60). An old-fashioned testament to a bride’s symbolic and material value to the groom’s family, a trousseau would be difficult to make in the trying times of the Civil War and impossible to fill in times of scarcity, but Rosa remains determined. Despite her unfamiliarity with marriage and sexuality, she does know the value they hold in constituting a woman’s identity and so forges on instinctively. The narrator invites the reader to “imagine too what Miss Rosa’s notion of such [underjgarments would be, let alone what her notion of them would look like when she had finished them unassisted” (61). From the untrained depths of Rosa’s imagination come the garments she understands more for their symbolic than their actual value. Her turn to domestic labor is almost intuitive; a product of the Southern way of life, even if it has all but vanished, she is compelled to participate in these female rites of passage by the lingering rhetoric of Southern femininity.

Miss Rosa’s sewing project, clumsy and unskilled, simultaneously challenges the dominant understanding of a Southern lady’s relationship to domestic labor and expresses a desperate desire to partake in traditions of womanhood. It also resists the impression that she has no feminine identity, that she is neither girl nor woman. W hen Quentin visits Rosa early in the novel, he finds a tiny old woman who “resembled a crucified child” and whose house reeks with “the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity” (4). His perception of her demonstrates tension between two asexual female identities, the child and the elderly spinster, and shows Rosa caught between these two undesirable categories. Even earlier in Rosa’s life, her “lack of place in her southern town centers around the fact that [she] never marries, that she spends her life wanting to fit into the prescribed role of wife and mother, earning her right to exist” (Edenfield 58). These “prescribed” roles remind readers, and the characters who listen to this labyrinthine story, of the limited options for women at the time; they are also reminders of the fact that a respectable marriage was generally considered the most important goal for women of Rosa’s class. Her sewing project, then, stakes a claim to a “vicarious bridal,” and her own way of participating in this traditionally feminine rite.

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Rosa essentially insists on redefining her own relationship to womanhood by refusing, if only for a time, to accept the spinsterhood thrust upon her by the war and her absent family. As she abandons her symbolic position and the class privilege that keeps her removed from domestic labor, Rosa’s secret sewing project shows her determined effort to be a part of female experience. Her sewing project, simple and unskilled as it may seem at first glance, shows the generative possibilities of her unfamiliar approach to domestic labor and suggests that its undertaking has possibilities for redefining her life in relation to class and gender identity. This undertaking in particular signals a new relationship to domestic labor, which Rosa performs not out of necessity but on the urge to participate in a tradition of femininity to which she has had only limited access. In coming to domesticity from such a distance, Miss Rosa knows none of its burdens and finds in its performance only the comfort of a new yet manageable feminine identity. By identifying w ith Judith and appropriating a piece for her “vicarious bridal,” Miss Rosa grasps for the traditionally feminine role of bride. Rather than admit to her own fate as a spinster, she sews “tediously and without skill on the garments which she was making for her niece’s trousseau . . . whipping lace out of ravelled and hoarded string and thread and sewing it onto garments” (61).9 Ignoring the news of the crumbling nation, Rosa presses on, “losing the knell and doom of her native land between two tedious and clumsy stitches on a garment which she would never wear and never remove for a man” (61-62). Rosa’s bull-headed insistence on the awkward participation in her sister’s and niece’s lives is, as Paula Elyseu Mesquita suggests, an attempt to “compensate for the vacuum in her own life” (57). She goes on to argue that while Rosa’s relationship to these women is at best ambivalent, she is clearly “interested in playing out in an imaginary dimension the more fulfilling female roles—mother, lover—which were theirs in the real world” (58). This desire for “more fulfilling female roles” is manifested in Rosa’s insistence on making clothing for Judith. In an attempt to find a new feminine role, Rosa displaces her desire onto the garments she pieces together for her niece.

9Avoiding spinsterhood by turning to the occupation of sewing is of course ironic in that the term was coined due to unmarried women’s employment with spinning or sewing. In this case, Rosa’s labor allows her to perform the “vicarious bridal,” though temporarily, and allows her to stave off this undesirable feminine role, even if only for a while.

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W hen Faulkner writes th at Rosa’s stitches provide a “native land” (61) for her story, he also suggests that Rosa’s domestic practice allows her a distinctly feminine means of expression th at begins the telling of her story. As scholars have pointed out, the trope that associates weaving, sewing, or stitching w ith storytelling reverberates through the novel. For example, Eric Sundquist suggests th at w hen Miss Rosa tells her story, she is still “sewing those marital garments in her memory, and still unable to put them on or take them off forty-five years later” (116). Easier to rem em ber than the tale of h er “nothusband,” sewing in this case is a m etaphor th at expresses the unspoken disappointment of her life. Just as she insists on sewing for h er niece, Rosa insists on telling h er story. As Edgar A. Dryden argues, the narrator “makes the voices of all the characters sound alike, echo one another, although each stands for an individual w ho once tried desperately to tell his or her own story, to weave his or h er own pattern into the rug of life” (148). Here Dryden echoes the novel’s repeated references to sewing, stitching, or weaving, showing how the story is tinged w ith the traditions of feminized domestic labor. This ghostly presence insists on telling a tale th at not only illuminates the plight of the Southern lady, but also allows its teller to “weave his or h er ow n pattern into the rug of life” through the empowering act of narration. In staking this claim to storytelling, Rosa establishes a right to her own subjectivity and shows the surprising potential of engaging in this sort of work. Reanimating the ghost, she asserts her right to maintain a feminine existence.

Rosa’s transformed relationship to domestic tasks provides a d i f f e r e n t view of the established order, one th at allows for domesticity’s reevaluation not just in relation to the system, but also in spite of it. This form of alienating herself from the immediate Southern past into w hich she was born and refashioning a new fem ininity suggests that Miss Rosa’s modernist eyes question the established understanding of domestic labor and locate a liberating gendered identity outside of the restrictions of class-based identities. Because of the difference betw een Rosa’s social place and the reality of her situation, she challenges assumptions about the role of domestic labor in the Southern lady’s life. Allowing for a questioning of the unquestionable, her distanced perspective provides the strange view of the domestic, a gaze that reveals the modernist potential in the domestic sphere. The tensions betw een the expectations for the Southern lady and Miss Rosa’s approach to domestic labor become clear as she seeks her place in a rapidly changing society. Rather

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than maintaining the distance of idle privilege, Rosa, Faulkner’s representative ghost of the Old South, brings her alienated perspective to domestic labor to keep up the appearance of upper-class prestige. In this case, sewing becomes an active method by which she can establish agency, expressing a modernist relationship to her own identity. By serving as the point of intersection between competing definitions of femininity, this strange view of domestic labor provides an unexpectedly modernist view of Southern womanhood. In finding an unexpected way to take part in the weaving of her own tale, Rosa is one way that Absalom, Absalom! shows readers that they can find traces of the modernist aesthetic in surprising characters, places, and times.

While considering Rosa’s surprising relationship to clothing and domesticity shows the modernist implications of her evolving new feminine identity, her niece, Judith Sutpen, shows the possibilities of taking this relationship a step further, as she begins to use clothing as a catalyst for the evolution of a new identity. Because of her father’s desire to build a dynasty, she begins her life destined to become a Southern lady and ends it as the representative Southern ghost—more than any other lady or woman in the novel, Judith intensely experiences the displacement resulting from the collapse of Southern society. The loss of symbolic value occasioned by the Civil W ar is an eradication of life as she knows it. As a result, Judith’s turn to domestic labor is even more dramatic than Rosa’s.

Early in the novel, Judith, like her aunt, seems displaced and lost. While Ellen Sutpen is “practically bodiless,” Judith’s “body is [even] less present . . . than her m other’s,” according to Diane Roberts, her ambiguous place represented through a description of her physical body and her clothing. Roberts goes on to suggest that Judith is most physically present when she is imagined by the narrators as being surrounded by clothing (32). Even the other characters in the book understand Judith through clothing; at one point, Rosa imagines her in a patched-together wedding dress, waiting for a wedding that will not happen, and later Quentin imagines her standing in her “underthings,” “looking a t . . . the yellowed creamy mass of old intricate satin and lace spread carefully on the bed” (139). As Roberts suggests, Quentin imagines Judith preparing to be dressed as a bride, “the emblem simultaneously of the virgin and of the sexual woman” (33). Here, Roberts focuses on the way in which Judith’s “absence and emptiness” becomes a “presence” through others’ imaginations and her relationship

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to the wedding th at is not to be (33).10 Going a step further, I see Judith’s character as made particularly present by the clothing, w hich in tu rn acts as the cultural sign of the wedding and femininity. The clothes not only symbolically speak to th at relationship but also give shape to her body, making her a more physical, anchored person in the unanchored narrative and initiating h er rejection of “ghosthood.” Judith largely serves as a vehicle for h er m other’s desires and the site of h er two brothers’ displaced anxieties throughout the first half of the text, but her body after the war, hardened by labor and changed in appearance by w orn clothing, tells a different portion of her story.

Judith, a “collection of competing and com plementary texts” w ritten by “theorizers of the fem inine” (Roberts 25), changes throughout the narrative, her own identity evolving alongside her relationship to clothing and domestic labor. More specifically, the novel tracks Judith’s social decline through her relationship to her half-sister, Clytie. The illegitimate child of Thomas Sutpen, Clytie occupies a liminal space, living in the house but serving her own father and half-siblings. The two sisters, living side by side, exemplify the race-based class difference in the South. For most of th eir lives, each wom an occupies a uniquely feminine place— one the privileged daughter of the house, the other the house slave w ho serves the women— but th eir contrast heightens the lack each experiences. Judith does not participate in the traditionally feminine activities of keeping house, sewing, or cooking, while Clytie does not experience the courtship h er half-sister (almost) enjoys. Judith’s initial privilege in the family and the house is accentuated by the presence of her sister, a fact that continually emphasizes Judith’s removal from the labor h er sister performs.

The sisters’ relationship changes at the outset of the war, w hen the social spectacle of privilege, like the material of Judith’s fine clothing, can no longer stay intact. After receiving a letter from Charles Bon claiming they “have waited long enough,” Judith and Clytie “begin at once to fashion a wedding dress and veil out of rags and scraps” (81). This wedding dress will n ot feature the fine, decorative elements of the clothing of the Southern elite, like the hoop skirts th at signified the

10Judith waits many years for Charles Bon, the man who never actually proposes, and who is later revealed to be both her half-brother and mixed-race.

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woman’s removal from the need to work.11 Far from the fine dresses and hats that were the fashion in those days, the dress of “rags and scraps” is an unlikely substitute; the material and the laborer both change in a striking manner. Like the dress that Scarlett O’Hara fashions out of velvet curtains in Gone with the W ind i n order to maintain her image as Southern lady untouched by poverty and the labor of running a plantation (544-45), this dress brings the women in touch with the domestic practices that characterize other women’s lives. Judith knows that the spectacle of the dress and the traditional ceremony must be performed to maintain the identity she feels slipping away from her.12 Judith and Clytie find it more important to preserve the traditional ceremony than the image of luxury and excess. Thus the clothing is a site for articulating a new social relationship between the sisters—the dress is still made for the white sister, but they both work together with the “rags and scraps” to make it.13

The women’s sewing project makes it clear that domestic labor is important to Absalom, Absalom!, as skilled labor, a metaphor for storytelling, and a generator of personal value. In this case, the characters’ homemade clothing represents the breakdown of the formerly impenetrable barriers of rigid Southern society. Even the tangled, hauntingly rambling story woven together by Mr. Compson and Quentin seems to reflect Judith’s change in its very language. They note that Judith effectively “lived alone now,” since Ellen is in bed in a “shuttered room” waiting w ith that “amazed and passive uncomprehension to die” (99). Once a lady of symbolic value, Ellen now

uPierre Perrot argues that clothing has traditionally assisted in the representation of aristocratic privilege by presenting the woman as incapable of work. Likewise, it can physically reinforce the manners and gait of the upper class by literally making it difficult to walk. For high society women, “Walking was made perilous by the fullness of their dress, a highly symbolic physical hindrance. As a corollary, the drama of a tear or a spot was understood as more than an involuntary offense against the aesthetic order: it was the shameful evidence of ‘excessive’ movement” (95).

12Even upon his return from war, Sutpen still remembers the importance of appearance, as he and Sartoris arrive in regimental garb “sewed together out of silk dresses” (63).

13W hile many Southern men confined their wives to the plantations to protect them from the “polluting contact w ith the outside world,” many women sought out a “collective contribution” in their sewing projects in order to establish a community (Clinton 39, 52).

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seems to have outlived her usefulness. Before the destruction of the system that gave her life meaning, Ellen would have been one of the mothers who could “almost make themselves the brides of their daughters’ weddings” (59), but after a brief period of hope, Ellen retreats to the shuttered room. Unlike Rosa, who finds a way to participate through the “vicarious bridal,” or Judith, who pieces together a wedding dress out of “rags and scraps,” Ellen resigns herself to her lack of useful feminine identity. Rather than accepting this sort of social extinction, Judith maintains the plantation with Clyde as boundaries fall away. W hen the storytellers describe Judith as alone, the word choice is poignant—she is alone in that those who would have once been considered suitable companions for her are gone, but she lives in “anything but solitude” (99). Instead, she is surrounded by signs of a new social order.

Judith moves from the metaphorical pedestal traditionally occupied by the Southern lady to the fields and the kitchen, from relatively elite society to laboring alongside former slaves. Mothered into two different social classes, Judith and Clytie find their inequality erased through necessity, at least within the boundaries and evolving rules of Sutpen’s Hundred. W ith the departure of the men for the war, she and Clytie keep a “kitchen garden of sorts to keep them alive” (99), learn to manage the mule, and make their own clothing.14 No longer the young lady who took ceremonial shopping trips to town with her mother, Judith is now a woman in a “homespun dress and sun bonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl o f chickens." These words, which imply overuse, need, and the filth of labor, describe an unlikely costume for Judith. This threadbare outfit, which she wears while Wash Jones builds Charles Bon’s coffin “and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town," would once have been a marker of shame, but the changing times of the Civil War allow the women to see faded, homemade dresses and worn-out sunbonnets in a different light. The plantation is now the enterprise of toiling women; together, they “[weave] their own garments and [raise] their own food and cut the wood th ey [cook] it with” (148). Weaving again becomes the medium by which new stories are written, the homemade clothing marked by labor

14Wash Jones becomes responsible for a great deal of the physical labor at Sutpen’s Hundred. As women and former slaves run the plantation, it is clear that it can operate without the white male figureheads of the plantocracy.

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visibly represents a new way of life. Judith, who was once defined by her removal from domestic work, now finds herself not only working like a female slave in the house, but also working like a man, performing tasks of cutting wood or working the land; while she is still “the spinster in homemade and shapeless clothing," she has “hands which could either transfer eggs or hold a p lo w straight in furrow" (151). The novel continuously reinforces the fact that Judith’s body is now marked by work by emphasizing both her newly skilled hands and her faded homespun dress. The labor she performs, which blurs both gender and class lines, demonstrates the way in which Judith represents a new feminine relationship to labor and the management of the home.

The second half of the novel continues to value the women’s functional domestic labor over the flashy signs of luxury and decorative display. W hen Charles Bon’s octoroon mistress appears at Sutpen’s Hundred, the luxury of her person contrasts sharply with Judith’s appearance: the octoroon wears “new lace and silk and satin negligees subdued to the mauve and lilac of mourning,” her young son out of place with “four names and his sixteenth-part black blood and his expensive esoteric Fauntleroy clothing” (158). At Bon’s grave, her appearance is characterized by excess and luxury, evidenced by a “crystal bottle” of smelling salts, a silk cushion, and a parasol (158). Seemingly crippled by grief, but also by uselessness, the mistress is the opposite of Judith, with her “ calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet” (148). W ith no time for the weakness of grief, Judith moves on, while Bon’s mistress remains idle, hidden in a “room airless and shuttered,” “impregnated behind the sagging closed blinds with the heavy fainting odor of her flesh” (158). Like Ellen, she seems to have barely survived into an era that will no longer value such displays of consumption, and she is certainly out of place at Sutpen’s Hundred. The luxury and languor that characterize Bon’s mistress are in stark contrast to Judith’s utilitarian, stoic presence, suggesting that Judith’s is a life of more virtue, if not more happiness.15 The presence of the mistress in her

'’Similarly, when Quentin recounts his version of the tangled story to Shreve, his understanding of Sutpen’s childhood also vilifies ostentatious dress and excess. Sutpen, who becomes violently covetous when he is turned away from the main door of a rich man’s house as a child in Virginia, focuses his desire on the flashy shoes worn by the black man who teaches him shame. Clad in clothing that is “worn out,” “patched,” and “cut down” to fit him (185), Sutpen realizes that the black man “wore every day better clothes than he or his father and sisters had ever owned and ever expected to,” but in the

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idle, conspicuous excess only serves to emphasize the change in Judith’s circumstances.

The changing value of the “homespun dress and sunbonnet” shows the way in which the value of labor and clothing has evolved in the new era; in fact, as the detailed attention to the mistress’s appearance suggests, luxury and useless items are now the distasteful signs of excess. Sutpen’s seduction of Milly, Wash Jones’s granddaughter, is also associated with baubles and frippery, as he tempts her with “cheap ribbons and beads." In response, Judith gives the pregnant young girl a more practical gift and fashions a dress for Milly. She wears it “untilher increasing belly taught her embarrassment” (149). This dress, much different from the garments of a trousseau, serves a practical purpose as Judith tries to help the young girl clothe herself in a small measure of respectability. While there is little she can do to save the young girl from Sutpen’s sexual abuse, Judith’s sewing project here serves as another stand against a racist, patriarchal society that would teach the unacknowledged family members to despise rather than to support one another. In making this dress for Milly, Judith shows another way in which sewing can empower women to reject the system that quietly reinforces inequality and violence.

The women’s neophyte approach to labor—domestic or otherwise— allows the reader to see domestic work outside of the patriarchal history that initially condemned it and to realize the possibility such work has for the exploration of an alternative Southern femininity. It also breaks down barriers of class, race, and gender and shows that Southern women’s identity evolves alongside their changing, modern approach to labor. Tellingly, this redefinition of identity causes a redefinition of physical spaces as well, as Clytie now occupies a position closer to that of her white sister. The symbolic distance between them destroyed by necessity and cooperation, Clytie and Judith share a room. As Rosa notes, they “even slept together, in the same room but with Judith in the bed and she on a pallet on the floor ostensibly. But I have heard h o w on more than one occasion Ellen has found them both on the pallet, and once in the bed together" (112). Rosa’s shock, another sign of her ties to a previous generation, is a reaction to the changing values and social stratification after the war. The fact that they shared a room shows the sisters’ rejection of the old system. Sharing both the bed and the

end, he “coveted the shoes” (184).

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pallet—one clearly the sign of the lady and the other sign of her slave or servant—shows not that one has moved to the level of the other, but, rather, the erosion of those positions altogether. This redefinition of space in the house destabilizes Sutpen’s identity as founding father of a dynasty, as his house is now run by his unmarried white daughter and his unacknowledged black daughter. Taking control of the house (and the family name, or House), Judith and Clytie show that those with marginalized identities can find ways to subvert dominant power structures, even if their gestures are only the product of necessity in a time of war.16 W hen Sutpen dies and leaves the project of his dynasty in the hands of daughters, both legitimate and illegitimate, their labor in the domestic realm gives them access to an autonomous life, a modern approach to the home filled with the ghosts of the past.

Through this shift in power, the novel suggests an alternative understanding of the Southern lady-turned-ghost. Rather than maintaining the performance of an idealized, privileged leisure, Southern ladies such as Judith and Rosa find themselves faced with a “redefinition of Southern womanhood” (Mesquita 59). Through their actions, the women of the novel redefine metaphorical and literal domestic spaces as they “valorize” hardship and labor over ornament and idleness (Roberts 3).17 This theory of labor and hardship certainly informs my reading of Judith, who clearly adapts a closer, more labor-oriented relationship to the land that authorized her former privilege. More important, though, is the way in which Judith’s degraded class identity is manifested through a changing, strange relationship to domesticity that is inherently modernist in nature. Forced to consider the practical rather than the

16This speaks to Patrick O’Donnell’s theory that Sutpen’s design is based on fear: “the dynasty and history Sutpen wishes to conceive is founded upon the repression of what he fears most. W hat he fears—a fear that builds an empire—is that his ‘manhood’ is based merely upon a word” (31).

17Roberts suggests that this revised version of the “Confederate Woman image allowed women to take on traditionally masculine roles w ith no sacrifice of what the culture identifies as essential white femininity: maternal feeling, sexual chastity, adherence to a male economy where property (land) is all-important” (3). According to this theory, the redefinition of white Southern womanhood still relies on the land that grounded the plantocracy; in addition, it retains the essential tenets of the original Southern lady—chastity, maternity, and an economy based in traditionally masculine values. In the terms of this argument, that redefinition takes place as the Southern lady redefines herself in relationship to that land, learning to perform the work of subsistence from which she was previously kept distant.

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aesthetic aspects of materials, Judith, like many Southerners, sees new potential in the objects that once testified to her former privilege. Rather than simply representing an abstract and unstable status, luxuries such as curtains can be transformed into dresses and a carriage house can be scrapped for a coffin; formerly symbolic objects now have more concrete value, and this added value is the transformation that Rosa and, to a greater extent, Judith learn to enact. 18 While Judith’s change from idle spinster to domestic laborer seems an unlikely one, it results in an alienating confrontation with the modernizing effects of change. 19 More specifically, this alienation occurs between the character, Judith, and her relationship to the fabrication or “remaking” of these objects.20 Judith’s story is the tale of a lady-turned-woman whose life not only requires domestic labor, but in fact will come to be defined by it.

Hers, then, are the strange eyes of modernism. The unlikely partnership between Judith and Clyde, running the house that was intended to serve as a monument to the prestige of the Sutpen family, allows for a challenge to the previously unquestionable division between them. Working together to fashion a wedding dress out of rags and

18A s Rebecca Saunders writes, A dress or a curtain’s value no longer inheres in its ability to function as sign—of taste, status, prosperity—but in its ability to function as material—w ith which to cover the body or a wound. This remade “property” of the lamentation is, further, no longer “proper” to its possessor. Such redistributions of identity, that is to say, effect an alienating disjunction—a meconnaissance—between a “possessor” and objects. (734-35)

19Jameson argues that one characteristic of modernism is a preoccupation with time rather than space and w hat he calls a technological “lag.” Modernism can be “seen as uniquely corresponding to an uneven moment of social development. . . the coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history—handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields w ith the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance” (307). In other words,

modernism is characterized by a situation of incomplete modernization, or that postmodernism is more modem that modernism itself . . . if modernization is something that happens to the base, and modernism the form the superstructure takes in reaction to that ambivalent development, then perhaps modernity characterizes the attempt to make something coherent out of their relationship. Modernity would then in that case describe the way “m odem” people feel about themselves. (310)

20One reason this sort of labor is so validating is that it allows the laborer to “equate the process ofm a kin g w ith the construction o f meaning" (Attfield and Kirkham 7).

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sleeping side by side on the pallet in Judith’s room, the women’s collaborative domestic management of Sutpen’s plantation emphasizes the change in Judith’s circumstances. Bringing an inexperienced woman like Judith to domestic work, the novel challenges the stigma traditionally associated with its labors, both by the Civil War-era upper class and by the later work of feminist critics looking to free women from a mandatory sentence in its ranks. Because the concept of domestic labor was essential to understanding the Southern lady’s privilege, its changed presence in Judith’s life also suggests Faulkner’s understanding that one way to engage his female characters in literary modernism was through the representation of that labor, particularly through the strange eyes of the fallen Southern gentlewoman.

As the novel shifts to a new understanding of the home, house, and domestic sphere, it shows that private space comes to serve as more than a metaphorical trophy case for the Southern woman. Instead, it becomes a “site of agency and mode of communication for female novelists and protagonists, with the domain of the private, the interior and the everyday replacing the public sphere” (Briganti and Mezei 1). In this way, the private space provides a schematic for the mapping of the new possibilities for feminine identity. No longer prohibited from adopting a more traditional identity through the performance of tasks classified as recognizably female, women like Judith couple these domestic tasks with the management of traditionally masculine jobs. In its literary reimagining of the Southern plantation and home, the novel also reconceives of the House, the dynasty coveted by the aspiring Sutpen. It presents a dynasty of illegitimate children, mixed-race heirs, and laboring daughters, all of whom allow for this strange view; the novel problematizes what might be seen as the white Southern lady’s fall or disappearance by allowing her to escape becoming nothing more than a ghost of her past life through domestic labor.

In Absalom, Absalom!, the characters’ approach to domesticity brings with it the strange perspective of modernism: the distance from which they approach its labors allows for an expansion of traditional understandings of the potential of domestic labor. Coming to domesticity from this perspective, the women of the novel cannot help but see with strange eyes what many of their contemporaries—and many of ours—would not think to question. Their strange perspective allows them to see domesticity with eyes untarnished by the weariness of necessity and experience. Instead, they see strategies for claiming an

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identity, or a means to survive in a world collapsing around them. In questioning the stigma placed on the category of domestic, the novel suggests that social structures are organized and reinforced by even the most private and forgotten forms of labor.

This reading accomplishes several important things: first of all, it allows the women of the novel to adopt more modern relationships to their own femininity by taking part in the labor of the home and, eventually, the plantation. For Rosa and Judith, this work allows them to escape from the limited roles prescribed to them. Secondly, their work necessarily breaks down some of the class boundaries once rigidly upheld. Because performing one’s own domestic tasks generally implies need and the inability to pay someone else to do them, performing this sort of labor is a readable, class-based behavior. In addition, if clothing appears to be homemade—like Judith’s ubiquitous sun dress—it implies and makes that labor visible. But while Ellen finds this seeming erasure of status devastating, Rosa and especially Judith learn to survive in a society that no longer values the rules they once knew and craft new identities for themselves through their labor.

Perhaps more importantly, though, applying this concept of the “eyes of the strange” to the novel suggests that domesticity and domestic labor can be the generative sites not only of a modem life but also of literary modernism. As women whose idealized distance from labor once served as the icon of a way of life, the Southern ladies in this novel bring the distance of privilege and class prestige to their domesticity. These women, who Mr. Compson claims are changed from ladies into ghosts, are the vehicle for the story of women’s relationships to their own identities and the ways in which they are enacted and expressed through domesticity. In this way, the women question the unquestionable ways of life into which they were born, as well as the negative associations of domestic labor in the social hierarchy. As it helps to navigate the complications and tensions that define both private and public feminine experience, domesticity provides a point of view from which to turn the “strange eyes” of modernism to the pages of Absalom, Absalom!.

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