Submitted by johnmcorrigan@g... on Sun, 2015-03-29 13:58
Located near de Spain’s hunting camp, this "faint crossing" (282) is a deer trail, a path the animals themselves have made through the woods. In "The Old People," such the trail intersects the ridge trail - a path made by men. Such crossings are good places for hunters to wait for game. In "The Bear," the crossing assumes special importance as the site in which Sam Fathers teaches the unnamed boy to handle his gun and where they first encounter Old Ben, the bear, slowly moving northward.
Submitted by johnmcorrigan@g... on Sun, 2015-03-29 13:37
Although the camp is a central site of reference in the magazine version of "The Bear," Faulkner provides only one description of “the clearing, the house, the barn and its tiny lot with which Major de Spain in his turn had scratched punily and evanescently at the wilderness” (288). In the Go Down, Moses version of the story, Faulkner describes de Spain’s hunting lodge as “a pointless six-room bungalow set on piles above the spring high-water” on the south-side of the Tallahatchie River.
Submitted by johnmcorrigan@g... on Sun, 2015-03-29 13:26
The wilderness is an area of old-growth forest south of the Tallahatchie River in the north-west part of Yoknapatawpha. In the opening of “The Bear,” Faulkner describes the site as “thirty miles” (290) of hunting ground within “an area almost a hundred miles deep” (281). In his depiction of this setting as a “doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with axes and plows” (281-2), Faulkner presents a critique of the plantation and sharecropping systems.
After killing the two Burdens, John Sartoris tells his followers that he plans to find the sheriff and "make bond" (72). The office of Sheriff was different from the office of Marshal that is at stake in the election.
Bayard identifies the "six or eight strange white men" who are in charge of the black men who want to vote as "the Northern white men" (70, 71). Many of the men whom Bayard calls "the Jefferson men, the men that I knew" (70), would undoubtedly have called these strangers carpetbaggers, the pejorative term coined by the white South to label men who came into the defeated region after the end of the Civil War. The term referred to a kind of luggage made out of the heavy cloth from which rugs were also made.
Bayard calls the former slaves who gather to vote for Cassius Q. Benbow "nigger voters" (69). The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified February 3, 1870, guaranteed adult males the right to vote regardless of "race, color or previous condition of servitude," but the story is about using violence and intimidation to deny that right to blacks in Yoknapatawpha.
This icon represents the men who work with John Sartoris to resist any effort to give voting rights to the recently emancipated slaves. According to Bayard, "all the men in the county" and "all the other men in Jefferson" (69, 58) assemble in the town square "with pistols in their pockets" (69) to prevent black men from voting, and ride out afterwards with John and Drusilla to cast their own votes in the election at the Sartoris place.
