Character Keys
Code | title | biography | |
---|---|---|---|
203 | Mrs. Buddy McCallum |
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). |
|
1974 | Mrs. Burchett |
Along with her husband, Mrs. Burchett is the guardian of Susan Reed in "Hair." The narrator repeats the local rumor that Susan may be her illegitimate child, but this is never confirmed. Mrs. Burchett seems to be more involved with Susan's care than Mr. Burchett. However, she easily succumbs to Susan's deceptions. According to the narrator, Mrs. Burchett doesn't know that when Susan becomes a teenager, she stops going to school and forges the report cards that Mrs. Burchett signs. |
|
2477 | Mrs. C.L. Gambrell |
In "Monk" Mrs. Gambrell is the wife of the penitentiary warden who teaches Monk how to knit (50). |
|
130 | Mrs. Carothers McCaslin |
The wife of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the slave-owning patriarch at the head of the McCaslin, Beauchamp, Edmonds and Priest families in Faulkner's late fictions, is mentioned only once, in The Reivers. It is her Bible that Ned, the only one of her husband's illegitimate and biracial descendants who is named McCaslin rather than Beauchamp, carries in his bag - a symbolic gesture that is extremely interesting and opaque. |
|
76 | Mrs. Carter MacCallum |
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.) |
|
97 | Mrs. Charles Bon |
While almost nothing is certain in Absalom, Absalom!, it is particularly difficult to know how to identify this character. When she first appears in the narrative she is first called "the other woman" (other than Judith, that is) whose photograph Charles Bon is carrying when he is killed (71). Mr. Compson calls her "the octoroon mistress" (75), Bon's "eighth part negro mistress" (80), and "a hereditary negro concubine" (168). Shreve (who as a non-Southerner is unfamiliar with the caste term "white trash," 147) refers to her as "the octoroon" (249, 286). |
|
109 | Mrs. Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon |
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). |
|
2329 | Mrs. Christian |
"Mrs. Christian" (the narrator of "Uncle Willy" gives her no other name) is a prostitute in Memphis whom Willy marries on one of his regular trips to the city, and an affront to most of Jefferson when he brings her back to his house. She is "twice as big as Uncle Willy," and visually conspicuous in her clothes - "a red hat and a pink dress" (236), "a red-and-white striped dress so that she looked like a great big stick of candy" (237), "a black lace dress" (238). |
|
2300 | Mrs. Church |
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. |
|
2375 | Mrs. Coldfield 1 |
Goodhue Coldfield's mother is an elusive character. Absalom! several times asserts that Rosa Coldfield's childhood was spent in a household consisting of her father and her aunt, but in one passage it refers to the fact that Mr. Coldfield had to support "a dependent mother" as well as his family (32). |
|
2377 | Mrs. Coldfield 2 |
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). |
|
1748 | Mrs. Cooper |
Minnie Cooper's mother is not explicitly named in "Dry September," which mentions her once as Minnie's "invalid mother," who lives with her daughter in "a small frame house" (173). |
|
1976 | Mrs. Cowan |
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. |
|
439 | Mrs. de Spain |
The wife of Major de Spain is mentioned in "A Bear Hunt," when Ratliff wonders if she already owns a sewing machine - or may have given it to "one of her married daughters" (63). These daughters are never mentioned again, but Mrs. de Spain herself appears briefly but vividly in "Barn Burning" when Ab Snopes tracks manure onto the expensive "blond rug" inside the front door of her mansion (12). |
|
2892 | Mrs. Downs |
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. |
|
1787 | Mrs. Ed Walker |
While Sanctuary describes the jailer's wife as "a lank, slattern woman," her insistence on giving Ruby a bed after the Baptists got her thrown out of the hotel, despite her husband's reluctance to do so - "I kin always find a bed fer a woman and child," she says; "I don't keer whut Ed says" - is welcomed by Horace (181). |
|
142 | Mrs. Edmonds |
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). |
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304 | Mrs. Eustace Grimm |
In The Hamlet Ratliff notes that Eustace Grimm's new wife is a "Calhoun County Doshey" (399). (There are no Dosheys elsewhere in the fictions.) |
|
841 | Mrs. Farmer (Jailer) |
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). |
|
2664 | Mrs. Fentry |
In "Tomorrow" this wandering poor-white, pregnant woman is given shelter and aid by Jackson Fentry at Quick's Sawmill. He calls her "Miss Smith" when asked her name by someone else (99). Though initially she says she is already married, right after her baby is born she marries to Fentry and almost immediately dies (105). When her brothers turn up years later looking for the child, we learn her maiden name is Thorpe. |
|
761 | Mrs. Freeman |
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). |
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3077 | Mrs. Gail Hightower |
Unnamed, the daughter of the head of Reverend Hightower's seminary wants desperately to escape to the wider world and chooses the young Gail Hightower as her getaway vehicle. She marries him, and schemes with him to effect his appointment to the pulpit in Jefferson. There, she tries to adjust to his neglect and inattention, but eventually begins looking for male companionship on secret trips to Memphis. They aren't secret enough to keep her from becoming a scandalous topic among the women in her husband's church. |
|
2086 | Mrs. Gant |
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. |
|
3425 | Mrs. Goodyhay |
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). |
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2694 | Mrs. Habersham |
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. |
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3054 | Mrs. Hamp Waller |
In Light in August Mrs. Waller reports the fire at the Burden place to the sheriff after she and her husband discover the burning house and Joanna's murdered body. |
|
1204 | Mrs. Hamp Worsham |
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. |
|
2970 | Mrs. Hence Mossop Cayley |
In "Knight's Gambit" Miss Cayley explains that before her marriage her "mother was a Mossop" (193). |
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3017 | Mrs. Hines |
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. |
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2529 | Mrs. Hoake |
Alison Hoake buries her husband in a family graveyard "beside her father and mother" (150). This is the only mention of Mrs. Hoake in The Hamlet. |
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441 | Mrs. Holston |
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. |
|
832 | Mrs. Hope Hampton |
The wife of Sheriff Hope Hampton in Intruder in the Dust is in Memphis, where the couple's expectant daughter lives. |
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2330 | Mrs. Hovis |
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. |
|
2227 | Mrs. Howard Allison |
The wife of Judge Allison in "Beyond" is a rather vague character; the only things we know about her are that the Judge was twenty-eight when they married and she bore a son in 1903. |
|
230 | Mrs. I.O. Snopes 1 |
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. |
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231 | Mrs. I.O. Snopes 2 |
Faulkner's decision in The Town to make I.O. Snopes a bigamist complicates the identity of the various characters who appear as his wife. The first such character appears in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, as a "placid mountain of a woman" who spends her days in the porch swing of their "small frame house" - "not doing anything: just swinging" (235). Her son is named Clarence. |
|
143 | Mrs. Isaac McCaslin |
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). |
|
56 | Mrs. Jason Compson II |
The wife of General Compson first appears in the mid-1930s in at least four of the Unvanquished stories and the novel Absalom, Absalom! In the stories she appears mainly in the pieces of a lady's equipment that she lends Rosa Millard on two occasions: a hat, a shawl and a parasol. |
|
1751 | Mrs. John McLendon |
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. |
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3694 | Mrs. John Powell |
John Powell's wife is not named in The Reivers, but she is mentioned as having "stitched a neat strong pocket" inside his overalls for the pistol he chooses to carry (7). |
|
10 | Mrs. John Sartoris |
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). |
|
2312 | Mrs. Jordon |
Mrs. Jordon is Grandpa's Mottstown neighbor in "That Will Be Fine"; at the end of the story, after Rodney is killed, Rosie is taking Georgie to her house for the night. |
|
442 | Mrs. Killegrew |
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). |
|
3259 | Mrs. Ledbetter |
Mrs. Ledbetter - whom Ratliff invariably calls "Miz" Ledbetter - lives near Frenchman's Bend in a place called Rockyford. In The Town she buys a sewing machine. In both that novel and The Mansion Ratliff travels to Rockyford to deliver it. |
|
2909 | Mrs. Lilley |
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). |
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3683 | Mrs. Linscomb |
The Colonel's wife is away during The Reivers, visiting in "Monteagle," which is the name of a real town in southeastern Tennessee (277). |
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443 | Mrs. Littlejohn |
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. |
|
1930 | Mrs. Lovelady |
Mrs. Lovelady, the wife of the white man who collects insurance money from the local Negroes in "That Evening Sun," commits suicide "one morning" (308). Quentin's narrative gives no further account or explanation of that act. |
|
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). |
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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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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. |
|
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. |
|
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. |
|
3439 | Mrs. Meadowfill |
The Mansion describes Meadowfill's wife as a "gray drudge" (361). |
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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). |
|
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). |
|
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). |
|
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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. |
|
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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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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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. |
|
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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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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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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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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2542 | Mrs. Trumbull |
When Trumbull moves away from Frenchman's Bend in The Hamlet, "his wife" goes with him (72). |
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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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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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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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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). |
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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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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). |
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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. |
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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. |
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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). |
|
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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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.) |
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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. |
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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. |
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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.) |
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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. |
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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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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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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. |
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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. |
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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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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. |
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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. |
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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). |
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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. |
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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). |