The production of space and the barriers of class: A spatial reading of <i>Absalom, Absalom!</i>

Abstract Absalom, Absalom! presents the changing spatial geography of the American South under the power struggles among various social classes. Drawing on French philosopher Henri Lefebvre's spatial theory, this study argues that the Southern class in Faulkner's works constitutes not merely an economic or historical entity, but rather an ongoing, conflictual process of production of space. Integrating the map of Yoknapatawpha County, this paper contends that the inequality in spatial occupation among different classes in Jefferson and the spatial segregation enforced by the doors of the plantation houses concretize the representations of space conceived by planters in the context of slavery, revealing the spatialization of power and the class hegemony embedded in space. As a victim of this order, Sutpen's cross‐class spatial practice, such as transforming the capital acquired in transboundary spaces like the West Indies and the “wilderness” of the Indians into the localized representational space of Sutpen's Hundred, achieved the reproduction of space and social relations. The spatial transformation of Sutpen's Hundred, from wilderness to plantation and back to wilderness, demonstrates the restructuring of the old spatial order driven by shifts in the Southern economic model and the ethical misconduct underlying the planters' production of space. By connecting the local spaces of the American South with internal and external “other” spaces, Faulkner reveals that space serves not only as a medium through which different social classes define power and reshape identities, but also as a moral mirror reflecting the South's spiritual predicament as it attempted to position itself between traditional and emerging values during a period of social transformation.