HOMELESS AT HOME:
DIASPORIC CONSCIOUSNESS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1852-1936
By
Yoon Young Choi
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(English)
at the
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON
2012
Date of final oral examination: 03/28/12
The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee:
Susan Stanford Friedman, Professor, English
Thomas Schaub, Professor, English
Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Professor, English
Jeffrey Steele, Professor, English
Craig Werner, Professor, Afro-American Studies
i
HOMELESS AT HOME:
DIASPORIC CONSCIOUSNESS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1852-1936
Yoon Young Choi
Under the supervision of Professor Susan Stanford Friedman
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison
This dissertation argues how a distinct kind of diasporic consciousness can be found in
earlier periods of American literary history by examining the figure of “homeless at home” in the
texts which are representative of three quintessential American genres—Herman Melville’s
Pierre; or the Ambiguities (1852), of nineteenth-century romance, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One
Blood: or, the Hidden Self (1902), of turn-of-century realist fiction, and William Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom! (1936) of early twentieth-century modernist novel. The “homeless at home”
figures refer to the white male members of an elite upper class presented in the selected novels,
who should feel “at home” in the representative American home-space, and yet, do not fully
accept their privileged positions. I argue that the “psychological displacement” that these
individuals experience within their own homes is akin to the experiences of displacement that the
conventional diasporic subjects live through outside the normative space of home. Such an
approach also functions as a critique of the current scholarly trends that emphasize presentism in
the study of diaspora and migration.
In chapter 1, I present Pierre Glendinning as a proto-nomadic figure whose diasporic
consciousness grows as he begins to critically distance himself from his position of privilege in
ii
antebellum American home-space. Chapter 2 argues how the “unhomely” home of the elite white
Americans in the post-Reconstruction era echoes Avtar Brah’s “diaspora space” where the
mutual relationship between the “insider” and the “outsider” is integral to the insider’s sense of
being. Spanning the historical periods of the previous two novels, the final chapter argues how
each narrator’s search for home in the past in Absalom, Absalom! can be compared to those
efforts of the contemporary migrant writers, and notes on the dangers of “mythification” of one’s
past home which could obscure the problematics of history. This dissertation opens new ways of
thinking about diasporic consciousness, suggesting how the traditional sense of estrangement
that the typical diasporic subject suffers and the atypical diasporic consciousness that the
“homeless at home” figure experiences operate similarly in the sense that they both undermine
the idea of “home” as a permanent and utopian space.
iii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………..………...…iv
Introduction: Home, Homelessness, and the “Homeless at Home” Figure
in the American Heartland….............................................................................……1
Chapter 1: The Ideal Home and the Voluntarily Homeless Heir
in Herman Melville’s Pierre; or the Ambiguities…………………………………….38
Chapter 2: Homesickness in the Ideal Home
in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood: or, the Hidden Self………………………….…78
Chapter 3: The Imaginary Homelands in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!....................115
Conclusion: Diasporic Consciousness at Home……………..…………………………………156
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….161
iv
Acknowledgements
I can only begin to acknowledge and thank the many people who have been involved in
the completion of this project. First and foremost, I thank Susan Stanford Friedman, from whom
I learned so much. Your insight, intelligence, knowledge, expertise, honesty, and emotional
support were constant sources of encouragement to me in the evolution of this dissertation and I
am very grateful. Mostly, I thank for the respect you offered and the confidence you instilled. I
thank Professors Thomas Schaub, Jeffrey Steele, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and Craig Werner
who so kindly lent their expertise to the betterment of this dissertation and who always
responded to my questions with unfailing good will.
I appreciate the many friends and colleagues I’ve met in the University of Wisconsin
English Department, particularly Lauren Vedal, Jeanette Tran, and Leah Mirakhor to whom I
owe many conversations that stimulated my research and writing, and companionship that
brightened many days. Outside of the university, Okhee Lim, Pam Olsen, and Megan Adams
helped to keep it all in perspective, and Yekyung Kim supported me with friendship that
transcends geographical and temporal separation. I thank Hwanseo Yoon for things innumerable
and all the days spent together in Madison. My grandmother Chae Hee Oh passed away during
my graduate studies, but I remain inspired by her strength of spirit and her belief in me.
To my parents, Byung Ihn Choi and Eun Kyung Lee, my grandmother Byung Jin Lee, my
grandfather Kyo Woong Lee, and my brother Yoon Seok Choi, thank you for constant support
and helping me to celebrate every milestone. I dedicate this to you.
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Introduction: Home, Homelessness,
and the “Homeless at Home” Figure in the American Heartland
For the embattled there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is.
- Audre Lorde “School Note” (126)
Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is
the hidden face of our identity, the space that
wrecks our abode, the time in which
understanding and affinity founder.
- Julia Kristeva Strangers to Ourselves (1)
In recent years, the issue of home and its usefulness as a concept and springboard for
discussions—around the ideas of culture, society, local and global communities, and the role of
individuals within those communities—has come to the fore in disciplines throughout the
humanities. On the one hand, the notion of home is increasingly destabilized as the postmodern
tropes of travel, flux, fluidity or mobility have dominated individuals’ re-imagining of their sense
of being. And yet, the idea of home as a “fixed point” still prevails in people’s ways of thinking
as well. Words such as “home town,” “homeland,” “mother country,” or “native soil”—which
stress the importance and sanctity of such a designated space or idea—are still widely in use. For
some Americans, home is the space that protects them from the troubles and conflicts in the
outside world. John Howard Payne—in the opening lines of his famous song Home! Sweet
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Home!—writes “Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam; Be it ever so humble, there’s
no place like home.” For others, the idea of “home” may not be a simple matter of a definite,
physical space. The speaker in Audre Lorde’s poem, “School Note,” refers to being “at home”
anywhere because no place “is” home. For Gloria Anzaldúa, home is not so much a physical
space as a psychological state; in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza Consciousness,
Anzaldúa describes herself as a turtle who “carr[ies] ‘home’ on [her] back” (43). These examples
not only suggest various relationships that Americans hold with their homes but also illustrate
two contradictory aspects of the conventional American home-space. The space of the American
home is typically understood as having a dual-sided relationship with its inhabitants. For people
like Payne—who are securely located in the mainstream of American society—home is regarded
as a space of protection and comfort; however, for socio-political minorities like Lorde or
Anzaldúa, home is always the space filled with difficult challenges and conflicts.
Accordingly, the idea of homelessness in American society is generally linked to the
underprivileged or the outcasts who are oppressed or alienated from the normative home-space.
Studies of migration and diaspora, feminist criticism, and literary criticism by scholars of
minority literature constitute a series of attempts to mobilize and/or re-evaluate the concept of
“home” in an effort to intervene in the social construction of the American home-space.1 The
literature on diaspora or migration, in particular, provides an imaginative lens for understanding
different forms of alienation and homelessness by presenting the diasporic subjects’ experience
of double displacements: first, by an actual movement away from a place that they once have
called home; and second, by the estrangement they suffer in their newly adopted home.
1
Here, I am less concerned about the overlap or difference between and across these conceptual terrains. The point I
wish to emphasize is that these theoretical constructs are best understood as constituting a point of confluence and
intersectionality where insights emerging from these fields leads to the production of analytical frames capable of
addressing multiple aspects around the issues of home and homelessness.
３
Nevertheless, although the words such as “homelessness,” “diaspora,” or “exile” currently
denote specific geo-political and social conditions, the idea of homelessness can be applied to a
broader spectrum of times and spaces in American literature.
This dissertation examines the figure of the “homeless at home” in three American
novels with gothic overtones from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth-century:
Herman Melville’s Pierre; or the Ambiguities (1852), Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood: or, the
Hidden Self (1902), and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The individuals who
feel “homeless at home” that I discuss in this project refer to the white male members of an elite
upper class presented in the selected novels, who, in every sense, should feel “at home” in the
representative American home-space, and yet, do not fully accept the privileged positions in their
homes.2 The gothic theme of the haunted house is common to the selected novels. Each novel
presents the protagonists in their initial state of being “at home” in their respectable homes
located at the center of the American social landscape. And yet, the confrontation with ghostly
figures within their own home-spaces leads the privileged Americans in each novel to recognize
the unfamiliar aspects of their seemingly safe and comfortable homes. Consequently, although
their bodies are still rooted in their own homes, these characters experience a sense of
homelessness that is akin to the diasporic consciousness. In contrast to the physical or
geographical displacements that the post-colonial or national “others” undergo, the displacement
that those who feel “homeless at home” experience occurs at the psychological level; it is a
diaspora of the mind.3
2
The term “American home-space” that I use through my dissertation links the space of the familial household to
that of the nation.
3
Although it may be impossible to describe “diaspora” in a single definition, the term carries a sense of
“displacement” from and longing for home in all cases; that is, the individuals so described find themselves
contesting the established norms of home and experience physical and/or metaphorical dislocations from their
homes. I elaborate upon my understanding of the diasporic consciousness later in this chapter.
４
At the same time, it is also important to note that the diasporic consciousness of these
privileged Americans is not equivalent to that of migrants or other displaced people. Unlike the
conventional diasporic subjects who are outcasts in American society from the beginning, the
diasporic experience of the privileged heirs in these novels shifts from a sense of entitlement and
belonging to a sense of displacement. The particular sense of displacement at which these
individuals arrive reflects their own alienation from the privileged homes into which they are
born and in which they do not feel “at home.” Still, the entangled relationship that each
privileged American character has with his ghostly “other(s)” confirms how his own comfortable
home can, in fact, become a gothic space of haunting. The traditional sense of estrangement that
the typical diasporic subject suffers and the atypical diasporic consciousness that the “homeless
at home” figure experiences operate similarly in the sense that they both undermine the idea of
“home” as a permanent and utopian space.
By spotlighting three novels which are representative of three quintessential American
genres—Pierre of nineteenth-century romance, Of One Blood of turn-of-century realist fiction,
and Absalom, Absalom! of early twentieth-century modernist novel—I demonstrate how a
distinct kind of diasporic consciousness can be found in earlier periods of American literary
history. Such an approach also functions as a critique of the current scholarly trends that
emphasize presentism in the study of diaspora and migration.
The Figure of “Homeless at Home”: Diasporic Consciousness in the American Heartland
In her 1883 letter announcing her mother’s death to Maria Whitney, Emily Dickinson—
the quintessential homebody in American literature—included a poem that describes a state of
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being “homeless at home” (288). Dickinson’s representation of the figure of the “homeless at
home” in the poem has been frequently read as a model for nineteenth-century American women
writers’ resistance to the conflation of femininity and domesticity in its relations to the discourse
of home.4 As a woman living inside the confinements of nineteenth-century patriarchal
American society, Dickinson’s relationship to her home-space is similar to those of other social
“others.” However, the characters I include in my examination of the “homeless at home” figure
in modern American literature are individuals who are regarded as privileged elite in American
society. Despite their status as the natives, the insiders, the “welcomed” ones, and the “we” at the
center of American society, these individuals experience a sense of psychological displacement
within their homes.
The discussion of diasporic consciousness in the American heartland invites an
etymological analysis of the word “heartland.” The term “heartland” is frequently associated
with normative American traditions or values, and the privileged Americans presented in the
selected novels are the agents who embody and sustain these norms.5 Thus, it may appear strange,
even paradoxical, to argue that the individuals who represent the American heartland—those
who supposedly should emblematize the “traditional values and orders” of American society—
feel ill at ease in their own homes. How is it possible to argue that the consciousness of diaspora
4
For instance, Thomas Foster has recently argued that Dickinson’s retreat to her bedroom—her internal exile within
the home—neither re-inscribes the ideology of separate spheres nor transcends it. Rather, Dickinson’s
“homelessness at home” status clears a space for poetic production by redefining, from the inside, a white middleclass woman’s relation to domesticity and the private sphere: “the trope of homelessness at home in the work of
middle-class white women authors implies their rejection of any absolute boundaries between their positions and
those of other races and classes of women” (11).
5
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “heartland” as “the central geographical region of the United States in
which mainstream or traditional values predominate” while the Oxford English Dictionary identifies it as “central
region of homogeneous (geographical, political, industrial, etc.) character.” My use of the word “heartland” focuses
less on the geographical designation of the term but stresses its conceptual connotations—the notions of
homogeneity and normative values. However, it must be noted that the term “American heartland” is also associated,
as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary points out, with a geographical region of the United States, usually referring to
the Midwestern states.
６
can be found among privileged Americans—whose socio-cultural backgrounds would position
them comfortably at the center of the dominant society? In order to answer this pivotal question,
the following questions must be addressed: What does the word “home” signify in American
society? Who desires a home? Who is deprived of it? Who rejects it? Who feels “at home” in
their own home-space? Who is the “homeless at home” figure in modern American literature?
Defining and Re-reading the Space of Home
Although those who feel “homeless at home” are the focus of my discussion in this
project, a comprehensive study of the meanings of “home” should precede an analysis of the idea
of “homelessness at home.” What is a “home”? What are the connotations of the word? Who
creates the space and/or the idea of “home”? In other words, what constitutes the space of home?
These are the questions that may help us to understand the construction of the notion of home
and its implications in American society.
The traditional sense of “home” is usually connected to a physical structure or a
geographic location. Home is the place “in which one habitually lives, or which one regards as
one’s proper abode”; it is a “place, region, or state to which one properly belongs.”6 Sometimes,
home is the place where one presently resides. Other times, individuals think of home in terms of
the place in which they were born and/or grew up, but have since left. Then again, a physical
space is not always essential in one’s construction of home. At times, home is an imaginary
6
Oxford English Dictionary. Other English dictionaries also provide diverse denotative meanings of the word. For
instance, home is “the physical structure within which one lives”; “an environment offering security and happiness”;
“a valued place regarded as refuge or place of origin” (The American Heritage Dictionary of English
Language) ;“the social unit formed by a family living together”; or, “one’s own country” (Merriam-Webster
Dictionary). Nevertheless, two distinct connotative qualities can be extracted from these lists of definition: that 1)
the word “home” implies a physical space or a sense of “dwelling”; and 2) it is frequently connected to such ideas as
“attachment,” “belonging” or “affection.”
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space; it conveys a much broader meaning than a physical site of dwelling. Caribbean-American
poet June Jordan writes “home is what you imagine when you’re ‘on the road’” (47). Home can
be the place that brings back old memories or nostalgic longing; and, for this reason, the word
“home” also involves certain psychological aspects. Sometimes, it is a utopic space, an imagined
place that always welcomes and protects. Other times, it is a dystopic space which confines,
imprisons or even expels. In any case, home can be defined in myriad ways.
In an editorial for New Formations’s special issue on “Home,” Angelika Bammer sums
up the multivalent meanings of the word “home”:
Semantically, “home” has always occupied a particularly indeterminate
space: it can mean, almost simultaneously, both the place I have left and the
place I am going to, the place I have lost and the new place I have taken up,
even if only temporarily. . . . This indeterminate referential quality of the
term has two quite different even (at first glance) contradictory,
consequences. On the one hand, it demythifies “home” as provisional and
relative. . . . On the other hand, its very indeterminacy has lent itself to the
continual mythification of “home” as an almost universal site of utopian
(be)longing. (vii)
As Bammer notes, it would be impossible to insist on a single overarching conception of the
word “home,” since the very word itself resists fixed or stable definitions. However, Bammer’s
keen observations also reveal two important aspects of home that are directly relevant to the
discussion of the sense of “homelessness at home.” First, the “indeterminate quality” of “home”
points to the fact that home is a transient space which is constantly constructed and demolished
by various socio-political forces. Second, the psychological aspects of home reveal how this
８
process of home-building is based on myth and imagination. The home becomes a utopian idea
that we can never attain in reality yet persistently desire. Then, are we truly autonomous in
creating, maintaining, and/or choosing our own home-space as Bammer seems to imply? In other
words, who shapes and determines the space of home?
Whether it is a physical, psychological, symbolic, or figurative space, the idea of home
is always connected to a sense of place; it is the geographical place that we inhabit or the
symbolic place that exists in our mind. Because place is integral to the concept of home, we must
understand how places are produced. A groundbreaking study in this vein is French Marxist
sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, which argues that space is a complex
social construction.7 Lefebvre adopts Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to show how the
social production of space is controlled by a hegemonic class as a means of reproducing its
dominance: “(Social) space is a (social) product . . . the space thus produced also serves as a tool
of thought and of action . . . in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of
control, and hence of domination, of power” (26). Lefebvre’s theory regards space as a
geographic element and examines its influence on political and/or economic outcomes. Scholars
of various disciplines take on this social constructionist idea of space and argue that, when
entering into a dialogue about space, we should not discuss the manner in which it is used, but
rather the manner in which it has been socially created.8 These scholars also point to the
7
While I am using “place” and “space” as interchangeable terms, it is also important to note the specificity and
difference of these two terms. In my own mind, “space” is the more geographically neutral term, whilst “place” is a
social/historical nexus that links directly to the discourses of “home” and “belonging.” For Lefebvre, the connection
between these two terms is not made explicit. He seems to abandon the term “place,” thinking it merely physical,
while using “space” as a more open term. Lefebvre posits three kinds of space: 1) absolute space, 2) abstract space,
and 3) representational space. The idea of space that I am referring to in this dissertation is largely related to the
second type of space that he examines in relation to the notions of hegemonic forces and capitalism.
8
For more extended discussions, see post-colonial scholars such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha; feminist
scholars like Gillian Rose; and geographers like David Harvey and Doreen Massey.
９
intersections of different modalities—such as race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on—that
are involved in the production of space, and thereby, broaden the scope of powers that are
engaged in the process of space-production. Different forms of power in society decide what
should be included in and excluded from a place.9 As a representative type of social space, home
also involves various modes of power within it. Then again, who constructs and controls the
space of American home? To what degree can individual Americans claim agency over their
homes?
In Cartographies of Diaspora, sociologist Avtar Brah notes the limits of an individual’s
agency in his/her claiming and maintaining a home-space:
When does a location become home? What is the difference between
“feeling at home” and staking claim to a place as one’s own? It is quite
possible to feel at home in a place and, yet, the experience of social
exclusions may inhibit public proclamations of the place as home. (193)
Brah’s idea of “claiming home” is deeply related to the modes of power within society. If an
individual is excluded from the dominant social discourse, s/he cannot publicly “claim home,”
even if s/he “feels at home” in that space. Such instances can be most distinctly found in the
experiences of those who are categorized as “others” in society. The racial “other,” the sexual
9
Along with the social constructionist discussions of space, the other major approach in the modern understanding
of place is the phenomenological analyses which emphasize the “intersubjectivity” as the key concept in
understanding the constitution of space. Rejecting the underlying assumptions of traditional debates which
dichotomize space into the objective and the subjective, Edmund Husserl—the founder of transcendental
phenomenology—seeks a condition under which we can have conceptions of both objective and subjective space
(163-7). Following Husserl, Martin Heidegger recognizes the human character of space and its role as a condition of
experiences. Opposing the Kantian idea of space as an a priori feature of our mind, Heidegger attributes it to our
active being and our practical involvements in the world (101-13). Husserl, Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and
Gaston Bachelard are the major contributors to this approach, followed by humanistic geographers such as David
Seamon, Anne Buttimer, and Edward Casey. For a detailed analysis of phenomenological space, see Steven Galt
Crowell’s Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths towards Transcendental Phenomenology or
Elisabeth Stroeker’s Investigations in Philosophy of Space. Whether we are to follow the political-economy
approach or the phenomenological understanding of space, both approaches share the common emphasis on the
socially-constructed nature of space and on how the idea of power is interrelated to our understanding of space.
１０
“other,” immigrants, aliens, women, the underprivileged—these are some categories of
individuals who have difficulties in their attempts to “claim home” within the social domains
they inhabit.10
The “homeless at home” figure that I examine in this dissertation occupies the opposite
space in the discourse of home to those mentioned above. The privileged Americans in the
novels that I focus on in the ensuing chapters are the individuals who can “claim home” and yet
do not “feel at home.” This feeling of being ill at ease in their homes, despite having a legitimate
claim to that space, invites a probing of the psychological components of the American idea of
the home-space. Accordingly, the study of the “homeless at home” figure must interrogate the
different forms of power in American society which sanction these privileged individuals’ right
to claim their home-space. At the same time, it is also critical to look for the aspects of
hegemonic powers which ultimately have failed in allowing them to feel “at home” within their
own homes.
Regarding the imaginary aspects of the word “home,” Bammer further suggests that
what “home” means to us is shaped “at once by the material circumstances of our experience and
by the various narratives that attempt to define and interpret that experience for us” (ix).
According to Bammer, “various narratives” function as hegemonic powers that produce and
manipulate spaces. In its discussion of “narratives,” Bammer’s argument also affirms the
imagined or mythic qualities of the “home-space.”11 The fictional aspect of home functions in
two ways. On the one hand, as Bammer notes above, it allows the individuals who desire a home
10
Throughout my dissertation, I use the terms “domestic outcasts” or “domestic others” to indicate these individuals
who are prevented from establishing a comfortable home-space within the American national space.
11
In her examination of the home-space in twentieth-century global literature in English, Rosemary Marangoly
George similarly argues that being an “imagined location” is one of the imperative qualities of home. George
defines the home in three different yet connected senses: first, home is a “‘private’ space”; second, it is a “larger
geographic place where one belongs: country, city, village, community”; and third, it is an “imagined location” (11).
１１
to create the utopian home-spaces to which they yearn to belong. In this way, it can provide an
alternative imaginary sanctuary for those who lost their homes or find their homes insufferable.
At the same time, however, in the “continual mythification” of home lies the dangerous potential
to abuse the home-building process which could lead to the exclusion or oppression of the others
through social disciplines. Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction, claims that the
“most powerful household is the one we carry around in our heads” (251). Armstrong’s claim
reveals how a society disciplines its members to believe that there are certain proper norms to
follow in order to compose an ideal home, even as there is nothing given or natural about these
“norms.” By creating certain versions of hegemonic home-space in its narratives, literature can
serve as an ardent advocate of social norms. At the same time, by revealing the suffering of the
individuals within an ostensibly ideal home-space, literary works can also expose the tyrannical
power that the dominant society exerts upon its members.
The imposition of the normative home simultaneously creates a sense of homelessness
for those whose homes do not conform to the norms of the ideal home; in essence, these
pressures transform the home from a place of protection and comfort to a site of oppression or
abuse. This aspect of home as an imaginary or mythic space and the notion of homelessness that
results from its arbitrary, yet selective, process is most extensively studied and critiqued in the
works of feminist and minority scholars and in the studies of migration and diaspora.
Understanding home as a site of oppression rather than protection is one of the starting
points of the modern feminist movement. In their seminal essay, “Feminist Politics: What’s
Home Got to Do with It?”, Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty interrogate the notions
of home, family, and nation in various early feminist writings. Martin and Mohanty examine
how examples like Minnie Bruce Pratt’s account of home revise the relationship between an
１２
individual’s identity and his/her home. Pratt’s essay problematizes the traditional understanding
that an individual’s identity is molded by his/her experience of home and unsettles “the
assumption that there are discrete, coherent, and absolutely separate identities . . . based on
absolute divisions between various sexual, racial, or ethnic identities” (192). Martin and
Mohanty note that Pratt’s account exemplifies how individuals carry around their “growing-up
places” which affect their “frame of perception” in the present (196). The space of home, in this
sense, is not only a nostalgic space that s/he has left, but becomes the institution that constricts
his/her perception. Pratt’s idea that individuals “[carry] their growing-up places” is akin to Gloria
Anzaldúa’s notion of home.12 As an Anglo-American middle-class woman who grew up in the
segregated South, Pratt’s position in the national home-space is significantly different from those
of ostensible outcasts like Anzaldúa. And yet, as Martin and Mohanty suggest, Pratt’s
recognition of the “histories of oppression and resistance” that lie beneath the “illusion of a
coherent and safe home” makes it impossible for her to “be home” without taking any critical
distance:
“Being home” refers to the place where one lives within familiar, safe,
protected boundaries; “not being home” is a matter of realizing that home
was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific
histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even
within oneself. (Martin and Mohanty 196)
Therefore, what becomes important for women in their relationship to the home-space is their
12
As I have noted in the beginning of this chapter, Anzaldúa uses the metaphor of the turtle in explaining the
relationship between the self and one’s home. On the one hand, the shell of home connects Anzaldúa to her origin,
her Chicano heritage, which she endeavors to preserve against the dominant Anglo-American culture. However, the
home that she carries on her back “injures” her as well in the name of “protecting” her (44). As a lesbian of color,
Anzaldúa argues that the culture of her home—which is based upon patriarchy and heterosexuality—has triggered
the “fear of going home,” as she is labeled “unacceptable” by her home culture. Accordingly, home becomes a
contradictory, contested space that simultaneously protects and confines.
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ability to actively choose homelessness. In realizing that the illusory coherence afforded by the
normative home space both promotes and obscures its regulatory and oppressive power, women
may be freed to reject the constraints of the domestic space. Furthermore, feminist theorization
of the “politics of location” is also of critical relevance in understanding different types of
violence within the home.13 Finding themselves in various locations in political and social
contexts, women become aware of the fissures in the smooth narratives of home and nation.
Thus, by problematizing the traditional notion of home within the national space, feminist
discussions re-examine the relationship between the self and home.
Although the displaced individuals I discuss are Anglo-American upper-class males who
are positioned at the center of the American home-space, as compared to those gendered--and
sometimes, also racial and/or sexual—“others” like Pratt or Anzaldúa, Martin and Mohanty’s
argument of the impossibility of “being home” without recognizing the existence of the “others”
beneath the “illusion of coherence and safety” can be employed in their situations as well. In
much the same way that women’s identities are restricted within the home-space, the “familiar,
safe, protected boundaries” of the homes in the novels that I discuss place similar limits and
constraints on their inhabitant’s perceptions of themselves and the world around them. Thus, I
argue that the condition of being “homeless at home” directly relates to the importance of the
critical distance that every individual should maintain from their own home-space regardless of
his/her position within it.
13
Mohanty, in “Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience,” defines the “politics of location” as “the
historical, geographical, cultural, psychic and imaginative boundaries which provide the ground for political
definition and self-definition for contemporary US feminists” (74). In her essay, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of
Radical Openness,” bell hooks insists on a position that corresponds with the politics of location: “at times, home is
nowhere. At times, one knows only extreme estrangement & alienation. Then home is no longer just one place. It is
locations. Home is that place which enables & promotes varied & everchanging perspectives, a place where one
discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontier of difference” (148). For more detailed discussions on the politics of
location, see Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical
Literacy.”
１４
Feminist disruption of the fictional, mythic home parallels the discussions of home in
diaspora and migration studies. The term “diaspora” and the social and historical phenomena it
entails have frequently been placed under intense scrutiny—especially within the studies of
migration, globalization, and culture—in recent years. In their introduction to Theorizing
Diaspora, Jana Evans Braziel and Annita Mannur highlight the ambiguity of the term “diaspora”
used in the current scholarly discussion: “[i]t is often used as a catch-all phrase to speak of and
for all movements, however, privileged, and all dislocations, even symbolic ones” (3). Although,
it is impossible to give a uniform definition as the term holds a complex and problematic history
that must always be placed in a specific social context, most scholarly approaches to the word
can be grouped into two types. On the one hand, a number of sociologists use the concept of
diaspora primarily as a descriptive typological tool (Safran, Cohen).14 Other scholars take a more
analytical approach and seek to understand and explain diaspora as a social process (Hall,
Appadurai, Clifford).15 Despite the difference in their methodologies, however, existing
scholarly approaches concur in their understanding that the notion of diaspora should concern
those who exist outside or in the margins of the home-space. Consequently, the space of diaspora
typically stands in contrast to the space of home in these studies.
The external status of the “homeless at home” figure that I propose in my dissertation
does not belong to any of the standard categories of diaspora. In fact, according to the existing
discourse on diaspora, the characters I examine should be posited as the very emblems of the
14
This approach names certain geo-historical criteria that must completely or partly be shared by a group in order
for them to be defined as a diaspora. For instance, in his theorization of diaspora, Robin Cohen examines various
instances of human mobility from the ancient Jewish diaspora to the contemporary case of the Caribbean, and argues
that the study of diaspora should be based on the cases of people who live outside their place of origin.
15
James Clifford, for instance, discusses diaspora relations as different responses in the form of boundary fixing and
identifications in a context of deterritorialization and transnationalism. What is important for Clifford is thus to
come into contact with such experiences that are put forward in diaspora discourses and to see how these people
construct “homes away from home” (244).
１５
traditional American home-space, whose experiences are quite opposite those of the diasporic
subjects. However, I argue that the “psychological displacement” that these individuals
experience within their own homes is akin to the experiences of displacement that the
conventional diasporic subjects live through outside the normative space of home. While the
existing scholarly discussions on diaspora emphasize the physical mobility—“dispersion”—of
the diasporic subjects and their collective acts of remembering the old home and/or longing for a
new one, I focus on the experience of “displacement” that individuals undergo when they are
bereft of their homes. In this sense, as Clifford suggests, it is possible to define diaspora as “a
loosely coherent, adaptive constellation of responses to dwelling-in-displacement” (“Diasporas”
254). Using this notion of “dwelling-in-displacement” as a point of entry, I apply diasporic
consciousness theory to those individuals who are regarded as privileged heirs in the American
home-space. On the one hand, the “homeless at home” figure actively participates in the process
of displacing the “others” from the normative American home-space. At the same time, these
figures experience a peculiar type of diasporic state because their psychological displacement
within their homes results from their awareness of their participation in the physical and social
displacements of the “others.”
Moreover, although the studies of diaspora generally focus on the experiences of those
who are physically and/or socially displaced from their homes, scholars like Brah or Clifford
place equal emphasis on both the “indigenous” and the “outsiders” of the space of diaspora.
Brah’s examination of “diaspora space” highlights how it is “‘inhabited’ not only by those who
have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as
indigenous” (181).16 Similarly, Clifford’s concept of “traveling culture” underscores the mutual
16
Brah proposes a concept of “diaspora space” which differs from the notion of “diaspora.” For Brah, the “diaspora
space” involves both the “natives” and “migrants” in a single space, while the idea of “diaspora” exclusively
１６
influences that the “insiders” and “outsiders” have on each other:
We need to think comparatively about the distinct routes/roots of tribes,
barrios, favellas, immigrant neighborhoods—embattled histories with
crucial community “insides” and regulated traveling “outsides.” What does
it take to define and defend a homeland? What are the political stakes in
claiming (or sometimes being relegated to) a “home”? . . . How are national,
ethnic, community “insides” and “outsides” maintained, policed, subverted,
crossed—by distinct historical subjects, for their own ends, with different
degrees of power and freedom? (“Travelling Cultures” 108)
Through his idea of the interaction between the “insiders” and the “outsiders” of a single space,
Clifford rethinks the stakes and problems that the “insiders” face as they attempt to “define and
defend” the security of their home-spaces against the “outsiders.” My study of the diasporic
consciousness of the privileged Americans reveals the very stakes to which these individuals are
exposed when they remain within the “familiar, safe, protected boundaries” of home. Ironically,
the fact that their normative spaces of home can only be brought into being by alienating the
“others,” makes it impossible for these privileged figures to completely eradicate the “others”
from the discourse of home. In other words, the presence and exclusion of the “others” is the
indispensable to process of creating the protective space of the American home. At the same time,
the lingering presence of the “outsiders” within these seemingly untroubled homes provokes a
peculiar sense of alienation within the “insiders”’ own minds. As a result, although the “insiders”
and the “outsiders” occupy opposite positions in the American home, the domestic outsider’s
concerns the migrants’ “dispersion” or “travel” (182). Stuart Hall argues that diaspora does not refer to those
“scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all
costs return . . . . The diaspora experience. . . is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a
necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (235).
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typical sense of estrangement and the atypical diasporic consciousness that the “homeless at
home” figure experiences operate in similar ways in the sense that they both undermine the idea
of “home” as a permanent and utopian space.
The “Strangers” of the American Home-space
The “homeless at home” figures in the novels that I examine in this dissertation are the
inheritors of an upper-class American home-space who recognize the “strangeness”—the
haunting presence of the socially repressed “other”—beneath the seeming ideality of their homes.
The recognition of domestic “strangeness” puts these characters in an exceptional position within
the discourse of the American home as it results in their psychological displacement within the
boundaries of their own home. On the one hand, their recognition of the “strangeness” or the
“unhomeliness” of their reputable homes distinguishes these individuals from the typical
privileged Americans who remain “at home” within the “familiar and safe” boundaries of the
representative American home. At the same time, their conditions also differ from the
conventional American domestic “outcasts” because their “homelessness” results from their
questioning of home within the home-space as opposed to the domestic “others” whose
externally-enforced homelessness limits their ability to interrogate the norms of the American
home. In this sense, the particular status of these privileged, yet displaced, individuals echoes the
experience Julia Kristeva discussed in Strangers to Ourselves.17 As they acknowledge the
17
Examining various types of “strangers” of the nation and society as well as the notion of strangeness within the
self, Kristeva insists on the importance of the modern individual’s recognitions of the “stranger” within his/her own
society and self that challenge the notions of home and belonging. While Kristeva puts forth the cases of the French
who have “neither the tolerance of Anglo-American Protestants, nor the absorbent ease of Latin Americans . . . ,” it
is interesting to note that the novels that I present in the following chapters expose the intolerance of the AngloAmericans towards the “strangers” of their homes (38).
１８
“strangers” of the American home-space, these privileged Americans become “strangers”
themselves within their own homes.
The homeless state of individuals in the literary works of Americans is not a new subject
matter because the nation itself claims it was founded as the new home for uprooted people of
various backgrounds.18 The literary criticism that deals with the idea of homelessness in the
United States mostly focuses on texts that characterize individuals who travel away from their
original homes: the newly arrived immigrants, the exiles, the foreigners, and so forth (Ferraro,
Griffin, Muller, Needham). The ways in which these “displaced” individuals face the challenge
of negotiating the differences between their old and new homes has been the focal point in the
readings of these works. Through the physical dislocation of the characters, the literary works on
homelessness and their critical readings typically explore the integral relationship between the
identification of the self within the structure of a home, the disruption of self-identity caused by
its loss, and the subsequent recreation of identity in a new home. Scholars of minority literature
and feminist critics, in particular, constitute another series of attempts to mobilize and/or reevaluate the concept of “home” in an effort to intervene in the social construction of American
individual identity (hooks, Mohanty, McDowell, Rubenstein). And yet, both these approaches
generally highlight the meanings of home in its relation to the outcasts of that space. This project,
in contrast, attempts to take the insider’s position—insiders who voluntarily outcast themselves
from their homes—to re-examine the meanings that the American home-space holds for them.
There are certain universal connotations in the idea of home.19 Yet, it is important to
examine the specific meaning of “home” in the American context since this project focuses the
18
For discussions on various representations of the theme of homelessness in modern American literature, see John
Allen’s Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism, and Testimony.
19
For further discussion of the word “home,” see Friedman’s “Bodies on the Move: A Poetics of Home and
Diaspora.”
１９
meanings and functions of home in this particular nation. The link between the notion of home
and the concept of nation has already faced acute interrogation in modern cultural discourse.20
Following Benedicts Anderson’s argument, Bammer makes the analogy between nation and
home and points out the distinct similarities between the two concepts:
. . . the analogy between nation in Anderson’s sense and home . . . works on
a number of levels. Both, to begin with, are fictional constructs, mythic
narratives, stories the telling of which has the power to create the “we” who
are engaged in telling them. This power to construct not only an identity for
ourselves as members of a community (“nation,” say, or “family”), but also
the discursive right to a space (a country, a neighbourhood, a place to live)
that is due us, is—we then claim, in the name of we-ness we have just
constructed—at the heart of what Anderson describes as the ‘profound
emotional legitimacy’ of such concepts as ‘nation’ or ‘home.’ . . . The state,
as nation, is naturalized in domestic, familial terms (‘homeland’, we say, or
‘fatherland’) while familial relationships are hierarchized along lines of
authority patterned by state, where designated leader rule over subalterns.
Home, nation and family thus operate within the same mythic metaphorical
field. (ix-x)
Bammer’s argument brings us back to the constructed nature of space and the forms of power
which control it. The constructed nature of “we-ness” on the level of nation becomes
20
In his groundbreaking discussions on the spread of nationalism in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson argues that, despite the fact that both home and nation are
defined in territorial terms, they also exist as “acts of the imagination” (4). Anderson contends that the European
nation-state came into being as the response to nationalism in the European diaspora in colonies, namely in
American continents at the end of the eighteenth-century.
２０
“naturalized” as it becomes associated with domestic terms.21 In this sense, the home not only
sanctions the authoritative power of the nation, but also becomes the representative space
through which this power is exercised. Hence, the essential connotations that home and nation
hold in modern society become extensively interrelated; a “nation” becomes a “homeland” while
the “home,” in turn, becomes a space which reproduces the “natural” authority and social
hierarchy of the nation.22 As the exemplary model for a modern nation-state, the United States
becomes a site in which the relationship between the concepts of home and nation are intimately
interconnected to each other.
At the same time, the social exclusion of powerless “others” does not necessarily lead to
the complete disregard of these groups in the discourse of nation and home. On the contrary,
these individuals who cannot “claim home” in the normative American home-space become the
most integral component in the discourse. Edward Said’s argument on the relationship between
nationalism and the exile—another figure who cannot “claim home” or “feel at home” within a
national space—attests to the fundamental link between the modern displaced self and the nation.
In “Reflections on Exile,” Said defines this nexus between nationalism and exile:
. . . nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a
heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture,
and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its
21
George also notes the intricate connection between the two concepts as she examines the term “home-country”:
“The term ‘home-country’ suggests the particular intersection of private and public and of individual and communal
that is manifest in imagining a space as home” (11). For more on the relationship between the idea of home and the
national community see Yuval-Davis, McDowell, and Shapiro.
22
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein extend their arguments about the distinctive interconnection between
these two categories in their analyses: “as lineal kinship, solidarity between generations and economic functions of
the extended family dissolve, what takes their place is neither a natural micro-society nor a purely ‘individualistic’
contractual relation, but a nationalization of the family, which has as its counterpart the identification of the national
community with a symbolic kinship, much to project itself into a sense of having common antecedents as a feeling
of having common descendents” (101-2). Balibar and Wallerstein underscore how the symbolic kinship of a nation
began to stand in for the biological kinship of family within the space of home in the modern era.
２１
ravages. Indeed, the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s
dialectic of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each
other. All nationalisms in their early stages develop from a condition of
estrangement . . . . This collective ethos forms what Pierre Bourdieu, the
French sociologist, calls the habitus, the coherent amalgam of practices
linking habit with inhabitance. In time, successful nationalisms consign
truth exclusively to themselves and relegate falsehood and inferiority to
outsiders. . . . and beyond the frontier between ‘us’ and the ‘outsiders’ is the
perilous territory of not-belonging . . . . (176)
Set as the archetypal model for modern European nations, the nation-building process of the
United States followed the exact course that Said outlines above. While attempting to build a
new “home” for a group of people, it—simultaneously—“fended off” those “outsiders” who
failed to properly adapt to the “habitus” of the newly created American home-space. As
discussed in the previous section, the home within the American national space is endowed with
the constructed idea of “we-ness.”23 This insistence on the “we” subsequently produces various
forms of violence, especially towards the “others.” The legal or territorial “claiming of home”
within the national space does not automatically allow everyone to “feel at home.” In fact, many
Americans who are legally endowed with a geographical home-space suffer from physical and/or
psychological violence, oppression, and confinement within their own homes. This is often the
case for a large number of racial, economic, gendered, and/or sexual “others” who exist outside
the boundaries of the American “we.” The fictionality of the ideas of home and nation reinforces
23
For instance, geographer David Sopher points on this selective nature of American home-space: “home is not
where they have to take you in, it is where they want to take you in. The landmarks of home are the signs that one is
welcome” (147, my italics). Furthering Sopher’s argument, George claims that home is not even where they want to
take you in but “the place where one is in because an Other(s) is kept out” (26-7).
２２
the divide between the “we” and the “other.”
What does home signify in American socio-cultural and psychological landscapes? On
the one hand, as the opening lines of Home! Sweet Home! suggest, the American home-space
may still speak of comfort, security and the sense of belonging. However, in the past decade—
especially after September 11, 2001—the idea of home became particularly contentious in the
national discourse. After the Geroge W. Bush administration founded The Department of
Homeland Security in September 20, 2001, many Americans spoke of their discomfort toward
the term “homeland,” arguing how the word is rarely used by ordinary Americans to refer to
their country.24 Americans’ peculiar uneasiness over the term may have originated from the
distinctive history of the nation. In her article, “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language
and Space,” Amy Kaplan sums up this exceptionality in the relationship between the notions of
home and the American experience of the word:
. . . the exceptionalist notion of America as the New World pits images of
mobility against what might be seen as a distinctly Old World definition of
homeland. A nation of immigrants, a melting pot, the western frontier,
manifest destiny, a classless society—all involve metaphors of spatial
mobility rather than the spatial fixedness and rootedness that homeland
implies. Homeland also connotes a different relation to history, a reliance on
a shared mythic past engrained in the land itself. This differs markedly from
nineteenth-century notions of America as a “Nation of Futurity,” throwing
off the shackles of the past, or President Kennedy’s rhetoric of the New
24
Even those like Peggy Noonan, the Republican consultant and speechwriter, expressed her hope that the Bush
administration would change the name of the department. In her column in The Wall Street Journal, Noonan writes
“the name Homeland Security grates on a lot of people, understandably. Homeland isn’t really an American word,
it’s not something we used to say or say now.” Tracing the word’s origin in English in his column in New York
Times Magazine, William Safire also notes how Americans have mostly used the word in reference to foreign
countries before 9/11.
２３
Frontier. (86)
Evidently, in a nation founded by immigrants, the word “homeland” carries negative
connotations of self-enclosedness and the stasis of the “Old World” as opposed to the “images of
mobility” and “futurity” that the “New World” seems to promise.25 And yet, the word “home”
still resonates very much in the minds of Americans. The American national anthem explicitly
speaks of the nation being “the home of the brave.” The lyrics of God Bless America—the song
most often heard following September 11—presuppose that the nation itself stands as “home,
sweet home” for its people. In other words, the nation presents itself as a home established by
people who had distinctive ideas about what home should look like. Kaplan further examines
how the national emphasis on mobility works hand in hand with the expansion of state-power
and argues how the promise of “security” in American domestic space produces “an
exclusionary effect that underwrites a resurgent nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment and
policy” (87). By turning the nation into a “secure” home for its people, the American homespace paradoxically re-fetters itself to the shackles of “spatial fixedness and rootedness.” While
Americans’ recent angst over the security of their home-space rekindled and intensified the
interest in the physical and emotional boundaries of the American home, scholars have long dealt
with the nature of these boundaries, and especially with those who belong outside the boundaries
of the American home-space. What is this American “habitus” that welcomes certain individuals
into its national/home space while excluding others? The study of “homelessness” in American
society revolves around this question.
In most cases, the study of “homelessness” in the United States contemplates the
25
On a similar note, James A. Bartlett observes that the “homeland” does not “feel right” for most Americans for the
word connotes “a subtle signal that it is time this country belonged exclusively to those who are already here” and
thus speaks against the national ideal of being a country open to anybody. See also, Christopher Collins for more
current discussions on American usage of the term “homeland.”
２４
particular situations of the socio-political others— the “stranger” within the nation. For instance,
examining the notion of home in immigrant fictions, Carol Boyce Davies articulates the sense of
homelessness that immigrant women of color experience as they become the “strangers at home”
(114). Although the “strangers at home” in Davies’s essay specifically refers to Afro-Caribbean
immigrant women in the United States, the sense of displacement experienced by these women
and the idea of the “stranger” can be extended to broader discussions in diaspora and migration
studies. The territorial rights of these “strangers at home” fail to endow them with a sense of
emotional belonging in their homes. Existing outside the collective national ethos, the “strangers”
are permanently homeless on the psychological level within their newly adapted American
home-space. Members of the dominant American culture not only need the “strangers” outside
their national space against whom they defend their homeland but also require the “strangers”
within their national space against whom they must safeguard the values and habits of their
normative home-space.
By contrast, cultural theorist Madan Sarup presents another type of “stranger” whose
agency operates in a directly opposite way to the conventional ones. According to Sarup, this
particular “stranger” takes a position which differs from a foreigner or an alien in the sense that
s/he is not temporarily, but permanently, homeless as “[s]/he is an eternal wanderer, homeless
always and everywhere”:
Strangers are, in principle, undecidables. They are unclassifiable. A stranger
is someone who refuses to remain confined to the ‘far away’ land or go
away from our own. S/he is physically close while remaining culturally
remote. Strangers often seem to be suspended in the empty space between a
tradition which they have already left and the mode of life which stubbornly
２５
denies them the right of entry. . . . . S/he is constructed as a permanent Other.
Stigma is a convenient weapon in the defence against the unwelcome
ambiguity of the stranger. The essence of stigma is to emphasize the
difference; and a difference which is in principle beyond repair, and hence
justifies a permanent exclusion. (101-12)
Unlike the typical “strangers” within and outside the national home-space, whose sense of
homelessness is violently imposed upon them, this new type of stranger constantly disrupts and
threatens the smooth narratives of the nation and its representative home. Amidst the torrent of
exilic and migratory movements of people in the contemporary American landscape, the notion
of home became increasingly destabilized over the course of American history with the number
of various “strangers” rising every day. However, beneath the seeming celebration and
promotion of mobility and diversity, the dominant American social forces that stigmatize these
strangers in their attempt to guard their home against these “ambiguous” beings are increasing as
well.26 The “homeless at home” figure that I examine in this dissertation takes a peculiar stance
in the conflicts surrounding the notion of the American home-space.
The “homeless at home” figures are the inheritors of the normative American homespace, the individuals who were never “there” but always have been “here.” Typically, they are
the ones who “stigmatize” others in order to defend their safe and comfortable American home.
Still, as these privileged Americans encounter the “strangers at home,” they, ironically, are
forced to become strangers themselves within their own ideal home-space.27
26
These conflicting movements around the boundaries of home-space have long been a subject of studies for
theorists of culture and migration. For more in-depth historicized analyses of contemporary trans/national
movements and struggles of humans, information, culture, material and capital, see Chambers, Cohen, Brettell, and
Papastergiadis.
27
The term “stranger” contains double-meanings here. To be considered the “stranger” in American home-space,
one should be typically categorized as socio-political “other.”
２６
Confronting the Ghost: The Unhomely Space of the Ideal American Home
The theme of the haunted home—the confrontation between the heir of the normative
American home-space and the ghostly figure of the “other”—is the common focus of discussion
for the selected novels in this dissertation. As the prototypical heir of the American home comes
face to face with the spectral presence of the “other,” the ostensible ideality of his home
suddenly starts to disintegrate, evoking the sense of “unhomeliness” within the heir’s psyche.
Consequently, the heir becomes “homeless” within his own home.
The modern idea of the “unhomely” can be traced back to Sigmund Freud, particularly
in the type of anxiety he describes in the concept of the “uncanny.”28 In his 1919 essay “The
Uncanny,” Freud sets out to explain the particular sensation designated by the word “uncanny”
as the anxiety one experiences as a response to the metamorphosis of something “long familiar”
into something frightening (220). Freud probes the meaning of the “uncanny” by examining the
ambivalent relationship between the German words heimlich (homely) and unheimlich
(unhomely).29 Referring to Daniel Sanders’s Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, Freud points
out that the first definition of heimlich is related to such ideas as “belonging to the house or the
family,” “tame,” “friendly,” “intimate,” “homelike,” or “secure,” thereby linked to the notions of
28
The study of the “uncanny” is first introduced in Ernst Jentsch’s essay, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” on
which Freud elaborated. In “The Uncanny,” Freud introduces Jentsch’s work in which Jentsch concludes that 1) the
“uncanny” is the fear of the unfamiliar; 2) uncanny is based on intellectual uncertainty.
29
In his translated version of the essay, James Strachey uses the English term “uncanny” as a translation of the
original German word “unheimlich” in the title of the essay. Strachey notes that while the word “unheimlich” carries
the literal meaning of “unhomely,” it does not have an exact equivalent term in English (219). In this essay, I will
use both “unhomely” and “uncanny” interchangeably to describe the concept of Freud’s “unheimlich.”
２７
domesticity (Haüslichkeit) or being at home (heimatlich) (222-23).30 Freud also highlights the
secondary meaning of the word: that which is “concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not
get to know of or about it, withheld from sight and from others” (223). Grimm’s dictionary, the
work Freud uses as his second reference traces similar ambivalence in the meaning that lies
within the idea of the heimlich:
From the idea of “homelike,”“belonging to the house,” the further idea is
developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something
concealed, secret; and this idea is expanded in many ways . . . . Heimlich is
used in conjunction with a verb expressing the act of concealing . . . .
Heimlich in a different sense, as withdrawn from knowledge,
unconscious . . . . Heimlich also has the meaning of that which is obscure,
inaccessible to knowledge. . . . The notion of something hidden and
dangerous . . . is still further developed, so that “heimlich” comes to have
the meaning usually ascribed to “unheimlich.” . . . Thus heimlich is a word
the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it
finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way
or other a sub-species of Heimlich. (225-26)
Along these lines, the initial idea of the heimlich—the sentiment of belonging, security and
freedom from fear—gradually takes on the ominous dimensions of its apparent opposite, the
unheimlich. Consequently, the heimlich is a dialectic concept, suggesting something that is both
“private” or “intimate” and “concealed” or “hidden” from the self.
Conversely, the unheimlich as the negation of heimlich customarily applies only to the
30
Such understandings of the word home in its connection to the ideas of belonging, familiarity, or security are very
similar to the dictionary definitions of “home” that I have discussed in the previous section.
２８
first set of meanings—unhomely, unfamiliar, untame, uncomfortable. While the secondary
definition of unheimlich denotes something that is “unconcealed” or “unsecret,” it is used to refer
to that which; “is made known” or “is supposed to be kept secret but is inadvertently revealed”
(Freud 225). Such an ascription was confirmed for Freud by an aphorism quoted in Sanders and
taken from the philosopher Schelling: “Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have
remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (Freud 224). Unheimlich thus becomes a kind
of unwilling, mistaken self-exposure. Freud concentrates on the unusual semantics of these two
terms: heimlich in its first meaning of “known” and “familiar” and unheimlich as “unknown” and
“unfamiliar”; and heimlich in its second meaning, “secret” and “unknown” and unheimlich as
“revealed” and “uncovered.” The uncanny recognition turns on the discovery that the unfamiliar
is really familiar, but also that the familiar is unfamiliar. In this way, the concept of the uncanny
leads one to realize that “home” is, in fact, not what or where one thinks it is, but, rather, is a
place that can be alien and mysterious.
In the three novels I examine in the following chapters, the discovery of the ghostly
“other” inside their own homes provokes “uncanny” feelings in the mind of each heir. The heir’s
sudden awareness of the other’s “unfamiliar” presence inside his familiar home-space, and his
subsequent recognition of “familiarity” in the other’s “unfamiliar” face, gradually intensifies his
sense of the uncanny. The space of home no longer provides him with its usual promises of
security and happiness. Gradually, the home becomes a site of haunting or an idea that haunts the
heir. Displacement, then, can be experienced in the psyche of someone who is anchored in a
fixed physical space. The ideal American home becomes an “unhomely” space to its occupant;
the privileged heir falls into a diasporic state of “dwelling-in-displacement.”
Discussing the link between the idea of “displacement” and literature, Wendy W.
２９
Walters suggests that the migrant writers’ experiences of physical displacement from their homes
can “create a distance that allows [them] to encode critiques of their homelands, to construct new
homelands, and to envision new communities” (viii). Walters’s argument exclusively deals with
the situations of the African American migrant writers, who suffer from the physical dislocations
from their original homes. However, the notion of how individuals’ experiences of displacement
can lead to their critical distancing from their own home is useful in my examinations of the
homeless at home characters in American gothic literature. The privileged American’s
recognition of the uncanny presence of the other in his own home results in his psychological
displacement which, in turn, transforms his once idyllic home into a space of haunting.
The haunted house stands as one of the most popular settings in American gothic
narratives.31 Critics like Eric Savoy even argue that the haunted house is “the most persistent site,
object, structural analogue, and trope” in American gothic fiction:
The entire tradition of American gothic can be conceptualized as the
attempt to invoke “the face of the tenant”—the specter of Otherness that
haunts the house of national narrative—in a tropics that locate the traumatic
return of the historical preterite . . . . (13-14)
Although scholars of the American gothic disagree about the problems of its generic
categorization, they generally agree with Savoy’s claim that the “return of the repressed ‘other’”
is one of its most important themes (Lloyd-Smith, Crow, Goddu).32 In this sense, while gothic
31
For instance, Nathaniel Hawthorne—one of the most important figures in the development of American gothic
fiction—frequently uses the haunted house as the key setting in his gothic narratives. The Custom-House in The
Scarlet Letter (1850) and the Pyncheon mansion in The House of Seven Gables (1851) are the exemplary haunted
houses in which Hawthorne Americanizes the British gothic form.
32
For critics like Leslie Fiedler, American literature was from the beginning “a gothic fiction” (29). In Love and
Death in the American Novel, Fiedler insists on the ideological relation between the American national symbolism
and the tendencies of the gothic. Over forty years since the publication of Fiedler’s groundbreaking work, however,
only three book-length studies have been published on the American gothic. While there has been a resurgence of
３０
fiction in the United States has not hitherto yielded a cohesive genre, it is possible to understand
it as a discursive field where the haunted house becomes the metonymic space of the nation that
is undone by the return of the repressed “others.” The haunted house, then, once again illustrates
Freud’s theory of the “uncanny” as it becomes the space which illustrates the impossibility of
forgetting.33 It provides a space for the socially repressed subjects who are buried underneath the
smooth surface of the national narrative to articulate their voices inside the normative American
home. Moreover, the haunting provokes another form of displacement—psychological
displacement—within the occupant of ideal home, and thus makes him unable to ignore the
uncanny aspects of his home. Then, as a recurring manifestation of the repressed, the
significance of the ghost in the American gothic and its relationship to the homeowner can lead
to the understanding of what Kristeva presents as the “uncanny” presence of the “abject”:
The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. . . .
from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its
master. . . . A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which
familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries
me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing,
either. A “something” that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of
meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which
scholarly interest in the American gothic, with at least four more texts being published in the past decade, there are
still various on-going debates over the question of how it should be classified as a field of study. For instance, Alan
Lloyd-Smith argues that the American gothic “is about the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried
secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit, will not or dare
not tell itself” (1). Similarly, Crow states that the gothic “exposes the repressed, what is hidden, unspoken,
deliberately forgotten, in the lives of individuals and of cultures” (2). Goddu identifies the American gothic with
marginal groups or regions and presents the “three crucial categories in American gothic: the female, the southern,
and the African American” (11).
33
Freud further points out how the German expression “an unheimlich house” can only be translated in many other
languages as “a haunted house”, and suggests that the example of “haunted house” is “perhaps the most striking of
all, of something uncanny” (241).
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crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that,
if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. (Powers of Horror 1-2)
Kristeva’s metaphor for this uncanny cultural encounter illuminates the gothic confrontation
between the homeowner and the ghostly “stranger.” The return of the ghost in the gothic—the
return of what is unsuccessfully repressed—is not merely terrifying, but is uncanny in a sense
that it exists strangely as a “non-existence” inside the self.34 Restating Clifford’s emphasis on
insider/outsider relationships within a single space, the space of the haunted house exposes the
mutual influence that the “insider” and the “outsider” have on one another and the
interdependence of the ideal American home-space with this dialectic between the cultural
outsider and insider. The motif of haunting which disrupts the otherwise comfortable home
provokes the feeling of displacement for the privileged Americans and triggers their
psychological, and sometimes physical, wanderings within the boundaries of the nation. In this
sense, the space of the haunted house and the figure of the ghostly stranger within provide a link
between the idea of “uncanny” in American gothic literature and the “unhomeliness” of the
home-space in the contemporary diasporic consciousness.
Diasporic Consciousness At Home
This study provides interventions both in the discourse of “homelessness” in American
literature and in the studies of migration and diaspora. First, the use of homelessness in
American literature has been generally divided into two types: a glorification of freedom and
34
Homi Bhabha’s digression on Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” in The Location of Culture may be more useful in
its relations to the “abject.” While the “heimliche” can refer either to situations of the familiar and agreeable, the
“unheimliche” emerges both rhetorically and literally as its double, for example as a figure of foreignness that is
always already inscribed in the familiar. In this sense, to be “unhomed” for Bhabha is not to be homeless, but to
escape easy assimilation or accommodation and to focus on those “freak social and cultural displacements”
emanating from postcolonial societies (17).
３２
adventure associated with life “on the road” on the one hand, and a condemnation of miseries
and oppressions felt by those who have been socially displaced on the other. This division has
gone largely uninterrogated, and critical attention has mostly focused on related themes such as
exile, alienation, or escape that are usually substantiated by physical dislocations from the
normative American home-space. This dissertation differs from these existing literary
approaches to homelessness in that it focuses on the psychological dislocations of individuals
who can comfortably inhabit the space of home. Moreover, literary responses to the idea of
homelessness provide a means to examine the ideological struggle over the space of home and
the relationship between the notion of home and the formation of individual identity in modern
American society. While the concepts of freedom and constraint around the American homespace hitherto have been discussed as contesting ideas, I believe that literary texts about the
“homelessness at home” figure offer unique and unexamined points of entry for an analysis of
these contested values.
Secondly, by identifying the particular conditions of the “homeless at home” figure and
the space he occupies in American society, this project reveals how the awareness of the
psychological displacement taking place within an individual’s own home-space could affect the
subject’s identity formation. In that sense, the fictions about the “homeless at home” figure can
be evaluated as an attempt to challenge the oversimplified ideology of “home” in which
individuals are interpolated into single identities, while their own multifaceted backgrounds and
the conflicts within them are so vividly present. Thus, by emphasizing the agencies of the
“homeless at home” figures in their creation of complicated individual identities in the United
States, this project expands the scope of discussions around the American home-space and its
inhabitants.
３３
My intervention in the studies of diaspora comes in two ways. First, my focus on the
subject of “homeless at home” can evoke changes in the existing notions of diaspora. Recent
scholars in diaspora studies have argued that diasporic consciousness can be experienced by
native people as well as migrants (Bretell, Papastergiadis, Seyhan). However, the categories of
“diaspora” or “diasporic consciousness” in these studies are still limited to those who are
involved in the movements in and out of a geographic space of home. By showing that diasporic
consciousness can be felt by not only geo-political migrants, but also those who are native to a
home-space, my study of the “homeless at home” figure opens up the constricted notion of
diaspora.
Second, in recent years, scholars have pointed to the tendency in current diaspora studies
to conceptualize the subjects of diaspora through binary oppositions (Clifford, Hall, Bhabha,
Brah).35 Yet, while these critics endeavor to extend the scope of discussions on diaspora by
highlighting the importance of the function of the natives in relation to the migrants, they still
place the “we” and the “other”—or, borrowing Brah’s words, those who are “staying put” and
those who are “dispersed”—in opposition and, thereby, retain a binary approach themselves.
Along with the emphasis on the importance of looking at the heterogenous aspects of the
diaspora, the texts that I examine should bring new insights into the psychological and social
impacts of the migrant’s diasporic experiences on the natives. Moreover, by identifying the
“displaced” privileged American’s state of mind as another distinctive form of diasporic
consciousness, I attempt to problematize the categories of “we” and “others” in diaspora studies.
The disaporic consciousness of the “homeless at home” figure causes them to be unable to “stay
35
For instance, Brah argues that it is “generally assumed that there is a single dominant Other whose overarching
omnipresence circumscribes constructions of the ‘we,’” hence, that there tends to be “an emphasis on bipolar
oppositions” in current diaspora studies (184). As an alternative way to conceptualize the term, Brah argues that the
concept of diaspora should be evaluated as a “critique of discourses of fixed origins” (180).
３４
put” at home and provokes their psyches to “wander.”
While the selected texts portray the diasporic consciousness of the privileged Americans
of different time periods spanning more than eighty years, the theme of the haunted house
provides coherence among these texts. An in-depth study of novels by writers from different
historical periods reveals how each individual in the texts is struggling to understand, reconfigure,
imagine, and/or find home inside and outside the boundaries of the nation. Although I am not
looking for commonalities of expression in the literatures of the selected writers, I am interested
in examining the multiple ways in which they write about the dominant American’s experience
of homelessness within his own privileged home-space.
The dissertation’s first chapter, “The Ideal Home and the Voluntarily Homeless Heir in
Herman Melville’s Pierre; or the Ambiguities,” examines Melville’s depiction of a home-space
in the antebellum North in his first “domestic” romance, Pierre. While Melville opens the novel
with Eden-like landscape of Pierre Glendinning’s grand estate, the mysterious face that haunts
the heir quickly turns the ideal space of Saddle Meadows into an “unhomely” site. Pierre’s
discovery of the identity of the mysterious face initiates his gradual recognition of the hidden
histories of violence and oppression upon which his home is established. By voluntarily
renouncing his position as the heir of the house, Pierre abandons his home and puts himself in a
state of self-exile, choosing to live with the ghostly “others.” In this chapter, I argue that Pierre’s
deliberate self-exile and his incessant effort to escape any fixed identities not only echoes the
ideas of the “mobile habitat” or “dwelling-in-displacement” that scholars of contemporary
diaspora like Chambers or Clifford suggest, but is also linked to the nomadic way of life that
Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose as an active political choice in one’s relationship to a
space in the modern world. Pierre’s active and moral reaction to the “unhomeliness” of his own
３５
home-space also echoes Theodor Adorno’s insistence on the morality of “not being at home” and
the insistence on the importance of recognizing the “other” that critics like Emmanuel Levinas,
Julia Kristeva, and Homi Bhabha suggest. By presenting the privileged American heir as a selfexiled figure who actively alienates himself from his home in order to reject the oppressive and
duplicitous aspects of American society that the home upholds, Melville opens the secluded
space of home in the antebellum North into a space of deterritorialization.
Chapter 2, “Homesickness in the Ideal Home in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood: or,
the Hidden Self,” examines two different spaces of home in Reconstruction America. While most
often the novel has been read as Hopkins’s critique of the impossibility of African Americans’
attaining their own home-space in postbellum American society, I focus on the homes of the
upper-class white Americans in the text, the space which has been relatively neglected in the
existing criticism. The privileged heirs that Hopkins presents are relatively passive in their
questioning and challenging of their own homes. However, through the constant pairing of the
privileged Americans with the domestic “others” in the examination of the American homespace, Of One Blood reveals how the relationship between the heirs and the “others” are
intricately related to one another, and, therefore, how the sense of homelessness of the others
cannot help but lead to the impossibility of feeling “at home” for the American heirs themselves.
Rubenstein and Friedman’s double-readings of the word “home-sickness” can be aptly applied in
examining the interrelationship between the heir and the other. In this sense, the “unhomely”
home of the white Americans in the novel echoes Brah’s “diaspora space” where the mutual
relationship between the “insider” and the “outsider” is integral to the insider’s sense of being.
At the same time, Jacques Derrida’s take on Freud’s “uncanny” in his hauntology and the studies
of ghosts and haunting in American gothic fiction provides the grounds for my key argument on
３６
how the homeowners’ recognition of the homelessness of the others inevitably prevents them
from feeling “at home” themselves.
The final chapter, “The Imaginary Homelands in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!”
examines the space of the Southern home by adapting Salman Rushdie’s idea of the “imaginary
homeland.” Spanning the broad historical periods of the two novels in the previous chapters,
Faulkner presents the psychological displacements of the privileged American father and son in
the post Civil War South. While Rushdie’s account of the “imaginary homeland” typically
applies to contemporary diasporic subjects in the late twentieth-century, Faulkner traces different
kinds of “imaginative reclaiming of home” that his privileged Southerners undertake in the novel.
In contrast to the ostensible luxuries of the privileged homes in Melville and Hopkins, the “decay”
of the Southern homes in Absalom, Absalom! concerns the original “sin” of the South which is
distinctly related to the alienation of the “domestic others” in the nation’s home-building process.
The dilapidation of their present homes initiates the various narrators to build their own
imaginative versions of past home through their recounting of the history of Sutpen’s Hundred—
the emblematic home-space of antebellum South. The dichotomy between the “privileged home”
and the “haunted home” becomes extremely complicated in the novel as the haunted mansion of
Thomas Sutpen is not simply the home-space of the social outcasts; nor is it the privileged home
of an heir which gradually transforms into a space of haunting. Bammer’s notion of the fictional
aspects of the idea of “home” is useful in examining the “imaginary home” in the novel.
Focusing on the stakes and dangers that the “mythification” of the one’s former home could raise,
Faulkner reveals how the individuals’ lack of critical distance from their own home-spaces could
lead to their negligence and oversimplification of the problems that lie beneath the construction
and preservation of their homes.
３７
The tradition of American literature which focuses on privileged Anglo-American
subjects is still distinct from the body of literature which takes the minorities of American
society as its subject. In my reading of these texts, I argue that the diasporic consciousness of the
privileged characters may be akin—though not equivalent—to the diasporic consciousness of the
migrant “other.” In providing a link between these divergent experiences, I hope to make visible
their similarities than only their differences.
３８
Chapter 2: The Ideal Home and the Voluntarily Homeless Heir
in Herman Melville’s Pierre; or the Ambiguities
“Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?”
-
W. E. B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk (3)
“. . . it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”
-
Theodor Adorno Minima Moralia (39)
At the beginning of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of the sense of
homelessness that African Americans experience within their own homes. While the figure of the
“outcast” or “stranger” in Du Bois’s original statement is identified with a particular ethnic group,
the notion of feeling “homeless at home” became deeply influential to writers of various
minority groups who sought to represent and respond to their experience of homelessness within
American society. Half a century before Du Bois’s claim, Herman Melville presented another
“outcast and a stranger in his own house” in his novel, Pierre; or the Ambiguities (1852).
Ostensibly, the protagonist of the novel, Pierre Glendinning, can be placed at the opposite end of
the socio-economic spectrum from Du Bois’s narrator. Pierre is in every way the scion of a
reputable, upper-class Anglo-American family, comfortably seated at the center of the midnineteenth-century northern home-space. Then, how can we argue that Pierre is still an outcast
within his rightfully inherited home? How is Pierre’s particular sense of homelessness similar to
and different from Du Bois’s “outcast”?
In this chapter, through an examination of Melville’s first “domestic” novel, Pierre, I
explore the possibility that some mainstream Americans during the mid-nineteenth century
experienced an unconventional form of diasporic consciousness. Pierre Glendinning’s discovery
３９
of a “stranger’s face” within his home prompts his psychic displacement at home and his
eventual rejection of his privileged position as the heir of Saddle Meadows. On the one hand,
Pierre’s particular sense of homelessness corresponds with the diasporic experience of social
minorities as his psychological wanderings provoke his physical migration. At the same time, in
contrast to the diasporic experience of conventional migrants, who feel displaced since they
never occupy an elite or mainstream position in the American home, Pierre’s diasporic
consciousness grows as he begins to critically distance himself from his position of privilege.
Recognizing and embracing the face of the “outcast and the stranger,” Pierre renounces his
privilege because it stems from a history of violence and oppression. Ultimately, the heir’s selfexile opens up the segregated space of American home in the antebellum North into a space of
deterritorialization.
An Atypical Nomad: The Domestic Wanderings of Pierre Glendinning
As Melville’s nickname—“Mr. Omoo”—suggests, the author’s oeuvre contains a great
number of characters with nomadic dispositions.36 Along with Ishmael in Moby-Dick; or, The
Whale (1851), whose sea-quest made him Melville’s most popular wandering protagonist or,
even perhaps, one of the most famous wanderers in American literature, nomads in Melville’s
novels present the voyaging of human bodies as they leave their homes and roam around the
world.37 While these stories of travel had been extremely popular amongst Melville’s
36
The title of Melville’s second book Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847) comes from the
Polynesian word “Omoo” which means “wanderer.” “Mr. Omoo,” first used by Sophia Hawthorne, became
Melville’s nickname among his circle of literary associates in New York (Robertson-Lorant 39; qtd. from Julian
Hawthorne, Hawthorne and his Wife 1 407).
37
Following the success of his first novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), each consecutive novel that
Melville published until Pierre—Omoo, Mardi: and a Voyage Thither (1849), Redburn: His First Voyage (1849),
４０
contemporary readership for their exotic tales and adventures in faraway places, in recent years,
the theme of wandering in his texts has invited various critical readings from the perspective of
global economics and cultures.38 Much like his previous novels, Melville uses “wandering” as a
central theme in Pierre, and frequently repeats it as a keyword throughout the text. However, in
comparison to his previous works, the idea of wandering in this text is very different in nature.
While Pierre Glendinning’s quest does involve certain physical journeys as he leaves Saddle
Meadows—his proud estate and legitimate “home” in upstate New York—and heads to the
swarming city, the traveling individual in Pierre remains within the closed boundaries of the
nation. Furthermore, Melville distinguishes Pierre from his other nomadic characters by
emphasizing the psychological aspect of his wander, rather than focusing on the physical
voyages of the roving characters that predominate his seafaring narratives. Melville constantly
highlights how the protagonist’s mind would “wander” with inexplicable emotions—described in
such phrases as “strange yearning,” “confounding feeling,” or “wild fluttering”—throughout the
novel. Even before he physically leaves Saddle Meadows, Pierre experiences a psychological
wandering, an unsettledness invoked by his inability to reconcile his life with the others’
existence.
Melville’s unexpected turn from seascape to inland in Pierre much baffled his
contemporary readership and led to severe critical attacks.39 Scholarly readings of the novel have
White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of War (1850), and Moby-Dick—dealt with sea adventures.
38
For instance, Robert T. Tally Jr. attempts to chart what he calls “Melville’s nomad thoughts” in his recent book,
Melville, Mapping and Globalization. Tally argues that Melville, through his texts, transcends the intense national
consolidation and cultural centralization of his own time and presents the “literary cartography of the emergent,
postnational world system,” which functions as “an implicit, and sometimes explicit, critique of the national
narrative of his own era” (xi).
39
The most infamous episodes of Pierre’s critical receptions during Melville’s contemporaries are New York Day
Book’s review of the novel under the headline, “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY,” and the American Whig Review’s
affirmation that the author’s “fancy is diseased” (qtd. in Delbanco 179).
４１
made various attempts to understand why Melville had suddenly taken on the domestic setting,
abandoning his widely popular seafaring tales. Critical studies of the novel have varied from
autobiographical analyses of earlier periods (Parker and Higgins, Rogin),40 to more recent studies
based on diverse socio-historical or cultural approaches, such as Freudian readings (Murray,
Fiedler, Damon, Jehlen), feminist criticism (Phillip J. Egan, Kelley, Weinauer, Flory), or queer
theory (Creech, Silverman). And yet, none of the existing criticism has dealt with Pierre from
the angle of diaspora studies.41 While there are a number of contemporary analyses that explain
the text as an allegorical critique of the formation of the nation-state or modern selfhood, these
analyses usually limit their understanding of the novel as a story of a modern individual’s
incompetence or failure in his search for a new or alternative identity within nineteen-century
American society (Avallone, Dimock, Brown, Wald, Ken Egan, Otter).42 Moreover, most of the
40
For example, Hershel Parker and Brian Higgins attributed the novel’s “notorious failure” to Melville’s
“excessively personal sympathy for Pierre’s frustrations as an author”—sympathy that led him to “lose his grasp on
the narrative as a whole” (264). Michael Rogin also argued that Melville is gradually taken over by the “conjunction
between Pierre’s life and his own” and, thus, “loses himself inside his own fiction” (178). See Parker and Higgins
and Weinauer for more extensive summaries of earlier and contemporary autobiographical criticism on the novel.
41
In one of the most recent readings of the novel, William V. Spanos relates the Heideggerian feeling of
“unheimlich” to Pierre. Spanos argues that, after Pierre discovers his father’s transgression, he begins to feel himself
to be a “stranger” or a “decentered subject” and falls into “the domain of die Unheimlich, the uncanny or . . . , the
not-at-home: an uncharted or unmapped space that precipitates ambiguity and anxiety” (22). This reading is
somewhat similar to a diasporic approach to the text. However, Spanos limits his argument on the novel’s
“unheimlich” to the metaphysical level in which he leaves Pierre as another “ghost” that “haunts American
modernity” (47). While I agree with Spanos on the liberating notion of “unheimlich,” I see Pierre as a more active
agent in his attempt to build an alternative model of an individual’s relationship to his/her home-space.
42
Wai-chee Dimock, for instance, reads the novel as a “domestic staging of Manifest Destiny” where Melville
critiques the possessive individualism on which the modern American society is based (170). According to Dimock,
Pierre attempts to find an alternative model of selfhood by disinheriting himself; yet, his tragic failure is inevitable
for he cannot survive without exploiting others because in modern American society the idea of ownership
constitutes the essence of selfhood. Similarly, Priscilla Wald argues that Melville puts himself in position similar to
that of his contemporary non-white and/or non-male writers—such as Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson,
and Gertrude Stein—in that Melville, too, resists the national literature exemplified by the Young American
movement. To this end, Wald argues, Melville’s works reveal the “dilemma” of the character “who must choose
between conforming to cultural prescriptions and refusing comprehensibility” (3). While Wald’s argument is
compelling in itself in reading the novel as a criticism on literary nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century, I cannot
entirely agree with her claim. For one, I find Wald’s analogy between the crisis of selfhood experienced by white
male writers like Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe and the experience of alienation felt by non-white and/or female
writers like Du Bois or Stein much too generalizing; and two, unlike Wald who reads Pierre’s death as a failure of
４２
criticism tends to read Pierre separately from Melville’s previous works and, thus, identifies the
text as the author’s attempt—a mostly failed attempt, in fact—to write an entirely different
narrative in contrast to his commercially successful tales of sea adventures.
Yet, if we follow the current tendencies in Melville studies which examine the idea of
physical wanderings in his seafaring novels as a link that connects the national and the global
discourses about the author, the psychological wanderings that I present in this chapter allows
Pierre—a text that has been largely neglected in the global approaches to Melville—to find its
own place in the contemporary disaporic discourse on the author.43 In other words, I argue that
Pierre Glendinning’s psychological wanderings, his unique stance as a diasporic subject within
his own privileged home-space, and his ultimate choice to become a voluntary outcast, parallel
contemporary ideas of nomadism in global studies. Thus, my reading of Pierre attempts to
connect the existing rift between the nationalistic tendencies in the critical studies on the novel
and the recent global trend in Melville criticism.
Through the examination of the idea of home and the understanding of Pierre
Glendinning as an individual who suffers a sense of homelessness in his own home-space, I
argue that Melville presents Pierre as an atypical nomad whose discovery of the unhomeliness of
his home provokes him to deliberately exile himself from the space and, thus, become a selfexiled nomad. In order to explore the diasporic consciousness of the figure of “homeless at home”
in the novel, the chapter asks the following questions: In what ways is Pierre Glendinning a
“homeless at home” figure? In other words, how can we argue that Pierre suffers the feeling of
an attempt to reside or exist outside the national narratives, I suggest that his voluntary choice to become an outcast
and even his eventual death insinuate the possibility of alternative mode of existence to the homebound one.
43
Tally’s reading is one of the most recent attempts that seek to apply contemporary theories in global studies in
Melville’s texts by examining the theme of wandering. However, since his use of the idea of “wandering” is limited
to Melville’s sea-adventure novels—mostly focused on the physical movements of individuals—Pierre is still
largely neglected in those readings.
４３
“homelessness” within his own otherwise comfortable home-space? What does the space of
home mean in the mid-nineteenth-century United States? What are the grounds that prompt the
various types of “wandering” in each character in the novel? How might the trope of the
“haunted house” operate as a site for my discussions on diasporic consciousness and the complex
relationship between family and nation? Is the novel a parody of domestic ideology or a critique
of the nineteenth-century white American home as it has been commonly understood? Or is
Melville providing an alternative idea of home-space which differs from any other critical
assessments about home in the novel?
The “Ideal” Home of Saddle Meadows
Although the home-space has not been overtly important in Melville’s previous novels,
the author’s famous reference to the text hints that the idyllic manorial mansion surrounded by
the “green and golden world” of the country is the major site where most of the action takes
place in Pierre (3).44 Ironically, while most of the narrative revolves around the space of home,
the home gradually becomes a space which expels its inhabitants. By the end of the novel, none
of the main characters remains safely within the boundaries of their home, and the blissful homespace of Saddle Meadows becomes a haunted house. Whereas the homeless state of the socially
marginalized individuals—such as the poor orphaned girl like Isabel Banford or the ostracized
farm girl like Delly Ulver—may be more easily understood, the exilic condition of Pierre
Glendinning seems paradoxical considering his elite position within the society that he inhabits.
Pierre physically leaves Saddle Meadows after his encounter with Isabel. However, it must be
44
In his January 1852 letter to Sophia Hawthorne, Melville writes, “I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water.
The next chalice I commend, will be a rural bowl of milk” (Correspondence 219).
４４
also questioned if Pierre has ever been truly at home in this “embowered and high-gabled old
home of his fathers” even before he learned of his newly found half-sister (23).
The novel begins with a lengthy description of the heavenly surroundings of Saddle
Meadows, the ancestral mansion nestled in a landscape with its “finest features” bearing “the
proudest patriotic and family associations of the historic line of Glendinnings” (5). All such
“associations” are “full of pride to Pierre,” who “stood heir” to the estate’s forests and farms as
well as the family’s aristocratic reputation (6-7). Earlier critics generally accounted for the
excessive sentimentality that saturates these opening chapters as Melville’s unsuccessful attempt
to emulate the sentimental or sensational fictions which had been extremely popular among his
contemporary readers. However, culturally contextualized readings in recent decades take these
overly elaborate acclamations of the scenery of Saddle Meadows as a parody of the family
romance genre of the mid-nineteenth century.45 Although it is impossible to discern what
Melville intended in these opening sections, it seems that he was conscious of his repetitious and
grandiloquent narrative style. The omniscient narrator claims that he is aware of his “repetition”
and that he “verbally [quotes] [his] own words in saying that it had been the choice fate of Pierre
to have been born and bred in the country . . . the most aristocratic part of this earth” (33-34).
The narrator reiterates the Glendinning family’s standing among other families in the area, using
the metaphor of an “oak” that stands among so many “blades of grass” (29). By “asserting the
great genealogical and real-estate dignity” of the family, the narrator prefaces the entire narrative
by establishing “the richly aristocratic condition of Master Pierre Glendinning” (32). Endowed
with such “real-estate dignity,” Pierre is born with a “rare and choice lot” to become an heir to
one of the finest and the most aristocratic American families (34). Thus, by linking the splendor
45
These readings explain the excessively decorative passages in these sections as either tongue-in-cheek parody or
implicit protest against American acts of dispossession against Native Americans and the landless poor in
antebellum period. See, Avallone or Otter for examples of such criticism.
４５
of the physical space of Saddle Meadows with the family’s genealogical dignity, Melville sets up
the inextricable linkage between the ideas of domestic legitimacy and ownership and the
physical space of home.
At first, Pierre readily accepts his position as the rightful owner of his home-space and—
to a larger extent—as the proprietor of entire estate. Pierre and Lucy’s enchanting phaeton ride,
which is presented as the principal event in Book II, epitomizes his standing within the space of
Saddle Meadows. As the couple takes a long morning ride across the wide plains of Saddle
Meadows, the narrator gives a lengthy account of Pierre’s “breeding” which confirms his lineage.
At this point, Pierre’s own conviction about his “choice lot” is so strong that he imagines that
even his horses “[acknowledge] [him] as the undoubted head of the house of Glendinning” (43).
Besides, it is not just Pierre himself who confirms his solid status as the heir of the household.
There are his family, his servants, and the entire townspeople of Saddle Meadows who regard
him as the one who “shall one day be lord of the manor” (68). The entire community’s faith and
pride in Pierre’s “genealogical dignity” come down from a long line of his ancestors. Pierre is
the only son of a “lady” who is a “singular example of the preservative and beautifying
influences of unfluctuating rank, health, and wealth” (24) and a man who exemplifies a “true
gentlemanhood,” in his religious faith and soldier’s spirit (27). He is also named after his greatgrandfather, “grand old Pierre,” who—as a hero of the Revolutionary War—is the epitome of the
archetypal “American gentleman” in his own “patriarchal time and country” (52-53).46
Succeeding the long-established pedigree of his ancestors, Pierre prepares to protect his perfect
home by marrying Lucy Tartan, the daughter of his father’s closest friend. From a family of
ample means, Lucy is described as yet another ideal type of young American aristocrat—an
46
Later in the novel, it is revealed that Pierre’s father also carried the same name which only underscores the
succession of the familial privilege among its male heirs (104).
４６
“angelic” beauty who would occasionally “migrate inland” to spend springs at Saddle Meadows,
away from her “very fine house in the city” (48). In other words, Lucy is Pierre’s female
counterpart who will assume the grand Glendinning heritage as his wife and eventually pass it
onto their descendants. The phaeton ride scene climaxes as the couple drives out into the field in
the bright morning light:
For on the land of Saddle Meadows, man and horse are both
hereditary; and this bright morning Pierre Glendinning, grandson of grand
old Pierre, now drives forth with Lucy Tartan, seated where his own
ancestor had sat, and reining steeds, whose great-great-great-grandfathers
grand old Pierre had reined before.
How proud felt Pierre: in fancy’s eye, he saw the horse ghosts atandem in the van. “These are but wheelers”—cried young Pierre—“the
leaders are the generations.” (54)
While the phaeton—the emblem of Glendinning legacies—is now in the hands of the heir, Pierre
acknowledges that he is accompanied by the ancestral ghosts who would lead the path for him.
He is the driver and, at the same time, the “wheeler” in this long phaeton ride of Glendinning
history. Accordingly, Pierre believes the “illuminated scroll of his life” to be perfect and the
“inalienable fief” a gift that God has decreed (60).
Despite the splendor of the phaeton ride, Melville constantly suggests a peculiar feeling
of uneasiness that Pierre senses from the very early moments in the novel. Even before Pierre
discovers his father’s secret, the novel presents his intermittent psychological wanderings. Pierre
is constantly described as experiencing a “wandering in [his] mind” (63) or “wandering in [his]
soul” (72), which Pierre can only alleviate by returning to his familial home-space and joining
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the company of his mother and Lucy. Still, Pierre’s persistent sensations of wandering and
restlessness reveal the rift that lies in his psychological sense of belonging to his own homespace.47 The apparent bliss of the emblematic phaeton ride gradually wanes as Pierre and Lucy
share the anxiety that they have been suffering since the mysterious face began haunting Pierre’s
mind. Lucy confesses the sensations of “nameless sadness,” “faintness,” and “endless dreariness”
that have been troubling her since she heard about Pierre’s vision of the strange face. In order to
escape those feelings, she urges Pierre to “hie homeward” (60).48 Although neither of them
understands the origin or meaning of the “utterly unknown,” and yet, “too familiar” face at the
moment, Pierre professes that it is Lucy that soothes the distress evoked by the face (65). The
scene ends with the couple putting an end to their restlessness as they arrive home.
Initially, the novel shows how the safe and peaceful space of Saddle Meadows and the
possibility of setting up another similar type of space with Lucy can alleviate Pierre’s agitations.
However, Pierre is unable to completely eradicate such feelings of emotional wandering. As he
parts with Lucy for the night and rides back to his mansion, the agitation takes over his mind
once again. Moreover, when Pierre contemplates the mysterious face and the apprehension it
evokes, he realizes that the face disturbs him not just when he is alone, but even more so when
he is “in a joyous chamber, bright with candles, and ringing with two score women’s gayest
voices” (67). Drawing stark contrast between its own grimness and the cheerfulness of the
domestic environments of Saddle Meadows, the face prevents Pierre from enjoying the comforts
of his surroundings.
If these persistent restless feelings are the major grounds which hold the privileged heir
47
As I have examined in the introduction, the term “home” carries the double note of physical dwelling and
psychological sense belongings.
48
The word “homeward” reappears each time Pierre attempts to break himself away from the “mysterious feelings”
(77, 79).
４８
back from truly feeling at home in his splendid mansion, then the cause of these psychological
wanderings should be interrogated. The most palpable reason for Pierre’s distress lies in his
father’s hidden past. Soon after his ride to the countryside with Lucy, Pierre finds the mysterious
face in the flesh when he sees Isabel for the first time at a local charity gathering. This encounter
intensifies the wanderings in Pierre’s mind; and the heir finally confesses his bewilderment to his
mother:
“My son!” cried Mrs. Glendinning, instantly stopping in terror, and
withdrawing her arm from Pierre, “what—what under heaven ails you? This
is most strange! I but playfully asked, what you were so steadfastly thinking
of; and here you answer me by the strangest question, in a voice that seems
to come from under your great-grandfather’s tomb!” . . . “I swear to you, my
dearest mother, that never before in my whole existence, have I so
completely gone wandering in my soul.” (71-72)
The conversations between mother and son following Pierre’s first sighting of Isabel
immediately cast a gothic mood over their peaceful routine. Mary Glendinning notices the
ghostly voice of their ancestors in her son’s utterance as Pierre professes that he is utterly
terrified by a sudden sense of displacement, which destabilizes his very being. For the next few
days, Pierre is unable to escape the face, which provokes in him a “weird inscrutableness,” an
“inexplicable pang,” “wild reveries,” or “strange integral feelings” and sends him into a “mystic
exile” (72-78). Even then, since Pierre does not yet know Isabel’s true identity, he tries to ignore
the incident as a “foolish ghost story” (85). Once again, Pierre assumes that his restlessness will
be appeased by the comfort of his domestic surroundings:
It is a flawless, speckless, fleckless, beautiful world throughout . . .
４９
the face slid from him; and left alone there with his soul’s joy, thinking that
that very night he would utter the magic word of marriage to his Lucy; not a
happier youth than Pierre Glendinning sat watching that day’s sun go down.
(85-86)
While Pierre is sitting in his comfortable chair back at home, discussing his upcoming marriage
with his mother, and contemplating the prospect of his future home, the ghostly face disappears
and Pierre is once again brought back to his “flawless, speckles, fleckless, beautiful” world.
However, on his way to propose to Lucy on the same night, Pierre receives a letter from the
woman whose face has haunted him; in the letter, Isabel alleges that she is Pierre’s half-sister.
From then on, the beautiful and unfaltering world around him swiftly vanishes, and Pierre
gradually finds that the security and comfort that his home and family had once provided can no
longer soothe him.
Isabel exemplifies the state of ultimate homelessness. From the first letter she writes to
Pierre, Isabel constantly refers to herself as an “outcast” or an “exile” in the world (90, 146). Her
entire life is summed up as a series of “unavoidable displacements and migrations from one
house to another” (183). Isabel describes the first house that she lived in as an “old,” “halfruinous,” “wild,” and “dark” place that stands in the middle of nowhere (142). The subsequent
house she is placed in is presumed to be a madhouse, and the rest are equally deserted and
decrepit. All of these houses present a stark contrast to the blissful and sumptuous home of
Pierre’s Saddle Meadows.
As an embodiment of the outcast, Isabel’s notions of home are quite opposite to Pierre’s
experience. At the same time, however, Isabel also prompts Pierre to recognize how unhomely
the space of his own home is for him. From the moment Pierre reads Isabel’s first letter, the
５０
perfect and solid world around him rapidly crumbles away. Suddenly, Pierre feels like a “mariner,
shipwrecked and cast” without a home and his entire faith and pride about the noble lineage of
his family is overturned by this discovery (90).
Whereas the geographical landscapes of Saddle Meadows represent the “real-estate
dignity” of the family for Pierre, the elder Glendinning represents the symbolic impeccability of
the Glendinning home-space. While Pierre’s father has long been dead and, thus, is physically
absent from the space of Saddle Meadows, his memory is enduringly present in the house. The
large portrait, presenting the “truest, and finest, and noblest” expression of the elder Glendinning,
occupies the “most conspicuous and honorable place on the wall” in the great drawing-room of
the mansion and works as the key symbol of the absolute ideality that he represents (97). Along
with the portrait, the imagery of the father stands as “the perfect marble form”; this imaginary
statue of the elder Glendinning stands “without blemish, unclouded, snow-white, and serene” in
a “long stood shrine” within younger Pierre’s mind as the “personification of perfect human
goodness and virtue” (93).
Yet, when the possibility of the father’s immorality arises, both Pierre’s perception of
the representations of his father—both physical and mental—degrades. Suddenly, the younger
heir feels as if the father’s portrait is telling him that what it shows “is not all of [his] father,” and
that the father that he sees in the portrait is just an “imaginary image” that Pierre had constructed
of him (109). In tandem, the long-cherished marble-like vision of the father within the son’s
mind falls apart before him like a “green foliaged tree” turned into a “blasted trunk” struck by a
lightning strike (114). Moreover, it is not just the flawless images of the father and what they
represent that become transfigured in Pierre’s mind. Little by little Pierre begins to see other
aspects of the world that surrounds him. As he endeavors to hide Isabel’s existence from his
５１
mother to protect her integrity, Pierre gradually finds Mrs. Glendinning’s love for her son was
also her “pride’s love” for her own “mirrored image” (115). Thus, losing the “fond ideality”
represented by his parents, Pierre finds himself becoming “doubly an orphan” within his homespace like an “infant Ishmael . . . with no maternal Hagar to accompany and comfort him” (116).
As Pierre discovers the falsity that lies beneath the immaculate appearance of his “dear
perfect father,” the physical space of Saddle Meadows—which, thus far, has safely enclosed and
sheltered him—becomes antagonistic towards its heir (40). Immediately after reading Isabel’s
letter, Pierre feels as if the mansion is physically attacking him and forcing him to leave:
He could not stay in his chamber: the house contracted to a nut-shell
around him; the walls smote his forehead; bare-headed he rushed from the
place, and only in the infinite air, found scope for that boundless expansion
of his life. (91)
When the house becomes literally uninhabitable for him, Pierre finds himself in a dilemma. On
the one hand, if he acknowledges his father’s failings by accepting Isabel as his sister and, thus,
maintains his own moral values, his father’s reputation and the entire family’s honor will be
damaged, and the unwavering reputation of the Glendinning house will be ruined. On the other
hand, if Pierre chooses to conceal his father’s secret to preserve his family’s name, he has to
compromise his own ethical beliefs. In other words, Pierre’s personal morality is at odds with the
preservation of the familial status quo. Furthermore, since Pierre is the successor of the
Glendinning lineage, the impairment in his personal moral values, again, would compromise his
family’s integrity. Because either choice will inevitably destroy the “fond ideality” of Saddle
Meadows on which Pierre’s senses of pride and faith in his family’s estate are based, Pierre
experiences a rift in his notion of home. Upon realizing this, Pierre becomes a “homeless at
５２
home” figure in the text.
However, the infidelity of Pierre’s father is never an absolute fact in the novel. Melville
only describes Isabel’s alleged sisterhood to Pierre as “[t]he intuitively certain, however literally
unproven fact” (167). In other words, it is equally possible that Isabel is Pierre’s half-sister or
that her story is pure conjecture and the father’s integrity is intact. As the title of the novel
suggests, the “ambiguities” that surrounds this question have steered most of the criticism on the
novel toward the theme of the father’s infidelity and what it should imply.
Critical approaches that accept Isabel as Pierre’s actual half-sister focus on the
significance of the father’s infidelity. These readings commonly examine the Glendinning home
as the space that represents the nation itself. The immoral deeds hidden behind the father’s
pristine façade work as a metaphor for the history of violence and cruelty committed by the
dominant social group concealed within the heroic official narratives of American history.49 In
other words, Pierre’s attempt to unearth his father’s hidden history can be read as an allegory for
the author’s effort to expose the untold stories of the nation. Still, many critics suggest this
challenge to the official narrative results in the heir’s tragic demise at the end of the novel;
because Pierre is already a member of the dominant class himself, he literally cannot survive his
own challenge.
On the other hand, critics who interpret Isabel’s paternity claim to be a lie speculate on
what Pierre could have achieved by challenging the ideals that his father—and, to larger extent,
his entire household—represents. These readings largely focus on the novel’s critique of the
prevailing, nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity, which had been integral to capitalist
49
For instance, Ken Egan points out how the antebellum American writers “celebrated the home as the symbol of
‘America,’” which is depicted as a “site of nurture and republican fraternity” in contrast to the European feudal
home-space (13). Egan argues, however, that these depictions of “the American home” was a paradigm invented by
family ideologists in their aims to “bring order to the entrepreneurial striving, class conflict, gender divisions, and
racial tensions” that pervaded the nation in these era (14).
５３
development of American society.50 In other words, Pierre’s choice to renounce the prearranged
prospect of the “perfect home” with Lucy, to be disowned by his family, and to marry Isabel, is
understood as his effort to find an alternative idea of home in contrast to nineteenth-century
domestic conventions. In these readings, Pierre’s self-disownment is interpreted as his challenge
to the class-oriented, gendered, and hetero-normative model of mid-nineteenth-century American
home-space; and the “new” home that he sets up with Isabel, Delly, and Lucy in the Apostles is
interpreted as an alternative model which embraces those subjects who were oppressed and
marginalized in the normative space of home. Again, however, this attempt inevitably leads
Pierre to a tragic end since his identity—as a privileged white heterosexual man, placed at the
center of the upper-class mainstream American home—is the very symbol of the values and
norms that he attempts to eradicate.
Given the divide in the criticism, it is worth questioning whether Pierre’s repudiation of
his heirship should be interpreted only through these two limited readings: a critique of the
official narrative of antebellum American history or a challenge to the nineteenth-century
ideology of domesticity. According to the existing criticism, Pierre’s rebellious feat quickly
begins to wane from the very moment he leaves his ideal home. Each challenge Pierre
encounters after crossing over the threshold of Saddle Meadows forces him to realize how he has
lived his life under the multiple layers of protection that composed the privileged space of his
home. Scholars have commonly read the second half of the novel as the trajectory of Pierre’s
failed efforts to build a new home-space as an alternative to the segregated space of Saddle
Meadows. However, in this dissertation I propose that Pierre’s leaving of his ideal home of
50
See Royster, Dimock, Brown, Kelley, and Weinauer for examples that approach the text as Melville’s critique on
nineteenth-century family ideology. Although these readings also see Pierre’s attempt to exist outside the national
narrative as an ultimately failed one, they focus more on the significance of the possibilities and alternative values
that his failed challenge has raised.
５４
Saddle Meadows should not necessarily be interpreted as his pursuit for an alternative homespace. Although Pierre takes Isabel as his wife, his underlying intention for this incestuous
marriage is to share his inheritance with her—in other words, to share his current home-space
with Isabel without injuring his mother’s pride or his father’s honor—rather than to set out a
search for an alternative model of family.
Consequently, the existing critical readings’ focus on the validity of the father’s infidelity
in order to examine the significance of Pierre’s choice and actions has its own limits; that is,
whether one assumes that Isabel is the illegitimate daughter of the elder Glendinning or that she
is mistaken in her claim to kinship with Pierre, one reaches similar conclusions about his attempt
to contest the existing normative home-space and pursue an alternative version. As a result,
neither of these readings looks beyond the limited space of the mid-nineteenth-century American
home in their analyses, and the individuals are confined within the boundaries of the home-space.
Conversely, if we examine Pierre as one of Melville’s wanderers—even if he may be quite a
different type of nomad compared to those in his previous seafaring novels—the idea of home
and the relationship that individuals have with the space of home can be presented in a very
different form.
The Unhomely Home: Recognizing the Face of the Other
Besides the question of the father’s infidelity, another important theme that draws much
critical attentions in Pierre is the theme of incest. The autobiographical or psychoanalytic
analyses of the incest theme in earlier criticism continue to be enormously influential in
５５
determining subsequent readings of the novel.51 However, in order to examine the text in its
relation to the ideas of wandering and diasporic consciousness, it would be more effective to
study the idea of incest in the text not so much as a reflection of the author’s personal accounts,
but as a motif related to Melville’s thoughts on nomadism: a mode of existence outside the
closed boundaries of home. As noted above, Melville clearly notes that Pierre’s original
objective for his incestuous marriage was to share his inheritance with Isabel without injuring his
family’s reputation:
From the first, determined at all hazards to hold his father’s fair fame
inviolate from any thing he should do in reference to protecting Isabel, and
extending to her a brother’s utmost devotedness and love; and equally
determined not to shake his mother’s lasting peace by any useless exposure
of unwelcome facts . . . and finding no possible mode of unitedly
compassing all these ends, without a most singular act of pious imposture,
which he thought all heaven would justify in him, since he himself was to be
the grand self-renouncing victim . . . Pierre Glendinning was already
become the husband of Isabel Banford. . . . (203-04)
Referring his plan for the “imposture” marriage with words such as “pious,” “self-renouncing,”
and “virtue,” Pierre not only explains his design to be the only feasible way to protect everyone,
but also emphasizes that his incestuous matrimony is an ethical self-sacrifice rather than an
exercise of veiled desires. In this sense, Pierre’s seemingly incestuous relationship with Isabel
does not necessarily invite psychoanalytic readings about Melville or the characters in Pierre.
51
Critics like Dimock or Flory argue that autobiographical and psychoanalytic readings of the novel in earlier period
were enormously influential in determining subsequent views of the work. For examples of biographical or
psychoanalytic readings of the novel, see Damon, Murray, Fiedler, Broadhead, Sundquist, Higgins and Parker, or
Steele.
５６
Nonetheless, psychoanalytic theories can be useful in understanding the particular sense of
homelessness in relation to the gothic idea of the “unhomely” in the novel.
As detailed in the introduction, Sigmund Freud explains how the experience of the
“unhomely” or “uncanny” emerges from modern individual’s recognition of how his/her
“familiar” home is, in fact, not what or where s/he thinks but rather a place that can be alien and
mysterious to him/herself. This idea of the unhomely can be adapted to Pierre Glendinning’s
own sense of homelessness within Saddle Meadows. The mysterious and haunting face of Isabel
exposes him to the unhomely or unfamiliar dimensions of his hitherto familiar home.52
The most evident symbolic representation of this uncanny recognition is found in the two
portraits of the elder Glendinning. Besides the large portrait in the great drawing-room, the
narrator notes that there is another hidden drawing of the father, the “chair-portrait,” which
pictures him in his younger days. When Aunt Dorothea gives the chair-portrait to Pierre, the
story she tells him of its creation affirms the elder Glendinning’s relationship with a French
refugee woman—who is later presumed to be Isabel’s mother—before he got married. Although
Pierre hides the chair-portrait in his closet after his mother dismisses it for “signally bel[ying] her
husband,” he constantly wonders about the strange dissimilarities between the small portrait and
the larger one (97). At first, the mysteriousness of the elder Glendinning’s “strange, ambiguous
smile” in the chair-portrait fascinates Pierre. However, after he reads Isabel’s letter, the story
behind the portrait—along with the father’s delirious utterances on his death-bed—establishes
Pierre’s conviction of his father’s transgression, and, eventually, indicates to him that the
“painted self” in the chair-portrait is the “real father of Isabel” (230). Much like the father’s
portrait—once a symbol of the Glendinning excellence, but now a sign of their hypocrisy—the
52
The words that Pierre uses to describe Isabel’s face—“utterly unknown” yet “too familiar”—echo the idea of the
unhomely (65).
５７
privileged space of Saddle Meadows gradually reveals its unfamiliar side with Isabel’s
appearance. The veracity of Isabel’s sisterly relationship to Pierre is not imperative in
understanding the unhomeliness of Saddle Meadows. The critical problem is that Isabel’s
appearance casts doubt upon the moral integrity of the seemingly perfect home.
The ideal space of Saddle Meadows turns into a site of the gothic unhomeliness as its heir
endeavors to actively interact with the face of the “other.” From one point of view, as he strives
to invite Isabel into the space of his privileged home, Pierre begins to detect the callousness and
class-oriented prejudice of his family beneath the triumphant authority of the Glendinnings’
social dominance. On the surface, the Glendinnings are presented as the benevolent lords of the
Saddle Meadows community. Among the locals, Mrs. Glendinning is highly praised as the
“gracious manorial lady” who frequently assists charities and provides advice for communal
affairs (68). She is also the “generous foundress and the untiring patroness of the beautiful little
marble church” in the parish (124). Mrs. Glendinning even allows her son to befriend and to
grow up with the children of poor neighbors like Charlie Millthorpe. Yet, the narrator constantly
hints to other details that are left unobserved. The exclusivism of the family is already hinted
from the very first scene, where they interact with one another. Although Pierre and his mother
cheerfully banter with each other at the breakfast table, when Pierre attempts to invite the butler
into his joke, Mrs. Glendinning smoothly but instantly checks her son’s demeanor as soon as the
servant leaves the room:
“My dear Pierre, how often have I begged you never to permit your
hilariousness to betray you into overstepping the exact line of propriety in
your intercourse with servants. . . . It is very easy to be entirely kind and
pleasant to servants, without the least touch of any shade of transient good-
５８
fellowship with them.” (39)
The façade of Glendinning propriety is faithfully based on the values that the mother outlines for
the son. The benevolence of the family should only be exercised within the “exact line of
propriety” and Pierre, as the succeeding heir, should never “overstep” the line which sets them
apart from those of the lower class. While Mrs. Glendinning allows Pierre to befriend the local
farmer’s son Charlie, the poor neighbors like the Millthorpes are nothing more than adornments
that add the “povertiresque [to] the social landscape” of Saddle Meadows (314). Mary
Glendinning’s unsympathetic response towards the stories about Delly—a local working-class
girl who becomes ostracized from the Saddle Meadows community—reaffirms the family’s
class-oriented intolerance.
Moreover, the fact that Pierre is instantly deprived of his inheritance because he marries
Isabel confirms the family’s exclusivism underneath its munificent façade. When he considers
whether he should consult his mother on the matters regarding Isabel, Pierre begins to realize
that “the before unthought-of wonderful edifice of his mother’s immense pride;—her pride of
birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity, and all the pride of high-born, refined, and
wealthy Life” would prohibit her from showing any sympathy towards Isabel (115). Pierre’s
presumptions later prove to be valid as he faces his mother’s immediate censure when he
announces his marriage to Isabel. Without questioning the real grounds for Pierre’s sudden
decision to take Isabel as his wife, Mrs. Glendinning focuses her rage on the disparity in the
couple’s social rank. For Mary Glendinning, Pierre’s marriage to an “unknown—thing!” (226) is
the ruthless cutting off of the “fair succession of an honorable race! Mixing the choicest wine
with filthy water from the plebeian pool, and so turning all to undistinguishable rankness!” (228).
Mrs. Glendinning’s pride represents the morally contradictory aspects of the Glendinning
５９
ideality. As Saddle Meadows ultimately goes to Glen Stanly—the cousin with the “gold-laced
and haughty soul,” who shares a “congeniality of world views” with Mrs. Glendinning—over
Pierre, the ostensible generosity and benevolence that the Glendinning home-space has always
upheld reaffirms its hidden face of intolerance (259).
On the other hand, Melville discloses the hidden histories of violence and hypocrisy of
the privileged American home-space through the ghostly face which provokes the heir’s
psychological wanderings at home. The novel constantly hints how the noble reputation of the
family and the great heirlooms that fill the halls of Saddle Meadows were procured by exploiting
and subjugating others. When explaining the historical background of Saddle Meadows, the
narrator notes that the entire estate is built upon grounds that formerly belonged to the Native
Americans. 53 The “Major-General’s baton,” which once belonged to grand old Pierre who had
“annihilated two Indian savages by making reciprocal bludgeons of their heads,” has become
Pierre’s “inheritance” and “symbol of command” as he will take over the estate (41). The legend
of grand old Pierre as the representative “American gentleman” is supported by his reputation as
the “kindest of masters to his slaves; . . . a sweet-hearted, charitable Christian”; yet, the anecdote
also reveals the history of slavery on the estate (52). These family narratives link the private
accounts of the family to the official history of the nation. In this sense, although Isabel is
presented as the quintessential outcast of the privileged American home-space in the novel, her
haunting face—which constantly disturbs Pierre even before she physically manifests herself
into the space of Saddle Meadows—epitomizes the enduring presence of various ghostly “others”
hidden beneath the discourse of the antebellum upper-class home.
53
Examining the idea of “American picturesque,” which connects the idea of American social history and the
aesthetics of “willful forgetting,” in the novel, Samuel Otter points out that the “landscape of Saddle Meadows . . . is
saturated with reminders of those who were dispossessed” (“The Eden of Saddle Meadows: Landscape and Ideology
in Pierre” 72).
６０
Nevertheless, the narrator indicates that—unlike all the other past and present members
of the Glendinning household—Pierre holds a latent ability to critically assess the unhomely
aspects of Saddle Meadows, even before he becomes acquainted with its hidden histories. As a
child, Pierre can only go as far as the threshold of the Millthorpes’ dilapidated farmhouse; still,
the young heir would catch the “life-weary groans” coming from the invisible inhabitants and
imagine, with “some boyish inklings,” that there is “something else” beneath the “pure
povertiresque in poverty” (314). It is Isabel who finally invites Pierre inside the home-space of
the “others.” When he visits the ruined farmhouse that Isabel resides in with Delly’s family,
Pierre finally witnesses the unfamiliar side of the world from which the walls that surrounded
and protected the space of his mansion had sheltered him. As soon as he enters the Ulvers’
farmhouse with its “wretched rush-lights of poverty and woe” which sharply contrasts the
ambience of Saddle Meadows with its “brilliant chandeliers,” the “inklings of something else”
that the younger Pierre had vaguely perceived are more clearly seen and felt (138).
The privileged heir’s recognition of the mysterious face of the “other” radically alters his
relationship to his home:
. . . the accustomed features of his room by that natural light, which, till this
very moment, had never lighted him but to his joy; now first the dread
reality came appallingly upon him. A sense of horrible forlornness,
feebleness, impotence, and infinite, eternal desolation possessed him. It was
not merely mental, but corporeal also. He could not stand; and when he tried
to sit, his arm fell floorwards as tied to leaden weights. Dragging his ball
and chain, he fell upon his bed . . . . (119)
This critical scene demonstrates how Saddle Meadows—with its unhomely aspects revealed—no
６１
longer welcomes Pierre as its cherished heir, but instead takes him as its prisoner. The
transformation of the formerly safe and comfortable home into an unhomely space that imprisons
its inhabitants parallels Edward Said’s argument on the nature of modern home-space.
Examining the relationship between modern individuals and their notions of home, Said
highlights how—in our customary understanding of our home as a safe and familiar space—we
often neglect its conditional and restrictive properties:
We take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their
underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy . . . . homes are
always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety
of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended
beyond reason or necessity. (185)
Similar to Said’s analysis of the hidden constraints of the modern home, Melville shows how the
space of Saddle Meadows operates as a space of both protection and imprisonment for Pierre. If
Pierre wishes to be safely protected from the destitution and hostility of the world outside, he
must remain within the confined space of Saddle Meadows.54 In order to be sheltered in his
home-space, however, Pierre must conform to its “dogma and orthodoxy” established upon the
dubious values that Mrs. Glendinning’s “worldly view” represents.55 As the epitome of all that
Saddle Meadows stands to protect its inhabitants against, Isabel exposes the unfamiliar aspects
that had been so far hidden within the blissful space of Saddle Meadows. Ultimately, the
haunting presence of the outcast induces Pierre’s feeling of homelessness within his own home
54
Said’s argument on the double nature of home also resonates the discussions in feminism and diaspora studies that
I presented in the introduction. The image of Pierre in fetters within his own protective home resembles the
metaphor of shell that Anzaldúa and Martin and Mohanty propose.
55
On similar note, Dimock points out how the nineteenth-century American family model was engrossed with
Foucauldian ideas of surveillance, knowledge, and governance, making the family as the “primary site for the
production of knowable”—and, therefore, controllable—“identities” (158).
６２
by bringing upon the heir’s recognition of the other side of his home.
At the same time, the fact that Pierre loses his heirship to Glen Stanly signals the other
fracture in the family’s smooth and honorable façade. Again, with Isabel’s appearance in his
home, Pierre begins to realize that his firm position within his home-space is, in fact, a very
tenuous one because he can always be replaced by another more suitable individual. The
rationale that Pierre gives when he decides to marry Isabel confirms his provisional status in his
home-space. Upon considering how to accommodate his newly found sister, Pierre reasons that
the grievance that he might cause to his mother by marrying Isabel is a “wound that might be
curable” compared to the “world-wide and irremediable dishonor” that he might cast upon his
father if he acknowledges Isabel as his sister (204). In other words, while Pierre is the current
heir of the Glendinning household, he is aware that his position is a replaceable one. Indeed, this
is precisely what happens when he announces Isabel as his wife; Pierre’s position as the heir is
instantly filled by another individual, Glen Stanley. The structure of power that is manifested in
Mary Glendinning’s “worldly view” can instantly take away the heir’s entitlement to his home
once he refuses to conform to the accepted “view.” As the chosen heir who can claim the
privileged space of Saddle Meadows, Pierre seems to occupy the opposite space within the
discourse surrounding the American home in comparison to that of social outcasts like Isabel or
Delly who are denied access to such a place. And yet, the interchangeability of Pierre’s status as
the successor of Saddle Meadows proves his vulnerable position within his home.
Consequently, Isabel’s presence ironically reveals how the privileged heir and the
ultimate outcast exhibit similar relationships to the normative American home-space. Like the
domestic outcasts, the chosen heir does not hold much agency over the home that protects him
and is left helpless under its control. In describing Pierre’s feelings of “forlornness,” “feebleness,”
６３
“impotence,” and “infinite, eternal desolation,” Melville uses language that typically describes
the diasporic consciousness of outcasts or migrants who have limited agency within the modern
home-space (119). The heir can immediately be cast out of the sanctuary of Saddle Meadows if
he does not abide by its imperatives.
The mysterious face of Isabel that haunts Pierre even before he discovers her in the flesh
suggests that the face of the domestic outcasts already resides inside the privileged home-space
as the gothic figure of haunting. Like the second portrait of the elder Glendinning hidden away in
Saddle Meadows which reveals another side of the family’s history, Isabel serves as the double
for the heir who has always already been haunted by her presence within the space of home. The
“unhomeliness” that Isabel incites in Pierre echoes Homi Bhabha’s digression on Freud’s
discussion of the “uncanny” in The Location of Culture. Re-examining Freud’s concept of
unheimliche, Bhabha emphasizes the function of its prefix “un” as the token of repression. If the
heimliche can refer either to situations of the familiar and agreeable, the unheimliche emerges
both rhetorically and literally as its double—a figure of foreignness that is always already
inscribed in the familiar.56 Although Bhabha configures the “unhomely” as a “paradigmatic
colonial and post-colonial condition,” his idea of the individual’s experience of psychic
displacement without having any physical movement away from their home reflects Pierre’s
peculiar sense of feeling homeless at home (13).
As the heir’s hidden double, Isabel compels Pierre to realize the unhomeliness of his
own home-space with its dogma that his own set of moral values can never abide by. The
irresolvable paradox that he should be the prisoner of his own home-space in order to be the
56
In his seeking for the “’worlding’ of literature,” Bhabha urges that the literary critics’ responsibility in the
postcolonial world is to realize “the unspoken, unrepresented parts that haunt the historical present” (18). The
postcolonial subject’s experience of the “difference within” reflects the form of displacement that can be
experienced in the psyche of someone who has gone nowhere in the physical sense (19). See my introduction for
more discussions on Bhabha’s idea of “unhomely.”
６４
master of it denies him any genuine sense of comfort or security in Saddle Meadows.
Furthermore, the vulnerability of his own position within his home-space denies the heir with
any kind of secure sense of belonging, which is the imperative condition for an individual to feel
at home.57 Thus, even before he is disinherited from Saddle Meadows, Pierre is already a
“homeless at home” figure who will never feel at ease in the mansion now that he has realized
that he can only claim ownership of the estate by becoming its prisoner.
The fact that his privileged spaces of home can only be brought into being by alienating
the “others,” ironically, makes it impossible for the mainstream American to completely expunge
the domestic outcasts from the discourse of home. In this sense, Avtar Brah and James Clifford’s
discussions on the relationality of “diaspora space”—which underscore the mutual influences
that the “natives” and the “migrants” exert on each other—can be applied to the relationship
between that the heir and the outcasts of Saddle Meadows. In other words, the presence of the
“others” is indispensable in dominant American home-space in order to insist on the protective
nature of the space. Concurrently, the lingering presence of the outcasts within the mainstream
American’s seemingly untroubled home provokes a peculiar sense of alienation within the heir’s
own mind. As a result, albeit the fact that the positions that Pierre and Isabel hold within the
space of Saddle Meadows are exact opposites to each other, the domestic outsider’s typical sense
of estrangement and the atypical diasporic consciousness that the “homeless at home” figure
experiences operate in similar ways in the sense that they both undermine the idea of “home” as
permanent and utopian space.
57
As discussed in the introduction, the “homeless at home” figure is an individual who does not feel at home even as
he/she admittedly holds the title to his/her home. Furthermore, there are always certain forms of power involved
which would allow certain individuals to claim home while alienating others.
６５
The Voluntarily Homeless Heir
Pierre’s sense of displacement and, subsequently, his recognition of the unhomeliness of
Saddle Meadows, results in his voluntary exile from his home-space. On the night of his
departure, Pierre proclaims that he will cease to be a “worshiper” of the “heirlooms” that fill the
space of Saddle Meadows by dispossessing himself of the “hoarded up mementoes and
monuments of the past” (230). In burning the chair-portrait, the heir seeks to banish the memory
of his father, and thereby, to renounce the feigned excellence of Saddle Meadows that the elder
Glendinning represents. “‘Henceforth,’” he declaims, “cast-out Pierre hath no paternity, and no
past; and since the Future is one blank to all; therefore, twice-disinherited Pierre stands
untrammeledly his ever-present self!” (232). However, from the very first night as an outcast,
Pierre is forced to realize that he forfeited the manorial deference and privileges that came with
his upbringing the moment he renounced his heirship. As soon as he repudiates his home, the
formerly cherished heir finds himself dispossessed of everything else altogether. The second-half
of the novel which tracks Pierre’s voluntary exile is a spiral of rejection and disillusionment
which can end only in death.
The migration that Pierre launches into after he leaves his home starts with his physical
journey away from the peaceful countryside of Saddle Meadows into the hectic space of New
York City. And yet, the form of migration that I focus on in this chapter is more of a figurative
one. Pierre’s self-banishment from Saddle Meadows is, in a sense, similar to Edward Said’s selfexile that I have examined in the introduction first chapter. According to Said, the relationship
between nationalism and the figure of exile is a dialectic one. On the one hand, the condition of
exile is the byproduct of nationalism’s affirmation of the demarcated space of the home. With its
６６
insistence on “belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage,” nationalism “fends off exile” in
order to affirm the fixed space of home created by common culture and customs (Said 176).
However, exiles constantly threaten the fixed boundaries of the normative home-space for they
“cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience,” and, thus, blur the boundary between
“us” and “outsiders” (Said 185). Pierre does not exactly correspond with Said’s exile because,
unlike the exiles who are violently expelled from their homes against their own will, he initially
starts as a member of the dominant class, but subsequently ostracizes himself from his proscribed
home. In other words, Pierre is the “insider” who willingly chooses to become an “outsider.” In
this sense, Pierre’s self-expulsion from his own home obscures his own position in relation to the
home-space and raises another challenging case within the modern American discourse on home.
The question of incest should be considered first in order to understand the new
relationship between Pierre and the notion of home following his self-banishment from Saddle
Meadows. The idea of incest is central to understanding Pierre’s voluntary exile because it is the
reason for and/or the result of his self-exile. As noted above, scholars of earlier periods have
mostly limited their readings of the incest theme to a psychoanalytic approach based on
biographies of the author’s life. However, recent criticism tends to highlight the subversive or
problematic aspects of incest as it relates to the domestic and family ideologies that prevailed in
mid-nineteenth-century American society.58 Critics such as Myrna Jehlen, Gillian Brown, and
Ken Egan read the theme of incest in the novel as Melville’s attempt to critique or sometimes
even to parody the endogamous nature of nineteenth-century dominant American home-space59
58
For more fully detailed chart of critical history that relates the theme of incest in the novel to the author’s
biographical accounts, see Hayford.
59
Jehlen, for instance, argues that, in order to break out from the cyclic world of Saddle Meadows where each
generation of Pierre Glendinnings repeat themselves succeeding the “ideality” of their fathers, Pierre embraces
Isabel who is the epitome of what the society of Saddle Meadows casts out in order to preserve its own ideality.
Brown, on the other hand, critiques Pierre’s act of incest from feminist perspectives, arguing that he appropriates
６７
Other critics, however, extend their reading of incest as a means to re-imagine an alternative
family model (Kelley, Silverman).60 As the key focus of my analysis is to examine the idea of
incest in relation to the politics of home, the stance that I take to examine the theme is closer to
the socio-political approaches than psychoanalytic or autobiographical readings.61
Pierre’s recognition of the unhomeliness of Saddle Meadows and Isabel’s role as his
alleged sister who incites new awareness in him are related to the paradoxical understanding of
their incestuous relationship in Pierre. If the conventional incestuous plot in the nineteenthcentury sentimental novels emphasized the idea of sympathy and fraternal family relations in
order to reinforce the confined class, racial, and sexual boundaries of the normative American
home-space, Melville turns the dominant society’s homogenizing effort against itself through the
union of Pierre and Isabel.62 The existing criticism’s focus on incest in its correlation to the
Isabel as the “desirable dark woman of patriarchy” against the sentimental tradition of his mother and, thus, “affirms
patrilinear authority, purifying it from the claims of nurture to the development of individual identity” (156). Egan
points out how the antebellum writers idealized the imagery of “American home,” in contrast to “the feudal castle”
of Europe, as the “site of nurture and republican fraternity, embodiment of equality, affection, and toleration” (13).
However, according to Egan, “the American home” was more an illusion created by family ideologists of the period
constructed “precisely because social reality terrified them” than a norm in American society (14). And as a parody
of such tradition, Melville presents Isabel as the symbol of the “sins of the fathers” being visited upon the children
(146).
60
For Kelley, the incestuous family that Pierre creates with Isabel is Melville’s attempt to renovate the nineteenthcentury normative American household from the one based on marriage to that of which is based on “fraternal
communion” (102). Similarly, Silverman argues that Melville loathed the sentimental novels which were immensely
popular among his contemporaries for he considered the idea of “sympathy” that these novels promoted was not so
much as an idea of egalitarianism as it professed but as a coercion of conformity. Thus, for Silverman, the idea of
incest in the novel “suggests a rewriting or revision of normative familial relationships” (352).
61
It must be noted that there is also another major critical tendency which tends to link the theme of incest in the
novel with the idea of authorship, examining Melville’s own struggles within the literary market of his period. The
novel, indeed, spends an entire chapter, “Young America in Literature,” discussing the various aspects of authorship
in nineteenth-century United States. And yet, I deliberately leave out the discussions on authorship for the purpose
of keeping the focus on the ideas of home and diasporic consciousness in my reading.
62
More on the incestuous relations of the nineteenth-century American family and domestic fictions, see G. M.
Goshgarian’s To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance,
especially pp. 36-75, Shirley Samuels’s Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the
Literature of the Early American Nation, or Elizabeth Barnes’s “Natural and National Unions: Incest and Sympathy
in the Early Republic.” These studies examine the desire for incest as a consequence of the concentration on familial
bonds as a locus of value in the nineteenth-century American society, rather than as a psychological or oedipal
６８
nineteenth-century American family ideology invokes intriguing arguments about the prevalence
of incest in the literature of the period. However, such an approach limits the understanding of
the incest theme in the novel to the context of the nineteenth-century national discourse of
domesticity and, thus, results in the aforementioned rift between Pierre and the author’s other
texts which are usually studied by contemporary Melville scholars from the angles of global
and/or diaspora studies.
Hence returning to the idea of wandering and Pierre’s particular sense of homelessness
discussed earlier in the chapter, I intend to link the problem of incest in the text to the peculiar
relationship to his home-space that Pierre develops following his self-exile from Saddle
Meadows. The imperative question, then, should be focused on how to understand Pierre’s
distinctive condition of dwelling after he leaves his once ideal home.
Arriving in the New York City without any adequate social or financial means, Pierre
and his companions settle in a former church which has been converted into a tenement known
as the Apostles. Whereas Pierre’s fate after his disinheritance is usually understood as a tragic
one—as a failure to find an alternative space to which to belong—a few critics read the
community at the Apostles as an alternative home-space to Saddle Meadows. For instance, Wyn
Kelley argues that Isabel “teaches Pierre what a real home ought to be,” and that the Apostles
represents the “real home” based on a “radical utopian brotherhood” (103). From this vantage
point, the Apostles serves as the site of a radical domestic experiment, complete with “shared
labor and high ideals,” through which Pierre attempts to “reform the patriarchal household” of
Saddle Meadows (Kelley, 108). Similarly, Gillian Silverman suggests that Melville creates a
“vision of the family [that is] not reducible to sameness and [is] not structured by fixed familial
identities” through Pierre’s incestuous marriage to Isabel (356). Still, even those scholars who
theme.
６９
see the Apostles as an emblem of a “new” or “alternative” home-space conclude that this
“experiment” must fail in the end, since the social reality of the period does not allow room for
experiments based on naïve idealism. Then, it must be questioned whether or not Pierre
necessarily desires to create a new home after leaving Saddle Meadows. In other words, must we
examine Pierre’s self-exile through the limited discourse based on the closed space of home?
From the very beginning of their journey away from Saddle Meadows, the makeshift
family that Pierre forms with Isabel and Delly, which is later joined by Lucy, can never provide a
complete home in both physical and emotional terms. Dwelling in a tenement housing, Pierre no
longer owns his domestic space, but rents and shares a space with “scores of those miscellaneous,
bread-and-cheese adventurers, and ambiguously professional nondescripts . . . , and
unaccountable foreign-looking fellows . . . previously issuing from unknown parts of the world”
(303). The Apostles represents a space that is radically different from Pierre’s former, wellappointed home. In contrast to the carefully arranged spaces of Saddle Meadows, the Apostles
allows him little space for privacy and physical distance from its other inhabitants. Stripped of
comforts and proper furnishings, Pierre has to share three small rooms with the three women,
and from his window he can see other tenants gazing back at him. Where Mrs. Glendinning’s
imposition of the “exact line of propriety” kept Saddle Meadows as a carefully segregated place,
the lack of social boundaries leaves the inhabitants of the Apostles “ambiguous” and
“unaccountable.” In this sense, the status of the inhabitants of the Apostles resembles that of the
undecidable and unclassifiable “strangers” identified by Madan Sarup in modern diasporic
spaces (101).63 It is a heterogenous space where the line between the “insiders” and the
“outsiders” is eradicated.
Nor does the Apostles provide Pierre with any sense of emotional belonging, or in
63
See my introduction for more discussions on Sarup’s figure of diasporic “stranger.”
７０
Kelley’s term, the “ideal of domestic fraternity” (Kelley 109). Struggling to make a living by
writing in his cold room, Pierre suffers from an extreme loneliness. His mind is described as that
of a “soul-toddler,” “shrieking and imploring” entirely alone without a father or a mother (335).
Since Pierre cannot feel at home in the physical space of his new abode, he resumes his habit of
taking long evening stroll. Pierre’s walk around the busy streets of the New York City only
serves as temporary escape from the miseries at the Apostles. Moreover, in contrast to the “fond
ideality” that he enjoyed as he walked around Saddle Meadows, his wanderings in the urban
landscape amongst other “social-castaways” of the city only exacerbate the “utter isolation of his
soul” (382).
Further evidence that Pierre is not attempting to forge an alternative home-space is
found in the fact that although he initially claims Isabel as his wife in order to share his
inheritance, he attempts to abandon any familial affiliations following his self-exile. Soon after
the group of outcasts settles at the Apostles, Pierre refuses to be referred to as a brother by Isabel:
“Call me brother no more! . . . I am Pierre, and thou Isabel, wide brother and sister in the
common humanity,—no more” (310). By repudiating, at once, the epithet “brother” and the
patronym “Glendinning,” Pierre endeavors to stand as an individual in the world, unassisted and
unencumbered by familial bonds.
Although, while at Saddle Meadows, Pierre was a “homeless at home” figure, his status
in the community at the Apostles is more of an exilic condition than a home-bound one. Indeed,
both Pierre and Lucy describe his dwelling at the Apostle as “strange exile” or “mysterious exile,”
suggesting their own difficulty in explaining his condition (350, 353). Inferring that Pierre has
other motives than conjugal love in his unexpected matrimony to Isabel, Lucy joins Pierre’s
“present most singular apparent position in the eye of the world” at the Apostle (356). Ultimately,
７１
the “singular” community at the Apostles consists of four exiles—Pierre and Lucy as selfimposed exiles, Isabel who regards herself as an inborn exile, and Delly, the social outcast of
Saddle Meadows.
Through his “mysterious exile,” Pierre not only removes himself from the physical space
of his home, but also attempts to break from the normative socio-domestic ideologies that Saddle
Meadows represents. In this sense, his exile recalls a distinctive form of migration that
postcolonial scholar Iain Chambers describes. Referencing Said’s ideas on the exilic state,
Chambers proposes a form of migration which is different from the commonly accepted ideas of
physical movement and traffic of people. For Chambers, migration is a “form of picking a
quarrel with where you come from” (2), and the most compelling aspect of migration is its
emphasis on mobility:
Migrancy . . . involves a movement in which neither the points of departure
nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in
language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation.
Always in transit, the promise of a homecoming—completing the story,
domesticating the detour—becomes an impossibility. (5)
Chambers’s idea of migration resists the notions of fixed destinations or static identities, and
advocates constant changes and figurative movements. As a “form of picking a quarrel” with the
space of Saddle Meadows and the principles and set of values it represents, Pierre’s migration is
more significant in the sense that it endeavors to resist any fixed form of dwelling.64
On the one hand, existing critical readings of Pierre that understand the novel as a
critique on contemporary ideology of domesticity or as an attempt to seek an alternative model
64
Chambers’s understanding of migration as a resistance to the idea of home as a fixed space also recalls Brah’s reevaluation of the concept of “diaspora” as a “critique of discourses of fixed origins” (180).
７２
of home do concern the figurative aspect of migration that Chambers argues as they attempt to
critically assess the space of home in the novel. Yet, both these approaches construe Pierre’s
voluntary exile as a tragic failure because he does not succeed in finding a new home outside the
space of Saddle Meadows. In so doing, they fail to see Pierre as a positive agent in his
relationship to his home-space.
However, Pierre’s failure in finding a new home is not necessarily a defeat of an
individual in his struggle against the dominant discourse of the nineteenth-century American
home; rather, his self-exile may invite another form of dwelling—a diasporic one that Chambers
terms a “mobile habitat.”65 Instead of replacing the old home of Saddle Meadows with a new one
at the Apostles, Pierre resists the closed categories of home or family; thus, he sets up a “habitat”
that is in continuous motion. Consequently, the four exiles at the Apostles incessantly escape
fixed identities and literally dwell in constant displacements. In this vein, the distinctive type of
dwelling that Pierre presents in the novel can be evaluated as a proto-type of the nomadism that
Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose.66
Mostly discussed in the twentieth-century cultural context, the nomadic way of life is
65
Chambers argues that “[f]or the nomadic experience of language, wandering without a fixed home, dwelling at the
crossroads of the world, bearing our sense of being and difference, is no longer the expression of a unique tradition
or history. . . . This inevitably implies another sense of ‘home’, of being in the world. It means to conceive of
dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and space not as though they were fixed and closed
structures, but as providing the critical provocation of an opening ” (4). Chambers’s idea of the “mobile habitat” also
recalls James Clifford’s notion of “dwelling-in-displacement” that I have examined in the introduction. Clifford
discusses the state of displacement of the diasporic subject as an opposing condition to the efforts of boundary fixing
and identifications in the modern world. Although Clifford puts the diasporic subject between the spaces of the old
home and the new one and, thereby, limits his ideas of home within the boundaries of fixed space, his emphasis on
the “lived tension” as an essential commitment for the diasporic subject in order to maintain their distinctiveness
within their home-space echoes Pierre’s resistance to a fixed form of dwelling. See the introduction for more
detailed discussions of Clifford’s ideas on diaspora.
66
In their discussion of the nomad, Deleuze and Guattari contrast nomadic distribution with sedentary distribution in
spatial terms. While a sedentary distribution sees the division of a fixed amount of space to a number of people or
any other elements, nomadic distribution implies dispersing of people in an open or unlimited space. The two types
of distribution result in two types of space: the “striated” space, where boundaries indicate the division of space, and
the “smooth” space, where, instead, there are constantly changing groupings of people across unbounded space. See
Deleuze and Guattari, especially pp.351-87.
７３
characterized by movement across space which exists in sharp contrast to the rigid and static
boundaries of the modern state. Unlike the migrant, the nomad is never re-territorialized, but
maintains a state of constant “deterritorialization.” In this way, the nomadic lifestyle can be
understood as a way of being in the middle or between points which is characterized by
movement and change and is unfettered by systems of organization. Whether Pierre is fully
aware of the nomadic aspects of his life may be arguable. Nevertheless, Melville alludes to the
possibility that Pierre is aware of his own inclination to this radical form of existence as opposed
to the rigidly home-bound one. When Lucy accepts her own disownment from her family in
order to join the community of exiles at the Apostles, her social position resembles Pierre’s:
Concerning the loss of worldly wealth and sumptuousness, and all the
brocaded applauses of drawing rooms; these were no loss to her, for they
had always been valueless. Nothing was she now renouncing; but in acting
upon her present inspiration she was inheriting every thing. . . . And as if her
body indeed were the temple of God, and marble indeed were the only fit
material for so holy a shrine, a brilliant, supernatural whiteness now
gleamed in her cheek. (368-69)
Despite the constant, miserable experiences outside his home which have disillusioned him of his
exilic state, Pierre is still in awe of Lucy when she firmly rejects the “brocaded applauses of
drawing rooms” that are promised to her if she accepts the marriage proposal of Glen. By joining
the group of exiles at the Apostles, Lucy refuses the “worldly wealth and sumptuousness” that
she could have enjoyed had she accepted the proposal and shares in Pierre’s moral quandary.
Furthermore, similar to Pierre’s repudiation of familial affiliations, Lucy attempts to
break away from the institution of the family by renouncing her fixed positions in her home. She
７４
refuses to fulfill the conventional roles of a sister, a daughter, and a wife, and becomes an
ambiguous being at the Apostles as Pierre’s un-related “cousin.” The transformation of Lucy into
a “marble-like” temple in Pierre’s eyes echoes his earlier envisioning of his father as the “perfect
marble form” of immaculateness. As the embodiment of selflessness and an unblemished figure
of exile, Lucy replaces the elder Glendinning who personified the alleged ideality of the
dominant discourse of home. In contrast to the father whose presence as a “marble shrine” in
Pierre’s mind gradually falls apart after the discovery of his dubiousness, Lucy’s “marble-white”
form remains unaffected under the tumult of their exilic lives. Pierre finds that both his and
Lucy’s renouncements of their worldly inheritance enable them to “inherit every thing.”
At the same time, Pierre’s pursuit of writing—as much as it utterly fails in a worldly
sense as he gets rejected by every publisher in the city, inviting various critical debates on
whether or not the protagonist is a direct reflection of the author’s personal life—in itself recalls
the relationship between the migratory subject and the act of writing in contemporary discussions
on diaspora. British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie proposes that the migrant can find a home in
their literary productions as these writings can both celebrate and critique the different cultural
space they inhabit:
The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types
of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in
memories as much as in material things . . . . The migrant suspects reality:
having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory
nature. (124-25)
Abandoning all the “fine fruits of a care-free fancy” that were written at Saddle Meadows “in the
sweet legendary time,” Pierre decides to write a new book at the Apostles to fulfill his “burning
７５
desire to deliver what he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world”
(320-21). His recognition of the “illusory nature” of the space of Saddle Meadows leads him to
realize how the leisurely writing of love-sonnets by which he gained his fame as the “respectable
youth . . . blameless in morals, and harmless throughout” seems vain in the face of the harsh
reality (281). Accordingly, Pierre’s effort to write about the “miserably neglected” aspects of the
world corresponds with his self-exile in the sense that both acts reveal his endeavors to resist
fixed and constricted perspectives regarding his identity and the world around him.67
Nonetheless, Melville does not depict this distinctive type of voluntary exile as a new
utopian mode of dwelling. Perpetually linking his sense of belonging to a physical home-space,
Pierre finds himself unable to make a living in his exilic state. The writings in which he
endeavors to deliver the “neglected Truth” to the world fail to draw the world’s sympathy, and
he is labeled a “swindler” by his publishers for presenting “blasphemous rhapsody” instead of
the “popular novel” they requested (356). Moreover, the group of exiles at the Apostle is under
constant threat of Glen Stanly and Lucy’s brother who plan to kidnap and return Lucy to her
home. Ultimately, the confrontation between Pierre and Glen ends as the former heir of Saddle
Meadows kills the new heir. Thus, Pierre’s “own hand [extinguishes] his house” (402).
Incarcerated in an underground cell of the city prison, Pierre questions if his challenge to
live outside the space of the normative American home has ended up in a tragic failure. The
former heir of Saddle Meadows wonders what his fate could have been had he ignored the
mysterious face in the first place:
Had I been heartless now, disowned, and spurningly portioned off the girl at
67
Such aspect of writing can also be related to Azade Seyhan’s notion of writing as a “third geography” (15).
Discussing the language and memory of the diasporic subjects—which are usually discussed in relations to senses of
loss or repression—Seyhan argues how the act of writing can provide a symbolic space for these subjects to express
the complexity of their identities.
７６
Saddle Meadows, then had I been happy through a long life on earth, and
perchance through a long eternity in heaven! (360)
And yet, the heir immediately affirms that, once recognized, Isabel’s very existence would
transform his life into a “hell” regardless of his choice. Despite his present tragic state, Pierre
finally claims that he will gladly confront his hellish existence: “Well, be it hell. I will mold a
trumpet of the flames, and, with my breath of flame, breathe back my defiance!” (360). Without
“re-territorializing” themselves in a new home, Pierre and his two partners in exile—Isabel and
Lucy—end their lives in the prison.68 Through his portrayal of Pierre as a figure who constantly
problematizes his own relationship to the space of home, Melville presents a proto-nomadic
figure at the center of mid-nineteenth-century American society in Pierre.
A century after Melville published Pierre, Theodor Adorno—another prominent figure of
modern exile—insisted on the morality of “not [being] at home in one’s home” (39). Adorno’s
discussion of the ethical relationship between the modern self and the space of home is reiterated
by his contemporary, Emmanuel Levinas. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas emphasizes the
importance of acknowledging the “face of the Other” and the necessity of extending hospitality
to the “Other” in an individual’s home-space. For Levinas, a host’s opening of his/her home to
the “Other” benefits not only those who are the recipients of the host’s hospitality, but also the
host who is in perpetual danger of conflating his/her identity with the ideas of ownership and
possession (171-73). Levinas’s emphasis on the importance of identifying and welcoming the
“face of the Other” mirrors Pierre’s recognition and response to the “mysterious face” of Isabel.
The perpetual presence of Isabel’s haunting face initiates Pierre’s gothic recognition of the
68
In his reading of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), Daniel A. Wells makes a compelling argument, suggesting that
Melville wrote “Bartleby” as an emotional response to the fact that Pierre was published to bad reviews. Bartleby is
another character of Melville who dies in The Tombs—the city-prison where Pierre kills himself—after constantly
deferring the rigid boundaries of fixed identity.
７７
unhomeliness upon which his home is established. However, the elite American heir’s discovery
of the integral presence of the “others” in his privileged home-space also leads him to
comprehend the oppressive forces of the dominant society which work to keep the “others”
invisible. Still, once having recognized the other’s face, the heir is eternally left to feel homeless
in his own home since the formerly ideal space of home now becomes a space of haunting.
Pierre Glendinning’s deliberate self-disownment and his incessant effort to escape any
fixed identities not only echo the ideas of the mobile habitat that contemporary scholars of
diaspora suggest, but are also linked to the nomadic way of life that Deleuze and Guattari
propose as an active political choice for the modern individual. Inciting Pierre’s psychological
wanderings and physical migration, the haunting face of the domestic outcast leads the privileged
heir to voluntarily renounce his elected position within the American home-space. Pierre’s
diasporic consciousness grows out of ability to critically distance himself from his privileged
position at home. The heir’s active and moral reaction to the “unhomeliness” of his own homespace turns him into a proto-nomad in nineteenth-century America and, thereby, opens up the
constricted space of the home in the antebellum North into a deterritorialized space.
７８
Chapter 3: “Homesickness” in Haunted Homes
in Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood: or, the Hidden Self.
“If there is something like spectrality, there are reasons
to doubt this reassuring order of presents and,
especially, the border between the present, . . . and
everything that can be opposed to it: absence, nonpresence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality, or even
the simulacrum in general, and so forth.”
-
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (39)
In contrast to Herman Melville’s Pierre Glendinning—the atypical “outcast and a
stranger in his own house,”—Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood: or the Hidden Self (1902)
presents characters who seem much more akin to the figures of “outcast” and “stranger” that W.
E. B. Du Bois alludes to in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Indeed, the major critical readings of
Hopkins’s last novel assume that Du Bois’s accounts of African American selfhood and their
relationship to the national home-space at the turn of the twentieth century greatly influenced the
novel.69 Accordingly, Of One Blood has been mostly read as Hopkins’s commentary on the ways
in which post-Reconstruction American society made it impossible for African Americans to feel
“at home.” The sense of homelessness that Reuel Briggs—the African American protagonist
69
While it must be noted that Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk was published a few months after Hopkins started
serializing the novel in the Colored American Magazine late in 1902, most literary critics and biographers agree that
Hopkins—as one of the leading African American intellectuals in the early twentieth century—shared similar
political opinions on the issues of race relations with Du Bois in opposing the “accomodationism” of Booker T.
Washington. Dana Luciano points out that historians generally accept Du Bois’s contention that Hopkins was
“forced out” from the Colored American Magazine where she had been playing a decisive role as the editor-in-chief
because of “irreconcilable political differences” with Fred Moore and Washington after Washington took over the
management of the magazine (182). In her introduction to the novel, Deborah E. McDowell claims that the subtitle
of the novel—the “hidden self”—can be “regarded as the conceptual equivalent of Du Bois’s ‘soul’” (xiii). For a
more extensive treatment of Hopkins’s career and her affiliation with Du Bois, see McKay, especially pp. 1-20. See
also, Schrager, Lewis, Luciano, and Brown.
７９
who passes in order to pursue his medical career—experiences in his native land is particularly
intense insomuch as he emigrates to Ethiopia, the land of his ancestors, at the end of the novel.70
However, the emphasis on the African American characters in Of One Blood has led the critics to
overlook just how much Hopkins crafts her Anglo-American characters—the inheritors of
privilege—to complicate notions of home and being “at home” in whatever “skin” or social
position they occupy. In this chapter, I examine the two different home-spaces in postReconstruction America, focusing on the privileged home-space of the Anglo-American
characters in the novel which has been mostly neglected in the existing criticism. Despite their
apparent differences, Hopkins presents how the African American home and the privileged
homes of elite white Americans are ultimately interconnected in the discourse of American
home-space at the turn of the twentieth century.
Critical focus on how Hopkins responds to the post-Reconstruction race situation as it
relates to the meaning of home in Of One Blood falls largely into two types. The first type of
criticism takes a pan-Africanist approach through which the idea of home is frequently linked to
the political, cultural, and historical efforts to re(dis)cover an African American home through a
physical or an imaginary migration to Africa (Carby, Gaines, Sundquist, Gilman, Wallinger,
Davidson). In these readings, the protagonist’s travel and eventual migration—or “return”—to
Africa suggest either the author’s critique of the contemporary racist American society, which
70
The byzantine plot of Of One Blood traces the interconnected relationships of three characters. Reuel Briggs
mesmerically revives a light-skinned gospel singer, Dianthe Lusk, from a death-like trance, and marries her despite
her lingering amnesia. However, Aubrey Livingston—Reuel’s friend with a Southern aristocratic background, who
also falls in love with Dianthe—guesses Reuel’s African heritage and secretly sabotages his employment efforts.
Unaware of his friend’s duplicity, Reuel takes Aubrey’s advice and joins the archeological expedition to Ethiopia
with his friend Charlie Vance. With Dianthe under his care, Aubrey kills his white fiancée, Charlie’s sister Molly,
and blackmails Dianthe into marrying him. Escaping Aubrey’s plot to murder him, Reuel discovers the hidden city
of Telassar where he is declared King Ergamenes, the long-lost heir to the Ethiopian throne. Before marrying Queen
Candace and assuming his royal duties, Reuel returns to the United States to confirm his vision of Dianthe’s death.
He discovers that Aubrey has poisoned Dianthe and the secret that the three are also “of one blood,” that they are not
only siblings, but also the children of an incestuous relationship between a slave woman and her white master.
Aubrey commits suicide, and the novel ends as Reuel returns to Ethiopia to rule his kingdom.
８０
was becoming increasingly uninhabitable for the African Americans, or her efforts to foster
racial pride among African Americans by “rewriting” the African history against the western
racist and imperialist narratives. The other critical tendency in approaching the idea of home is to
read the text as a variation of the popular nineteenth-century domestic fiction genre. As the
American home becomes a politicized space from which to launch battles for political and social
agency in nineteenth-century domestic fiction, critics argue that Hopkins uses the space of home
in the novel to critique the problems of racial conflict and interracial inequality in the United
States during this period (Tate, Allen, Bernadi).71
However, as this chapter will show, the African American home cannot exist separately
from the dominant white American home-space in the novel. In other words, Reuel’s relationship
to his home is intricately linked to the relationships that his Anglo-American counterparts have
with their own homes.72 The white upper-class American men that Hopkins presents in the novel
are relatively passive in their questioning and challenging of their own homes. Still, by
constantly pairing privileged white Americans with domestic “outcasts” in the examination of
their relationships to the American home-space, Of One Blood reveals how the “outcasts’” sense
of homelessness provokes the privileged Americans’ own psychological displacements within
their homes.
71
For instance, Claudia Tate reads the novel as Hopkins’s deviation from the typical model for nineteenth-century
domestic fiction by transforming the polemics on racial equality and civil justice “into tests of true love,” thereby
invoking the reader’s sympathy on the subject (196). Carol Allen argues that Hopkins “disrupts dominant American
notions of what constitutes the family” by inserting black woman into the American home, and thus reads the text as
Hopkins’s attempt to insist upon the racial variety of American home-space. Allen concludes that the novel “centers
on the nation rather than domestic scenes” and, as a result, she reads Telassar as “a potentially vibrant, regenerated
African nation . . . juxtaposed against the decayed American family structure, rendered so by the ravages of slavery”
(29-30).
72
While the majority of the existing criticism focuses on Reuel, it should be also noted that there is another major
tradition of reading of Of One Blood through feminist perspectives. These readings emphasize the female characters
and their roles and agencies in the novel. For more, see Ammons, Carby, Tate, Kassanoff, Lewis, Bryant or Brown.
８１
Two Homes: The Heirs and the Waifs of the Post-Reconstruction American Home
In the decades following Reconstruction, race relations in American society took a
particularly violent turn as the dominant Anglo-American identity was thrown into crisis with the
emergence of a population that Du Bois referred to as “the freedmen’s sons” (9). On the one
hand, the generation of African Americans born after Emancipation eagerly expected and
asserted equal civil rights within their national space. On the other hand, dominant white
American groups fervently enforced segregationist policies such as Jim Crow laws and the 1896
Supreme Court case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in their drive to maintain racial inequality. Racial
pseudo-science emerged as a means of justifying white supremacist oppression and violence.
Accordingly, the reassertion of racial discrimination, what Eric J. Sundquist has called the “new
slavery of racism,” largely defined legal and social experiences of late nineteenth-century
Americans (12). Against this backdrop of the political, ideological, and living realities of racial
segregation, it was almost impossible for the African Americans of the post-Reconstruction era
to feel “at home” in their native land.73 Consequently, Reuel’s flight to Africa at the end of the
novel could reasonably be understood as Hopkins’s critique of the racial situation in the United
States in this period.
Reflecting the postbellum crisis of race relations, Of One Blood begins with parallel
accounts of two different types of American home in the opening chapters. At first, Hopkins
seems to confirm the acute feeling of homelessness of the African American characters in
contrast to the Anglo-American characters’ sense of entitlement to their prestigious homes. The
novel starts in the “third-rate lodging-house” where Reuel Briggs, a Harvard medical student,
73
Hopkins professes this dilemma of African Americans in their relationship to their home country in the novel
through Reuel’s rant about the “mighty curse the bond that bound him to the white race of his native land” (163).
８２
muses to himself after reading an essay on paranormal phenomena (1). Hopkins underscores
Reuel’s forlornness in the world through a lengthy description of his gloomy single-room
apartment:
Briggs could have told you that the bareness and desolateness of the
apartment were like his life, but he was a reticent man who knew how to
suffer in silence. The dreary wet afternoon, the cheerless walk over West
Boston bridge through the soaking streets had but served to emphasize the
loneliness of his position, and morbid thoughts had haunted him all day: To
what use all this persistent hard work for a place in the world—clothes, food,
a roof? Is suicide wrong? (1)
As opposed to the grandeur of Melville’s Saddle Meadows, which reflects the protagonist’s
“choice lot” as the rightful heir to one of the most aristocratic American families, Hopkins’s first
chapter highlights the privation of Reuel’s home. The “bare” and “desolate” apartment is filled
with overwhelming melancholy, mirroring the “suffering” and “loneliness” of the protagonist. In
this bleak, rented habitat, Reuel contemplates suicide only to be reminded of his insignificant
status in the world. The narrator underscores Reuel’s “ostracism” by informing the reader that
even if Reuel were to end his life, “his places in the world would soon be filled; no vacuum
remained empty” (1). The scene exemplifies how Reuel lacks both a physical “at-home-ness”
and a psychological sense of belonging.
In contrast to the upper-class white American heirs with their elaborate family lineage,
no one has any knowledge regarding Reuel’s origin; there are only “rumors” and “guesses” about
his obscure background (4).74 While the Anglo-American heirs boast their familial lineage in
74
Scholars, especially those who examine the novel from the psychological angle, usually read Reuel’s depression
in the opening chapter as “a trope for the situation of the African American who is ‘passing’” (Schrager 187).
８３
order to affirm their social status and legitimate positions within their homes, Reuel must cut
himself off from his family and conceal his personal history to establish his position in society.
The scene ends with Reuel confirming his status as an ultimate outcast by aligning himself with
various underprivileged groups in the society: “I have a horror of discussing the woes of
unfortunates, tramps, stray dogs and cats and Negroes—probably because I am an unfortunate
myself” (9). The physical space of his desolate apartment does not relieve the protagonist from
his sense of displacement; he still feels as rootless as a “tramp” or “stray dog” within his home.
In contrast to Reuel’s miserable apartment, the world outside is full of light and optimism.
After presenting the bleak African American home-space in the first chapter, the novel moves
away from the individual home into the space of the nation.75 Hopkins opens the second chapter
with a hopeful outlook on post-Reconstruction American society. With slavery and the Civil War
passing like a “dream of horrors,” the entire nation “rejoice[s] and heave[s] a deep sigh of
absolute content” (11). The nation stands as a jubilant home filled with “the spur of the
excitement,” and money flows in from all directions to “pay the great debt” that the American
society owes to the former slaves (11). However, this blissful image of the nation only stresses
the irony in the earlier scene where the impoverished son of a former slave contemplates killing
75
In order to understand the connection between the space of the individual home and the nation as an extension of
the individual’s home (“homeland”), Amy Kaplan’s argument on the idea of “domesticity” can be very useful. In her
essay “Manifest Domesticity,” Kaplan reconceptualizes the idea of the “domestic” to signify both private household
and national homeland. The idea of “domesticity” not only helps to define the boundaries of the home and the nation,
but becomes crucial in formulating shifting distinctions between the home and the foreign—concepts that loom large
in the public consciousness during moments of national expansion. Kaplan’s essay focuses on how white middleclass women participated in the American imperial project by attempting to expand their influence beyond the home
and nation, while policing the boundaries of home against a foreign threat (583-87). And yet, for African Americans
at the turn of the twentieth century, the concerns of empire were weighted differently. Debra Bernadi argues that
Hopkins and other writers in the Colored American Magazine, in their attempt to “formulate racial solidarity in
opposition to white attack,” transformed the “symbolic nuclear families” in their novels into a “[families] of the
diaspora” and thereby extended the domestic borders to “include other homes and other homelands (including those
of people of color who expressly do not want to join in solidarity with American blacks)” (207). In this sense,
Bernadi argues, the “turn-of-the-century African homes” in the novel become ambivalent spaces since they are the
“spaces vulnerable to racist invasions,” while its inhabitants,” in resistance to such dangers, counter-invade other
spaces, other homes” of the colonized (205).
８４
himself to escape his misery.
In this chapter, Hopkins also portrays a different kind of individual home-space, which
indeed reflects the blissful façade of the national “home.” The grand mansions of Reuel’s
wealthy Anglo-American friends reflect their own prestigious positions in the society. In his
initial appearance, Aubrey Livingston literally brings a light to Reuel’s apartment. Upon his
dramatic entrance, Aubrey demands “a light, a light!” in the room, which Reuel has so far left
“as black as Hades” (6). As the only heir of a Southern aristocratic family, Aubrey boldly claims
that the “[s]hades of [his] fathers, forbid that [he] should ever have to work!” (7). Aubrey owns
apartments on Dana Hill, “the most aristocratic portion of Cambridge,” and he will soon be
returning to Virginia to “renew the ancient splendor of his ancestral home” after his marriage
(57). Although the Southern heir claims that he is ashamed of his native South for its
ignominious history of slavery, Hopkins hints how Aubrey’s former plantation home still thrives
decades after Emancipation.
Through Aubrey’s friendship, Reuel is able to get a glimpse of another privileged homespace: the home of an affluent Bostonian, Charlie Vance. Located in Mount Auburn, “where the
residences of the rich lay far apart,” the Vance family’s estate stands as “the one exception” that
stands conspicuous in the darkness with its “cheering light” and “extensive and well kept”
grounds, telling “silently of the opulence of its owner” (17). Whereas Aubrey’s Virginian home
represents the abiding prosperity of the Southern white home-space after the Civil War, Charlie’s
Vance Hall represents the privileged home-space of the Northern elite Anglo-Americans. The
light imagery that pervades the descriptions of these two homes creates a levity which starkly
contrasts with the mood in Reuel’s dark and gloomy abode.76 Later in the night, when Reuel
76
The ways in which Hopkins describes the physical dispositions of the three men also reiterate the contrasting
moods between the heirs and the outcast. Aubrey is constantly compared to the Greek gods with “fair face” and
８５
muses upon “the bright home scene . . . of love and home and rest” that he sees in Vance Hall, he
compares “such a life as was unfolding before Aubrey Livingston and sweet Molly Vance” to his
lonely existence (23).
Whereas the disparities between the descriptions of black and white American homes in
the opening chapters mostly focus on their physical differences, the novel simultaneously
presents the psychological dimensions of the characters in their domestic affiliations. Having
spotted Dianthe as a member of the Fisk Jubilee singers, Aubrey and Reuel are aware of her
racial identity; however, the train accident and her subsequent amnesia allow the men to
withhold their knowledge about her African American heritage. Without an identity or a home,
Dianthe becomes a “waif,” dependent on others, and paradoxically gains access to white society
(39). In one sense, Dianthe’s unwitting racial passing sanctions her to freely enter the white
upper-class home-spaces of people like the Vances. Like Reuel, who receives Aubrey’s
charitable financial aid, Dianthe’s distressing story raises the sympathy of the “petted heiress,”
Molly Vance (52). Taking the name Felice Adams, the “beautiful stranger” charms the Vance
family, and Dianthe is soon “domiciled under the roof of palatial Vance hall” (53). At the same
time, Dianthe remains a “waif” because she loses all memories of her past, with her life
“virtually [beginning] with her awakening at the hospital” (53). Dianthe’s status as a
psychological “waif” mirrors Reuel’s emotional forlornness in that the loss of her original
identity results in psychological displacement.
On the other hand, Dianthe also brings a new possibility for Reuel to finally envision a
comfortable home of his own. Reuel’s successful “reanimation” of Dianthe after the accident
“golden hair” (5), whereas Charlie, as his nickname “Adonis” tells, is presented as a light-hearted man, “fastidious
and refined—who had known no hardship and no sorrow” (155). On the contrary, Reuel is persistently associated
with gloomy imagery, described in words such as “unsocial,” “shabby,” or “seedy” (4).
８６
increases his fame and popularity as a doctor and, thereby, offers him the social and economic
means to set up a respectable home. Moreover, his growing love for Dianthe suggests the
possibility of a home which is not only physically inviting, but emotionally fulfilling as well.
Confessing his intention to marry Dianthe to Aubrey, Reuel claims that their union would lift
them out from their conditions as “waifs” by providing them with an agreeable home:
“I will give her life and love and wifehood and maternity and perfect
health. God, Aubrey! [y]ou, with all you have had of life’s sweetness, petted
idol of a beautiful world, you who will soon feel the heart-beats of your wife
against your breast when lovely Molly is eternally bound to you, what do
you know of a lonely, darkened life like mine. . . . This is my opportunity
for happiness; I seize it.” (44)
Acknowledging the drastic difference of the positions that he and Aubrey hold within the
discourse of postbellum American home-space, Reuel suggests that his marriage to Dianthe
would enable them to establish a proper household that is akin to that of the white privileged heir.
Finally getting engaged to Dianthe, Reuel finds “[a]ll things had become new to him, and in the
light of his great happiness the very face of old Cambridge was changed” (57).
Still, unlike the mainstream white American couple who—as “petted idols of a beautiful
world”—are expected to prolong their “life’s sweetness” in their new home, Reuel and Dianthe’s
quintessential “otherness” continues to prevent them from establishing a decent home.
Immediately after the optimistic and promising portrayal of race relations in post-Reconstruction
society, Hopkins exposes how Reuel and Dianthe’s racial identity still impedes the very
possibility of a decent and respectable African American home by revealing the realities of the
ongoing racial discrimination in postbellum American society. When Reuel professes his
８７
intention to marry Dianthe, Aubrey immediately points out the lingering prejudice which will
hold her African American background against Reuel’s success in the world: “it is insanity
indeed, for you to love this woman. . . . how can you succeed if it be hinted abroad that you are
married to a Negress?” (43). Moreover, as Aubrey gradually feels himself attracted to Dianthe,
he uses the social prejudice to sabotage the couple’s union. Aubrey’s knowledge of Reuel’s
hidden African American blood gives him an opportunity to hold Reuel back from getting a
proper job.
Reuel’s situation exemplifies the predicaments of the African American in his
relationship to the domestic and national space of home in postbellum American society.
Ultimately, left with no other option than to join the African expedition that Aubrey had offered
him as his only economic opportunity, Reuel decides to leave Dianthe on the day of their
wedding to travel to Africa. The narrator emphasizes how Reuel’s main objective in his African
expedition is to “return in two years as a wealthy man no longer fearing poverty” and, thus, to be
able to build “golden castles” for his wife (60). Using the racist discourse of home, the privileged
white heir can cast the African American protagonist from the national home-space.77 In
revealing how an individual’s racial identity can serve as a critical factor that could prevent
him/her from establishing an adequate home, the novel seems to reaffirm the conventional
readings of the novel which emphasize the impossibility of a normative African American homespace within post-Reconstruction American society.
Furthermore, Hopkins demonstrates how the home-spaces of the privileged white
American heir and the African American domestic outcast are mutually constitutive of each
other. The relationship between Reuel and Aubrey allegorizes how—beneath the insistence on
77
The fact that Aubrey not only sends Reuel away from his American home but attempts to eliminate him by
plotting his murder allegorizes the alienation of the domestic outcast from the national space of the dominant
American home in both literal and figurative senses.
８８
equal race relations in postbellum national discourse—the privileged Anglo-American household
is still based upon the destruction of the African American home. In addition to providing
financial assistance to Reuel, Aubrey presents himself as a philanthropist who keenly
acknowledges and even criticizes the enduring practice of racism in the late nineteenth-century
United States. Promising to keep Reuel’s passing a secret, Aubrey condemns the “infernal
prejudice” of racism for “clos[ing] the door of hope and opportunity in many a good man’s face”
(58). However, the narrator constantly hints at the sinister side of the seemingly benevolent white
heir. Underneath his “beautiful face” and “sculptured features,” the narrator keenly notes that
there are certain aspects in Aubrey’s countenance that “engendered doubt” (6). Beneath the
surface of his generosity towards the domestic others, Aubrey professes his contempt and
prejudice for the racial others. While he confirms that Dianthe’s “perfect manners” and “goodbreeding” would enable her to get into the privileged white community, the narrator detects the
“slight frown” that passes over his face as he discusses her hidden racial identity (54). The
duplicity of the Anglo-American heir reflects the contradictions within the dominant society’s
approach to the politics of race relations.
At first, the duplicity of the Anglo-American heir only seems to affect the domestic
outcasts and their homes. Aubrey artfully uses Reuel and Dianthe’s racial otherness and the
persistent racial prejudice in the society as his means to destroy the African American couple’s
prospective home. As Dianthe recovers her memory, Aubrey blackmails her into leaving Reuel
by using his knowledge of her racial origins and Dianthe’s ignorance of Reuel’s black lineage.
After the fatal boat accident, Aubrey is finally able to get rid of Molly and takes Dianthe—who,
yet again, suffers from amnesia—to his Southern home. By bringing down the home of the
domestic other, the heir seems to have established a seemingly idyllic home for himself. Thus
８９
far, the novel seems to reaffirm that the promise of an ideal home in post-Reconstruction
American society is only available to its privileged white heirs.
Homesickness: Excavating the “Hidden” Aspects of the American Home in Africa
Referring to Roberta Rubenstein’s double reading of the word “homesickness,” in which
home can be a space of both nostalgia and confinement for women, Susan Stanford Friedman
notes how the word “homesickness” can serve as a “cryptogram; . . . open[ing] up into opposites:
sick for home and sick of home” (“Bodies on the Move” 191). While both Rubenstein and
Friedman examine the idea of “homesickness” through women’s and/or immigrants’
relationships to their homes, the double meaning of “homesickness” can be useful in examining
Charlie Vance’s relationship to his privileged home in Of One Blood. In the course of his journey
into the ancient home of the domestic other, Charlie apprehends the double ideas of “sickness”
that his ideal American home upholds.78
The existing criticism’s general focus on the troubled space of African American homes
in the novel has mostly neglected or oversimplified Hopkins’s staging of the white American
homes in the novel. The two central Anglo-American characters—Aubrey and Charlie—are
mostly examined in their roles as foils and contrasts for Reuel.79 As a result, the two men are
78
In her discussion of the African setting in the novel, Hanna Wallinger argues that Africa serves as the “archetypal
‘other’ of the European and also the American imperialist mind” (212). The space of Africa as the “archetypal other”
to the dominant American national space echoes the African American’s status as a “domestic other” within the
national discourse of the American home.
79
It is possible to argue that Aubrey does not belong to the category of “Anglo-American” for, later in the novel, it
is revealed that he is born to a slave woman and gets switched at birth for the dead son of the white mistress;
however, Aubrey never discovers his own black heritage, and thus, firmly maintains his identity as the heir of a
white Southern family till the end. Accordingly, most critics read Aubrey as a white aristocratic American. For
instance, Elizabeth Ammons examines Aubrey as “the powerful white man who symbolizes the system [of racism]”
(82). Similarly, Wallinger argues that the “white part of [Aubrey’s] inheritance and his upbringing as a white
southern gentleman have corrupted him and led to his cruelty” (221).
９０
considered to be the elite white Americans who maintain opposite relationships within the
national discourse of American home compared to the orphaned and impoverished African
American protagonist. While Aubrey is usually read as the white villain who plots the downfall
of the heroic black protagonist, Charlie is understood as the quintessential western male whose
observations of the racial others around the world are filtered through his imperialist
viewpoints.80 Such polarizing of the relationships between the white and black characters also
resulted in separate examinations of the white and black American home-spaces in the novel.
Moreover, the critical neglect of the white American home in Of One Blood assumes the white
characters’ “at-home-ness” in the postbellum American society as inherent, and puts the black
and white Americans in dichotomized positions as the outsiders and the insiders of the American
domestic space.
Yet, by re-examining the space of the privileged Anglo-American home, Hopkins
gradually reveals how its heir and the domestic other maintain mutually interconnected
relationships within the American home-space. In the earlier scene of Christmas Eve at Vance
Hall, the narrator notes how the apparent “warmth,” “gaiety” and “luxury” of the affluent white
American home depends on an unnamed force “well-calculated to remove all gloomy,
pessimistic reasoning” (45). This scene reveals the calculation that goes into producing the
ostensible opulence and comfort of the dominant white domestic space. The ideality of this space
is not an intrinsic quality, but rather a constructed façade, created by carefully removing all
unseemly elements from sight.
80
For instance, Tate applies the conventions of nineteenth-century African American domestic fiction in her reading
of the novel and places Aubrey as the “white villain” who contests the hero over “possession of the mulatta heroine”
(195). Despite the fact that a large part of the African expedition chapters are narrated in Charlie’s perspective, there
are few critical readings of his character. While two recent critics—Luciano and Wallinger—pay more attention on
Charlie in their analyses, they do not go beyond reading his role as a representative Anglo-American imperialist
sentiment that views Africa as the “archetypal ‘other’ . . . which lacks the modern and progressive qualities of the
American society” (Wallinger 212).
９１
The question of the Anglo-American home in the novel becomes particularly problematic
as the setting shifts to Africa. Leaving his homeland in search of the means to fashion a proper
home, Reuel is paired with the other elite white American—Charlie Vance—in his expedition to
Ethiopia. The relationship between the idea of home and Africa in the novel has been mostly
discussed in the context of the African diaspora in the existing scholarship. The idea of the
“black diaspora” in Of One Blood is examined as the African American characters’ search for
and restoration of their African heritage (Carby, Allen, Gilman, Goyal, Davidson).81 The other
tendency in reading the “back-to-Africa” plot in the novel takes on the critical viewpoints
towards the imperialistic connotations of the African American characters’ migration to Africa
(Baker, Greusser, Gaines, Bernadi, Japtok, Goyal).82 Still, both these approaches are mostly
concerned with the African Americans’ relationships to their home as the African setting is
examined as an alternative homeland—either real or fictional—for the disillusioned African
Americans who were suffering from increasing racism in the United States.
And yet, the African expedition in the novel could be examined for its function aside
81
These readings usually link the novel to a diasporic African American literary convention where the African
American characters search for and discover their family and heritage by fictionally traveling to Africa. For instance,
Hazel V. Carby argues that the “black diaspora” in the novel is a “variation on the Afro-American convention of the
search for and discovery of family,” and Reuel’s migration to Africa prompts the discoveries of “not only his family
heritage but also the heritage of all blacks in the diaspora” (157). For Allen, the novel is Hopkins’s attempt to “sift
through” the “unreliable and biased reports from white colonialists and explorers,” which formed the general
opinion on Africa at the turn of the twentieth-century, and to construct “her own mythic Diaspora” (20). Yogita
Goyal suggests that Hopkins moves away from the domestic romance genre—as she considers that “the failure of
the romance plot is also the failure of the American nation to provide a home for Hopkins’s mixed-race
characters”—and ultimately “draws on the separatist logic of black nationalism to take us outside the domestic
realm into a diasporic one” (28-29).
82
These scholars frequently criticize Hopkins for exhibiting ideological dependence on dominant white American
norms, colonialist and imperialist implications, or escapism regarding race relations in late nineteenth-century
American society. John Greusser, for instance, argues that Reuel returns to the hidden city “as a kind of colonialist
and missionary” (80). Similarly, Kevin Gaines suggests that the novel shows “assimilationist assumptions of
Western cultural superiority” in its African expedition plot: “Hopkins’s elite, Western vision of African heathenism
was meant to enhance black Americans’ race pride, but at the expense of the autonomy of African peoples, whose
cultures and histories remained a blank page for imaginary conquest. . . . Hopkins’s writing was part of a broader
tendency among marginalized racial, religious, and gender minorities who used the idea of civilization at the turn of
the century to give credence to their own aspirations to status, power, and influence” (435).
９２
from providing an escape for the African American characters. More than an escapist fantasy, the
trip to Africa critically distances its domestic “insiders” from their privileged national homespace and, thus, allows the characters to examine the American home-space. Whereas Biddy
Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s argument on the importance of “not being home”
discussed in the introduction focuses on the individual’s psychological distance from their own
home-space, Hopkins’s transporting of her characters into the space of Africa not only allows
these Americans a physical distance from their home, but also invites the home of their national
“others”—the African “home”—into the reassessment of the relationship between the “insiders”
and “outsiders” of the American home-space.83
On the one hand, Reuel’s sense of homelessness is not resolved as he travels, and
eventually emigrates, to Africa. Serving as the representative viewpoint of the expedition party,
Reuel’s assessment of Africa aligns with those of white colonialists.84 Until his disappearance
into the “hidden city,” Hopkins interchanges Reuel with the omniscient narrator as the focal
point of the novel to examine the African landscape. Upon his arrival in Africa, Reuel watches
over the landscape with a feeling “akin to indifference,” and his viewpoint resembles the
dominant imperialist gaze on the colonial landscape in its combination of exoticism and
contempt:
Against a sky of amethyst the city stands forth with a penetrating charm. It
is the eternal enchantment of the cities of the Orient seen at a distance; but,
alas! Set foot within them, the illusion vanishes and disgust seizes you. Like
beautiful bodies they have the appearance of life, but within the worm of
83
84
The phrase “national others” indicates the Africans living in Africa.
Martine Japtok offers an extensive argument on how Hopkins presents the “interiorization of a dominant ideology”
in the African American psyche through her portrayal of Reuel (413).
９３
decay and death eats ceaselessly. (77)
The western explorer’s “enchantment” with the exterior landscape of the exotic land is soon
replaced by a sense of “disgust” for the “decay and death” he finds in Africa.
Hopkins parallels the imperialist gaze of the western colonizers over the African
landscape with the sentiments of dominant white Americans back home in the American South.
As the excavation party lands in the port of Tripoli, the narrator remarks that only those who are
“familiar with Southern exuberance” in the party can comfortably amuse themselves among the
bustle created by their landing, while the novices are bewildered like a “civilized man” in the
midst of the fray caused by their arrival (78). The dichotomy between the “civilized” white
Americans and the African slaves at home is replicated as the American explorers contrast
themselves with the African “savages.” Like the rest of the expedition group, the African
American protagonist also regards the journey as a “business” and is concerned with the material
wealth and public fame that he may gain through the excavation of the “hidden city.” Reuel
travels to Africa as an American with dreams of the “fame and fortune he would carry home”
(83).
Moreover, throughout the journey, Reuel constantly professes his longing for his
American home. Hopkins notes how his white American friend, Charlie, represents the
American home that Reuel longs for, especially in the earlier stage of their African expedition.
Charlie is the “home-line” for Reuel, “warranted to ward off [his] homesickness,” and Reuel’s
thoughts are frequently “under the trees in the garden of Vance Hall” as he crosses over the
African desert (77). Ironically, the home that Reuel yearns for is neither the dark and desolate
apartment that he has left, nor the imaginary home that he seeks to build with Dianthe, but the
home of the privileged white American heir, in which he left his bride as a domestic other. The
９４
paradox of the African American’s nostalgia for the home that he is forbidden to attain in the
United States exposes how not only the American imperialist ideologies, but also the dominant
discourse of the “normative” and “ideal” American home are deeply embedded within the
psyche of its domestic outcast.
Aside from his homesickness for the American past and grim premonition of Africa’s
future at the end of the novel, Reuel never seems to feel truly “at home” in Ethiopia. Hopkins
does not leave Reuel “at home” in the city of Telassar, where he eventually becomes heir to the
royal throne of ancient Ethiopia and spends the rest of his life ruling its people. The novel ends
with Reuel—now as King Ergamenes—haunted by his past life as he observes “with serious
apprehension, the advance of mighty nations penetrating the dark, mysterious forests of his
native land,” and sadly questions where it will stop and what its end will be (193). Despite the
privileged position that he inherits and the prospect of a new home with Queen Candace,
Hopkins shows how Reuel feels “trapped” in his African palace.85 Although critics usually read
Reuel’s union with the Ethiopian Queen as his chance to establish the privileged home that he
failed to establish in the United States, the novel reveals how the feeling of “restlessness”
ensnares Reuel throughout the preparation of his royal wedding, with Dianthe’s voice “ever
calling to him through space” (141).86 When his uneasiness ultimately becomes “insupportable,”
85
It is also significant to note that Hopkins never uses the term “home” to refer to Reuel’s position in Africa.
Throughout the novel, the word “home” always designates the United States for Reuel.
86
For instance, Adenike Marie Davidson argues that after witnessing the failure of assimilationist strategy in her
earlier novels, Hopkins reaches out to the “international setting” in Of One Blood to promote a “global black nation”
and, thus, the novel “presents a fully functioning ‘homeplace’ outside the United States” (82-83). For Davidson, the
union of Reuel and Candace presents “the utopian possibility of a relationship of equals between the Black man and
woman, forming a strong foundation for the global Black nation” while the incestuous relationship between Reuel,
Dianthe and Aubrey “can be seen as a remnant of white supremacy’s devaluing of blackness” (102). Similarly,
Shawn Salvant suggests that “formally homologous” to the incestuous relationship between Reuel and Dianthe, the
final union between Reuel and Candace “resolves incest’s dialectic between the categories of the natural and
unnatural, thus neutralizing incest’s prescribed cultural and moral meanings” (674). However, compared to Reuel’s
earlier proclamation of love toward Dianthe, Hopkins describes his acceptance of his second marriage as much more
reluctant one.
９５
Reuel confesses his sentiment to Ai—the erudite Ethiopian priest; and through Ai’s magical
power, he finally learns of Aubrey’s malicious crime (141). Despite his newly elected position as
the heir of the Ethiopian kingdom, Reuel does not have much influence over his new home.
Finding himself unable to get away from the “hidden city” on his own will, Reuel gradually
realizes that he is “virtually . . . a prisoner” in his grand African palace (148).87 Ultimately, only
after promising his “safe return” to Africa once his revenge is complete, Reuel is released from
his new palatial home (164). Neither the desolate American apartment nor the golden palace of
Africa provides the feeling of “at-home-ness” for the African American subject. Significantly,
the feelings of restlessness that the mysterious land of Africa provokes within an individual’s
psyche are even more intensely experienced by the dominant Anglo-American heir.
The trajectory of the changes in Charlie’s understanding of and relationship to his home
through the course of the expedition exposes the hidden “sickness” of the privileged white
American home-space and its connections to the African American home.
In the early stage of their journey, the white American heir and the African American
domestic outcast seem to share the same imperialist standpoint in their stance to the African
landscape. Charlie—as the bearer of the western imperial gaze—joins the expedition as a
“tourist”; and the white upper-class heir declares that he is “only travelling for pleasure . . .
intend[ing] to get some fun” (97). For Charlie, the African continent is full of sights that “would
make an interesting show—a sort of combination of Barnum and Kiralfy” (81).88 And yet, as
87
Reuel’s recognition of his palace as a “prison” parallels Edward Said’s argument on the binary relationship that a
modern individuals hold with their space of home that I discussed in the previous chapter.
88
Wallinger argues that while there is “no difference in perspective between Reuel and Charlie” in the early stage of
their African expedition, their imperialist perspective is what Reuel “learns to revise when he later discovers his
royal ancestry,” and that such revision “is part of the development of his character that he experiences shame at his
initial attitude” (214). Wallinger’s reading can serve as a counter-argument to those scholars who criticize Hopkins
for her “escapist” presentation of Africa as the natural homeland for all African Americans. Nevertheless, such
９６
soon as the novelty of the exotic landscape exhausts him, Charlie suffers as much homesickness
as Reuel. The journey away from his native land only causes Charlie to realize the superiority of
the home he left:
Charlie Vance stood in the door of his tent and let his eyes wander
over the landscape in curiosity. . . . The loneliness made him shiver. It was a
desolation that doubled desolateness, because his healthy American
organization missed the march of progress attested by the sound of hammers
on unfinished buildings that told of a busy future and cosy modern
homeliness. Here there were no future. No railroads, no churches, . . . no
promise of the life that produces within the range of his vision. (93)
Hopkins opens the second half of the narrative with this scene, which closely parallels the
opening scene of the novel. The extreme “loneliness” and “desolation” that Charlie suffers in
Africa echoes the misery and forlornness that Reuel experienced in his bleak rented apartment in
Boston. Lacking the “cosy modern homeliness” that Charlie—in his “healthy American
organization”—cherishes, the visit to Africa causes the privileged heir to value the home he left
in the United States to a greater degree. Throughout the entire expedition, Charlie is mostly
preoccupied with reminiscing about the “jollities” that he has left at home. While Reuel’s sense
of homelessness in the first chapter results from his own alienated position as an outcast in the
discourse of the American home, Charlie’s extreme loneliness in the “dilapidated” land of Africa
is deeply related to his nostalgia for his “modern,” “civilized” American home.
Yet, as Charlie’s journey proceeds into the deeper, “hidden” parts of Africa, Hopkins
gradually exposes the “unfamiliar” aspects of his “cosy” American home. When Professor
analyses still focus on Reuel’s relationship to his home while Charlie stands as the symbol of dominant white
colonialist ideology that Reuel should break away from.
９７
Stone—the British archeologist leading the expedition—explains his theory that Africans are the
primal race of human history and discusses the superiority of ancient Ethiopian culture,
Charlie’s response to these ideas is that of a genuine “horror”:
“Great Scott!” cried Charlie, “you don’t mean to tell me that all this
was done by niggers?”
The Professor smiled. Being English, he could not appreciate
Charlie’s horror at its full value.
“Undoubtedly your Afro-Americans are a branch of the wonderful
and mysterious Ethiopians who had a prehistoric existence of magnificence,
the full record of which is lost in obscurity.” . . . Charlie Vance said nothing.
He had suffered so many shocks from the shattering of cherished idols since
entering the country of mysteries that the power of expression had left him.
(99-101)
Before long, however, the professor’s theories are confirmed when the expedition party finally
excavates the city of Meroe and finds the magnificent buildings and treasures that the professor’s
theories predicted. The very idea that the despised and ignored domestic outcasts of his
“civilized” American home could be the descendents of a civilization that once far surpassed the
western culture compels Charlie into a profound silence.
The excavation of the hidden city radically changes the two men’s understandings of
home. For Reuel, the rediscovery of his lost heritage, at least partially, recuperates his sense of
home in the world. Separated from the expedition group, Reuel falls into an even deeper part of
the city that the excavation party has failed to discover. Through his encounter with Ai, who not
only introduces him the magnificence of African history and culture, but also keenly critiques
９８
Reuel’s lingering colonialist world-view and ingrained self-contempt for his own racial
background, Reuel begins to re-evaluate his understanding of and relationship to his own
homeland. When Ai questions Reuel’s “isolation from [his] race” as a result of the racist politics
at home, Reuel repents, feeling that there should have been “some way . . . to surmount the
difficulties of caste prejudice” instead of “play[ing] the coward’s part” by passing for white
(129). In this sense, Reuel’s encounter with the “”hidden city” exposes the “sickness” of his
American home. Reuel realizes that his self-contempt and alienation from his home and family
are the results of the imperialist and racist discourses with which the normative American homespace has imbued him.
For Charlie, on the other hand, the excavation overturns all the principles upon which his
own privileged home stands. The physical proof of the cultural and historical superiority of the
ancient African race contradicts his pre-established understanding of the “abjectness of the
American Negro” which justified the practice of slavery and subsequent racist politics at home
(101). Accordingly, the excavation of the “hidden city” becomes the unearthing of the hidden
racist discourse that had been promoting the false historical propaganda of white supremacy. The
“horror” of discovering the unfamiliar aspects of the familiar home-space leaves the heir at a loss.
At first, despite his gradual recognition of the baseless grounds of the racist politics that
divide the national space of home, the privileged American heir is still not fully disillusioned
about his ideal American home. Hopkins notes that Charlie is “no longer the spoiled darling of
wealth and fashion, but a serious-minded man of a taciturn disposition”; however, the apparent
change in his character does not necessarily lead to the transformation of his understanding of his
home (149). After Reuel is separated from the expedition party, Charlie is paired with another
African American, Jim Titus, who has been working as Aubrey’s tool in plotting Reuel’s murder.
９９
Presented as the “Negro of the old régime who felt that the Anglo-Saxon was appointed by God
to rule over the African,” Jim epitomizes the imagery of the submissive and ignorant slave that
prevailed in the American society throughout the pre-Emancipation era (78). With his
“obsequious manner” and his “subservient ‘massa,’” Jim represents “home” for Charlie as his
“anecdotes” and “songs” about the “Southern life” makes the white heir to feel as if “a portion of
the United States had been transported to Africa” (150). As the stereotypical slave character, Jim
seems to bring back the representative dominant American home for Charlie that the excavation
of the hidden city had shattered. The white elite heir’s relationship with the stereotypical
domestic other seems to restore the imagery of the idyllic home and intensify Charlie’s sickness
for home.
However, the privileged white American’s recognition of the sickness of his own home
gradually increases as he moves deeper into the African landscape. Charlie’s final entrance into
the internal space of the hidden city completes the defamiliarization of his American home. As
soon as Charlie and Jim enter the pyramid that leads them into the inner space of Telassar, the
positions of the white American heir and the racial other reverse as Charlie becomes a “stranger”
and an “alien” inside the hidden African city (153).89 While Aubrey is depicted as the white
American who actively engages in the alienation of the domestic others from American homespace, Charlie’s attitude towards the question of home has been mostly indifferent thus far.
However, Charlie’s conversations with Ai inside the hidden city compel him to slowly
apprehend the problems at home. Initially, Ai’s critique of the absurdity of racism in the United
States fails to make Charlie to recognize the problems of his homeland. Insisting that racist
practice has been a lingering “custom” in American society, Charlie tries to get away from Ai’s
censure. Secretly mocking Ai as a “lunatic,” Charlie only regrets leaving his country “to wander
89
This echoes Dianthe’s positions as the “beautiful stranger” within the space of Charlie’s American home.
１００
among untutored savages” and vows that he would get married after he gets out of Africa and
return home (155). Because Hopkins highlights Charlie’s reputation as a womanizer throughout
the earlier part of the novel, his sudden plan for marriage can be regarded as another attempt to
restore the idea of the “cosy” white American home-space which has been under constant threat
throughout his African expedition.
Nevertheless, as he continues to make futile efforts to escape from the hidden city with
Jim, Charlie’s intimate interactions with Jim gradually transform his patronizing attitude toward
the African American other:
. . . as he clasped Jim’s toil-hardened black hand, he told himself that Ai’s
words were true. Where was the color line now? Jim was a brother; the
nearness of their desolation in this uncanny land, left nothing but a feeling
of brotherhood. He felt then the truth of the words, “Of one blood have I
made all races of men.” (159)
When the two men finally discover the hidden treasures inside the pyramid which are the final
proof of Professor Stone’s theories, Charlie confirms the absurdity of the racism which firmly
established the politics of his home and, finally, embraces Jim as a fellow human-being. Again,
echoing the feeling of desolation that Reuel experienced at the beginning of the novel, the heir
ultimately identifies the “uncanny” aspects of his ideal home as he holds the hand of the
domestic other in the “uncanny land” of Africa. Gradually, the “homesickness” that Charlie
suffered earlier in his journey gives way to his recognition of the “sickness” within his home that
has been “well-calculatedly removed” from his sight. As he finally holds Jim’s “toil-hardened
black hand,” Charlie acknowledges the man who served an integral, yet purposefully hidden role
in establishing his home. Charlie is born again through his experience of being trapped—“being
１０１
buried alive”—in the hidden city of Africa (155). 90
Both Reuel and Charlie’s encounters with the “hidden city” of Telassar involve a
symbolic death; they must enter the “great Pyramid”—an ancient tomb—in order to reach the
interior of the hidden city. Accordingly, Reuel’s entrapment in and subsequent release from the
Pyramid has often been read as a process of rebirth, after which he emerges as a self-affirming
African American subject.91 On the one hand, Charlie’s experience of “being buried alive” in the
hidden African city and his subsequent escape echoes the rebirth process of the African
American protagonist; however, the two men’s experiences of symbolic death bring different
kinds of transformations in each man’s relationship to their homes. Sigmund Freud’s discussion
of the “uncanny,” as examined in previous chapters, closely parallels Charlie’s resurrection after
“being buried alive.” In “The Uncanny,” Freud explores the fear of being “buried alive” and
suggests that this fear is linked to wider terrors relating to the un/dead and that it appears itself in
a return of latent, psychic energies:
Many people experience the [uncanny] feeling in the highest degree in
relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and
ghosts. . . . To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the
most uncanny thing of all, and yet psychoanalysis has taught us that this
terrifying fantasy is only a transformation of another fantasy which had
90
Hopkins’s paring of Charlie and Jim echoes the coupling of Huck and Jim in Mark Twain’s Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884) in the sense that both novels examine the individual’s relationship to the idea of “home”
through their journey away from their home. Although the pairings of black and white American characters in these
two novels are not identical since each character occupies a different position in the American society, both Hopkins
and Twain explore the nineteenth-century American home-space by examining the interconnected relationships
between white and black Americans.
91
For instance, Goyal argues that Reuel’s “physical journey and excavation of a hidden city clearly signifies a
journey into his own racial unconscious, with Africa serving as a backdrop for this psychological drama. . . . that the
scars of slavery must be purged through this ‘Lethean calm’ or a figurative death and rebirth before Reuel can
experience the fantasy world of Meroe” (42).
１０２
originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain
lasciviousness—the fantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence. (Freud 24749)
Thus live burial is uncanny, unsettling, and terrifying in that it manifests a dialogue between
worlds that should remain unconnected. Freud characterizes notions of premature burial as a
form of forbidden movement between the living and the dead. In images of live burial, the
deceased figuratively and literally rises up; thus, the concept of live burial is paradigmatic of a
connection between worlds that should remain separate. It is a symbol of trespass—signifying
that what “ought to have remained secret and hidden . . . has come to light” (Freud 224).
Charlie’s recognition of Jim as his “brother” and his affirmation that the privileged white heirs
and the domestic others are “of one blood” connect worlds that the dominant racial discourse in
American society actively separates. In other words, Charlie’s experience of live burial in the
pyramid, in turn, compels him to acknowledge those who were “buried alive”—actively silenced
and ignored—within his privileged American home. Jim and—to a greater extent—the entire
“hidden city” of Telassar, represent the world that has been “buried alive,” a world that gets
resurrected through Reuel and Charlie’s African excavation. As the novel had hinted earlier,
Charlie’s “cosy” American home is adjacent to the haunted house where the ghosts reside.
Although he failed to recognize the haunting specters earlier in the novel, Charlie’s experience of
“being buried alive” during his African journey results in his excavation of those who are
“buried alive” in the dominant American home-space. This revelation, in turn, initiates his
discovery of the “unhomely” aspects of his familial home.
The physical displacement from his “bright home scene” initially leaves the white elite
American with intense sickness for his home. Constantly comparing the “circus-like desolation”
１０３
of the African landscape with the “modern” and “civilized” space of his American home, Charlie
attempts to transport his home to Africa through his interaction with Jim—the “Negro of the old
régime.” However, Charlie’s physical dislocation in Africa soon leads to his psychological
displacement from his idyllic American home. His “live burial” inside the pyramid of the hidden
city casts the privileged American heir into the role of a helpless “stranger,” an “alien” in the
diasporic space. Charlie’s conversation with Ai and the physical evidence that he discovers
which proves Professor Stone’s theories bring his realization of the arbitrariness of the enduring
racist politics that has divided, maintained, and policed the “insides” and “outsides” of the postReconstruction American home-space. The heir’s recognition of the sickness of home is
complete when he acknowledges the subjecthood of the domestic other by holding Jim’s “toilhardened hand.” The physical dislocation of the privileged Anglo-American in the “uncanny
land” of Africa endows him with the critical distance to reevaluate his home and to “excavate”
the impossibility of “being home” without recognizing the existence of the “others” beneath the
illusion of coherence and safety of the pos-Reconstruction dominant white American home.
The Haunted House of the Heir
While Charlie’s African expedition could be regarded as Hopkins’s forceful displacement
of the white elite heir into an unfamiliar space in order to bring about his realization of the
unhomeliness of his own familiar home, the other white character, Aubrey, remains safely
enclosed within his own privileged home. Despite the tragic boat accident which kills his fiancée,
Molly, Aubrey promptly starts a new home as he moves back to his Virginian estate with his new
“white” bride, Dianthe. The young Livingston’s home is portrayed as a blissful space from the
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outside: “[t]o the on-looker life jogged along as monotonously at Livingston Hall as in any other
quiet home. The couple dined and rode, and received friends in the conventional way. Many
festivities were planned in honor of the beautiful bride” (171). However, the novel gradually
reveals how the “unhomeliness” of the Aubrey’s home emerges and evokes within him a sense
of being homeless in his own home.
Alongside its pan-Africanist visions, another central theme in Of One Blood that has
caught the most attention of critics is the subject of mysticism. Hopkins’s interest in mysticism
had been generally discussed as it relates to the ideas and theories of the “new psychology” that
was emerging in academic discourse in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. 92 In these
readings, the elements of “new psychology”—such as Freud’s concept of the unconscious, the
Jamesian figure of the “hidden self,” and the occult or mysticism—are linked with the social and
historical situation of African Americans (Otten, Tate, Horvitz, Schrager, Luciano). These
readings suggest that Hopkins revised and appropriated the ideas and theories of “new
psychology” to discuss African American psychology, a subject which had been mostly
neglected in the dominant studies of the field. The notion of the “hidden self” in psychology is
imported to sociology and used as a metaphor for the suppressed histories and cultures of
African Americans under the institution of slavery.93
92
This is another aspect of the novel that many critics find to be evidence of Hopkins’s affiliation to Du Bois. For
more on the critical discussions of Hopkins’s engagement with the “new psychology” and her critical connection to
Du Bois, see Ammons, Otten, Schrager, McDowell, Horvitz, Luciano and Brown. For discussions of the emergence
and the popular interest of the new psychology in the United States, see, Nathan G. Hale, Jr., Freud and the
Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917, and Robert C. Fuller, Americans and
the Unconscious. Throughout the novel, Hopkins intermittently draws from the essay written by William James—
one of the pioneering figures in his field. In his essay, “The Hidden Self,” James examines an aspect of the self that
is fully conscious yet sealed off from normal consciousness that preserves and represses memories of guilt and
trauma.
93
For instance, Cynthia Schrager argues that the “hidden self” in Hopkins’s work is a “metaphor for the suppressed
history of oppressive social and familial relations under the institution of slavery, the collective legacy of abusive
power relations, rather than simply the residue of repressed individual trauma” (196-97). Furthering Schrager’s idea
on Hopkins’s adaptation of James’s “hidden self,” Luciano even suggests that Hopkins attempted to make an
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Among the variety of supernatural elements in the novel—such as the revival of the dead,
mesmerism, telepathic voices, paranormal forces, and clairvoyant sights—the most significant
one is the presence of paranormal beings. The most evident examples of the paranormal presence
in Of One Blood are the African American characters’ visions of ghostly figures. For instance,
Reuel witnesses the ghostly appearance of Dianthe each time when she falls into a distressing
situation. Also, Mira recurrently appears as a ghostly presence to her children, Reuel and Dianthe,
in order to give them guidance and help. Both of these supernatural experiences provide
evidence for the psychological readings of the novel which interpret paranormal phenomena in
the text as the reemergence of the repressed African heritage, history and culture within the
African American identity. However, this section aims to focus on how Hopkins presents the
uncanny experiences of the white American heir and the significance of such encounters through
the case of Aubrey Livingston.94
From the very beginning of the story, Hopkins draws an implicit connection between the
different home-spaces of the privileged white heir and the domestic other. The description of
Charlie Vance’s “warm and luxurious” home is soon paralleled with another dark home-space
besides Reuel’s apartment. The Hyde House—the property adjoining the Vance estate—has
allegedly been known for years to be a “haunted house.” ”Entirely concealed” and marked by an
“air of desolation and decay in keeping with its ill-repute,” Hyde House stands in stark contrast
to the cheerful domestic scene of Vance Hall (20). There are rumors that it had been a site for
intervention in western psychology by problematizing its neglect of racial difference and African American
identities (156-62).
94
The other white elite heir, Charlie, also goes through certain supernatural experiences throughout the novel. For
instance, during his African expedition, Charlie hears the paranormal voice of his sister, Molly, crying for help on
the day when she is murdered by Aubrey.
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various “dark deeds,” giving the place a reputation as a “haunted house” (20).95 By placing Hyde
House next door to Vance Hall, Hopkins not only accentuates the light and dark oppositions
between the privileged white home-space and the home of the alienated, but also suggests the
close physical proximity of the two home-spaces. Even though it is concealed and deserted, the
dark house is constantly present next to the privileged home of the heir.
Beside its dark and shadowy appearance, Hyde House shares another aspect with Reuel’s
apartment: it is in these two desolate home-spaces that Reuel encounters the mysterious face.
Like Melville’s representation of Pierre’s experiences of mysterious visions of Isabel at Saddle
Meadows, Hopkins sets the gothic mood with the appearances of ghostly figures that haunt the
characters within their homes.96 When Reuel is occupied with his thoughts in his dark apartment
in the opening chapter, a female face appears to him in a vision. Reuel is again visited by the
same face on the night he visits the Vance family mansion. On Hallows Eve, the guests of the
party at Vance Hall visit Hyde House to find the ghost that is allegedly haunting the mansion.
And yet, it is only Reuel who witnesses a “sorrowful” and “lonely” female figure while all the
other members in the party fail to spot anything (19). On this second sighting, Reuel recognizes
the visionary figure as Dianthe, one of the singers in the Fisk Jubilee concert he attended on the
night of her first visionary appearance. After the incident on Hallows Eve, Hyde House seems to
fade from the narrative, and Hopkins does not return to the setting in the rest of the novel.
95
Although Hopkins does not provide any explicit evidence for the allusion, the name of the building recalls Robert
Louis Stevenson’s novella “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886), which deals with the idea of
“doubleness” and a theory of the unconscious.
96
I am bringing up this point not to suggest that Hopkins had any deliberate intention to echo Melville’s plot, but to
note the unexpected and yet intriguing similarities between Pierre’s vision of the mysterious face and Reuel’s
similar vision of Dianthe’s face. Reuel’s curiosity over the face is quite similar to that of Pierre’s for neither of them
can initially identify the visionary faces they see, both of which later turn out to be the faces of their sisters. It would
be possible to argue that the gothic elements, which had been widely popular in the later part of the nineteenth
century, could have influenced both texts in their “ghost vision” plots. The gothic elements in these novels can be
examined in their relations to the experience of the “uncanny” and the idea of familiarity or the feeling of “at-homeness” within one’s own home.
１０７
On the one hand, as critics have pointed out, the paranormal sightings in the novel can
function as a means of “making coded and ‘hidden’ signs visible and comprehensible” to the
African American characters in the novel (Luciano 166). For instance, both Reuel and Dianthe
are constantly haunted by the ghostly appearance of Mira, which eventually leads them to
uncover the dangerous family secret and Aubrey’s malicious plotting against them. Nevertheless,
the sighting of the paranormal vision recurs later in the story; this time, it is Aubrey who
experiences the supernatural encounter within his own protected space of home.
The idea of incest in Of One Blood can be interpreted as Hopkins’s “blurring the
boundaries” of the home-space. The “quiet” and “conventional” life at Livingston Hall soon ends
when Aunt Hannah discloses the hidden history of the Livingston family. Hannah’s story assails
the ideality of Livingston Hall. By confessing that she changed the white mistress’ dead baby for
her own daughter’s new-born son, Hannah not only confirms Aubrey’s own African American
blood, but proves that the young Livingston couple’s relationship is an incestuous one. While the
traditional view on the incest theme in the novel is generally that it is a tragic outcome of the
institution of slavery, when examined in its relations to the idea of home, the trope of incest can
operate as another powerful means that further disrupts the boundaries that the domestic
discourse endeavors to maintain.97 Nonetheless, since Hannah confesses her actions to no one
besides Dianthe, Aubrey can still maintain his position as the “white” heir of Livingston Hall.
The falseness of Aubrey’s status as the legitimate white heir of the family exposes how the racist
logic of the “color line” is based upon arbitrary rules.
Initially, the mystical forces themselves do not challenge the white American heir within
97
Carby notes how the “changeling” plot, along with the incest theme, has been frequently used as a narrative
device through which the writer could critique the institution of slavery and the falsity of white supremacy. See also,
Kassanoff, Schrager, Salvant, and Luciano for discussions of these themes as the author’s critique on the history of
slavery in the United States.
１０８
his own privileged home. Rather, the paranormal seems to aid Aubrey in his reaffirmation of
authority within his home. Finding herself not only a bigamist, but married to both of her
brothers, Dianthe plans to murder Aubrey by poisoning him; however, plotting the murder of the
heir within his own home only brings Dianthe her own death. On the night Dianthe attempts to
murder Aubrey, he is awakened by a strange “trance-like yet conscious power” which enables
him to compel Dianthe to drink the poison herself (180). The source of Aubrey’s paranormal
experience on this crucial night is never clearly explained. While it is tempting to see the
mystical elements in the novel as a subversive or alternative force that aids the domestic others in
resisting the dominant white-male-centered authorities, Hopkins does not exclusively attribute
these abilities to the African Americans characters. Earlier in the novel, Aubrey reveals that his
father, Dr. Livingston Sr., was deeply interested in mesmerism and that he even successfully
performed hypnotism on his plantation slaves. Moreover, when Reuel finally returns from Africa
to confront Aubrey and charges him with murder, Aubrey can easily evade the charges because
his wealth “purchased shrewd and active lawyers to defend him” (191). Discussing Hopkins’s
use of the supernatural tropes, Deborah E. McDowell links the “fantasy” and “paranormal”
elements in the novel to the “cultural fantasy” of American racism:
. . . it bears remembering that Hopkins was writing in the face of perhaps the
most resilient fantasy in the U.S. cultural imaginary: the fantasy of
“whiteness,” which, it could be added, was “paranormal” in the extreme
although it enjoyed a naturalized “normativity” in “scientific” discourse, as
well as in the political economy of the nation. (xx)
In this sense, the mystical powers of the Livingston father and son could be read as representing
the American “fantasy” of racial purity and white supremacy which served as the “natural” and
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“scientific” rationale for slavery and racist politics. The mesmerism through which the elder
Livingston manipulates his slaves or the supernatural faculty through which his son convinces
Dianthe to drink the poison intended for him can be read as allegories of the “paranormal”
discourse of racism which prolonged the white dominance within the American national homespace.
Although the paranormal elements in the novel often aid the Livingston men, the ghostly
haunting of Livingston Hall begins to torment the white heir. From the moment of his first
supernatural experience, Aubrey becomes increasingly restless in his home. On the morning after
the incident, Aubrey wakes up feeling “[u]ncertain what to do or where to go” (183). His
restlessness intensifies as he hears the news that Dianthe, whom he poisoned the night before, is
sick in her chamber. Finally, getting tired of his emotional “wandering,” Aubrey launches on a
physical journey without a destination and without knowing when he will return (183). Ironically,
Hopkins illustrates how the heir’s effort to remove the domestic other from his home conversely
forces the heir out of his own domestic space. Leaving his house, Aubrey becomes an aimless
wanderer and roams around the countryside by himself all day:
Now he moves swiftly over the plain as if some sudden purpose drove him
on; then he turns back in the self-same track and with the same impulsive
speed. What is he doing in the lonely night? All day, hour after hour, mile
on mile, the scorching midday sun had blazed upon his head, and still he
wandered on. The tranquil sunset purpled round his way and still the
wanderer hastened on. (189)
Finally, when he hears a voice calling his name, and as he convinces himself that the voice
belongs to Dianthe, Aubrey stops his incessant wandering and heads home. However, on his way
１１０
to Livingston Hall, Aubrey sees two figures approaching him across the plain. Identifying one of
the figures as Dianthe, Aubrey feels a sudden relief thinking that she is not dead and hurries to
return home. Still, just as he reaches the entrance gates of the Livingston mansion, Aubrey
witnesses the two figures entering his home ahead of him. At that moment, the heir identifies one
of the figures as Molly Vance. After finding Dianthe’s dead body in his home, Aubrey is put on
trial for the murders of Dianthe and Molly.
The final supernatural scene in the novel functions on two levels. On the one hand, this is
the first time that the white American heir confronts the spectral “others” he violently forced out
from his own privileged home. As Aubrey physically witnesses the “ghosts” entering his
mansion, his home becomes a haunted house.98 Moreover, Hopkins shows how the privileged
white Americans can become ghosts themselves through Molly, the once “petted heiress,” who
now accompanies Dianthe in their haunting of the idyllic white American home. Still, the heir
escapes public punishment by using his wealth and social influence to save him from any legal
charges. Nonetheless, the ghostly visions of the two women leave Aubrey no longer at home in
the Livingston mansion.
The confrontation between Aubrey and the two ghostly figures echoes Julia Kristeva and
Homi Bhabha’s arguments on the uncanny cultural encounter.99 The gothic confrontation
between the elite white American heir and the ghostly “stranger” devastates the apparent ideality
of the dominant white home-space and creates a feeling of displacement in the privileged
Americans. When Reuel and his party visit Livingston Hall for the last time, Aubrey is sitting
98
It must be noted that this is not the first time in the novel where Hopkins introduces a ghostly figure inside the
dominant white American home. Earlier in chapter 20, Dianthe claims that she sees a ghostly figure in her chamber
at Livingston Hall who leaves an inscription in the Bible with a name “‘Nina’ [‘Mira’?]” (168). However, it is still
only the African American domestic other who experiences the spectral sighting as nobody besides Dianthe
witnesses Mira’s ghost.
99
See my introduction for more details on Bhabha and Kristeva’s discussions of the “uncanny.”
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alone in his “sumptuous study,” but his eyes are “fixed on vacancy,” and his appearance is that
of a prematurely aged man (191). Ultimately, the aristocratic lineage of the Livingston family is
brought to an end when Aubrey’s body is found floating in the Charles River not long after
Reuel’s visit.
Although the novel began with contrasting images of the homes of the white elite heir
and the African American domestic other, Hopkins gradually obscures the clear boundaries that
separate them through the presence of the ghostly visions. The final scene in which the white
heir watches the two paranormal figures entering the Livingston mansion indicates how the
ghostly presence of the others does not exist exclusively outside or “adjacent to” the safeguarded
boundaries of the white elite home, but haunts it from within. Ultimately, Aubrey’s privileged
mansion turns into a space where the demarcation of time and space becomes completely
collapsed. The privileged American home becomes a place where the white heir and the African
American domestic other concurrently reside. It also becomes a space where the ghosts of the
past and present constantly reemerge.
Hopkins’s revelation of the permeability of the dominant white American home-space in
the final scene invites a comparison with the idea of the “ghostly” or the “spectral” that Jacques
Derrida examines in his analysis of Marxism. Derrida claims that a “specter” is “always a
revenant . . . because it begins by coming back” (11). In neither coming from somewhere nor
going anywhere, the specter constitutes an incessance that belies origins or ends: a haunting.
Haunting, thus, is an “always-already” phenomenon and becomes “irreducible” (51). Expunging
the physical bodies of the domestic others from his home does not allow Aubrey to be free of
their presence. The dark house with the haunting ghosts has “always-already” existed “adjacent
to” the bright and cheerful mansion of the heir. Furthermore, as the ghosts physically invade the
１１２
home-space of the heir, the borders between the two homes are ultimately shattered. In this way,
it is also possible to argue that the “invasion[s] of the home” that occurs in the novel do not
involve only the dominant white society’s invasion of the African American home or the western
imperialist’s invasion of the African home, as most scholars have argued, but also the counterinvasion of the African American domestic others into the home of the privileged AngloAmericans.
Hopkins uses the trope of the ghostly haunting in a way that can be linked to the idea of
“the uncanny” and the return of the “undead” discussed in previous sections. The ghostly
confrontation illustrates Freud’s theory of the “uncanny” as the home of the privileged white heir
becomes the space which illustrates the impossibility of forgetting. As the repressed returns in
the form of a specter, the haunted home of the heir, which once had been a space of domination
and alienation, becomes a space for the domestic outcasts who are buried underneath the smooth
surface of the national narrative to claim their presence. In his discussion of the specter, Derrida
takes on Freud’s idea of the “uncanny” to examine the uncanny return of a strange revenant:
To welcome, . . . with anxiety and the desire to exclude the stranger, to
invite the stranger without accepting him or her, domestic hospitality that
welcomes without welcoming the stranger, but a stranger who is already
found within (das Heimliche-Unheimliche), more intimate with one than
oneself, the absolute proximity of a stranger, . . . invisibly occupies places
belonging finally neither to us nor to it. (172)
The return of the stranger who “invisibly occupies” the white elite American home disrupts the
heir’s sense of belonging. In the end, Hopkins allows neither the heirs nor the domestic others to
stay “at home” and leaves the American home finally belonging “neither to us nor to them.”
１１３
Because Of One Blood is Hopkins’s last novel, many critics have argued that Hopkins’s
decision to leave the characters without a sense of home at the end of the novel reflects the
author’s ultimate disillusionment with American society. However, if the state of homelessness
in the novel can be understood not so much as a loss or deficiency that an individual must suffer,
but as a positive challenge to notions of the “ideal” or “safe and cosy” home, the destruction of
the American home in the novel may incite new thinking regarding the nature of the home-space.
For Derrida, the irreducibility of the ghost is made clear in the closing lines of his analysis:
. . . even if it is in oneself, in the others, in the others in oneself: they are
always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer,
even if they are not yet. They give us to rethink the “there” as soon as we
open our mouths . . . . (176)
The ghosts that enter and reside in the privileged white American home provoke its heir to
“rethink the ‘there’” which is “hidden” underneath the apparent “bright home scene.”100 Only by
recognizing the ghosts that have been “well-calculatedly removed” from the “ideal” home scene
can the white American heirs coexist with the domestic outcasts in their permanent state of
positive “haunting.” Consequently, the “haunting” or the “homelessness” in Of One Blood do not
indicate a negative state; rather, the displacement brings about an alternative mode of habitation
that invites both the privileged heirs and the domestic others into the shared space of home.
Focusing on the triangular relationships among the African American characters, their
American home, and their ancestral land of Africa, most scholarly interpretations of the idea of
home in Of One Bloood focus on the inability of the African American characters to find a
100
The Bible inscription that Mira’s ghost leaves in the earlier scene of her appearance in Livingston Hall echoes
Derrida’s argument of the impossibility of eradicating the revenant. When Dianthe asks Aubrey to read what the
ghost had left in the Bible, Aubrey finds ink lines underscoring the chapter of Luke: “For there is nothing covered
that shall not be revealed, neither hid that shall not be known” (168).
１１４
suitable home-space either in the United States or in Africa. Such approaches to the novel often
focus on the author’s response to an environment which was becoming increasingly hostile to
African Americans. However, this chapter examines how Hopkins’s illustrations of the
privileged Anglo-American characters’ relationship to their home-space in the novel could
complicate the notions of home and being “at home” in whatever socio-political positions they
occupy in American society.
Through the physical displacement of Charlie Vance into the “hidden city” of Africa,
Hopkins traces how the dominant white American’s sickness for home is transformed into his
apprehension of the sickness of home and how this shift results in his psychological displacement
from his idyllic home. Charlie’s “live burial” inside the pyramid of the hidden city brings his
recognition of those who are “buried alive” within his privileged American home. Through the
symbolic trespassing into the ancestral home of the African American, the privileged white
American opens a dialogue between the two homes which remain separate in the dominant racial
discourse of the post-Reconstruction American society. Consequently, Charlie’s journey into the
“uncanny land” of Africa endows him a critical distance to re-evaluate his home and to
apprehend the impossibility of being “at home” without recognizing the existence of the
domestic (and national) others “hidden” beneath the “illusion of coherence and safety” of home.
By actively displacing the domestic others from the dominant American home-space,
Aubrey Livingston not only upholds his own privileged position within the domestic discourse of
the postbellum America, but also maintains the spatial segregation between the white and black
American homes. However, Hopkins gradually obscures the apparent boundaries that separate
the two homes with the spectral haunting of the domestic others inside the privileged American’s
home. The paranormal scenes where Mira’s ghost appears in the chambers of Livingston Hall
１１５
and where Aubrey himself sees the two spectral figures entering his mansion indicate how the
white elite home is “always-already” a space of haunting itself. Through the white American
heir’s recognition of the spectrality within his home, Hopkins turns the privileged white
American home into a space where the “insiders” and the “outcasts,” the living and the “undead,”
the past and the present of the American home-space concurrently exist.
Through the constant pairing of the white elite Americans with the African American
domestic others in the examination of the American home-space, Of One Blood reveals how the
heirs and the outcasts of the dominant American home are intricately related to each other. On
the one hand, the sense of being homeless at home provokes the African American protagonist to
launch a physical migration to Africa. And yet, the hidden “homesickness” of the postReconstruction dominant American home that Hopkins exposes through the excavation of the
ancient African home results in the psychological displacement of the privileged white
Americans themselves. Accordingly, the “unhomely” home of the elite white Americans at the
end of the novel echoes Avtar Brah’s “diaspora space” where the mutual relationship between
the “insider” and the “outsider” is integral in the insider’s sense of being. Consequently, the
domestic outcast’s sense of homelessness renders it impossible for the privileged American heirs
to feel “at home.” In place of the racially exclusive tendencies in the existing criticism on the
post-Reconstruction American home-space in the novel, an examination of the psychological
homelessness of the privileged white Americans in Of One Blood can resituate the novel as
Hopkins’s attempt to recast the American home-space as a racially interrelated space.
１１６
Chapter 3: The Imaginary Homelands in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
. . . it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home,
albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.
- Salman Rushdie “Imaginary Homelands” (9)
Aligning himself with other members of the “post-diaspora community of displaced
people,” Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie illustrates how—for those who suffer “physical
alienation” from their homes—the past becomes a home, “a country from which [they] have all
emigrated,” while they reside as “foreigners” in the present (12). However, Rushdie further notes
that the pasts that these “exiles,” “emigrants,” or “expatriates” create are “fictions” or “imaginary
homelands . . . of the mind” because they will “not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing
that was lost” (10). Although Rushdie is focusing narrowly on the stance of Indian immigrant
writers in Britain and more broadly on the “exiled” writers in contemporary western society, the
sense of displacement and the attempt to “reclaim” a home—even as the reclaimed home is but a
“fictional” or “imagined” version of the original space that was lost—in his account can be
broadly applied to the geo-political migrants, who have either voluntarily left or have been
forcibly removed from their homes, in the late twentieth-century post-diasporic world.
Examining the space of home in the early twentieth-century American South, William
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) traces another account of a “haunting,” which displaces
individuals within their own homes and their process of “reclaiming” a home-space. The
construction of an “imaginary homeland” that Rushdie describes is useful for understanding how
the privileged Southerners in Faulkner’s novel relate to their homes. For Rushdie, it is removal in
space and time through migration that leads the diasporic subject to the construction of
“imaginary homelands” in his/her writing. In this sense, being diasporic in a literal sense of
１１７
being migratory and having a tie to a past home is central to Rushdie’s view. In contrast, there is
no diaspora or migration that the privileged Americans’ in Absalom, Absalom! experience in a
traditional sense. While Quentin Compson’s “migration” to college in the North is a kind of
physical movement during which he can only think of “home,” the fact that he is still the
inheritor of his home back in the South puts him in a position opposite to that of conventional
diasporic subjects. Nevertheless, the migrant’s experience of being “haunted by some sense of
loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back” that Rushdie describes is echoed in the psyche of
Faulkner’s characters (10). Enclosed in their decaying homes, the mainstream Southern
Americans migrate to their past in their effort to “reclaim” their “lost homes” through
imagination as a way to resolve their sense of displacement within their own present homes.
Published in the early twentieth century, Absalom, Absalom! spans the historical periods
of the two novels discussed in previous chapters. Thomas Sutpen and General Compson’s
antebellum Jefferson, Mississippi coexists with Pierre Glendinning’s New York, while Mr.
Compson and Quentin’s South after the War is contemporaneous with Reuel, Aubrey, and
Charlie’s New England. Like Melville and Hopkins, Faulkner leaves no one indubitably feeling
“at home” in their own homes at the end of the novel. However, while Melville and Hopkins
trace the transformation of the privileged Americans’ once “idyllic” and “luxurious” homes into
haunted spaces once the heirs recognize the ghostly presence of the socially repressed others
within their own homes, the privileged homes in Faulkner are already gothic spaces of haunting,
with their inhabitants residing as “aliens” and “ghosts” within them.
Throughout the last several decades, various critics have celebrated the prominence of
Faulkner and Absalom, Absalom! in the American literary canon; accordingly, the sheer volume
１１８
of scholarship on the text is daunting.101 Taking a long view of this body of scholarship, however,
certain trends can be detected as well. Within the various angles of extensive scholarship—
ranging from the earlier formalist or psychological approaches to more recent historical and
cultural criticism—scholars have paid great attention to the meaning of home in the novel. As its
working title—“Dark House”—suggests, Absalom, Absalom! is a novel about the history of a
haunted house that stands in southern Mississippi.102
As Faulkner himself has remarked, the novel’s central character is Thomas Sutpen—a
man who commits his entire life to a grand “design” to erect a home for himself and for his
heirs.103 Accordingly, there have been extensive readings of the novel that approach the rise and
fall of Sutpen’s Hundred as an allegory about the history of the American South or about the
entire nation. Eric J. Sundquist’s Absalom, Absalom! and the House Divided, is one of the
prominent examples that approach the novel by examining the meaning of the “house” in the text.
As André Bleikasten has argued in his insightful assessment of Faulkner scholarship,
Sundquist’s examination of the novel—with his attention to placing the text in a larger historical,
social, and cultural context—has pointed the way in Faulkner studies in the recent years.104
101
Just to offer a few examples, Harold Bloom argues that “[b]y universal consent of critics and common readers,
Faulkner now is recognized as the strongest American novelist of this century” (1). As for Absalom, Absalom!,
Cleanth Brooks claims it is “the greatest of [Faulkner’s] novels” (295). In recent years, Joseph Urgo pronounces it as
the author’s “greatest novel, his most complex and rewarding literary work” (56). Dirk Kuyk, Jr., in Sutpen’s Design,
declares that not only does Absalom, Absalom! “tower among” Faulkner’s work, but that “we can now hear it
described as the greatest American novel of the century . . . joining Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn at the pinnacle
of American fiction” (2).
102
According to Noel Polk, Faulkner used “Dark House” as the title of the manuscript of the novel when describing
it to his editor in 1934, then later changed it to Absalom, Absalom! upon its publication (24).
103
In his conversation with the students at the University of Virginia in April 1957, Faulkner noted that while the
novel is “incidentally the story of Quentin Compson’s hatred of the bad qualities in the country he loves,” still “the
central character is Sutpen . . .” (Gwynn 71).
104
Bleikasten points out that Sundquist was “the first critic to reassess Faulkner’s achievement and to reorder the
Faulkner canon according to extraliterary criteria,” seeking Faulkner’s importance not “in his contribution to the art
of the novel but in the seriousness with which he addresses social and historical themes” (206). Such assessment
indicates important changes in Faulkner scholarship albeit Bleikasten somewhat overstates the shift in direction and
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The historical, social, and cultural approaches that Sundquist and numerous other critics
in the last few decades have employed allow critics to read the novel not solely in the context of
the American South from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century but, rather, in
the larger world of ideas and social and political currents regarding the still unresolved conflicts
between the dominant white Americans and the socially marginalized “others.” In her recent
reading of the novel, Melanie R. Benson notes that the recent scholarship in Southern studies and
Southern literature advocates “viewing the South as inherently and historically transnational,
born of early global forces and continuing in critical ways to reflect and interact with other
nations’ economies, histories, cultures, and citizens” (18). Benson claims that the American
South is no longer a distinctive enclave protected from time and history, but is now “being
appraised as a region among other colonial and postcolonial sites” (18).105 In this sense, the rise
and fall of Sutpen’s house in these readings would not only mirror the course of the history of the
American South or of the entire nation around the Civil War period, but also relates to the
problems regarding the space of the American home in earlier centuries as well as to
contemporary American and global ideas of home.
However, even as most of the accounts in the novel revolve around Thomas Sutpen and
his family, Sutpen is not the privileged American in the novel; rather, he is one of the “others,”
who violates other “others” in trying to gain admittance to privileged status. The mainstream
Americans that Faulkner presents in Absalom, Absalom! are the three characters who tell the
disapproves of the recent socio-historical angles, arguing that it brings a “regression to a naively realistic conception
of literature” (207). For further useful discussions of recent directions in Faulkner criticism, see Donald M.
Kartiganer, “In Place of an Introduction: Reading Faulkner” and André Bleikasten, “Faulkner in the Singular” in
Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect. See also, Charles A. Peek, A Companion to Faulkner Studies for
extensive assessments of major critical approaches in Faulkner studies.
105
See Jeremy Wells, Romances of the White Man’s Burden: Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American
Literature 1880-1936, Michael Kreyling, The South that Wasn’t There: Postouthern Memory and History, Martyn
Bone, The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction or Harry Stecopoulos, Reconstructing the World:
Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1889-1976 for more examples on scholarship taking such approaches.
１２０
story of the Sutpens: Mr. Compson, Rosa Coldfield, and Quentin.106 When Quentin’s Canadian
roommate, Shreve McCannon, and other friends at Harvard ask him about the South, it is
through the intermingling of these different voices—all of which confer their own versions of the
stories around the Sutpen’s Hundred—within him that Quentin endeavors to explain about his
home.
While it is imperative to examine the significance of Sutpen’s home in Absalom,
Absalom!, this chapter focuses on the manifestation of these other homes created by the various
narrators in the novel. In their retelling of the accounts of Thomas Sutpen’s haunted mansion, the
three mainstream Americans build their own versions of Southern home-space for themselves.
Although Faulkner does not provide physical manifestations of these other homes, they emerge
as vital spaces with close connections to one another and to the physical space of Sutpen’s
haunted house. Focusing on these “imaginary” homes, this chapter aims to examine the
following questions: What provokes the particular sense of homelessness that the novel’s central
narrators experience which lead them to build their own versions of “imaginary homes” while
physically inhabiting their present homes? How are the narrators’ psychological dislocations
connected to their stories about Sutpen’s haunted house? In other words, how are the sentiments
that these mainstream Southern Americans have toward their inherited home projected through
their telling of the story of Sutpen’s own home-building project?
The Haunted Space of the Southern Home
Resembling the two previous novels, Absalom, Absalom! begins with an illustration of an
106
I deliberately avoided using the phrase “privileged Americans” here since Rosa, as a daughter of a tradesman
who presently lives in “genteel poverty,” does not precisely belong to the group of “privileged heirs” who are the
focus of my discussion in this dissertation. Still, Mr. Coldfield’s established reputation in the Jefferson community
endows his daughter with a position inside the mainstream.
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individual home-space; however, the homes that Faulkner presents are drastically different from
the Edenic space of Saddle Meadows or the palatial edifice of Vance Hall. The description of the
“office” that opens up the novel where Rosa begins her story is filled with an air of deterioration
and wretchedness. The Coldfield house stands as a representative Southern home in decline after
the South’s loss in the Civil War. The “dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and
fastened for forty-three summers” is filled with “dust motes . . . of the dead old dried paint,” the
“dim coffin-smelling gloom,” and the “rank smell of female old flesh.”107 Such moribund
descriptions of the atmosphere are echoed in the Compson house with its “deep shaggy lawn”
(25) and the “stained and bug-fouled” single globe that gives only a little light to its inhabitants
(73).
Confined in their dilapidated homes, Mr. Compson and Rosa conjure up another decrepit
house through their narratives. The description of the current state of Sutpen’s “haunted house”
does not stand far from the post-war Southern homes in which the narrators live. Even before
listening to Rosa and his father’s stories, Quentin already “knew the house, twelve miles from
Jefferson, in its grove of cedar and oak, seventy-five years after it was finished” (31) and has
seen how it presently stands as a “rotting shell . . . with its sagging portico and scaling walls, its
sagging blinds and plank-shuttered windows, set in the middle of the domain which had reverted
to the state and had been bought and sold and bought and sold again and again and again” (176).
While Mr. Compson and Rosa are presented as living ghosts who are unable to leave their
current homes, Thomas Sutpen and his family are the ghosts from the past who are still trapped
in their house long after their deaths for—much like the mansion that is repeatedly being “bought
and sold” to different people—their stories are repeatedly told by different voices which bring
them back to their home “again and again and again” as ghostly presences.
107
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 5. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.
１２２
In contrast to these homebound ghosts, Quentin is the only character in the novel that is
able to escape from his home in the South. As if to get away from these wretched surroundings,
Quentin leaves his home and heads to the North to attend college. Still, the physical escape from
his home does not guarantee Quentin’s ultimate freedom from the space; the questions about and
memories of his home forbid him to flee permanently. Faulkner shows how Quentin’s Southern
home still haunts him in the North as he is constantly bombarded with repeated questions that
ask about his home: “Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do
they live there. Why do they live at all” (143). In fact, the entire novel is Quentin’s answer to
these questions as he reluctantly takes up the position of a representative narrator of the histories
of the South. Through his recounting of Sutpen’s haunted house, Quentin attempts to explain his
home in the South. Still, since the stories about Sutpen’s Hundred with which Quentin is familiar
are already colored and shaded by various narrators, his answers to the questions about his home
necessarily incorporate all of these voices; the result is an intermingling of reinventions and
reinterpretations that says as much about the narrators as about the Sutpens themselves.
The dichotomy between the “privileged home” and the “haunted home” is extremely
complex in Absalom, Absalom!. The haunted mansion of Thomas Sutpen is not simply the homespace of the social outcasts like the Ulver’s farmhouse in Melville or Reuel’s miserable
apartment in Hopkins; nor is it the privileged home of an heir which gradually transforms into a
space of haunting like Saddle Meadows or Livingston Hall. Rather, Sutpen’s Hundred is a space
that constantly disrupts the clear spatial dichotomies of the Jefferson community; as Rosa
recounts in horror, it is where the “gentlefolks” and “the very scum and riffraff” gather around
every night to fight naked with the “wild Negroes” (23). At the same time, the distinct meanings
that the space of Sutpen’s Hundred embodies are integral in each mainstream American’s
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creation of their own imaginary homes in the novel.
Escape to the Mythic Past: Mr.Compson’s Imaginary Southern Home
Like the privileged Americans in the previous chapters, Mr. Compson is presented as
another aristocratic American heir in the novel. Although Mr. Compson’s current status is not as
affluent as that of Pierre Glendinning or Aubrey Livingston, his family background confirms his
position as the “Southern gentleman” standing at the center amongst the “responsible citizens
and landowners” of the Jefferson community (30). Whereas Pierre had inherited the “baton” of
his valiant great grandfather who was a hero of the Revolutionary War, Major-General
Glendinning, Mr. Compson succeeds his father, General Compson, who served an integral role
in the Southern community around the Civil War era. Faulkner further suggests that the family’s
reputation is not established merely through economic wealth, but through a long-term
genealogical history, an establishment of a name and reputation that a family builds within a
society. The fact that the Compson name helps Sutpen, an outsider with a “name that none of
them had ever heard,” to be accepted—at least partially—in Jefferson further proves the
Compson family’s reputable position within the community (26).
However, the home that the aristocratic heir inherits in the postbellum South does not
endow him with a sense of privilege. When Quentin asks his father why Rosa should choose him
to tell her stories, Mr. Compson relates Quentin’s role in Rosa’s stories to his own ideas about
the current status of the South and its people:
“Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies. Then the War
came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being
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gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?” (9)
The heir’s fatalistic outlook towards the present state of the South only proves his own sense of
displacement within his home. Instead of yielding his estate to his son, Mr. Compson sells the
lands to let his heir join other young men of the South who have already left their homes in order
to find opportunities in the North.108 The younger heir’s departure for the North indicates the
failure of the post-war Southern home which can no longer provide opportunities or protections
for its inhabitants. At the same time, the elder heir, who does not even have the chance to leave
home, can only resume his empty role as a member of the dying race of the Southern gentleman
as he listens to the ghost stories in lethargy.
Psychologically displaced in his present home, the heir professes his idealistic outlook
towards the past Southern home. While Mr. Compson’s claim above exposes the family’s
present failure, it also indicates how the elder heir strongly fixes his identity as a “gentleman,”
insists on the idea of the romantic Old South which had turned the “women into ladies,” and
blames the War for turning these “ladies” into “ghosts.” However, Faulkner reveals how it is not
only the “ladies” of the South, but the heirs like Mr. Compson himself, who are joining the
“back-looking ghosts” who seek an alternative space which could provide the sense of belonging
that their current dilapidated homes fail to offer (9). Throughout the novel, Mr. Compson mostly
exists in the form of a voice that constantly recounts the histories of the home that he inherits.
The extreme sense of loss and the urge to reclaim the “lost home” that Mr. Compson presents in
his stories echoes the migrants’ yearning for the left-behind homes discussed in Rushdie’s essay.
While living as a “foreigner” in his war-torn home, Mr. Compson endeavors to reclaim the “Lost
108
Although this is not explicitly mentioned in Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin recollects in The Sound and the Fury
(1929) that the Compsons had to sell their land to send him to Harvard.
１２５
Cause” that his past Southern home represents.109 In this sense, the constant retellings of histories
in the novel can be read as acts of escapism. In other words, Mr. Compson’s storytelling can be
interpreted as an attempt to create a fictional past in which he can feel “at home” because the
space he currently inhabits is alienating and “unhomely.”
The past home that Mr. Compson reclaims through his stories is not only a fictional space
but a very romantic one. The sketch of the antebellum South that Mr. Compson draws for his son
in 1909 at the beginning of the second chapter presents it as an idyllic space with church bells
ringing “peacefully and peremptory,” ladies “moving in hoops among the miniature broadcloth
of little boys and the pantalettes of little girls, in the skirts of the time when ladies did not walk
but floated,” and “house Negroes” carrying the “parasols and flywhisks” in a “soft summer”
Sunday morning (25). Employing the cliché of Southern belles and jovial slaves, Mr. Compson
imaginatively recreates the space of the antebellum South which provides him with a fictional
distance from his decaying present home. Angelika Bammer’s notion of the fictional aspect of
the idea of “home” that I have presented in the introduction can be useful in examining Mr.
Compson’s “imaginary home” in the novel. As Bammer suggests, the fictional aspect of the
notion of home functions in two ways. On the one hand, it allows the individuals, who have lost
their homes or find their homes insufferable in the present, to create alternative imaginary homespaces which could serve as their emotional sanctuaries. At the same time, however, the
“continual mythification” of “home” as an “almost universal site of utopian (be)longing” could
109
In The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War history, the Civil War historian Gary W. Gallagher aptly
summarizes the “Lost Cause” explanation of the Southern experience: “The architects of the Lost Cause acted from
various motives. They collectively sought to justify their own actions and allow themselves and other former
Confederates to find something positive in all-encompassing failure. They also wanted to provide their children and
future generations of white Southerners with a ‘correct’ narrative of the war” (1). In their efforts to provide the
“correct narrative” about their past, these Southerners tend to portray the Confederacy’s cause as noble and most of
its leaders as exemplars of chivalry and gentlemanliness, while condemning the North for destroying the noble
traditions and ideals of the South. Mr. Compson’s imaginative “reclaiming” of the past Southern home can be
understood as an example of the Southerner’s effort to provide a “correct narrative” to his heir.
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lead to the individual’s negligence and oversimplification of the problems that lie beneath the
construction and preservation of each home-space (Bammer vii). While Mr. Compson’s
imaginary past home may serve as an emotional haven through which he may alleviate his
psychological displacement in his current home, it can dangerously oversimplify the homebuilding process and overlook the histories of violence and oppression that are hidden beneath its
smooth, utopian surface.
The haunted Sutpen mansion serves an integral role in exposing the hidden histories that
the privileged heir’s imaginary recreation of his past home attempts to conceal. In contrast to
Rosa, who tells the stories of the Sutpen family in their relations to her own home in first-person
narration, Mr. Compson emphasizes his role as an impartial narrator of the Sutpen stories which
he mostly gathered from his own father. As he asserts that General Compson was both the
principal member of the Jefferson community and the “nearest thing to a friend” for Sutpen in
the entire town, Mr. Compson suggests that not only is he informed by what other people in town
know, but that his father’s personal interaction provides him even deeper insights about the
Sutpens (9). In this way, the heir becomes the representative and authoritative voice for the entire
community in recounting the past histories related to Sutpen’s Hundred. However, Faulkner
reminds the reader how much of Mr. Compson’s stories are full of conjectures in themselves.
The elder heir’s entire narratives are punctuated by phrases—such as “I think,” “I believe,”
“perhaps,” “maybe,” “I suppose,” or “I can imagine”—that mark his speculations about
individuals’ motives and actions.
On the one hand, Mr. Compson’s stories of Sutpen’s Hundred seem to confirm the myth
of the self-made man—both the Southern myth of the self-made planter and the general
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American myth of the self-made man.110 The “legend” of Thomas Sutpen resembles those of the
representative Southern planter that W. J. Cash examines in his work The Mind of the South
(1941). Cash’s influential study of the American South examines how the image of “the Old
South” remains a strong influence on twentieth-century Southern society. Cash looks into the
cotton boom years from 1820 to 1860 as the crucial years of Southern history and argues that,
after the Civil War, Southern elites used this period to create a mythological past for the South,
one based on the dominance of the planter class.111 The descriptions that Mr. Compson offers
Quentin to explain how Sutpen built his mansion epitomize the conventional account of the selfmade Southern planter that Cash presents: “He now had a plantation inside of two years he had
dragged house and gardens out of virgin swamp, and plowed and planted his land with seed
cotton which General Compson loaned him” (33). The image that Mr. Compson offers to his son
emphasizes how Sutpen “dragged” his plantation house “out” of empty, “virgin” swamp by
himself. By presenting Sutpen as a single-handed individual in his home-building process, Mr.
Compson reaffirms the myth of the self-made Southern planter. At the same time, by
emphasizing that Sutpen’s plantation was brought into being through the “seeds” that his father
had lent him, the heir proves how the “gentlemen” of the South ardently promote and support
such legend of self-making.
However, the elder heir’s mythologizing of Sutpen’s Hundred as the space that proves the
“self-made man legend” yields another myth that obscures the problems hidden under its
110
For instance, Carolyn Porter argues that Sutpen is “no less American for being Southern, and no less Southern for
being American” and, thus, presents him as an emblem of the “American innocence” (209).
111
In his examination of the novel, Fred Hobson compares the similarities between Sutpen and the representative
Southern planter that Cash presents in his work: “a raw, crude man who started with nothing except energy,
determination, innocence’ (Cash’s words as well as Faulkner’s), and a capacity for hard work; . . . who acquired
land and slaves, grew cotton, soon became wealthy, and eventually built a big house that some called a mansion . . . .
Though uneducated and unacquainted with formal culture, he aped Tidewater manners, ways foreign to him, made
himself an ‘aristocrat,’ and set out to found a dynasty” (6).
１２８
triumphant history. In the process of Mr. Compson’s storytelling, the historical realities of the
South become increasingly abstracted; the heir constantly compares the rise and fall of Sutpen’s
Hundred to classic Greek tragedies or chivalric romances. In telling the story of how Sutpen’s
mansion was erected, Mr. Compson puts great emphasis on the clash between Thomas Sutpen,
who aims to build a house in its “castlelike magnificence” and “baronial splendor,” and the
French architect, who struggles to curb Sutpen’s vanity in order to display his “artistic”
accomplishment in the mansion (31-32). Although this portrayal of the home-building process
highlights the quixotic aspects of the two men, it obscures other human beings who are
concomitantly involved in the process.
The exploitation of the African slaves or the appropriation of the lands from Native
Americans which are the other integral aspects of Sutpen’s home-building are largely obscured
in Mr. Compson’s imaginary accounts. At one point, Mr. Compson acknowledges the arbitrary
nature of racial hierarchy in the South, indicating how the whites and the blacks perspire “the
same sweat,” while “the only difference being that on the one hand it went for labor in fields
where on the other it went as the price of the Spartan and meager pleasures which were available
to them because they did not have to sweat in the fields” (80). Yet, the Southern heir does not
advance his narratives to explore the hidden histories of violence any further but, rather,
romanticizes the exploitations that were involved in Sutpen’s “legend.” In describing the system
of slavery which serves as a foundation of Sutpen’s plantation mansion, Mr. Compson focuses
more on the “humane” aspect of Sutpen’s relationship to his slaves. Emphasizing how Sutpen
“never raised his voice at them” but, instead, “led them, caught them at the psychological instant
by example, by some ascendancy of forbearance rather than by brute fear,” the elder heir
presents Sutpen as a benevolent “leader” and, thus, romanticizes slavery (29-30). Moreover, Mr.
１２９
Compson’s version of the “legend” of Sutpen’s “wild negroes” not only shifts the focus from the
black slaves to Sutpen, but also dehumanizes the slaves, transforming them into wild animals
that the white man should tame and educate (29).
Mr. Compson’s depiction of mixed-race characters—the more ambiguous representation
of the “other” involved in Sutpen’s “legend”—further exemplifies his romantic stance toward
racist politics in South. As the illegitimate son of Sutpen, Charles Bon appears “almost phoenixlike, fullsprung from no childhood, born of no woman and impervious to time and, [vanishes],
leaving no bones nor dust anywhere” (61). Unlike his son, who conjectures Bon’s hidden racial
identity to be the ultimate reason for the tragedy of the Sutpens, Mr. Compson’s “mythologizing”
of Bon presents him as a “rootless” and “timeless” figure and places him outside history. The
elder heir’s story about Charles Bon largely centers on Bon’s relationship with the octoroon
mistress in New Orleans. The octoroon mistress in his narrative is far from the defiant “mixedblooded” figure that was widely popular in postbellum Southern literature.112 Rather, the
octoroon in the elder heir’s imaginative story is the helpless prey in a tragic romance: “the
apotheosis of two doomed races presided over by its own victim—a woman with a face like a
tragic magnolia, the eternal female, the eternal Who-suffers” (94). Moreover, while Mr.
Compson—through Bon’s voice—insists that the combination of the white and the black race
would create a perfect amalgam of sensuous beauty in the octoroon, his argument depends upon
two conventional Southern myths: the one, that white women “flee” from sensuality “in moral
and outraged horror”; the other, that black women are more erotic by virtue of their direct
connection to something primitive (96). Such “primal” and “erotic” qualities that Mr. Compson
112
For instance, in her study of the literary representation of “mixed-blooded” characters around the Civil War
period, Barbara Ladd argues that while the slaveholder’s mixed-race children were immensely popular among the
Northern writers in their intent to stir public sentiment against slavery, the Southern writers’ increasing interest in
the subject after the War promoted the “octoroon” or “quadroon” characters as the representation of “the political
and cultural repressions and displacements, the submerged or forgotten history that underlies the dream of US
national unity” (220).
１３０
endows upon the mixed-race woman displace her from the historical reality that produced her
and, thus, leave her a sentimental sufferer of a tragic fate. In a similar sense, the child that the
mistress begets with Bon is compared to “a calf or puppy or sheep” and is completely
dehumanized in the story as well (94).
A sense of fate and tragic destiny pervade Mr. Compson’s version of the Southern past,
and the realities of colonialism and slavery and their dreadful aftermaths are buried under these
melodramatic tales. For Mr. Compson, the octoroon is “a sparrow which God himself neglected
to mark. Because though men, white men, created her, God did not stop it” (96). Again, a sense
of fatalism pervades his imaginative Southern past and, even as he acknowledges the wrongs
caused by slavery to a certain degree, Mr. Compson casts the people of the South as helpless
pawns who are ruled by its fateful destiny. For the elder heir, the buried histories of Sutpen’s
Hundred are only “a matter between [Sutpen’s] conscience and Uncle Sam and God”; and,
therefore, the wrongdoings that occur in the course of its legendary home-building stay at the
individual level in his narratives (36). Even the Civil War—the final outcome of the “sin” of the
South—is comprehended as “a stupid and bloody aberration in the high (and impossible) destiny
of the United States, . . . , that curious lack of economy between cause and effect which is always
a characteristic of fate when reduced to using human beings for tools, material” (98).
On the other hand, however, Mr. Compson’s stories of Sutpen’s Hundred repudiate the
very self-made man myth that the “noble” tradition of his Southern past seem to promote.
Faulkner constantly hints that, while the antebellum Southern past that the elder heir illustrates is
a place where an individual like Sutpen can create his own legend through his own sheer will, it
is, nonetheless, a place where such an individual is destined to fail because the world he attempts
to penetrate demands of him a past, a name that cannot be obtained through his money or
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training. While Mr. Compson notes the impressive size and the lavishness of Sutpen’s mansion,
he, nevertheless, clearly distinguishes it from the typical privileged home-spaces in the Jefferson
community. The “castlelike” mansion, decorated in Sutpen’s “overweening vanity,” never
succeeds in granting its owner entrance into the high, “respectable” society of the South.
Sutpen’s last attempt to earn “respectability” through marriage fails as the townspeople refuse to
attend the wedding. Although Sutpen finally gains entrance to the community by becoming too
rich for the people to ignore, the Southern community’s insistence on the blood and name
suggests Mr. Compson’s “legend” of the antebellum South has ignored the realities of the society
in its mythification.
Studies on antebellum Southern literature note the mythic turning away from the
“yeoman” ideal toward the figure of the “aristocratic planter” or “cavalier” in Southern minds. In
Yeoman Versus Cavalier: The Old Southwest’s Fictional Road to Rebellion, Ritchie Devon
Watson examines how the original “yeoman” identity of the Old South with its frontier roots was
superceded by the figure of an aristocratic planter, or the “lordly cavalier,” in the 1830s, which—
after the Civil War—became “enshrined within the new myth of the Lost Cause” (8).113 The
imposition of a “cavalier” model, Watson argues, was originally intended to promote the ideal of
the noble, cultured planter of aristocratic blood and manners in response to the increasing attacks
on slavery and the plantation system.114
Despite his apparently sympathetic attitude toward Sutpen, Mr. Compson himself
113
Similarly, Cash also detects the “flaw” in antebellum pretensions of Southern aristocracy, which were “not an
emanation from the proper substance of the men who wore it, but only a fine garment put on from the outside” (71).
114
Although Watson’s claim tends to over-generalize the Southern writers’ involvement in promoting the “cavalier
myth,” his argument on how the emphasis on the ethos of “nobility” and “culture” gradually turned into imposition
of social class and “aristocratic blood” brings up an important aspect of the problematic nature of Southern class
and race systems. For more discussions on the “cavalier myth,” see William R. Taylor’s Cavalier and Yankee: The
Old South and American National Character or Weaks-Baxter’s Reclaiming the American Farmer: The Reinvention
of a Regional Mythology in Twentieth-Century Southern Writing.
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exemplifies his own class bias based on the mythic “cavalier” visions:
. . . yes, he was underbred. It showed like this always, your grandfather said,
in all his formal contacts with people. . . . He may have believed that your
grandfather or Judge Benbow might have done it a little more effortlessly
than he, but he could not have believed that anyone could have beat him in
knowing when to do it and how. (38)
In explaining the limits of Sutpen’s social climbing, Mr. Compson suggests that while Sutpen
may imitate the mannerisms of men who have been born into the status of the Southern
“gentleman,” he still fails to duplicate them because he has no past. In this sense, the striking
irony of Sutpen—who personifies the character traits of “yeoman”—results from his pursuit of
“cavalier” visions.
Moreover, Mr. Compson’s “mythologizing” of Sutpen’s story further obscures the falsity
of the “cavalier” ideals upon which the Southern class hierarchy bases itself. Mr. Compson
repeatedly uses terms such as “legend,” “fate,” and “destiny” to describe the history of Sutpen’s
Hundred, which dehumanize the man behind the story by transforming him into an abstraction.
Faulkner illustrates how the elder heir parallels Sutpen’s stories to those of the heroes in Greek
tragedies:
Only I have always liked to believe that he intended to name Clytie,
Cassandra, . . . to designate the presiding augur of his own disaster, and that
he just got the name wrong through a mistake natural in a man who must
have almost taught himself to read. . . . like the mask in Greek tragedy,
interchangeable not only from scene to scene, but from actor to actor . . . .
(50-51)
１３３
As he continues to recount the stories about the Sutpen family, Mr. Compson notes that he had
“always liked to believe” that Sutpen had named his illegitimate child that he begot from a slave
woman after a mythic character in Greek tragedy who foretells the inevitable disastrous end of
the family. Mr. Compson’s conjecture not only exposes his own class prejudice against Sutpen—
that he immediately assumes Sutpen should have mistaken the name because he is an underbred
and uneducated social climber—but reveals how his process of “mythologizing” Sutpen turns the
man into a character or an idea that is “interchangeable” with another, and his fall as an
inescapable fate rather than a result of a socio-historical consequence.
The haunted house of Thomas Sutpen in Mr. Compson’s imaginary past is a site of an
individual tragedy. Sutpen’s failure in his attempt to enter the privileged space of the antebellum
Southern home becomes a defeat of an individual “hero,” a personal history, while the problems
that lie behind his fall become further obscured. Examining the mythic nature of knowledge
about the South, Thadious Davis notes how Shreve’s knowledge about the South is “a result of
his melodramatic vision of the South,” which reflects to a large degree “the legend” that grew
out of the need of the South to justify its social hierarchy and system (95). Through the elder
heir’s narratives of the imaginary past home, Faulkner reveals how Mr. Compson—along the
lines of Davis’s argument—is one of the active collaborators who create these “legends” and,
thus, conceal the racial and class oppressions that are hidden behind the social system of the
South. In a similar sense, Scott Romine, in his study of the relationship between narrative forms
and the American South, suggests how the history of Southern community is “enabled by
practices of avoidance, deferral, and evasion” (3). This argument can be employed to understand
Mr. Compson’s narrative technique in the sense that his construction of the imaginary
community of the Southern past that he builds out of his stories is filled with his desires to
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“avoid,” “defer,” and “evade” the realities of his past and present home. When Mr. Compson
considers the circumstance around Bon’s death, he repeatedly points out how the various
conjectures he makes about the incident “just [do] not explain” (83). However, the elder heir
does not venture to delve into the question, but rather comes to a hasty conclusion, finishing off
his narratives claiming that “perhaps that’s it: they don’t explain and we are not supposed to
know” (83).
As he endeavors to defer any attempt to understand the cause of the fall of Sutpen’s
Hundred,—and the fall of the Southern home—Mr. Compson is able to preserve his vision of the
ideality of his imaginary home in the past. However, as the novel indicates, the imaginary past
that Mr. Compson creates through his mythologized stories does not release him from his present
tomb-like home as he continues to lead the life of a “back-looking ghost” in his dilapidating
house.
Looking into the Cracks: Rosa’s Imaginary Home
Through Rosa Coldfield, Faulkner presents another “homeless at home” figure in the
novel. The home that Rosa presents in her narratives is even more overtly connected to the past.
When Quentin visits the Coldfield house, he finds Rosa in a “dim hot airless room with the
blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers” where she is sitting in a chair like a child
with an “air of impotent and static rage” (5). Like the air “[im]prisoned in [her home] like in a
tomb,” Quentin perceives the old woman as being gravely confined in her present home (8).
Rosa’s sense of psychological displacement at her present home parallels her physical
confinement as she tells Quentin that her life “was destined to end on an afternoon in April forty-
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three years ago” and, as a living ghost, she is trapped in her father’s house, exhausting her
remaining days recollecting past events (14).
However, while Mr. Compson’s creation of the mythic past could offer him an imaginary
“at-home-ness” within his own narratives, the past that Rosa recounts is as much an unhomely
space for her as her present home is. In Mr. Compson’s narrative about Rosa’s childhood, she is
portrayed as a “Cassandralike” figure, “listening beyond closed doors” and “lurking in dim halls”
of her “grim tight little house” filled with a “grim mausoleum air” (49). Rosa does not belong to
the group of privileged inheritors like the elder and the younger Compsons. As a daughter of a
“respectable” yet poor tradesman in the antebellum South and as “an orphan a woman and a
pauper” who loses everything in the War and must lead her life with the help of anonymous
people in the community, both the past and the present homes are tomb-like spaces from which
Rosa cannot escape (15).
As a triply marginalized individual—“an orphan a woman and a pauper”—in the
American South, Rosa’s narratives and her role in the novel have been vigorously reevaluated—
especially in feminist readings—in recent years. These readings usually attempt to redeem Rosa
from many earlier critics’ charges that she is a bitter, unreliable narrator whose judgments are
completely untrustworthy.115 The space of home in these readings usually represents the “house
of the Father”—the patriarchal power that attempts to trap and erase Rosa from the grand
narrative of the South—while she endeavors to break away from the house through establishing
her own space in her narratives. However, when examining the home that Rosa creates in her
115
For instance, Minrose Gwin examines the struggle between the male narrators’ desire to silence Rosa and her
own desire to voice the feminine difference within a masculinist culture. See also John N. Duvall’s “Faulkner’s
Critics and Women: The Voice of the Community,” Susan V. Donaldson’s “Subverting History: Women, Narrative
and Patriarchy in Absalom, Absalom!”, Jenny Jennings Forest’s “The Psychic Wholeness and Corrupt Text of Rosa
Coldfield, ‘Author and Victim Too’ of Absalom, Absalom!”, Deborah Clarke’s Robbing the Mother: Women in
Faulkner or Diane Roberts’s Faulkner and Southern Womanhood for more examples of feminist approach on Rosa
Coldfield.
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stories through the relationship between the mainstream American’s “imagined home” and the
haunted space of Sutpen’s Hundred upon which this chapter focuses, Rosa’s “imaginary home”
puts her in a double position, both as the advocate and the victim of the mythic space of the past
Southern home.
On the one hand, the rise of Sutpen’s Hundred becomes a threat to Rosa’s own home
within the antebellum Southern community. While Rosa reveals as much class prejudice and
racism as Mr. Compson in her own telling of the Sutpen stories, the novel hints that the origins
of her exclusionary attitudes are somewhat different from those of the privileged heir. As their
class status is still not firmly established in the Jefferson community, in comparison to other
highly-privileged families like the Compsons or the Benbows, the Coldfields need to be more
fastidious in maintaining the clear boundaries between the insides and the outsides of the
Southern home-space. Rosa constantly aligns herself and her family with the “gentlefolks” like
the Compsons and suspects that Sutpen’s motive in his marriage to Ellen is his need for a
“respectability” which she believes her own family holds:
. . . all he would need would be Ellen’s and our father’s names on a
wedding license (or on any other patent of respectability) that people could
look at and read. . . because father knew who his father was . . . and the
people we lived among knew that we knew and we knew they knew we
knew . . . . And the very fact that he had had to choose respectability to hide
behind was proof enough . . . that what he fled from must have been some
opposite of respectability too dark to talk about. (13)
Rosa firmly believes that her family’s “respectable” name—that people “knew” her father and
his father and his father—would ensure their position within the mainstream Jefferson society.
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However, she also understands the limits of her own class status as she notes that she is not the
“daughter of a wealthy planter,” but “the daughter merely of a small store-keeper” (139).
Therefore, Sutpen’s entry into her own family provokes her apprehension for the Coldfields’
affiliation with a man who is “not even a gentleman . . . with a name which nobody ever heard
before” would not only destabilize their status within the community but also remove them even
further away from the privileged class that Rosa yearns to enter (11).
At the same time, unlike Mr. Compson, who sees the rise of Sutpen’s Hundred as a
romantic manifestation of the “yeoman legend” in the antebellum South, Rosa focuses on the
disruptive aspects of the unruly spatial orders in Sutpen’s home-space. In order to preserve her
own tenuous class status within the society, Rosa must vigorously participate in the making of
the Southern home as an exclusionary space. However, the disorderly space of Sutpen’s mansion
constantly brings a threat to the clear spatial dichotomy that Rosa endeavors to maintain. In
comparison to Mr. Compson’s romantic and triumphant account of Sutpen’s home-building,
Rosa underscores how Sutpen “tore violently” the land upon which he builds his plantation (7).
Rosa’s emphasis on the destructive nature of his home-building process discloses her own fear
about the disorder that Sutpen’s home-space may bring into her world. The signs of spatial
disorder that she finds in the Sutpen’s Hundred, such as the fighting matches that Sutpen holds at
his mansion where men of all class and the slaves get together to wrestle naked or Sutpen’s
children playing and sleeping together with their slave sister, provoke her apprehension about
how Sutpen’s home-space would interrupt the rigid class and racial hierarchies that Rosa’s
Southern home attempts to preserve.
In contrast to the inheritors of privilege who are firmly positioned within the Southern
community, Rosa’s precarious status as a poor middle-class woman leads her to fiercely
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advocate the exclusionary dichotomies of the Southern home-space.116 As a woman who lives
most of her life inside the confined space of her home, the only education that Rosa receives is
her knowledge of “how to keep house” (58). Although the idea of “keeping house” literally
indicates the domestic duties that were usually allocated to women, the phrase could easily lend
itself to another level of meaning in relation to the ideas of tradition and norms. In fact, Rosa’s
entire narrative is her testimony of how she endeavored to “keep her house” from the spatial
disorder that the space of Sutpen’s Hundred brings into the normative Southern home-space.
Through the relationship between Rosa’s Southern home and Sutpen’s Hundred,
Faulkner indicates how the problem of the normative Southern home-space lies in the fact that its
inhabitants—especially those who are not born into the privileged class—are forced to protect
the boundaries which would afford entitlement to the space to a few select individuals while
rejecting and alienating the rest. The trouble arises from the fact that the nature of the logic that
sets these boundaries is ambiguous at best and mostly baseless. Moreover, as Sutpen finally
becomes the “wealthiest man” in Jefferson and is “accepted” into the community because he
“obviously had too much money now to be rejected,” the class boundaries, which Rosa firmly
believed to be grounded upon “respectability” and “name,” are disrupted as well (59).
On the other hand, the novel also indicates how the preservation and disintegration of
Rosa’s Southern home are linked to the rise and fall of Sutpen’s Hundred. While Rosa believes
that her family’s alliance with Sutpen caused the downfall of her home, she cannot fully
comprehend the motive behind her father’s agreement in the alliance. However, the
interconnection between the two home-spaces and their eventual downfalls are intimately related
116
In discussing the spatial disorder of Sutpen’s Hundred, Rosa constantly notes how members of the lower class
like Wash Jones can enter the mansion through its front entrance. Rosa’s remark echoes Quentin and Shreve’s
retelling of General Compson’s story about the “balloon faced nigger” at Tidewater mansion who tells the young
Sutpen to use the back door (191). Again, in both cases, it is not the privileged Southerner themselves but those who
occupy the insecure positions in the Southern home-space who endeavor to impose rigid spatial segregation.
１３９
to the problem of the Southern economic system. Unlike General Compson, who—as a
privileged member of the upper-class, securely positioned in the Southern society—can distance
himself as a generous supporter and a partial on-looker in the process of Sutpen’s home-building,
Mr. Coldfield must actively engage in the process because Sutpen’s “big house and the position
and state” can bring the advancement of his own social status (43). As a woman who “[cannot]
count money,” Rosa is unable to comprehend the possibility that her father—who she believes to
be an example of the honest, industrious, and pious gentlemen of the South—would be involved
in fraudulent financial dealings with Sutpen, nor can she conceive of any of his earlier crimes in
business (63). Mr. Compson—as a man who is well-informed about the economic system of the
South—notes that Mr. Coldfield must have committed “close trading or dishonesty” to make his
living (“in a country such as Mississippi was then”) (68). He assumes that Mr. Coldfield
ultimately helped Sutpen in his illicit business to complete his mansion, a move which would in
turn help Mr. Coldfield to sustain his own home as well.
On one level, Rosa’s approach toward the downfall of her past-home mirrors that of Mr.
Compson’s:
. . . as though there were a fatality and curse on our family . . . . Yes, fatality
and curse on the South and on our family as though because some ancestor
of ours had elected to establish his descent in a land primed for fatality and
already cursed with it, . . . . I used to wonder what our father or his father
could have done before he married our mother that Ellen and I would have
to expiate and neither of us alone be sufficient; what crime committed that
would leave our family cursed to be instruments not only for that man’s
destruction, but for our own. (16-17)
１４０
Explaining her family’s recent tragic decline, Rosa speculates that the “land” that her ancestors
elected to establish her Southern home must have been fatally “cursed.” Similar to Mr. Compson,
Rosa illustrates Sutpen’s fall as a “devil’s fate” or as an inescapable “curse” and considers her
family’s association with Sutpen as a divine malediction (111).
However, Rosa’s use of mythic language in her recounting of the disintegration of her
past home is not so much her attempt to obscure the problematic aspects of her home—as Mr.
Compson does—but rather her effort to understand the inexplicable sides of her home. Because
Rosa can neither comprehend the arbitrary nature of the social and racial hierarchy nor
understand the need for morally compromising actions in order to survive in the Southern
economic system, she cannot fully comprehend the logical grounds for her family’s association
with Sutpen’s home-building which, ultimately, brought her home’s collapse. In contrast to Mr.
Compson, who uses the rhetoric of fate and destiny in order to avoid answering the things that
“cannot be explained” without facing and exposing the problems of his past home-space, Rosa
uses the languages of myth and tragedy in her attempt to explain the things that she cannot
understand. Still, due to her lack of critical knowledge about how the space of the Southern
home operates, Rosa’s own narration about her home also remains abstract.
While the privileged heir’s mythologized account of Sutpen’s home-building obscures
and romanticizes the histories of violence and oppression that are hidden under the idyllic
Southern home-space, the relationship between Rosa’s middle-class home-space and the rise and
fall of Sutpen’s Hundred reveals how the Southern home-space exists both as antagonistic to and
integral for different groups of domestic “others.” In this sense, Rosa’s unhomely past home
exposes the cracks hidden under the smooth façade of the privileged heir’s imaginary home.
Moreover, Rosa’s imaginary home-building also provides a possibility of change in her
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fatalistic approach towards her past home as she recounts her own experience of entering the
space of Sutpen’s haunted mansion. When she visits Sutpen’s Hundred during the War, the
person she encounters inside the mansion is neither Sutpen nor his legitimate heir but the
“Sutpen coffee-colored face” of Clytie (112). At first, Rosa perceives Clytie as a dehumanized
figure—the “cold Cerberus,” the “sphinx face”—and rebuffs her approach. However, when
Clytie calls Rosa in her given name and touches her body, it brings an indistinct new insight to
her understanding of the Southern home-space:
. . . with a shocking impact too soon and too quick to be mere amazement
and outrage at that black arresting and untimorous hand on my white
woman’s flesh. Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh
which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate
channels of decorous ordering . . . . let flesh touch flesh, and watch the fall
of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color . . . . (115)
The physical contact between Rosa and the racial “other” suddenly introduces a human quality to
the black woman’s presence, and Rosa finds herself standing with Clytie “joined by . . . a fierce
rigid umbilical cord, twin sistered to the fell darkness which had produced her” (115). On the
one hand, Clytie’s touch provokes the disruption of the “decorous ordering” and the “eggshell
shibboleth of caste and color” that Rosa endeavored to safeguard within her Southern homespace. At the same time, however, Rosa recalls how all throughout her “warped and Spartan”
childhood she was taught “not only to instinctively fear her and what she was, but to shun the
very objects which she had touched” (115).117 This instance shows how social discipline
117
Rosa’s rendition of her confrontation on the stairs with Clytie has received a lot of critical attention, most of
which focused on the problem of cross-racial female relationships in the antebellum South. For instance, Gwin
argues that “Clytie on the stairs of the Father’s House embodies Rosa’s complicity in the cultural text” and, thus,
Rosa’s “denial of Clytie” in this scene and “the concomitant show of alliance with white patriarchy, is precisely
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becomes embedded in individual’s mind and becomes an “instinct” regardless of the tenuousness
of its logic.
Clytie represents the spatial disorder that the space of Sutpen’s Hundred brings into
Rosa’s “decorous” Southern home—she is the “nigger” who plays with and sleeps in the bed of
her white half-sister and mistress. At the same time, she is also the representation of the
“domestic other” that the space of Sutpen’s Hundred exploits and oppresses—she is still one of
the slaves in Sutpen’s plantation. In this sense, the face of Clytie that Rosa confronts within the
haunted space of Sutpen’s mansion becomes the figuration of the uncanny that Rosa finds inside
her Southern home-space. She is the unfamiliar that threatens the familiar order of Rosa’s
Southern home-space; and, simultaneously, the familiar face within Rosa’s home which reveals
its unfamiliarity—the hidden histories of racial oppression and violence.
Breaking Inside the Haunted House: Quentin’s Imagined Past
Despite his physical migration to the North, Quentin’s Southern home constantly haunts
the younger heir’s mind. Throughout the novel, Faulkner repeatedly describes how the letter that
Mr. Compson sends to his son at Harvard carries up the “dead summer twilight—the wisteria,
the cigar-smell, the fireflies—attenuated up from Mississippi and into this strange room, across
this strange iron New England snow,” recreating the scene from his home on the night before
Quentin leaves the South (142). The announcement of Rosa’s death in Mr. Compson’s letter
reinitiates Quentin’s own reflection on his home:
—the letter bringing with it that very September evening itself (and he soon
what leads the young Rosa to position herself as the object within the realm of the proper” (156-57). See also, Davis
and Andrea Dimino for detailed discussions of the “stair” scene.
１４３
needing, required, to say ‘No, neither aunt, cousin, nor uncle, Rosa. Miss
Rosa Coldfield, an old lady that died young of outrage in 1866 one summer’
and then Shreve said, ‘You mean she was no kin to you, no kin to you at all,
that there was actually one Southern Bayard or Guinevere who was no kin
to you? then what did she die for?’ and that not Shreve’s first time,
nobody’s first time in Cambridge since September . . . . (143)
The voices that come to Quentin from their Southern homes via these narratives figuratively
bring the home to Quentin’s room in the North and, thus, convey Quentin’s mind back to the
South. The story within the letter also evokes Quentin’s need to explain his home to his friends,
once again. For outsiders like Shreve, the news of Rosa’s death generates their curiosity about
the South since they cannot understand why Mr. Compson should write to his son about the
death of a woman who had no apparent relation to the family.
Although Quentin is the younger heir of an individual Southern family, Faulkner
describes how he is also the heir to the entire Southern community; Quentin’s body is an “empty
hall,” a “commonwealth,” and a “barracks” within which the “back-looking ghosts” of the South
congregate (9). Accordingly, Quentin not only inherits the physical house of the Compson family,
but his own body becomes the representative home of the American South. In other words,
Quentin becomes the receptacle of all the “heritages” that the South bequeaths to its descendants
through the legendary stories about the Sutpens.
Mr. Compson’s letter announcing Rosa’s death frames and provides a context for two
critical developments in Quentin’s understanding of his home. The letter brings Quentin back to
the night before his departure—“that very September evening”—when Mr. Compson had passed
on his own version of the stories about Sutpen’s Hundred (143). At the same time, Quentin also
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remembers how—on the very evening—he had “walked out of his father’s talking at last” and
headed to Sutpen’s haunted mansion accompanied by Rosa (143). Consequently, the letter
invites Quentin back to his father’s narratives as well as releases him from his father’s voice by
initiating the younger heir’s own recounting of the Sutpen stories.
On the one hand, Mr. Compson’s letter allows Quentin to realize the centrality of his
father’s voice in his own re-telling of the Southern home; as he reads the letter, Quentin feels as
if his father is physically present in his room. Shortly after Quentin stops reading the letter with
Mr. Compson’s words, “I do not know that either,” the father’s voice seems to disappear from
the novel (143). From that point where Mr. Compson’s knowledge ends, Quentin and Shreve
take over the story and begin to detail the history of Sutpen’s Hundred in their own voices.
Nevertheless, the novel indicates the persistent presence of the elder heir’s voice in the stories
that Quentin and Shreve tell each other.118 As the representative voice of the outsiders, Shreve
attempts to come up with his own understanding of the South by recapitulating the Sutpen stories
that Quentin had told him earlier. Listening to Shreve’s voice, however, Quentin notices that
Shreve “sounds just exactly like father” and claims that he already “ha[s] heard,” “ha[s] had to
listened to” and “ha[s] been told” the stories “too much, too long” (149, 171, 173, 174).
Furthermore, Shreve also points out how Quentin’s own narration “sounds like [his] old man”
(215). Shreve additionally notes that the existing versions of the Sutpen story must sound
exhausted for his roommate:
But you were not listening, because you knew it all already, had learned,
absorbed it already without the medium of speech somehow from having
been born and living beside it, with it, as children will and seem do: so that
118
Doreen Fowler points out the virtual disappearance of the phrase “Father said” from the text, which signals
Quentin and Shreve’s taking over the narration (112). Fowler further notes on the lingering of Mr. Compson’s voice
in the form of the “sloped fine hand” in the emblematic letter (144).
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what your father was saying did not tell you anything so much as it struck,
word by word, the resonant strings of remembering. You had been here
before, seen these graves more than once . . . just as you had seen the old
house too, been familiar with how it would look before you even saw it . . . .
(175)
As both men point to the fact that the stories about Sutpen’s Hundred have always been present
in Quentin’s life from the day he was born, they note on how Quentin would have “been familiar
with how it would look before [he] even saw it” with his own eyes. In other words, Sutpen’s
haunted house has already existed in Quentin’s mind in distinct form molded by the various
voices within Quentin’s mind even before he visits the house himself.
Consequently, Quentin’s understanding of the meaning that the space of Sutpen’s
Hundred holds until this point is not so much triggered by his own experiences but from the
stories that his predecessors have bestowed upon him. Moreover, by pointing out that Shreve
sounds “exactly like his father” when he repeats Quentin’s stories, Quentin acknowledges that
the pre-established stories about Sutpen’s Hundred that he passed on to Shreve up to this point
are mostly the versions that he received from his father. In other words, Quentin’s recognition of
Mr. Compson’s voice in the stories that Shreve recites to him puts him and Shreve in similar
positions—both as recipients of the stories of the much mythologized Southern home that Mr.
Compson has created. Accordingly, the “old house” that Quentin should be “familiar” with
“before [he] even [sees] it” is the imagined version of Sutpen’s house that his father has created
for him. Ultimately, the fictional home that Quentin—who is “born and bred in the deep
South”—grows up with is not so different from the romantic and sentimentalized versions of the
Southern home—the stories of “Southern Bayard or Guinevere”—that Shreve is familiar with as
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an outsider of that community (6).
On the other hand, Mr. Compson’s letter brings up another voice that summons Quentin
on the very evening which, eventually, causes him to “walk out of his father’s talking.” In
addition to Quentin’s genealogy, Mr. Compson notes that the “real reason” why Rosa should
choose Quentin as the elected listener of her story is because she needs someone to accompany
her when she visits Sutpen’s haunted house that evening (9). Indeed, Quentin’s own visit to
Sutpen’s Hundred marks a turning point in his understandings of the relationship between
Sutpen’s haunted mansion and his own present home-space.
Critics have frequently read Quentin’s role in the novel—as a “barrack filled with
stubborn back-looking ghosts”—as that of a passive listener.119 Yet, the switch in the authorial
control between Mr. Compson and Quentin takes place when Quentin begins to reflect on his
own visit to Sutpen’s Hundred with Rosa. In his examination of the relationship between the
fathers and the sons in the novel, John T. Irwin discusses the father and son’s struggle for
narrative control in the novel:120
The event that destroyed Sutpen’s attempt to found a dynasty is the same
event that began the decline of the Compson family—the Civil War closed
off the virgin space and the time of origins, so that the antebellum South
became in the minds of postwar Southerners that debilitating “golden age
119
For instance, John T. Matthews, in his examination of Faulkner’s narrative frames, claims that Quentin’s
“relation to narrative confines him both to the margins of life and the margins of the story” (72). In her recent
reading of Quentin’s role in the novel, Gretchen Martin expands upon Matthews’s characterization of Quentin as a
“largely silent witness” (72), and contends that Quentin’s “inability to escape his role as narratee and the distressing
nature of the information he receives” in Absalom, Absalom! “leads to the psychological impasse that compels his
suicide” in The Sound and the Fury (48).
120
Taking a psychoanalytic approach to the novel, Irwin examines the relationship between narrator and story and
argues that “Quentin seems to move from a passive role to an active role in the narrative repetition of the past” as he
and Shreve “begin their imaginative reconstruction of the story” in the second half of the novel (114). As he
journeys “into the dark, womblike Sutpen mansion, a journey back into the past,” Quentin “learn[s] more about the
events that occurred before he was born than either his father or grandfather knew” (119).
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and lost world” in comparison with which the present is inadequate. . . .
what is at work in Quentin’s struggle to bring the story of the Sutpens under
control is the question of . . . whether that repetition which in life Quentin
has experienced as a compulsive fate can be transformed in narration,
through an act of the will, into a power, a mastery of time. Indeed, Rosa
Coldfield suggests to Quentin when she first involves him in the story of the
Sutpens that becoming an author represents an alternative to repeating his
father’s life in the decayed world of the postwar South. (Irwin 112-13)
Although Irwin’s Freudian approach focuses on the oedipal relationship between the fathers and
the sons in the novel, his claim about how Quentin’s struggle for narrative control could release
him from his “compulsive fate” of repeating the lives of his father and grandfather is instructive
in considering the difference between the father’s and the son’s imaginative approaches to the
past Southern home. In this sense, Quentin’s visit to Sutpen’s haunted mansion initiates his own
creation of the past Southern home, one which differs from the romantic and fatalistic stories of
his father.
As Quentin takes over the narrative, he begins to create his own “imaginary” Southern
home-space that directly repudiates the “mythic” homes that Mr. Compson and Rosa presented.
The letter brings Quentin back to the night when he finally visits the haunted mansion with Rosa
who is carrying “all the keys which the house possessed” (144). Like the keys that Rosa carried,
Quentin and Shreve’s imaginative recreation of Sutpen’s Hundred opens up different histories
that the haunted house holds which have not been revealed thus far. In this critical scene,
Faulkner lays out an interesting backdrop by having Quentin place Mr. Compson’s letter opened
in front of him throughout his conversations with Shreve. The author describes Quentin as if he
１４８
is not talking to Shreve but “talking apparently (if to anything) to the letter lying on the open
book on the table between his hands” when he tells his version of the Sutpen stories to Shreve
(210). In this sense, Quentin not only “walks out of” his father’s narratives about the past
Southern home, but “talks back” to the stories that he had been told thus far.
First, Quentin’s imaginary past home challenges the “mythologized” version of Mr.
Compson’s Southern home. While Mr. Compson’s story of the construction of Sutpen’s Hundred
depicts Thomas Sutpen’s “rise” as an exemplary self-made Southern gentleman, Quentin, in
contrast, describes Sutpen’s entry into Southern society as his “fall.” The two men create a
narrative in which Sutpen “[falls] into” the Southern society where he learns “the difference not
only between white men and black ones, but . . . between white men and men . . .” (185-86).
Their narratives also comment on how the drastic difference between the Tidewater mansion
with its “barricaded and protected” opulence and Sutpen’s own home with its “rotten log walls”
and “sagging roof” launches the man’s obsessive home-building project (193-94). After
experiencing the rebuff of the Tidewater mansion, Sutpen vows that no one will be turned away
from its door. Therefore, Quentin’s narrative traces how, in the process of his fall, Sutpen
gradually indoctrinates himself with class and racial hierarchies that serve as the foundation of
the Southern home-space. At the same time, as the younger heir illustrates how Sutpen’s
meritocratic “innocence” fails him to gain entrance into the world of privilege in the South, he
contests his father’s explanation of Sutpen’s failure as that of a tragic or ill-fated individual.
Moreover, Quentin and Shreve’s version of Sutpen’s home-building process is far from
the romanticized stories that Mr. Compson imparts. The younger heir explicitly brings in the
details of “violence and injustice and bloodshed and all the satanic lusts of human greed and
cruelty” related to the histories of slavery, colonialism, and the oppressions of the social others
１４９
through which Sutpen attains the means to build his mansion (206). In this way, the “fall” of
Sutpen’s Hundred after the War is, once again, by no means, the tragic undoing of an individual
hero or an inevitable “fate” as Mr. Compson suggests, but instead a retribution for crimes and
wrongdoings that were committed in the construction of the Southern home-space.
Second, Quentin avoids the mythologizing that Rosa succumbs to in her account of her
past home by explaining the aspects of the Southern home that she fails to understand. While
Rosa cannot comprehend the underlying motives that bring her father and Sutpen together and,
thus, tries to explain it as a tragic and inexplicable fate that was brought upon her family,
Quentin and Shreve carefully describe the circumstances that lead Mr. Coldfield to his tragic end.
Although, Mr. Coldfield endeavors to recuperate his moral conscience by rejecting the money he
earned with Sutpen through illicit business, the War eventually brings down both their homes.
Unlike Sutpen, who determines to maintain his plantation regardless of the immorality through
which he garnered his means, Mr. Coldfield refuses to preserve his home and locks himself up in
it to die. Quentin’s imaginative recreation of Mr. Coldfield’s final thoughts reveals the
problematic nature of the economic system that his Southern home-space is based upon:
. . . that when he saw that it had worked it was his conscience he hated, not
Sutpen—his conscience and the land, the country which had created his
conscience and then offered the opportunity to have made all that money to
the conscience which it had created, which could do nothing but decline;
hated that country so much that he was even glad when he saw it drifting
closer and closer to a doomed and fatal war; . . . the South . . . was now
paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of
stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral
１５０
brigandage. (214)
Unlike Mr. Compson, who portrays the decline of the Southern home-space as the South’s tragic
fate, Mr. Coldfield—as Quentin re-imagines him—comprehends the impending doom of his
home as the moral consequence of the sin of the entire social and economic system upon which
his own home is established. In that sense, despite the fact that the disintegration of the
Coldfields’ home begins with Mr. Coldfield’s affiliation with Sutpen’s illicit business, Quentin’s
imaginary narrative expounds that it is not a matter of an individual sin, but the immoral
foundation of Southern society that eventually brings down the individual homes and the entire
home-space of the South.
Quentin’s “demythologizing” of the imaginary Southern home-space culminates as he
finally recounts the night of his visit to Sutpen’s haunted mansion. Quentin’s visit to Sutpen’s
Hundred echoes Rosa’s own prior visit which resulted in her critical encounter with Clytie.
Whereas Rosa had found an uncanny familiarity in Clytie’s coffee-colored face in her earlier
visit, Quentin confronts other ghostly faces inside the mansion. As he breaks into the haunted
house with a hatchet that Rosa offers him, Quentin—the representative privileged young heir of
the present Southern home—faces two other hidden heirs of the past Southern home-space. The
two ghostly heirs that Quentin encounters represent the secrets—or, in Mr. Compson’s words,
“the skeletons in the closet”—of the history of the Southern home that all the earlier voices
inside Quentin’s mind endeavored to keep concealed inside the haunted house (9). Whereas Jim
Bond—the illegitimate “scion, the heir, the apparent (though not obvious)”—embodies the
enslaved, the colonized, the cast out, and the oppressed individuals of the past Southern home,
Henry—the last legitimate heir of the house— is the embodiment of what becomes of the heirs
themselves when they ultimately fail to recognize those domestic others (304).
１５１
Consequently, the failure to comprehend the subjectivities of the “others” in the Southern
home-building process and the “moral retribution” that the South receives in the form of their
defeat in the War leaves the space of the Southern home haunted by its ghostly heirs. The
Decoration Day that Shreve describes on which the old Confederate veterans “doddering” in
their “spurious bronze medals that never meant anything to begin with” and the “chosen young
girls in white dresses” faithfully recreate the night before the Confederate soldiers first marched
out to the War fifty years ago, reveals the unending “mythologizing” of the Old South (270).
Like the old veterans’ “spurious medals,” the various voices’ repeated recreation of the romantic
and mythologized past home-space is another attempt to keep its ghostly heirs hidden away from
the eyes of their present heirs. Thus, even when he finally breaks into the haunted mansion
himself, Quentin confesses that he believed that “[h]e knew that the room was empty” because
the “echo of his voice had told him that” (303). However, Quentin’s immediate discovery of the
“worn coffee-colored face staring at him” in the “empty” house and his subsequent encounters
with the two heirs inside the house ultimately result in his realization of the hidden histories of
the past Southern home (304).
Quentin’s encounter with the ghostly heirs of Sutpen’s Hundred awakens him from the
false “at-home-ness” that the existing narratives of the imaginary past Southern homes instilled
in him. After his own confrontations with the hidden heirs in the mansion, Quentin remarks on
how “waking and sleeping . . . would be the same forever as long as he lived” for he will be
haunted by the nightmarish presence of the other heirs (307). Ultimately, Quentin’s discovery of
the ghostly heirs explicitly elicits his own unhomely feelings towards his present home-space.
Running away from Sutpen’s haunted mansion, Quentin returns to his “dark familiar house” and
attempts to comfort himself. However, since his confrontation with the ghostly heirs, the
１５２
privileged younger heir of the South confesses that he would have “[n]evermore of peace,
Nevermore of peace. Nevermore Nevermore Nevermore” (307). As Shreve points out, despite
the efforts to keep the histories of the domestic others hidden, Jim Bond’s presence would
constantly haunt the space of the Southern home in the present: “Of course you can’t catch him
and you don’t even always see him and you never will be able to use him. But you’ve got him
there still” (304).
Through his recognition of the ghostly “other” heirs inside the haunted space of the past
Southern home, Quentin is finally able to escape from the voices of the “back-looking ghosts”
that resonate in his “commonwealth” of a body. Furthermore, Quentin and Shreve’s collaborative
construction of their own imaginative version of the Sutpen stories affirms their interconnections
with the past regardless of the different relationships they have with the South. The image of the
Mississippi River as the “geologic umbilical” connecting Quentin—as the privileged insider of
the American South—and Shreve—as an outsider of both the South and the nation itself—
confirms that the idea of the past Southern home and an individual’s responsibility to understand
the histories behind it surpass time and space (212).
As the two men continue to recreate their own version of the past Southern home through
the history of Sutpen’s Hundred, their narrative identities meld so that the source of the
information is no longer traceable back to a single person, but to a collaboration. In the end,
Shreve also undergoes certain changes in his attitude towards the Southern home as he
transforms from a nonchalant audience to a fervent inquirer. Through their recognitions that
anything that happens in history should have an effect like a “pebble’s watery echo” which
endlessly spreads out to other pools in time and space, Quentin and Shreve note that their
reconstructions of the past also create their present, raising the narrative’s stakes from that of an
１５３
individual’s history into an emblematic history of the South and of the nation (215).
Faulkner presents two distinct aspects of the relationship between the younger heir and
his Southern home in Absalom, Absalom! First, whereas the privileged Americans in the
previous chapters endeavor to understand their home-spaces by examining the relationship
between the inheritors and the outcasts of their own homes, Quentin—in his attempt to explain
his home—must recall the history of Sutpen’s Hundred—the home-space which eludes the
insider/outsider dichotomy. Still, the novel gradually reveals how the history of Sutpen’s
Hundred becomes the history of the South and, ultimately, the story of Quentin’s own present
home. Through his accounts of the Sutpen family and the South, Quentin begins to trace the
origin of the present-day sense of homelessness he suffers despite the everlasting and haunting
presence of his home within his mind. Second, while Mr. Compson and Rosa narrate two distinct
home-spaces—their own imaginary past homes and Sutpen’s haunted mansion—in order to
explain their current state of homelessness, the stories that Quentin recounts are a collection of
these multiple voices that tell the history of Sutpen’s haunted house. It is only by combining the
different voices that resonate within him that Quentin is able to explain his home.
In her examination of Southern literature, Lucinda H. MacKathen argues that the “grand
narrative of the South is not the historical South, but the narrative myth created out of an image
of arcadia” (9). MacKathen further suggests that the fact that the narrators in Absalom, Absalom!
do not have any direct blood relation to Sutpen allows them “to develop Sutpen more directly as
an ‘imaginative construct’ and to show more convincingly the motivations for the narrators’
obsession with the past” (164). None of the imaginary homes that the narrators create in the
novel can be regarded as the authentic Southern home-space of the past since most of the
accounts come from their speculations about the histories of the South. Faulkner repeatedly
１５４
underscores how little “fact” the narrators have about the past events and reveals how much of
their narratives are constructions pieced together from “rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and
telling” that may not be related (250). In their telling of the history of Sutpen’s Hundred, the
narrators inadvertently reveal their own stances toward their homes in the American South.
Each narrator’s search for home in the past in Absalom, Absalom! can be compared to
those efforts of the migrant writers in Rushdie’s essay. In other words, the narrators’ retellings of
the history of Sutpen’s Hundred take forms which resemble the “non-stop self-regeneration” of
storytelling that Rushdie’s migrant writers perform (16). At the same time, while Rushdie puts
equal weight on both the positive and negative effects of the imaginary recreation of the
individual’s past home, Faulkner puts more emphasis on the danger that the “mythification” of
the one’s past home could obscure the problematic elements of their histories.
The imaginative creation of Mr. Compson’s past home achieved by recounting the
Sutpen stories provides him an alternative space of happiness and ideality; however, Mr.
Compson’s imaginary home also presents the danger of obscuring history by mythologizing
one’s past. Rosa’s narrative begins with another myth-making of the Old South. Yet, Faulkner
presents the possibility of a shift in Rosa’s imaginary home-building through her encounter with
the uncanny face of the domestic “other” inside Sutpen’s haunted mansion. Unlike Mr. Compson,
who endeavors to impose his own understanding—the “correct narrative”—of Sutpen’s haunted
house on his son, Rosa tells Quentin that she “will tell [him] what [Sutpen] did and let [him] be
the judge” (139). By accompanying Quentin in her penetration into Sutpen’s Hundred, Rosa not
only attempts to release herself from her own ghostly state, but also helps the younger heir to
explore the past Southern home by himself. In one sense, Quentin’s final encounter with the
hidden heirs of the Southern home-space intensifies his sense of homelessness. At the same time,
１５５
however, through his efforts to “demythologize” the existing narratives about his past home, the
privileged younger heir is finally able to free himself from the voices of “back-looking ghosts”
and embrace the unhomeliness of his own home.
１５６
Conclusion: Diasporic Consciousness at Home
In her comprehensive study of home in British and American fictions, Roberta
Rubenstein notes how the idea of home involves not only the physical or geographical location
but also the sentimental and emotional energies which make the space comfortable. The
particular kind of “diasporic consciousness” which I examine in this dissertation differs from the
typical notion of diaspora in the existing studies. While the conventional discussions on diaspora
mostly focus on the domestic or national others who are geo-politically displaced from their
homes, I examine those who are entitled to their privileged homes in the United States. Still, the
privileged American’s recognition of the uncanny presence of the “other” in his own home
results in his psychological displacement which, in turn, transforms his once idyllic home into a
space of haunting. In this sense, the space of the privileged American home that the “homeless at
home” figures occupy can be read as another distinctive site of displacement. The motif of
haunting which disrupts the otherwise comfortable home provokes the feeling of displacement
for the privileged Americans and triggers their psychological, and sometimes physical,
wanderings within the boundaries of the nation. Accordingly, the common themes of the haunted
house and the presence of the ghostly stranger within the privileged American home-space in the
novels that I examine provide a link between the idea of the “uncanny” in American gothic
literature and the “unhomeliness” of the home-space in the contemporary diasporic
consciousness.
The study of the “homeless at home” figure reveals how the diasporic mode of existence
or the trope of displacement can not only work as a critical tool for the minorities or outcasts of
the American home-space, but also become a means for the dominant Americans in their selfcritique of the myth of the American home. Each novel presents similar and yet distinct instances
１５７
of how the privileged heir’s experience of displacement can lead to his critical distancing from
his own home.
In his first “domestic” novel, Pierre; or the Ambiguities, Herman Melville presents the
possibility of an unconventional form of diasporic consciousness that some mainstream
Americans during the mid-nineteenth century experienced. Pierre Glendinning’s discovery of a
“stranger’s face” within his home prompts his psychic displacement at home and his eventual
rejection of his privileged position as the heir of Saddle Meadows. On the one hand, Pierre’s
particular sense of homelessness corresponds with the diasporic experience of social minorities
as his psychological wanderings provoke his physical migration. At the same time, in contrast to
the diasporic experience of conventional migrants, who feel displaced since they never occupy
an elite or mainstream position in the American home, Pierre’s diasporic consciousness grows as
he begins to critically distance himself from his position of privilege. As a “form of picking a
quarrel” with the space of Saddle Meadows and the history of violence and oppression it
represents, Pierre actively acknowledges and embraces the face of the “outcast and the stranger”
and ultimately joins their state of homelessness. Pierre’s voluntary migration is also significant in
the sense that it endeavors to resist any fixed form of dwelling, and thereby, suggests a protonomadic form of existence in the antebellum American.
Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood; or the Hidden Self presents the post-Reconstruction
American society where the problems of the American home-space had become much more
visible. Accordingly, the existing criticism’s general focus on the troubled space of African
American homes in the novel has mostly neglected or oversimplified Hopkins’s staging of the
white American homes in the novel. However, this dissertation examines how Hopkins’s
illustrations of the privileged Anglo-American characters’ relationship to their home-space in the
１５８
novel could complicate the notions of home and being “at home” in whatever socio-political
positions they occupy in American society. Through the constant pairing of the white elite
Americans with the African American domestic others in their relationship to the mainstream
American home-space, Of One Blood reveals how the heirs and the outcasts of the dominant
American home are intricately related to each other. On the one hand, the sense of being
homeless at home provokes the African American protagonist to launch a physical migration to
Africa. And yet, the hidden “homesickness” of the post-Reconstruction dominant American
home that Hopkins exposes through the excavation of the ancient African home results in the
psychological displacement of the privileged white Americans themselves. The “unhomely”
home of the elite white Americans at the end of the novel echoes Avtar Brah’s “diaspora space”
where the mutual relationship between the “insider” and the “outsider” is integral to the insider’s
sense of being. Consequently, the domestic outcast’s sense of homelessness renders it impossible
for the privileged American heirs to feel “at home.” The critical neglect of the white American
home in Of One Blood assumes the white characters’ “at-home-ness” in the postbellum
American society as inherent, and puts the black and white Americans in dichotomized positions
as the outsiders and the insiders of the American domestic space. However, by re-examining the
space of the privileged Anglo-American home in the novel, this chapter reveals how its heir and
the domestic other maintain mutually interconnected relationships within the American homespace.
William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! spans the historical periods of the previous two
novels. Thomas Sutpen and General Compson’s antebellum Jefferson, Mississippi coexists with
Pierre Glendinning’s New York, while Mr. Compson and Quentin’s South after the Civil War is
contemporaneous with Reuel, Aubrey, and Charlie’s New England. Like Melville and Hopkins,
１５９
Faulkner leaves no one indubitably feeling “at home” in their own homes at the end of the novel.
However, while Melville and Hopkins trace the transformation of the privileged Americans’
once “idyllic” and “luxurious” homes into haunted spaces once the heirs recognize the ghostly
presence of the socially repressed others within their own homes, the privileged homes in
Absalom, Absalom! are already gothic spaces of haunting. While most of critical discussions on
home in the novel focus on Sutpen’s Hundred as the representative antebellum Southern home
which is usually regarded as a distinct space in American history, I focus on the manifestation of
the “imaginary” homes that the three mainstream American narrators build in their retelling of
the accounts of Sutpen’s haunted mansion. The dichotomy between the “privileged home” and
the “haunted home” is extremely complex in Absalom, Absalom! as the haunted mansion of
Thomas Sutpen is not simply the home-space of the social outcasts; nor is it the privileged home
of an heir which gradually transforms into a space of haunting. Rather, Sutpen’s Hundred is a
space that constantly disrupts the clear spatial dichotomies of the Jefferson community. At the
same time, the distinct meanings that the space of Sutpen’s Hundred embodies are integral in
each mainstream American’s creation of their own imaginary homes in the novel. Each
narrator’s search for home in the past in Absalom, Absalom! can be compared to those efforts of
the contemporary migrant writers that Salman Rushdie notes in his essay. At the same time,
while Rushdie puts equal weight on both the positive and negative effects of the imaginary
recreation of the individual’s past home, Faulkner puts more emphasis on the danger that the
“mythification” of the one’s past home could obscure the problematic elements of their histories.
While the concepts of freedom and constraint around the American home-space hitherto
have been discussed as contesting ideas, literary texts about the “homelessness at home” figure
can offer unique and unexamined points of entry for an analysis of these contested values.
１６０
Accordingly, this dissertation can provide interventions both in the discourse of “homelessness”
in American literature and in the studies of migration and diaspora. First, by emphasizing the
agencies of the “homeless at home” figures in their creation of complicated individual identities
in the United States, this project expands the scope of discussions around the American homespace and its inhabitants. Second, by showing that diasporic consciousness can be felt by not
only geo-political migrants, but also those who are native to a home-space, my study of the
“homeless at home” figure opens up the constricted notion of diaspora. Along with the emphasis
on the importance of looking at the heterogenous aspects of the diaspora, the texts that I examine
should bring new insights into the psychological and social impacts of the migrant’s diasporic
experiences on the natives. Moreover, by identifying the “displaced” privileged American’s state
of mind as another distinctive form of diasporic consciousness, I attempt to problematize the
categories of “we” and “others” in diaspora studies.
The tradition of American literature which focuses on privileged Anglo-American
subjects is still distinct from the body of literature which takes the minorities of American
society as its subject. My reading of these texts—which suggests that a non-conventional
diasporic consciousness may be akin to though not equivalent to the consciousness of
conventional diasporic subjects—can provide a link that would reveal the continuities between
the domestic outcasts and the privileged Americans in their experiencing of diasporic
consciousness in modern American society, and thus, will confirm a certain affinity rather than
polarity between them.
１６１
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