Eula Varner Snopes

Daughter of Will Varner, the richest man in Frenchman's Bend, Eula is married to Flem Snopes after she becomes pregnant by another man. She arrives in Jefferson with her illegitimate child in a wagon pulled by mules and driven by Flem's ambition. Her sexual power has a mythic status; Charles Mallison describes Eula's effect on men: "There was just too much of what she was for any just one human female package to contain and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory . . . so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instant with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew that there never would be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her" (6). Maggie Mallison expresses the female point of view concerning Eula: "The ladies of Jefferson dont care what she does. What they will never forgive is the way she looks. No: the way the Jefferson gentlemen look at her" (50). With an impotent husband, she turns to the town's most eligible bachelor, Manfred de Spain, with whom she has an affair that lasts almost two decades; even in this transgressive role, however, she can be seen as a victim, since her husband exploits the affair to further his own career. Eula's later concerns center on her daughter's happiness: she becomes Gavin's ally in attempting to separate Linda from Flem, and even exacts a promise from Gavin (to whom she once offered herself) that he will marry Linda. Eula's fate is a tragic one, although her final sacrifice serves to free Linda. It also allows Flem - in one last, ironic exploitation of her - to erect a monument to her as "A virtuous Wife" and "a Crown to her Husband" (372).