136 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
mainstream view of ethnicity in American popular and intellectual
culture, the novel traces the tragic fall of the Sutpen and Coldfield
families immediately before and after the American Civil War.
Chasing his Gatsbyesque dreams of escaping poverty and living a
life of wealth and prestige, Thomas Sutpen marries the daughter
of a rich Haitian plantation owner. On discovering that she is not,
as he initially believes, “white,” but an “octoroon,” Sutpen leaves in
disgust.^29 Their son, Charles Bon, eventually finds his way to the
same town in Mississippi in which his father resides and becomes
embroiled in an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Judith.
The fact that his partially “black” heritage goes completely unde-
tected by the whites surrounding him in this portion of the narra-
tive serves to undercut the essentialist principles of race theory that
abounded at the time the novel was written.
Adding further depth to this deconstruction of “race,” Faulkner
also depicts the younger Sutpen first articulating the differences
between blacks and whites in terms of a sociopolitical designation
rather than as something that is biologically fixed. After suffering
the humiliation of being turned away from the door of a wealthy
white plantation owner by a black servant, Sutpen learns that “the
difference not only between white men and black ones [... but the]
difference between white men and white men” was “just a matter
of where you were spawned and how.”^30 Faulkner describes this as
the moment in which Sutpen “discovered his innocence”—the loss
of which contributes to the story’s tragic d é nouement.^31 Perhaps the
most extreme instance in which the category of “race” is undercut in
the novel, however, can be seen when Charles Etienne Saint-Valery
Bon, Sutpen’s grandson by his Haitian “octoroon” wife, repudiates
his white heritage and insists on being identified as a black man.
His light skin and European features make this highly problematic,
however, particularly when he marries a black American woman. As
Jason Compson Senior informs us, the “negroes” thought he was a
white man and “believed it all the more strongly when he denied
it; the white men who, when he said he was a negro, believed that
he lied in order to save his skin, or worse: from sheer besotment of
sexual perversion.”^32 Once again, we are faced with a figure who is
able to “pass” as both black and white (this time choosing the former