"Hollywood," where Faulkner often worked as a screenwriter during the 1930s and 40s but where he never felt at home, is used several times as a point of reference in The Mansion (392, 394). It is also the place where "the only sister of old Major de Spain" lives with "her only child" (463), and more pointedly, the place where Montgomery Ward Snopes, who imported French pornography into Yoknapatawpa, is last seen, "engaged in some quite lucrative adjunct or correlant to the motion picture industry" (404).
Early in Chapter 9 Charles Mallison mentions "Munich," though his equivocation - "observed or celebrated or consecrated" - and his uncle Gavin's commentary - "It wont be long now" - probably won't explain themselves to 21st-century readers (229).
The novel recalls how (young) Bayard Sartoris died trying out an experimental airplane "at the Dayton testing field" (210). The Wright Brothers were from Dayton, Ohio, and there was an airfield just north of Dayton built for Orville Wright's airplane factory.
When Ratliff and Stevens are in Greenwich Village for Linda Snopes' marriage, the talk turns to "the war, . . . Spain and Ethiopia" (194). The year is 1936. In Spain the Civil War between communist and fascist armies, in which Linda and her husband will soon be fighting, has begun. The other front in the conflict that would soon plunge the planet into World War II was Ethiopia, which was invaded in 1935 by Italy, ruled by the Mussolini.
When V.K. Ratliff and Gavin Stevens are in Greenwich Village for Linda Snopes' marriage in The Mansion, the talk turns to "the war, . . . Spain and Ethiopia" (194). The year is 1936. In Spain the Civil War between Nationalists and Republicans has begun; Linda and her husband Barton Kohl will soon be fighting on the Republican side. Also a kind of prologue to World War II was the fighting in Ethiopia, which Mussolini's Italy invaded in 1935.
Two well-known Virginia historic sites are mentioned in the novel: Mount Vernon (171), and Appomattox (202). But Virginia becomes the site of an event when V.K. Ratliff insists that Gavin and he take the train to New York so he can trace his first American ancestor's history. He isn't sure where this earlier V.K. lived, but the train they're on travels through "Bristol then Roanoke and Lynchburg and turns north-east along side the blue mountains" - that is, the Blue Ridge Mountains (184).
After their marriage, Linda and Barton Kohl travel to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). In that conflict the fascist governments in Germany and Italy supported General Francisco Franco's Nationalist forces - using the occasion to try out many of the tactics and weapons they would soon deploy in the Second World War. Linda and Barton are among the many foreign volunteers who fight on the losing side, described by an F.B.I. agent as "the Loyalist Communist army" (260), which received support from the Soviet Union.
