Character Keys

In The Mansion Ratliff wonders, facetiously, whether Linda has a daughter "stashed out somewhere" - because he knows that given Gavin's obsession with Eula Varner Snopes and her daughter Linda, another female Snopes would be too much for him to deal with (476).

In The Mansion Res Snopes employs "a hired Negro" to help him build a fence (363).

According to The Mansion, male "guests" staying at the Holston House are required to wear "a coat and necktie" in the dining room, while women guests must have their "heads covered" (421). The only guests whom the novel specifically identifies, however, are "drummers" - i.e. traveling salesmen - and they are all men (37).

The group of people in The Mansion who admire the new Jaguar in which Linda Snopes Kohl will ride away from Yoknapatawpha consists of "men, boys, a Negro or so" (464); throughout the novel the people of Jefferson are often described as spectators, but the fact that this group explicitly includes blacks as well as whites makes it worth creating as a 'character' in itself.

In The Mansion Mink's lawyer speculates that after Mink gets to the penitentiary, a meddler with "access to the Governor's ear" may be able to secure his early release (50). Almost four decades later, a different Governor approves Mink's petition for freedom (408). (The actual Governors of Mississippi in 1908 and 1946 were, respectively, James Kimble Vardaman and Thomas Lowry Bailey.

In The Mansion the story of the dead man who was married to the former prostitute in Goodyhay's congregation is told in matter-of-fact terms in a couple pages by Albert, a member of the congregation. Albert says nothing about how he married his wife, but describes how he decided to kill himself during the fighting at the start of the Second World War. He is a Lieutenant in command of an infantry platoon falling back as part of the confused retreat in "Malaya" (a British colony on the Malay Peninsula, 305).

These two Finns in The Mansion are among the more exotic inhabitants of Jefferson. They escaped "from Russia in 1917" and then "from Europe in 1919" (236). The 1917 Russian Revolution produced a lot of refugees and set off a civil war in neighboring Finland, but the text does not provide any details about what these two Finns were doing in Russia or why they had to "escape" from Europe when they did. "In the early twenties" they arrive in Jefferson, where one becomes a cobbler, taking over Nightingale's shop, and the other a tinsmith.

"The gal's paw" (424) - that is how Ratliff refers in The Mansion to the father of the wife whom the penitentiary trusty had killed. This man has "swore he would kill [the trusty] the first time he crossed the Parchman fence" (424).

In the chapter he narrates in The Mansion, Montgomery Ward refers to this girl when, in a passage summing up the scoundrels in his family, he talks about "Uncle Wesley leading a hymn with one hand and fumbling the skirt of an eleven-year-old infant with the other" (93). In The Town Wesley is caught having sex with a fourteen-year-old, so it is certainly possible that Monty is referring to a real event and victim, but it seems more probable that, as in his use of the word "infant," Monty is inventing or exaggerating here.

In The Mansion this pilot offers to let Chick Mallison train flying one of the planes he uses to dust crops.

In The Mansion the exasperated president of Yoknapatawpha's Board of Supervisors meets with Flem to ask for his help in ending Linda's campaign to improve the education of local Negro children.

The congregants in Goodyhay's church in The Mansion are mostly ex-soldiers and their wives or mistresses; one of the men wears a "barracks cap still showing where the officer's badge had been removed" (305), and another refers to the group as "ex-drafted sons of bitches" (300). But the group also includes "the moms and pops of soldiers that got killed" (295) as well as the men who help to build at the two church sites.

In The Mansion these two cattle-buyers are brought in as experts to establish the value of the heifer that Mink Snopes wintered in Houston's pasture.

This is the "youngish quite decent-looking" (464) car agent who brings Linda's new Jaguar down to Jefferson at the end of The Mansion.

In The Mansion these men are the crew of the bomber on which Charles Mallison is the bombardier and Plex is the pilot. After their plane is shot down behind enemy lines, they all end up in German prisoner-of-war camps together.

The people who are in the bank lobby in The Mansion to witness Gavin Stevens' negotiation for a loan on his car are described as "not only all the staff but the moment's complement of customers" (401).

The Backus estate has a whole slew of "butlers and footmen" just for their horses; Melisandre also has an extensive domestic staff of "maids and couriers and nannies and secretaries" (218). Later the "Negro houseman and one of the maids" are mentioned (399). The Mansion does not provide any more details, but it's safe to assume that, like the houseman, most of these employees are black, but given the racial categorization in Yoknapatawpha, it's likely that the 'secretaries' are not.

According to Charles in The Mansion, it "doubtless" was some "brass-hatted theorist in Personnel" in the Army who is behind the decision to have Devries put in command of "Negro infantry" because he is a "Southerner" (339).

"Sucker" is the generic term Montgomery Ward Snopes uses in The Mansion to refer to the kind of man who falls for Clarence and Virgil's scheme to cash in on Virgil's sexual "powers" (82). The one specific "sucker" who is mentioned during Monty's visit to Memphis is described as "a big operator, a hot sport" (92).

In The Mansion this is the "feller" - i.e. the fellow - mentioned by Ratliff who was "pistol-whipped" by Clarence Snopes when he was constable in Frenchman's Bend, and who complained effectively enough to get Clarence removed from the position (68).

When Franklin Roosevelt died in office in 1945, his Vice-President Harry Truman became the 33rd President of the United States. In The Mansion he is mentioned by the character named "Dad" in a sentence about the unorthodox theology and politics of the members of Goodyhay's congregation (300).

Thelma is a "new girl" at Miss Reba's brothel in The Mansion (89); Reba tells Mink that she "just came in last week" (84). Apparently she forgets to ask Strutterbuck for money before having sex with him.

A patron at Reba's brothel in Memphis in The Mansion. Montgomery Ward Snopes says Strutterbuck "even got his name out a book" (86), but it's not clear what book Mink might be thinking of, and the money order he gives Miss Reba proves Strutterbuck's last name is real. Most of the rest of his story, however, rings false, including the military rank he claims and the stories he tells about his service in World War I. He is described as "about fifty," "tall, pretty big, with a kind of rousterbout's face" (83). He tries to cheat a prostitute named Thelma out of her money.

Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until 1953. "Hitler's and Stalin's pact" - mentioned in The Mansion - was the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and Russia that the two men signed in 1939 (two years before Germany invaded Russia in World War II).

During World War II a Marine Corporal, and afterwards the husband of Essie Meadowfill. His character in The Mansion is honest and hard-working. He and his wife are one of the most promising married couples in the fictions.

This is the "paw" in The Mansion who "ought" to have "burned" his son's "britches off" for being out in the early morning hours to witness the robbery of the Christian's Drugstore (61).

The man whom Strutterbuck refers to in The Mansion as "Black Jack" is John Joseph Pershing, who led the American Expeditionary Force that went to Europe during the last year of World War I - or as Strutterbuck puts it, who went "to France to run the show over there" (84). Strutterbuck claims to know Pershing, but there is not the slightest chance he is telling the truth, about that or anything else.

Mr. Nightingale in The Mansion is "a little scrawny man who wouldn't weigh a hundred pounds" even holding all the tools of his trade (201). His trade is shoe repair, "cobbling" (201). He is also a "Hardshell Baptist" who believes the earth is flat, and an ex-Confederate and unreconstructed Southerner who was "seventeen years old" at Appomattox when Lee surrendered. He gets very upset when his son joins the "Yankee" army to fight in World War I (202).

The American Legion was created in 1919 as an organization for veterans of World War I. Historically it has worked to secure veterans' rights. In The Mansion it is seen both positively and critically. Gavin is thinking of it when he talks about how "the Veterans' clubs and legions" provide "refuge" for the men who fought in the First World War only to find themselves feeling alienated, "betrayed and dispossessed" when they returned to the U.S. (201).

The bright and endearing daughter of Otis Meadowfill in The Mansion. She graduated valedictorian of her high school with "the highest grades ever made" (361).

The Mansion describes Meadowfill's wife as a "gray drudge" (361).

When Gavin refers to "John L. Lewis' C.I.O." in The Mansion he is referring to the American labor leader who founded the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935 (236).

In The Mansion Mack Lendon is "one of a big family of brothers in a big house" (205).

The deputy sheriff who watches over Montgomery Ward Snopes in The Mansion is named Hunter Killigrew. We assume he is also the unnamed deputy who escorts Mink Snopes from the jail cell to the courthouse at the beginning of the novel.

The guard at Parchman Penitentiary who shoots Jake Barron in The Mansion is called "Cap'm Jabbo" by Mink (108).

Hoover was a founder and the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; he ran the agency from its founding in 1924 until his death in 1972. In The Mansion someone - Gavin is sure it is Flem - calling himself "Patriotic Citizen" sends Hoover a letter warning him about Linda as a "commonist" (269).

In The Mansion Holcomb is a "thick but not fat and not old" woman who gives Mink chores around the house and points him in the direction of Brother Goodyhay (291).

In The Mansion the wife of Brother Goodyhay ran off with a "sonabitching Four-F potato chip salesman" while her husband was away fighting in World War II (294).

Gihon is a federal agent of "no particular age between twenty-five and fifty" (259) who appears in The Mansion after "the police find out" that Linda Kohl is "a communist" (236).

First mentioned in The Mansion as "that one in Spain" on a list that includes "Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany" (183), included by name on the later "Hitler and Mussolini and Franco" (214), General Francisco Franco led the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War, coming to power afterward as the country's right-wing dictator. He remained in power until the 1970s.

In The Mansion the "folks" of Devries are surprised to see him return to World War II so soon after coming home (339).

In The Mansion this man (who will be elected Captain Lendon's "First Sergeant" in the Sartoris Rifles) tells what happens in 1916 when Lendon and Tug Nightingale try to convince Tug's father to let him join "the Yankee army" (204).

The man whom Ratliff, facetiously, refers to as "our own Bilbo in Mississippi" in The Mansion was a racist and an outspoken supporter of the Jim Crow system of segregation. He was elected twice as Governor of Mississippi and later three times as a U.S. Senator (179). Two rural white characters in Yoknapatawpha (Bilbo Snopes and Bilbo Gowrie) were named after him.

Luther Biglin's mother in The Mansion is the "sister of the rural political boss whose iron hand ruled one of the county divisions" (448). This connection helps explain how Luther got the job of county jailer.

Luther appears in two different roles in The Mansion. He is mentioned as the best bird shot in the county who "shot left-handed" (228). When he appears near the end, after having been "a professional dog-trainer and market-hunter and farmer," he is serving his uncle-in-law the Sheriff as the county's "jailor" - and as the self-appointed secret "bodyguard" for Flem Snopes (448).

Harold Baddrington is a pilot who serves with Charles Mallison during World War Two in The Mansion. He gets his nickname "Plexiglass" on account of his obsession with cellophane, "which he called plexiglass" (323).

In The Mansion Miss Allison is the spinster daughter of Old Major de Spain's sister and "the retired principal of a suburban Los Angeles grammar school" (463). She is deeded the old De Spain mansion - 'the mansion' of the novel's title - by Linda Snopes Kohl.

The title character of "Miss Zilphia Gant" learns from a newspaper about this woman "in another state" who marries the man to whom she herself had been married (379); from the detective agency she hires, Zilphia learns about "the birth of a daughter and of the mother's death," a sequence that suggests this woman died in childbirth (381). Although from the agency's reports Zilphia learns enough about this woman's marriage to live "vicariously" inside it (380), what the story passes on to readers is vague and confusing.

In "A Justice" "the Willow-Bearer" - his name never appears without the definite article - apparently performs an undefined ceremonial function related to the selection of the new "the Man" - the tribal chief whose title also always includes the "the" (349).