Character Keys

The two-story Frenchman's Bend boarding house that Mrs. Littlejohn owns appears in five different texts. She herself appears in three of them - "Spotted Horses," The Hamlet and The Town - as a witness to the hapless efforts of "them fool men," as she puts it in the first story, to buy the Texas ponies (174). And she is not simply a spectator: when one of the horses invades her house, she breaks a washboard over its head. She plays her largest role in The Hamlet. Described there as a "man-tall, man-grim woman" wearing a "faded wrapper" (219), Mrs.

Mr. Lilley's wife does not appear in Intruder in the Dust, but he cites her - "my wife aint feeling good tonight" - when he explains to Gavin why he isn't going to the Square to join the lynch mob (47).

Mrs. Killegrew and her husband are neighbors of the Griers in "Two Soldiers" and "Shingles for the Lord." In the second story she is described by the vernacular narrator as "worser deaf than even Killegrew" (28). In the first story that disability explains why the Grier sons can go to the Killegrews' to find out what's going on in the world beyond Frenchman's Bend: because she is "deaf" (that is, presumably, very hard of hearing), her husband "runs the radio as loud as it would run," and so the boys can "hear it plain . . . even standing outside with the window closed" (81).

Colonel John Sartoris' wife and (Old) Bayard's mother is a very elusive figure. In the Unvanquished series it emerges that her maiden name was Millard, and it can be assumed that she originally came from Memphis (where Rosa Millard and her husband lived before the Civil War). In "My Grandmother Millard" Bayard notes that Cousin Melisandre is married in the same wedding dress that both her grandmother and mother wore at their weddings, and says that "Mother wasn't much older than Cousin Melisandre even when she died" - and Melisandre is a very young woman (698-99).

Mrs. McLendon appears at the end of "Dry September" as the "pale, strained, and weary-looking" wife of the man who leads the lynching party (182). When he comes home at midnight and finds her reading a magazine, he accuses her of waiting up for him, and strikes her.

Isaac McCaslin's "dead wife" is very briefly referred to in "Delta Autumn." Go Down, Moses evokes her from the start, by identifying Ike as a "widower" twice on its first page (5). His wife - who may be the daughter of the bank president who hires Ike and his partner to put a new roof on his stable - remains in the background for most of the novel, but in her brief appearances Faulkner emphasizes her hostility, as Ike meets her "tense bitter indomitable voice" with a posture of familiarity (104).

In The Hamlet I.O. Snopes calls himself "a single man, unfortunately" (225), but to the surprise of Frenchman's Bend, three years after he arrived in the hamlet he turns out to have a wife, a "big gray-colored woman" (292). When she appears with "a baby six months old" in a carriage, I.O. "takes one look at that buggy" and vanishes (293). Her character is not developed further in this novel. In the next novel in the Snopes trilogy, The Town, it turns out that she is only one of I.O.'s wives - he is a twice-married man, i.e. a bigamist.

In "Uncle Willy" Mrs. Hovis is among the ladies who try to reform the title character. She alternates with Mrs. Merridew in staying with Willy "day and night" for three days as part of the plan to keep him away from morphine (229). It seems likely that, like Merridew, she is a member of Reverend Schultz's congregation.

The name Holston is one of the oldest in Yoknapatawpha, but in both "Skirmish at Sartoris" and the reprinting of the story in The Unvanquished this character appears only as a name in the phrase "Mrs. Holston's porter" (71, 207). He is a hotel porter, and presumably works at the Holston House, one of the oldest buildings in Jefferson. As we know from other fictions, it was established by Alexander Holston; it seems to be owned now by this Mrs. Porter, who may be his daughter.

Mrs. Hines, the mother of Milly and grandmother of Joe Christmas, is described in Light in August as "a dumpy, fat little woman with a round face like dirty and unovened dough, and a tight screw of scant hair" (346). Early on, she is a much less vivid character than her dominating husband, whose religious fanaticism seems to control them both. Later, after she realizes that Joe Christmas is the grandson whom her husband had taken from her thirty-five years earlier, she takes charge of her husband, manages to visit Joe in jail, and seeks assistance on Joe's behalf.

In "Go Down, Moses" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, Hamp Worsham's wife is a big woman "in a bright turban" whom Gavin Stevens sees at Miss Worsham's participating in the mourning service for Mollie's lost grandson (263, 361). She has a powerful suprano voice.

The older of the "two ladies in fur coats" in "Two Soldiers" whom Mr. Foote summons to help with the Grier boy (90). She may be a social worker, like the younger woman, or as is more likely, just a caring member of the community. Her family name is one of the oldest in Yoknapatawpha. Because the is wearing a "fur coat" and is apparently married, we assume she is not Miss Habersham, the impoverished "spinster of seventy" in Intruder in the Dust (92) and elsewhere.

Mrs. Gant is probably the most powerfully drawn character in the story named after her daughter, "Miss Zilphia Gant," just as she is an overwhelming force in Zilphia's life, even long after she is dead.

In The Hamlet Mrs. Freeman watches as Eck and Wall Street try to catch their horse. Eck and the boy try to stop the horse by tripping it. "She said that when it hit that rope, it looked just like one of these here great big Christmas pinwheels" (365).

In Requiem for a Nun Cecilia Farmer's mother, who is married to the Yoknapatawpha County "jailor," apparently performs all domestic duties such as washing or drying dishes with her husband's assistance, because Cecilia's "frail hands" are not capable of the tasks (180).

The "Mrs. Edmonds" who is Cass Edmonds' mother in Go Down, Moses may be Lucius (Old Carothers) McCaslin's granddaughter, or she may be the wife of McCaslin's grandson - depending on whether her mother or she herself married a man named Edmonds. The novel doesn't allow us to decide between these alternatives. All it says about this character is that she died, presumably when her son was very young: his grandmother, McCaslin's daughter, "raised him following his mother's death" (9).

In Intruder in the Dust Mrs. Downs is "an old white woman who lived alone in a small filthy shoebox of a house . . . in a settlement of Negro houses," and makes her living telling fortunes, curing hexes and finding lost objects for African American customers (69). She is perhaps the same as, or is at least very similar to the "half-crazed" woman who appears in Sanctuary.

Mrs. Cowan owns and runs the Jefferson boarding house where Hawkshaw and Mitch Ewing live in "Hair." She never appears directly in the story, but Matt Fox says that she's the only woman Hawkshaw knows.

Rosa Coldfield's mother (and Goodhue's wife) is barely mentioned in Absalom!, though we know she was "at least forty" when she died giving birth to Rosa (46).

In "That Will Be Fine," after Mrs. Church pays a call on Mrs. Pruitt, she gossips about her with the women of Grandpa's family, saying that she uses too much makeup, does not dress properly, and drinks.

The "inescapably negro" woman whom Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon marries in Absalom! (168) is apparently somewhat mentally deficient; at least, "her mentality" is mentioned disparagingly (167), and she is described as "existing" in an "automaton-like state" (166). The phrase "inescapably negro" is attributed to Judith; the phrases that Mr. Compson uses to describe her include "coal black and ape-like" (166); "resembling something in a zoo" (169), and "the black gargoyle" (170).

Virginius MacCallum's mother is not mentioned in Flags in the Dust, but in "The Tall Men" - where that character is referred to as "Old Anse" - this woman is identified as "a Carter," which explains his determination "to go all the way back to Virginia to do his fighting" at the start of the Civil War (54). (The Carters are one of the oldest white families in Virginia, dating back to the early 17th century.)

In "Monk" Mrs. Gambrell is the wife of the penitentiary warden who teaches Monk how to knit (50).

Buddy McCallum's dead wife in "The Tall Men" - the mother of the twins Lucius and Anse - is only mentioned briefly, in connection with her absence from the McCallum family graveyard where the story ends. Like Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, she "wanted to be buried with her folks" (60). According to Gombault, "she would have been right lonesome up here with just McCallums" (60).

In The Sound and the Fury Mrs. Bland is the mother of Quentin's Harvard classmate Gerald; she has moved from Kentucky to Cambridge to be close to her son. She lays claim to an aristocratic heritage, and in person is both formal and insistent. Shreve calls her "fate in eight yards of apricot silk" (106).

Mrs. Ben Quick makes a very brief appearance in "Tomorrow" when Isham Quick refers to "the dishes and skillet [that] mammy" let Fentry have while he lived in the boiler room at the sawmill (105).

Old Bayard's wife, the grandmother of Young Bayard and Young John Sartoris, is never named, and mentioned only in passing in Flags in the Dust, when that novel sums up the history of the parlor in the Sartoris mansion over the decades. We're told that she and her daughter-in-law and Miss Jenny clean the room "thoroughly" twice a year. There are exactly two words devoted to her: "his wife" (55).

The wife of the farmer named Armstid appears or is mentioned in seven texts; she is unnamed in five of them, but her name is Lula in As I Lay Dying, the first one, and Martha in Light in August. That is not the only inconsistency in her character. In both these novels she doesn't hesitate to speak her mind to her husband; in "Spotted Horses," however, she is extremely self-effacing, submitting without complaint to her husband's abusive behavior.

"The only sister of old Major de Spain," Mrs. Allison in The Mansion is "a bed-ridden old woman living in Los Angeles" (463). She and her daughter end up owning 'the mansion' after which the novel is named. (If in Faulkner's imagination she is related to the Allison family that appears in the earlier short story "Beyond," the text doesn't say so.)

Mr. Wordwin, a cashier at the Bank of Jefferson, plays his small part in The Reivers when he accompanies Boon to Memphis to fetch Grandfather's new car, but the narrative adds that he is "a bachelor, one of our most prominent clubmen or men about town" who has been "a groomsman in thirteen weddings" (30).

In The Town Mr. Widrington is a newcomer to Jefferson who drives his wife and her pedigree dog around town in a Cadillac.

The man with the badge outside Grandpa's house in Mottstown in "That Will Be Fine" reminds Georgie of "Mr. Watts at Jefferson that catches the niggers," so it seems safe to say that Watts is either the sheriff or one of the deputies or, perhaps, the town marshal (277). The fact that all the people he catches are black probably reflects the fact that most arrested people in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha are black, not that Watts has a special commission to catch Negroes.

He is the husband of Rodney's earlier Jefferson conquest, Mrs. Tucker. Rodney makes clear to Georgie, the very young and uncomprehending narrator of "That Will Be Fine," that Mr. Tucker is not involved in his "business" with Mrs. Tucker (266).

The Oxford, Mississippi, lawyer with whom Linda consults while attending the University of Mississippi is named Stone in The Town. At her request, he devises a "contingency" by which Linda stipulates that Flem Snopes should receive any inheritance she is left by her mother. "He was very nice," Linda says (342). (He is mentioned but not named in The Mansion.) The real person behind this character is unquestionably Oxford resident Phil Stone, a lawyer and a descendant of a prominent local family.

In Go Down, Moses Semmes is a distiller in Memphis to whom Boon and Ike are sent by Major de Spain for whisky during the annual hunting trip.

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).

Mr. Powell is John Powell's father in The Reivers. John works for him "on the farm" to earn the money with which he buys "a .41 caliber snub-nosed revolver" from him (6).

Pearson is the "state draft investigator" in "The Tall Men" (45). A man of "better than average intelligence," he has developed an arrogant, stereotypical way of thinking about country people (48). His previous relief agency work has taught him to expect the worst from such groups, but his encounter with Mr. Gombault and the McCallum family is "different from what he had expected" (48). Over the course of the story, he learns how wrong his assumptions can be.

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).

Mr. McDiarmid is one of the two judges at the horse race in The Reivers. Lucius describes him, memorably, as the operator of "the depot eating room, who . . . could slice a ham so thin that his entire family made a summer trip to Chicago on the profits from one of them" (229).

In "That Evening Sun," Nancy tells the Compson children that "I got my coffin money saved up with Mr. Lovelady" - or as Quentin's narrative explains, Mr. Lovelady is "a short, dirty man who collected the Negro insurance, coming around to the cabins or the kitchens every Saturday morning, to collect fifteen cents" toward a fund to pay for their funerals (308). He lives at the hotel with his wife and only daughter. Though he and his family occupy only part of a paragraph, the details of their story are provocative: Mrs. Lovelady commits suicide, and after leaving town with his daughter, Mr.

In The Town, Mr. Kneeland owns the tailor shop in Jefferson, where he makes men's clothes and rents out formal menswear, such as the tuxedos worn to the Cotillion Club ball.

In The Mansion, Mr. Holland is the President of the Bank of Jefferson, the rival of the bank founded by Bayard Sartoris. Holland creates a scholarship in honor of his "only son," who died fighting in World War II (361).

Harker is the night engineer of the municipal power plant in Jefferson in both "Centaur in Brass" and The Town. In both the story and the novel he serves as a source of the story of Flem Snopes' effort to embezzle by turning the plant's two Negro firemen against each other. His attitude toward the events is mostly that of a bemused spectator, though in the novel's re-telling of the episode he actively intervenes to help the two Negroes recognize that their real antagonist is the white Snopes.

In "A Rose for Emily," Mr. Grierson has been dead for some time when he is first referred to in the story. Alive he was an old-fashioned, over-bearing patriarch who did not allow his daughter to mingle with any men, keeping all possible suitors at bay. Nonetheless Emily keeps "a crayon portrait" of him displayed in the parlor "on a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace" (120).

In both "The Tall Men" and The Town, Gombault is a federal marshal in the district that includes Yoknapatawpha. He is only mentioned in the later novel, but in the earlier story he plays a major role. One of Faulkner's most palatable lawmen, Mr. Gombault is repeatedly described as old, yet he moves "quickly, easily" (61). He displays a deep understanding of human behavior as he deals shrewdly with both Mr. Pearson and the McCallum family, and is perhaps one of the "Tall Men" of the story's title as the final line identifies him as a "tall, lean old man" (61).

In As I Lay Dying Gillespie is a farmer who lives between Mottson and Jefferson. He agrees to let the Bundrens stop for the night on his property, but when his barn burns down as a result he threatens to sue the family unless they have Darl committed to Jackson - the Mississippi state mental institution.

The boy narrator of "Two Soldiers" calls him "the Law" (89). The employee at the bus depot calls him "Mr. Foote" (89). He's probably the night marshal in Jefferson. He finds the boy alone at dawn in the empty town square, takes him to the depot, and turns him over to the town's informal social service system - "two ladies in fur coats" (90).

Mr. Burchett is the guardian of Susan Reed in "Hair." The story's narrator repeats the local rumors that Susan may be Mr. Burchett's illegitmate child, but this is never confirmed.