SOURCE: Putzel, Max. “What Is Gothic about Absalom, Absalom!” Southern Literary Journal 4, no. 1 (fall 1971): 3-19.

In the following essay, Putzel presents an overview of Absalom, Absalom! examining several gothic elements in the work as techniques used by Faulkner to create a vision of the American past that conveys decay and decline while also providing the reader with a sense of lost greatness.

1.

During the second World War, when he was just setting out to build Faulkner's reputation into the national monument it has since become, Malcolm Cowley placed Absalom, Absalom! “in the realm of Gothic romances, with Sutpen's Hundred taking the place of the haunted castle on the Rhine, with Colonel Sutpen as Faust and Charles Bon as Manfred.”¹ By now one is aware of so many louder literary echoes, so many prototypes and conventions Faulker assimilated into his ambitious novel, that one hesitates to single out the...