The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

"Miz De Spain," as Ratliff invariably calls her in The Hamlet, is the wife of Major de Spain. In "Barn Burning" her first name is given as Lula.

This Negro servant tries - unsuccessfully - to keep Ab Snopes from walking in to De Spain's mansion with manure on his feet; he seems to be the source of Ratliff's account of this event, which is told by a third-person narrator in "Barn Burning."

Ab Snopes’ two daughters are indistinguishable in The Hamlet, where they are simply described as “two hulking gals” who take no part in the intensive labor their mother and aunt engage in once they arrive at the de Spain sharecropper's cabin (15-16). In "Barn Burning," they are described as twins; one is unnamed, the other, this one, is named Net.

The sister of Ab's wife is referred to as "the widow" (15). In "Barn Burning" both women have names - Ab's wife is Lennie and her sister is Lizzie - but the short story makes no mention of the sister's marital status. Together these older women engage in the most labor-intensive chores, without comment or complaint, while Ab's twin daughters malinger and quarrel, and Ab himself orders them around and threatens them without helping (15-16).

Ab's wife is never named in The Hamlet, but called "Lennie" in "Barn Burning." She is Ab's second wife and the mother of his four children. At the outset of the novel, she is introduced as a "strapping gal" (15), at once hardworking and valuable to Ab, who uses her for menial labor and other tasks (15-6).

The central character throughout the Snopes trilogy, which traces Flem's rise from poor white to bank president; the first stage of that narrative, which takes him from a share cropper's cabin in the county toward his newly acquired property in the town of Jefferson, organizes The Hamlet. Flem is shrewd and rapacious. The oldest child of Ab and Lennie Snopes, he gets himself hired as a store clerk by Jody Varner as “fire insurance” (28) against Ab’s propensity to burn the barns of his landlords.

Eula Varner is the sixteenth and final child of Will Varner. Her initial appearance in The Hamlet emphasizes her premature sexuality. She is "a soft ample girl with definite breasts even at thirteen and eyes like cloudy hothouse grapes and a full damp mouth always slightly open" (12). Faulkner accentuates Eula's early womanly maturation, writing that "she was already bigger than most women and even her breasts were no longer the little, hard, fiercely-pointed cones of puberty or even maidenhood" (105).

Will Varner's wife Maggie is a "plump cheery bustling woman who had borne sixteen children and already outlived five of them and who still won prizes for preserving fruits and vegetables at the annual county fair" (11-12). She raises a commotion when she finds that Eula is pregnant.

This "cook," under the perpetual supervision of Mrs. Maggie Varner, is mentioned as a sign of Will Varner's relative wealth. The narrator calls her the "only" servant of any sort in the whole district" (11) - though later the novel mentions three other Negro servants, including 'Sam,' who also works for the Varners, and a man and a woman who work for Houston.

Although he plays a much larger role in other works, especially Go Down, Moses, which was published just two years after The Hamlet, Ike McCaslin and his plantation are used solely as a reference point in this novel: before he appears in Frenchman's Bend, Ab Snopes and his family spent the winter in Ike's "old cottonhouse" (10).