While reading (and struggling through) the first three chapters of Absalom, Absalom! I came across a recurring metaphor: the shell. There are numerous descriptions in the novel where something is described as having a means of structure, but lacking substance. For example, the word ‘ghost’ appears numerous times in chapter one. Mr. Compson said ‘Years ago we in the South made out women into ladies. Then the War came and made our ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts?…’  (6-7). Not much further in the chapter another description describes Ellen “who even while alive had moved without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all” (8).  Ellen is described here as a ghost. The fact that she is a being who has has a body, but lacks substance essentially makes her a shell.

This shell metaphor is further continued when Stupen’s house is described. The house in which he lived in  “until he could furnish it as it should be furnished–” (39). Stupen lies for years in a shell of a home. It is an empty space that lacks not only family, but furnishing as well. It is not surprising that his home lacks substance as is he is also earlier described as being a ghost himself. He, similar to Joe Christmas, is a foreigner with no known background to the town.

The third description I found interesting and which fit into this metaphor of shell-like being, is when the narrator describes Judith in her “transition stage between childhood and womanhood…the state where, though still visible, young girls appear as though seen through glass and where even the voice cannot reach them; where they exist…in a pearly lambence without shadows and themselves partaking of it; in nebulous suspension held, strange and unpredictable, even their very shapes fluid and delicate and without substance, not in themselves floating and seeking but merely waiting, parasitic and potent and serene, drawing themselves without effort the post-genitive upon and about which to shape, flow into back, breast; bosom, flank, thigh.” (52).  While this description of Judith turns into a sexual one, its beginning describes young women as in a stage where they are not wholly human, but instead are shadowless beings. They’re described more like an energy that is afloat and idle.

I’m not exactly sure what exactly this metaphor means in relation to the novel as a whole, but I do think it is something to look at for since it has appeared many times within the first three chapters.