Dying of the Stranger's Disease: Yellow Fever, Narrative Space, and the Art of Exclusion in Absalom, Absalom!

Introduction: The Sutpen Cemetery

At the physical, narrative, and thematic center of Absalom, Absalom!, in one of the novel's most memorable and vivid moments, Quentin Compson encounters the Sutpen family cemetery, seeking shelter when rain interrupts a quail hunt with his father. Later, as he recalls his impression at the beginning of a night's storytelling with his Harvard roommate Shreve, Quentin vividly visualizes those collected graves:

the two flat heavy vaulted slabs, the other three headstones leaning a little awry, with here and there a carved letter or even an entire word momentary and legible in the faint light which the raindrops brought particle by particle into the gloom and released[.]

(156)

The imagery of light and dark, stasis and change, speaks resonantly to the novel's larger patterns of revelation and obfuscation, of things "momentary and legible." Moreover, in its correlation of narrative and burial plots, this image also materializes much of the novel's narrative space.¹ This spatial-narrative analogy works precisely because these plots are visibly unequal. The hierarchies of life persist in death: it is the grand, vaulted slabs of Thomas Sutpen and his wife, cracked and worn but still "quite legible," that are physically and narratively approached first (156–57). And it is only subsequently that Quentin is compelled to brush back the heavy fall of cedar needles to make legible the inscription on the other, more faded headstones, "leaning a little awry": of Charles Bon, Sutpen's spurned, and likely mixed-race, son (158); of Bon's own son, Charles Etienne de Saint Valery Bon (158); and of Sutpen's daughter, Judith, whose grave lies "at the opposite side of the enclosure, as far from the other four as the enclosure would permit" (174).

The cemetery consolidates and reveals, in a single site and image, the Sutpen family's fatal history. It reveals, in particular, how Sutpen's plantation "design" (218) was doomed by the very exclusion of his firstborn mixed-race son, Bon, that he believed would ensure its preservation.² Killed by his white half-brother Henry, in a tragic escalation of his father's earlier rejection, Bon rests in death beside the father who rejected him in life, with the dynastic plantation design shrunk down to a small plot of burial ground. Yet amidst this physical revelation, there is also mystery. Why are the graves of Bon, Charles Etienne, and Judith so deliberately differentiated from—and rendered so less legible than—those of Sutpen and his wife? And why, still more noticeably, is Judith's grave set apart from the others? This latter question is partially addressed by Quentin's wry observation that "whoever had buried Judith must have been afraid that the other dead would contract the disease from her" (174)—the disease in question being yellow fever. The observation is not intended literally: beyond the physical impossibility of post-mortem contraction, Quentin also knows—through recollection of his father's account immediately before this (173–74)—that Charles Etienne already had yellow fever, and that Judith contracted it while nursing him. A further question arises, then: why, if they died almost simultaneously, of the same disease, were Judith and Charles Etienne buried apart?

To answer these questions is to uncover the submerged yet profound significance of sickness and yellow fever within Faulkner's novel as historical referents and narrative structures. "Cultural margins and national borders are often summoned, if not articulated, through the figure of specific contagious diseases," Wald, Tomes, and Lynch argue (3), and this is very much true of Southern yellow fever discourses. Known as yellow jack, vómito negro, and most significantly "the stranger's disease," yellow fever haunted the consciousness of the US South as both sickness and symbol (Carrigan 64). The swift and devastating effects of outbreaks—such as the 1878 summer epidemic, which claimed 20,000 lives in the Mississippi Valley (Humphreys, Yellow Fever 10)—along with yellow fever's historically unknown origins and visually striking re-coloring of skin, helped the disease...