Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
2738 | Phoebe |
In Go Down, Moses Phoebe (or "Fibby," as her name is written by Buck McCaslin in the plantation ledger, 252) is one of the slaves that "Carothers McCaslin" inherited and brought with him to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina (249). She is the wife of Roscius (spelled "Roskus" in the ledger, 252), and like him manumitted when Old Carothers dies in 1837; also like him, according to the ledger, she "Dont want to leave" (252) and remains on the plantation until her death in 1849. |
|
2808 | Philip St-Just Backhouse |
"Cousin Philip," as Bayard usually refers to him in "My Grandmother Millard," is a 22-year-old "shavetail" (lieutenant) in General Forrest's Confederate cavalry troop (694). Born a "Backhouse" - a familiar term for a privy or outhouse - he explains why he cannot change the name by telling Granny and Bayard that the Backhouses include men who fought in both the Revolutionary and Mexican Wars, and who ran for Governor of Tennessee. The narrative presents him as both a genuinely heroic gentleman and a caricature of the typical hero of Civil War romances by authors not named Faulkner. |
|
2259 | Philip |
Philip is "a grave, sober young man of impeccable character and habits" who courts the title character of "Elly" with clock-like regularity (213). As a Jefferson boy whom she has known "from childhood," Philip is the epitome of a suitable husband for Elly (213). His draw as a suitor is indicated in the same breath as his current occupation: "an assistant cashier in the bank, who they said would be president of it some day" (213). |
|
42 | Philadelphy |
Philadelphy - almost certainly a corruption of "Philadelphia," the name she has in "My Grandmother Millard" (668) - is, like her husband Loosh, a slave on the Sartoris plantation. She is what is sometimes called a 'house slave,' i.e. one of the slaves who work inside the white family's mansion rather than in the cotton fields. We see her serving as a maid in "My Grandmother Millard," which Faulkner wrote half a dozen years after The Unvanquished was published. |
|
937 | Pettigrew |
The "Pettigrew" in the short story "Beyond" is Judge Allison's attorney and the executor of his will, responsible for making sure that the Judge's last wishes are implemented - though he doesn't seem to do so. In Requiem for a Nun - published almost two decades after "Beyond" - a man named 'Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew' is the source of the name of the town that is the seat of Yoknapatawpha county, but it's not likely Faulkner is consciously thinking of a connection between the characters. |
|
2379 | Pettibone |
Pettibone is the only one of the characters, black or white, who appear in the Tidewater section of Absalom! who is named, and in his case the name is an adjective rather than a noun: Sutpen's father comes home one night boasting that "we" - he and other poor white men - "whupped one of Pettibone's niggers tonight" (187). The whole passage suggests that "Pettibone" himself is the owner of a plantation near the one that Sutpen works on. |
|
460 | Pete Grier |
In "Two Soldiers" Pete Grier, the oldest of the two Grier sons, enlists in the Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. "I got to go," he says; "I jest ain't going to put up with no folks treating the United States that way" (83). Before December 7, 1941, he worked on his family's farm in Frenchman's Bend. The "ten acres" of land he himself owns was given to him by his father "when he graduated from the Consolidated" (82). According to his younger brother, who idolizes him, Pete was a very hard worker: "He never got behind like Pap, let alone stayed behind" (82). |
|
3137 | Pete |
Pete is "the man" who was "there that night" when Nancy committed the murder in Requiem for a Nun (50). The younger brother of Alabama Red, the sexual partner of Temple Drake whom Popeye murdered in Sanctuary, Pete comes to Jefferson after finding the salacious letters Temple wrote eight years earlier to his brother. When he brings them back into Temple's life, he becomes both her blackmailer and her lover, the "next one" she falls in love with (132). |
|
3025 | Percy Grimm |
Introduced into Light in August in Chapter 19, twenty-five year old Grimm brings Joe Christmas' life to a violent end. A captain in the state national guard, he organizes American Legion members to patrol Jefferson even though both the Legion commander and the sheriff refuse to give him permission. When he insists on carrying a gun, the sheriff makes him a special deputy (455). Like Christmas, Grimm's life seems strangely determined. |
|
27 | Percy Benbow |
In the Yoknapatawpha fictions as a group, the Benbows are among the county's oldest and most prominent families, but the reference in Absalom! to Judge Benbow's son is "Percy" is the only mention of this character in the canon (172). Chronologically it is possible that Percy is brother of Will Benbow, the Benbow who is the father of Horace and Narcissa Benbow, major figures in Flags in the Dust (1929) and Sanctuary (1931), but that is speculation. |
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2736 | Percival Brownlee |
In Go Down, Moses Buck McCaslin purchases Percival Brownlee from Bedford Forrest, and quickly learns that Percival is unable to perform any of the tasks to which he and his brother Buddy assign the slave. When Percival is emancipated as a result of the McCaslins' frustrations with him, he refuses to leave the plantation. He disappears during the Civil War, but reappears during Reconstruction as a preacher, "leading the singing also in his high sweet true soprano voice," and again in the "entourage" of an Army paymaster (278). |
|
3696 | Paul Rainey |
The "Paul Rainey" whom Lucius mentions in The Reivers was a real Northern millionaire famous for his love of hunting (163). As Lucius notes, he "liked our country enough to use some of [his] Wall Street money" to purchase 11,000 acres of Mississippi land as a hunting preserve (163). Faulkner's father Murry knew him personally. |
|
2257 | Paul de Montigny |
There is a lot that "Elly" never explains about Paul's character - where he lives, for example, and what he does - but the one mystery that matters most is his racial identity. Paul visits Jefferson as a white man, but the friend who introduces him to Elly insists he is really black. As part of her proof, she recounts a story in which Paul's "uncle killed a man once that accused him of having nigger blood" (209). |
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1650 | Patterson Boy |
In The Sound and the Fury the Pattersons' house is adjacent to the Compsons'. Quentin remembers that when Jason was younger, he and "the Patterson boy . . . made kites on the back porch and sold them for a nickel a piece" (94). Jason parted ways with him, apparently when the boy complained about not getting his share of the profits. |
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456 | Pat Stamper |
The legendary Pat Stamper, master of "the science and pastime of horse trading in Yoknapatawph county," makes a fool of Pap, who tries to trade with him in "Fool about a Horse," and of Ab Snopes, when that story is revised and interpolated into The Hamlet. With the help of his Negro hostler, he can even get not only the better of each trade but "actual Yoknapatawpha County cash dollars" - as it's put in the novel (37) - out of the farmers who try to take him on. |
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1658 | Parson Walthall |
The minister of the Methodist Church in Jefferson in The Sound and the Fury is named Parson Walthall; he protests the slaughter of the town's pigeons to prevent them from fouling the town clock. |
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732 | Paralee|Guster |
The mother of Aleck Sander - named Paralee in Intruder in the Dust and Guster in The Town - has been a servant in the Stevens-Mallison household for a long time, perhaps her entire life. She lives in a cabin behind the white family's house. Like her employer, Maggie Mallison, she is protective about her own child, but she is also a kind of 'mammy' to Chick Mallison. She is never given a last name, but the earlier novel mentions her father Ephriam, and the later novel gives her a husband (Big Top) and another son (Top, or Little Top). |
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3049 | Pappy Thompson |
In Light in August he is the seventy-year-old deacon of an Negro church in Yoknapatawpha whom Joe Christmas knocks down in the middle of a service. |
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1496 | Pappy |
In Flags in the Dust "Pappy" is the "older negro" (213) of the two who rescue Young Bayard after his car goes off the bridge and carry him home; he is suspicious both of meddling with a white man and of the automobile. The "younger negro" is his son, John Henry (213). |
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2323 | Papa George |
Georgie, the narrator of "That Will Be Fine" calls his father "Papa," but his actual name is also George. He is "in the livery-stable business" (268), and has no illusions about the dynamics of his wife's family or the character of its black sheep, his wife's brother Rodney. When his wife's sister Louisa, for example, rationalizes Rodney's promiscuous behavior by pointing to his lack of opportunities "to meet a nice girl and marry her," George says: "Marry? Rodney marry? |
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883 | Pap 2 |
In "Fool about a Horse," Pap is a tenant farmer who has little interest in growing the corn and cotton he is supposed to be cultivating on the land he rents in Frenchman's Bend. Instead, he fancies himself a talented and successful horse- and mule- trader, but as his son explains,"he never owned nothing that anybody would swap even a sorry horse for and even to him" (119). His attempt to best Pat Stamper, the acknowledged champion horse-trader of the Yoknapatawpha region, ends disastrously, but Pap himself seems blissfully unaware of his ineptitude. |
|
455 | Pap 1 |
"Blind and deaf," with eyes that "look like two clots of phlegm" and apparently voiceless and toothless as well (12), Pap is one of the most grotesque characters in Faulkner's fiction. Lee and Ruby make sure he gets fed, but despite his name, Sanctuary gives no hint about "who he was kin to," as Horace puts it (110), or how he came to be at the Old Frenchman place. Horace facetiously speculates that he may have been there as long as the house itself. In his grotesqueness he does fit the Gothic atmosphere of the place. |
|
2979 | Paoli |
In "Knight's Gambit" Paoli is the "famous Italian fencing-master" who taught Max Harriss (169). According to Harriss' unnamed sister, Max was "the best pupil Paoli had had in years" (190). |
|
3631 | Owl-at-Night |
Though called "Owl-by-Night" the first time he is mentioned (363), this Chickasaw is more often referred to in "A Courtship" as "Owl-at-Night" (364). He is one of the young men who were interested in Herman Basket's sister - until they realized that Ikkemotubbe wanted her. After that, he willingly helps Ikkemotubbe with his efforts to win the young woman. |
|
3440 | Otis Meadowfill |
Otis Meadow fill is the irascible neighbor of Orestes Snopes in The Mansion, and is "so mean [i.e. miserly] as to be solvent and retired even from the savings on a sawmill" (361). |
|
2051 | Otis Harker |
In The Town Otis is "nephew or cousin or something" of the Harker who is the engineer at the town's power plant. Although he has "inherited the saw mill" that the older Harker originally ran, Otis fills in at the power plant "whenever Mr. Harker wanted a night off" (26). By the end of the novel he has become Jefferson's "night marshal"; Gavin Stevens calls him one of Yoknapatawpha's "minor clowns" (334). |
|
3689 | Otis |
In The Reivers Otis is Corrie's nephew, visiting Memphis from his home in Arkansas in order to acquire "refinement" (97). Although he has his fifteenth birthday in the course of the story, he is smaller than the 11-year-old Lucius. As Lucius says the first time he sees Otis, "there is something wrong about him" (104). By the time Lucius calls him a "demon child" (154), most readers are likely to agree. |
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454 | Oscar |
In "Gold Is Not Always" and again in Go Down, Moses, Oscar works for Roth Edmonds as a stableman, and along with Dan, the head stableman on the McCaslin-Edmonds place, he helps Edmonds search for the missing mule. Like Dan, he recognizes the human as well as the animal footprints they are following; the fact that Edmonds doesn't "realise" until "later" that "both the negroes" withheld the name of the man, another Negro, subtly calls attention to the racial dynamics in play in Faulkner's world (229, 81). |
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278 | Orestes Snopes |
Orestes is one of the last Snopeses added to the family tree. He appears late in The Mansion as "a new Snopes living in Jefferson" (354). Also called Res, his exact relationship to Flem is never made clear. Flem establishes him in the converted carriage house on the Compson place, which Flem now owns, where the hog farm Res operates becomes a source of increasingly violent friction with his neighbor. |
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3283 | Old Mr. Stone |
The "old" lawyer Stone (as Eula refers to him in The Town) is likely "the nice" Mr. Stone's father (342). |
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306 | Old Man Killegrew |
Old Man Killgrew is a farmer who lives near the Griers in Frenchman's Bend. Although he never appears in person, he is mentioned in all three of the World War II stories about the Grier family. Killigrew is seventy years old, and prosperous enough to have a cook. He hunts foxes the old-fashioned way, which in Faulkner's Mississippi means "squatting on a hill" rather than riding to the hounds (27). His and his wife's deafness means that the Grier sons can stand outside his house and hear his radio reporting on the progress of the war. |
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302 | Old Maid Snopes |
This particular Snopes is identified in The Town only as the "old maid daughter" of the man (either Flem's father Ab or Flem's unnamed uncle) who lives in a house just close enough to Jefferson to see the town clock (136). Also in the household are two of I.O. Snopes' children, but her relationship to them is not defined at all. She may be Flem's sister, but more likely is another of Flem's many cousins. |
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507 | Old Lady Wyatt |
Miss Wyatt is Emily Grierson's great-aunt in "A Rose for Emily," and reputed to have been insane: she went "completely crazy at last" (123), the narrator says, but provides no further details, about either her or her illness. Emily's father and her other "kin in Alabama" have a falling out "over the estate of old lady Wyatt" after she dies (125). (There are six other characters named Wyatt in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, but whether or how this woman is related to any of them is not established.) |
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453 | Old Het |
The black woman who serves in "Mule in the Yard" and The Town as both partner in and witness to Mannie Hait's ongoing feud against mules and a man named I.O. Snopes remains a kind of enigma. No one in the town knows how old she is: as the story puts it, "she was about seventy probably, though by her own counting . . . she would have to be around a hundred" (249). Even at the younger age, she would have been born into slavery, though that story remains untold. |
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2536 | Old Frenchman, Son of |
In The Hamlet the Old Frenchman's son has disappeared from the scene along with the rest of his family, except for a single detail: this heir to the Old Frenchman plantation - possibly accompanied by his father - rode into Jefferson in the early days of the Civil War to recruit men to the Confederate army (373). |
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2535 | Old Frenchman, Family of |
The Frenchman's Bend planter who appears in The Hamlet is elsewhere identified as Louis Grenier. His family is distinguished by the way it has disappeared completely in the years after the South lost the Civil War: "he was gone now, . . . the Frenchman, with his family" (4). In one scene late in the novel the life of the white ladies and gentlemen on the old plantation is conjured up, but there too the novel notes that "there is nothing to show of that now" (373). |
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261 | Old Bayard's Aunt |
At the start of Flags in the Dust, in Will Falls' re-telling about the time the Yankee patrol chased Colonel Sartoris away from his plantation, he reminds the Colonel's son Bayard that among the people living there was "yo' aunt, the one 'fo' Miss Jenny come" (22). According to Falls' story, she is "a full-blood Sartoris," but this is the only time Faulkner's fiction mentions her existence. |
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772 | Odum Tull |
Odum Tull appears only once in the fictions, in "Fool About a Horse," when he gives his neighbor Vynie Snopes and her milk separator a ride back home from Jefferson in his wagon. (When Faulkner revised this story for inclusion in The Hamlet, he is essentially replaced by a farmer named Cliff Odum.) |
|
452 | Odum Bookwright |
Described in The Hamlet as "sturdy short-legged black-browed ready-faced man" (63), Bookwright is one of several characters in Frenchman's Bend who keep Ratliff apprised of the goings on about the hamlet when he is gone. At the end of that novel, he and Ratliff and Armstid are swindled by Flem Snopes into purchasing the Old Frenchman’s Place - an event that is referred to again in The Mansion. |
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2478 | Odlethrop |
The man who is Mrs. Odlethrop's son in "Monk" and also, presumably, the title character's biological father, is described as "too much even for that country and people" (43). He returns to his mother's home with a woman, presumably Monk's mother, after a ten year absence. He initially left (or was driven out of Yoknapatawpha) after killing someone, and after his return his own mother is said to have "driven" him out of town again at gunpoint (43). |
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451 | Nub Gowrie |
Nub Lowrie's appearance in Intruder in the Dust is memorable. His name - Nathan Bedford Forrest Gowrie - comes from a former slave-dealer who was also one of the Confederacy's most effective generals and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan; his nickname - "Nub" - combines the initials of his first names with the fact of his missing left arm. How he became handicapped is not explained, but the loss doesn't diminish the force of his character. He is "a short lean old man with [pale] eyes . . . and a red weathered face"; his voice is "high thin strong [and] uncracked" (156). |
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3460 | Norman Thomas |
Norman Thomas was a Presbyterian minister by training, one of the country's most famous pacifists during the First World War, and the six-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, 1928-1948. According to the character named Dad in The Mansion, the members of Goodyhay's unorthodox congregation "like as not would have voted for Norman Thomas even ahead of [Franklin] Roosevelt" (300). |
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1649 | New York Yankees |
In Faulkner's fictions "Yankees" typically refers to the Union soldiers during the Civil War or people from the North in general; in The Sound and the Fury, however, it refers to the New York Yankees baseball team. The 1927 Yankees, which featured Babe Ruth as part of a lineup called 'Murderers' Row,' is often cited as the greatest team in baseball history. Despite this, in his April 1928 conversation with Mac, Jason Compson insists "They're shot" (252), adding that he'd never bet on them. |
|
185 | Net Snopes |
While Abner and Lennie Snopes' older son Flem is one of the most prominent inhabitants of Faulkner's imagination, and their younger son Sarty the central character of one of his greatest short stories, neither of their twin daughters gets much attention in the two texts in which they figure. Only one sister - Net, this one - is named. In "Barn Burning" both are described as "big, bovine, in a flutter of cheap ribbons" (9), and very lazy: they do very little to help with household chores, leaving most of the work to their mother and aunt. |
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3267 | Nelly Ratcliffe |
She is the wife of the original Vladimir Kyrilytch and mother of the second. She is the daughter of a Virginia farmer who hid and fed the Russian-born mercenary soldier when he escaped from an American prison during the Revolutionary War. At some point they married, and began the line of "V.K."s that culminates in the character readers meet frequently in the fictions. As her story is told in The Townand repeated in The Mansion, her maiden name was Ratcliffe, and the couple adopted it as their married name. Over time, the "c" and "e" were dropped from the spelling. |
|
177 | Ned McCaslin |
Introduced into The Reivers as "Grandfather's coachman" (31), Ned McCaslin plays a major role in the narrative, and becomes, at times at least, one of Faulkner's most complex African American characters. The novel's narrator, Lucius Priest, calls him "our family skeleton" (31). He was "born in the McCaslin back yard in 1860," at which time he would have been enslaved (31). His grandfather is Lucius McCaslin, the white man who owned his mother - and after whom Lucius himself is named. In 1905 he is married to the Priest family's cook (one of his four wives). |
|
754 | Nathaniel Burrington II |
The relatives of Joanna Burden who remain in New Hampshire in Light in August are named Burrington. Her nephew Nathaniel - he has the same name as her great-grandfather - offers a $1000 reward for her killer after he is informed about her murder. |
|
753 | Nathaniel Burrington I |
In Light in August the first Nathaniel Burrington stands at the head of the ancestral line that reaches an end with Joanna Burden. He is a Unitarian minister in New England who fathers ten children, the youngest of whom is Calvin, who changes his last name from Burrington to Burden. |
|
752 | Nathaniel Burden |
Joanna Burden's father in Light in August. He is the only son of Calvin Burden I and Evangeline. Like his father, he runs away from home as a teenager. In the far west he meets Juana, and they have a son, Calvin Burden II, born out of wedlock in 1854. With his father and son he moves to Jefferson in 1866, "to help with the freed negroes" (251). |
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320 | Nathan Bedford Forrest |
Historically, Nathan Bedford Forrest was a slave dealer before the Civil War, one of the Confederacy's most successful cavalry officers during the war, and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. Although the KKK appears in several fictions (for example, Absalom! and The Mansion), none of the eleven fictions that mention Forrest connect him with it, or make any reference to his actions after the war. |
|
2517 | Nate |
In "Hand upon the Waters" Nate is a Negro farmer who lives in a cabin near the path to Lonnie's camp, and the owner of the "Negro voice" that "answers" Stevens when he asks him to let people at the nearby store know if he, Stevens, isn't "back by daylight" (79). In response to his wife's misgivings, Nate "murmurs something" - but readers never hear what Nate himself says, either to Stevens or to her (80). |
|
1648 | Natalie |
In The Sound and the Fury Natalie is a girl about Quentin and Caddy's age who lives near their house. Caddy calls her "a dirty girl" (134) after catching her and Quentin naively exploring their sexualities together in the barn, but their behavior would probably seem natural enough to anyone but Quentin. Natalie does, however, take the lead in this exploration, and given the contemptuous way Caddy treats her (calling her "Cowface," for example, 136), the novel might be suggesting she is lower class. |
|
159 | Nat Beauchamp Wilkins |
Lucas and Molly's daughter Nat is described in "A Point of Law" and again in Go Down, Moses as "small, thin as a lath, young; she was their youngest and last - seventeen" (71). She struggles against her domineering father and with her lazy husband, determined to get what she deserves. Despite her shrewdness as a bargainer, she can't ultimately overcome her circumstances. |
|
30 | Narcissa Benbow Sartoris |
Narcissa is born into one of Yoknapatawpha's leading families and marries into another. She plays a major role in three early fictions, which together even form a kind of asymmetrical trilogy. In Flags in the Dust she is the most eligible young woman in Jefferson before she becomes Mrs. Bayard Sartoris. In that novel her role is essentially passive, as she is courted or stalked by men from three very different classes; by the end of it she is a young widow with a newborn son, whom she names Benbow Sartoris. |
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2835 | Napoleon |
Napoleon Bonaparte rose to prominence in France during the French Revolution. In 1804 he proclaimed himself Emperor, and undertook to wage a series of wars in order to achieve dominion over Europe. The allusion to him at the beginning of "Appendix Compson" serves as a template for several of the characters Faulkner will create: dictatorial leaders driven to expand their holdings at all costs. |
|
3134 | Nancy Mannigoe |
As "Nancy" this black woman appears in "That Evening Sun" (1931) as a laundress and part-time servant of the Compson family who also sells herself as a prostitute to white men who don't always keep their promise to pay her. She is terrified of the black man in her life, whom Faulkner provocatively names "Jesus." Nancy prays that her Jesus will not come again, but the story ends without settling that issue. There is evidence that in the early 1930s Faulkner apparently began a longer narrative that would develop Nancy's life and character more fully, but it was never completed. |
|
882 | Myrtle 3 |
Miss Myrtle in Sanctuary is one of the two women who come back to the brothel with Miss Reba after the funeral for Red. Myrtle is the "short plump woman in a plumed hat" who is accompanied by Uncle Bud, a "boy of five or six" (250). She may be his mother, though her attempt to discipline him for drinking from their beers is half-hearted at best. (The context suggests both she and Miss Lorraine might be madams at other Memphis brothels, but that is not made explicit in the text.) |
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881 | Myrtle 2 |
The Myrtle in The Sound and the Fury is the daughter of the sheriff and the wife of Vernon. The sheriff introduces Myrtle and Vernon to Jason when he comes to get the police to chase his niece. (Chronologically it's possible that this is the same Myrtle who, younger, worked as a receptionist in Flags in the Dust, but the novel provides no evidence for that connection.) |
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449 | Myrtle 1 |
The Myrtle in Flags in the Dust is a "young woman" who works for Doctors Alford and Peabody as a receptionist. In her exchanges with Miss Jenny, she is alternately a trained professional and a deferential southern girl. |
|
3406 | Myra Allanovna |
Myra Allanovna in The Mansion is the Russian immigrant proprietor of an upscale New York store where she sells the neckties she designs. She is described by Ratliff as "a short dumpy dark woman in a dress that wouldn't a fitted nobody," but he adds that she has "the handsomest dark eyes I ever seen even if they popped a little" (186). (Faulkner almost certainly bases this character on Lucilla Mara de Vescovi, an Italian immigrant who opened Countess Mara, a men's neckwear company, in New York in the early 1930s; Countess Mara ties are still sold today.) |
|
3444 | Mussolini |
Leader of Italy's National Fascist Party and the country's Prime Minister from 1922-43, during which time he took his country into World War II as an ally of Nazi Germany. The Mansion links his name with Hitler's several times. |
|
3108 | Murrell's Gang |
In "A Name for the City" and again in Requiem for a Nun some of the settlers speculate about a relationship between the bandits in their jail and John Murrell's "organization" of criminals who worked the Mississippi River area of the South between about 1825 and his capture in 1834. His activity at this period makes him contemporaneous with the events in Faulkner's texts. |
|
1514 | Mrs. Winterbottom |
In Flags in the Dust the woman who owns the boarding house in Jefferson where the two carpetbaggers are staying is named Mrs. Winterbottom. According to Will Falls' story about the event, she stands "gapin' after him with her mouth open" when Colonel Sartoris goes up to their room and shoots them both (243). (The third time Faulkner tells this story, in "Skirmish at Satoris" and again in The Unvanquished, the hotel is owned by Mrs. Holston.) |
|
1981 | Mrs. Will Starnes |
Mrs. Starnes, mother of Sophie Starnes, becomes widowed after Will Starnes dies. He leaves her with a mortgage on the house in Division that Stribling (Hawkshaw) promises to pay off. Although the narrator refers the Starnes as "backwoods folks" (139), Mrs. Starnes believes her family's status is nonetheless superior to Stribling's (she calls him "one of these parveynoos" [140], i.e. parvenus). When she dies, Hawkshaw buys her headstone. |
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1470 | Mrs. Wilkins |
In The Unvanquished Mrs. Wilkins and her husband give Bayard a home while he is pursuing a law degree in Oxford, Mississippi. She is a "small" woman whose little gestures ("she just put her hands on my shoulders") reveal her big compassion for Bayard (215). |
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3275 | Mrs. Widrington |
In The Town Mrs. Widrington owns a "a Pekinese with a gold name-plate on its collar that probably didn't even know it was a dog" (380). When the animal disappears, Mrs. Widrington runs ads "in all the Memphis and north Mississippi and west Tennessee and east Arkansas papers" and agitates the local lawmen - Hub Hampton and Buck Connors - to look for it. |
|
2865 | Mrs. Wesley Pritchel |
The unnamed wife of Wesley Pritchel was the mother of four children. She is already dead when "An Error in Chemistry" begins. |
|
247 | Mrs. Wallstreet Panic Snopes |
Although the wife of Wallstreet Panic Snopes is never named in The Town, she is memorably characterized. When she first appears at school in Jefferson, the teacher, Miss Vaiden Wyott, instructs Wall that "this is she. Marry her." He does. His wife is described as a "tense fierce not quite plain-faced girl . . . and a will if anything even more furious" than Gavin's in opposing the rest of the Snopeses (154). |
|
78 | Mrs. Virginius MacCallum 2 |
Virginius MacCallum is married twice in Flags in the Dust. The novel says very little about his deceased second wife, except that Buddy, Virginius' youngest and her only son, inherited his "hazel eyes and reddish thatch" of hair from her (354). |
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77 | Mrs. Virginius MacCallum 1 |
In Flags in the Dust Virginius MacCallum has two wives. Both have died before the novel takes place. The first of them was clearly a country girl of humble origins: her dowry consisted of a clock and "a dressed hog" (332). The novel does not mention anything else about her, but what it says later about the second wife - Buddy's mother, from whom he gets his coloring - suggests this wife was the mother of Virginius' five other sons: unlike Buddy, for instance, they all have "brown eyes and black hair" (354). |
|
3006 | Mrs. Vinson |
In "Miss Zilphia Gant," Mrs. Vinson "conducts" the business at the tavern where Jim Gant stays (368). A "youngish" woman, "with cold eyes and a hard infrequent tongue," she may be the wife or possibly the daughter of the "oldish" man in the background of the place (368), but she runs off from there with Gant. Together, they get as far as Memphis before Gant's wife catches up with them and kills them both. |
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2317 | Mrs. Tucker |
In "That Will Be Fine," Mrs. Tucker is one of Rodney's earlier Jefferson conquests, the married woman with whom he had an affair while visiting town "last summer" (266). One one occasion, Mrs. Tucker is "sick," so Georgie doesn't get a quarter for his part in the "business" (285). |
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447 | Mrs. Tubbs|Tubb |
In Intruder in the Dust, the wife of the county jailer is only mentioned when the jailer, a man named "Tubbs," says "I got a wife and two children" (52). She appears in both the prose and the dramatic sections of Act III in Requiem for a Nun, though she is only named when in the latter jailer Tubbs mentions "Mrs Tubbs" (208). The prose section describes her as a woman "engaged in something as intimate as cooking a meal" (200). |
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2542 | Mrs. Trumbull |
When Trumbull moves away from Frenchman's Bend in The Hamlet, "his wife" goes with him (72). |
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2663 | Mrs. Thorpe |
In "Tomorrow" this woman appears in Frenchman's Bend a week after Thorpe was shot, "claiming to be Thorpe's wife" (90), and hoping he left some property. Though she has "a wedding license to prove it" (90), the narrator sounds suspicious about her marriage. |
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746 | Mrs. Solon Quick |
In "Shall Not Perish," the wife of Solon Quick lives with him on a farm in Frenchman's Bend. She also rides to Jefferson in the bus that he drives, paying the same fare as all the other riders. The money she uses is "egg-money," that is, money she makes from selling the eggs that her chickens lay (111). |
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1507 | Mrs. Smith |
In Flags in the Dust, Mrs. Smith is characterized by her "impregnable affability" as the receptionist and switchboard operator at Dr. Brandt's office in Memphis(246). |
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2914 | Mrs. Skipworth |
Chick speculates in Intruder in the Dust that the wife of Constable Skipworth probably served supper to Lucas during the time he was in her house. |
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1331 | Mrs. Rouncewell |
In The Town, as the florist in Jefferson, "Mrs Rouncewell" gives her name to a memorable event in Jefferson history, the "Mrs Rouncewell panic" (81). This ensues when her shop runs out of flowers before a major dance. "She ran the flower shop; not . . . because she loved flowers nor even because she loved money but because she loved funerals; she had buried two husbands herself and took the second one's insurance and opened the flower shop and furnished the flowers for every funeral in Jefferson since" (73). In the next novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Mansion, Mrs. |
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3270 | Mrs. Riddell |
In The Town this woman is the wife of the highway engineer who moves to Jefferson, where they discover that their second grade son has polio. |
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446 | Mrs. Res Grier |
In "Two Soldiers," the first of the three stories about the Grier family that Faulkner published in 1942 and 1943, the mother of the 'soldiers' is called "Maw." Unlike her shiftless husband, although she wishes her son Pete wasn't determined to enlist, she accepts his decision to do so. Through her tears, she sends him off with mended and clean clothes and "a shoe box of vittles" (85). She also functions as something of a bridge between the World Wars, as her brother served in World War I. |
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57 | Mrs. Quentin Compson II |
The "Mrs. Compson" who appears in "Skirmish at Sartoris" as both a short story and a chapter in The Unvanquished is a hard character to identify. Throughout the other four Unvanquished stories that mention "Mrs. Compson" it seems clear that she is married to General (Quentin) Compson, who is off fighting the Civil War until the final story, "Odor of Verbena," when he makes a brief appearance (245). But in "Skirmish at Sartoris," readers are told that the "only husband [Mrs. |
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873 | Mrs. Pruitt 2 |
Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. This is the Mrs. Pruitt in "Tomorrow": the widow who is the Fentry's closest neighbor. Along with her son, she tells part of the Fentry-Thorpe saga, helping Chick and Gavin solve the mystery of why Fentry voted to convict Bookwright in the killing of Buck Thorpe. |
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445 | Mrs. Pruitt 1 |
Pruitts appear in two different texts - "That Will Be Fine" (1935) and "Tomorrow" (1940) - but there seems to be no connection between the group in each text. This Mrs. Pruitt is the wife of the President of the Compress Association in Mottstown is having an affair with the uncle of the narrator of "That Will Be Fine." |
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444 | Mrs. Provine 2 |
The woman who is married to Wilbur Provine in The Town is mentioned during her husband's trial for making and selling illegal liquor. Judge Long tells Provine, "I'm going to send you to the penitentiary, not for making whiskey but for letting your wife carry water a mile and a half from that spring" (178). |
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879 | Mrs. Provine 1 |
According to the narrator of "A Bear Hunt," Mrs. Luke Provine receives no financial support from her ne'er-do-well husband. It seems that she is the principal breadwinner in the family, with money she "earned by sewing and such" (64). |
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3692 | Mrs. Poleymus |
The wife of Parsham's Constable in The Reivers had a stroke "last year," and "cant even move her hand now" (257). |
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1652 | Mrs. Patterson |
In The Sound and the Fury the Pattersons live next door to the Compsons. Maury Bascomb has an affair with Mrs. Patterson when the Compson children are young. At least once Caddy takes her a letter from "Uncle Maury," and sometime later Benjy tries to deliver another. On that occasion we hear Mrs. Patterson call Benjy "you idiot" as she tries to grab the letter before her husband can reach him (13). |
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3675 | Mrs. Parsham Hood |
Like Lucas' Beauchamp's cabin in Intruder in the Dust, Parsham Hood's cabin in The Reivers contains "a big gold-framed portrait on a gold easel" (244). The woman in the picture - "not very old but in old-timey clothes" (244) - is certainly his deceased wife. |
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763 | Mrs. Odum Bookwright |
In The Hamlet Odom Bookwright mentions but does not name his wife when he tells Ratliff that she hasn't spoken of "anybody's new sewing machine in almost a year" (76). |
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2480 | Mrs. Odlethrop |
Presumably Monk's grandmother, Mrs. Odlethrop lives like a hermit with Monk and seems fiercely protective of him. People tell of how she chased her son and Monk's mother "out of the house and out of the country" with a shotgun because that son was "too much even for that country and people" (43). |
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3263 | Mrs. Nunnery |
Mrs. Nunnery is the mother in The Town who enlists Eck Snopes' help when her son Cedric goes missing. She is so frantic that she doesn't even hear the explosion in which Eck blows himself up during the search; "finally they made her sit down and somebody gave her a drink of whiskey and she quit screaming" (115). |
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759 | Mrs. Nathaniel Burden |
In Light in August Joanna Burden's mother is Nathaniel Burden's second wife, but compared to all Joanna tells Joe Christmas about Juana, Burden's first wife after after whom she is named, Joanna says very little about her own mother, not even her name. All we know about her is that she moves to Jefferson from New Hampshire after Nathaniel writes his cousin there that he is seeking a wife who is "a good housekeeper and . . . at least thirtyfive years old" (250). |
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2331 | Mrs. Merridew |
Mrs. Merridew is the character whom the juvenile narrator of "Uncle Willy" casts as the story's main antagonist: when he accuses Job of telephoning "Her" about Willy's whereabouts, both he and Job know he means Mrs. Merridew (246). She is a member of Reverend Schultz's church and the determined leader of the crusade to "save" Uncle Willy from his predilections, which she sees as both beastly and sinful (238). |
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3439 | Mrs. Meadowfill |
The Mansion describes Meadowfill's wife as a "gray drudge" (361). |
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3031 | Mrs. McKinley Grove |
In Light in August McKinley Grove's wife is described as "labor- and childridden," spending "almost half of every year either pregant or "recovering" (5), so it is not surprising that she discovers her sister-in-law Lena's pregnancy and tells McKinley about it. |
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2696 | Mrs. McKellogg |
In "Two Soldiers" Mrs. McKellogg functions somewhat as the Memphis version of Mrs. Habersham, intervening on behalf of the Grier boy. The narrator notes that she is wearing "a fur coat, but she smelled all right" (97). She provides him with food and a ride back to Frenchman's Bend. |
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3040 | Mrs. McEachern |
Joe Christmas' foster-mother in Light in August, Mrs. McEachern, is a small, timid woman, a "patient, beaten creature without sex demarcation," who looks fifteen years older than her husband and who has been hammered "into an attenuation of dumb hopes and frustrated desires now faint and pale as dead ashes" (147, 165). She tries without success or acknowledgement to provide what she thinks Joe wants and needs. |
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1493 | Mrs. Marders |
A gossipy friend of Belle Mitchell's in Flags in the Dust. It is she who tells Narcissa that her brother and Belle are having an affair. The narrator tells us that "her eyes were like the eyes of an old turkey, predatory and unwinking; a little obscene" (184). |
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1498 | Mrs. Lucius Peabody |
Loosh Peabody married a woman he "courted for fourteen years before he was able to marry her" (400). She lived somewhere "forty miles" away from Jefferson, outside Yoknapatawpha, and the demands of his patients meant that Peabody could not even see her as often as once a year. We can infer she is patient and loyal, but all the narrator of Flags in the Dust says is that her "only child" is Lucius Peabody, Jr. (400). |