Thomas Sutpen as a Bourgeois
Priscillya Gunardi
A bourgeois is someone in the middle class who has distinctive features apart from a proletariat, someone who is inferior to the bourgeois. As a bourgeois, according to Marx, he simplifies the society into two distinct classes, bourgeoisie and proletarians, by stripping sentimentalism in order to achieve an efficient and productive society. In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! , Thomas Sutpen is the epitome of both of these classes. Sutpen was born into a proletariat household where his family had neither wealth nor respect to their name. After he moves into the West Indies, he had a son and negro wife and worked as an overseer of a plantation. However, he eventually becomes a bourgeois when he renounces his wife and son, and…show more content… Therefore, in order to surmount his past experiences as a proletariat, Thomas Sutpen is best described as a bourgeois because he attempts to achieve his own image of himself, which is to attain his status as a patriarchal figure, by desiring respectability when acquiring property and wealth, exploiting people around him to further achieve his desires of wealth and respect, and being inevitably obliterated by his own image of himself and nature of origin when he ambitiously pursues his desires in creating a dynasty. By acquiring property and wealth, Thomas Sutpen will be able to reach his desire of respectability. This can be seen when Sutpen acquires Ellen Coldfield as his wife. Sutpen devoted all of his time and energy to her father so that he could gain respect from the town. Eventually, he marries Ellen two months later when “he no longer carried flowers, and when he returned to the gate, he was engaged to be married” (Faulkner 36). Not only did Sutpen garner Mr.Coldfield’s respect, but also Ellen as his own private property. By earning