Although Quentin most often refers to it generically as the "West Indies" (192) and Shreve flippantly refers to it as "Porto Rico or Haiti or wherever it was" (239), the place to which Sutpen goes to accomplish the first step in his design is the island of Haiti, as the Chronology and the Genealogy at the end of the novel make clear.
Quentin Compson assumes the first Sutpen to arrive in the new world traveled on a "ship from the Old Bailey" (180). The Old Bailey in London has been the site of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales since the 16th century. A great many of North America's early colonists had been convicted of crimes in England, and were shipped out of the country as part of their sentence, but the idea that Sutpen's ancestors were transported criminals seems to be entirely Quentin's.
Although Quentin most often refers to it generically as the "West Indies" (192) and Shreve flippantly refers to it as "Porto Rico or Haiti or wherever it was" (239), the place to which Sutpen goes to accomplish the first step in his design is the island of Haiti, as the Chronology and the Genealogy at the end of Absalom! make clear.
The Coldfield family is originally from Virginia (11), and "Richmond" is one of the cultural capitals of the Old South (188), but the most significant "Virginia" in the novel is the "nest of Tidewater plantations" (195) located in the "slack lowlands about the mouth of the James River" (178). This location includes "Jamestown," the British colony where "the first Sutpen" in the new world landed (180). It is also the place where Thomas Sutpen discovers and loses what the novel calls his "innocence" (178).
The novel's account of the way the Sutpen family "fell" from the mountains in western Virginia (180) to "the slack lowlands about the mouth of the James River" (181) is deliberately vague. They travel in "a lop-sided two wheeled cart" pulled by "two spavined oxen" (181), and the journey takes long enough for one of the family's daughters to have one child and become pregnant again with another. Along the way, the children repeatedly "sit in the cart outside the doors of doggeries and taverns" while the father gets drunk; the "huge bull of a nigger" who throws Mr.
Thomas Sutpen was born in the mountains of western Virginia. By 1863 that would be "West Virginia," as Quentin calls it, but as Shreve reminds him, "West Virginia" didn't exist as a separate entity until 1861, when the people in that region seceded from Virginia after Virginia seceded from the Union, and didn't exist as a state until 1863, when it was admitted to the U.S. (179). The narrative's depiction of Sutpen's birthplace relies on a set of simplifications that sharply distinguish it as a rugged frontier from the older, more socially stratified slave-holding regions of the South.
The description of the "nest of Tidewater plantations" (195) located in the "slack lowlands about the mouth of the James River" (178) where the Sutpens live and where Thomas finds (and loses) his innocence in Absalom! is perhaps Faulkner's most pointed representation of the system of plantation slavery.
In Absalom! Thomas Sutpen was born in the mountains of western Virginia. By 1863 that would be "West Virginia," as Quentin calls it, but as Shreve reminds him, "West Virginia" didn't exist as a separate entity until 1861, when the people in that region seceded from Virginia after Virginia seceded from the Union, and didn't exist as a state until 1863, when it was admitted to the U.S. (179).
In Absalom, Absalom! Quentin Compson assumes the first Sutpen to arrive in the new world traveled on a "ship from the Old Bailey" (180). The Old Bailey in London has been the site of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales since the 16th century. A great many of North America's early colonists had been convicted of crimes in England, and were shipped out of the country as part of their sentence, but the idea that Sutpen's ancestors were transported criminals seems to be entirely Quentin's.
We don't really have a place on any map for "Heaven," but just as The Hamlet contains a scene in "Hell," Absalom! includes the posthumous reunion that Mr. Compson imagines between Wash and Sutpen in an unnamed place that is clearly heaven: a place "serene, pleasant, unmarked by time or change of weather," and even with a new "scuppernong" arbor in which they can sit (152).
