Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:40
When Mrs. Armstid looks "up the road" from Varner's store, she sees (in this order) Mrs. Littlejohn's, the school, and then, the church, standing "on the crest of the hill . . . among its sparse gleam of marble headstones in the sombre cedar grove" (349). Presumably this is Rev. Whitfield's church; this novel does not identify it by denomination, but in The Mansion it is referred to as "the Baptist church."
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:39
A Frenchman's Bend church appears in seven-and-a-half different texts. The population of the Bend is probably big enough and at least nominally religious enough to fill more than one church on Sunday mornings, but the narrator of The Hamlet says "the church" in the description of the Bend, as if there is only one (31).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:35
Columbia is a real town in Tennessee, south of Nashville; at the time of the novel it contained about 6000 people. Ratfliff meets one of his kinsman here.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:27
Memphis, Tennessee, is the closest city to Yoknapatawpha, whose inhabitants go there for a variety of reasons in many of Faulkner's fictions, though often to misbehave in ways they can't in Jefferson. In The Hamlet, for example, Labove goes there with his classmates after passing the bar and immediately wants to know "how to find a brothel" (130). Ratliff, on the other hand, goes there both on business and to have an operation.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:26
About a mile after leaving Stamper's camp Ab and Ratliff get caught in a storm. Ratliff continues driving home for about two hours, but finally finds shelter in an old barn.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:19
Jefferson's courthouse square sits on the top of the plateau that the town is built on. Climbing the "big hill" that leads up to it (42) proves too much for the mules that Ab Snopes has just traded Pat Stamper for.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:17
Jefferson sits on top of what Faulkner's fictions often refer to as a plateau. Although in "Fool about a Horse" Pap and the unnamed narrator climb this "big hill" to reach the town while coming to Jefferson from Frenchman's Bend (i.e. the southeast), when Ratliff retells the story as part of Ab Snopes' biography in The Hamlet, he and Ab climb the "big hill" while approaching Jefferson from a different direction - the novel doesn't specify which. Faulkner hardly ever is troubled by this kind of discrepancy, but we had to pick a direction, so for several reasons we chose the east.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2016-02-27 10:09
The "three-mile bridge" undoubtedly gets its name because it's three miles from Jefferson ("Fool about a Horse," 124; The Hamlet, 39). It plays exactly the same role in both the story and the story as it's retold in the novel. Faulkner wrote the short story about a hapless farmer named Pap about half a decade before he decided, while writing The Hamlet, to make it part of the backstory of Ab Snopes.
