Masculinity, Menace, And American Mythologies of Race in Faulkner's Anti-Heroes (Critical Essay) (Character Overview‪)‬

Henry Sutpen, the young heir in Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, is confronted with the necessity of killing his mixed race half brother, Charles Bon, who is about to marry Judith Sutpen, their sister. While Henry's desire to prevent the marriage might reflect his wish to prevent an incestuous union, it also might arise from his knowledge that his half brother, Charles Bon, is part black. What is interesting here is not that Henry would try to prevent the marriage on the basis of either incest or miscegenation, but that his action is presented precisely as an either/or choice. Faulkner presents Henry's struggle with the ideas of incest and miscegenation not as multiply compounded but as mutually exclusive, asking of Henry that "which [he] cant bear," as if incest and miscegenation cannot be simultaneously enacted (AA 356). Of course, a simple explanation can encompass Bon as both half brother and racially mixed--he is Thomas Sutpen's illegitimate progeny with a woman of mixed Haitian descent. (1) This obvious explanation, however, does not inform the logic of the narrative, nor does it mitigate the action. This failure of the obvious to register with the logical is the result of the split in the ideological. For what Faulkner is representing at this climactic moment of Absalom, Absalom! is a split in cultural constructions of racialized sexualities taking place in the first decades of the twentieth-century. This moment is emblematic of the cultural split in configurations of racialized masculinities where the refusal to choose between Bon's transgressions is equivalent to the refusal to recognize distinctions of either race or gender.