Armstids' Farm (Location Key)

Armstid's farm is one of the examples of how Faulkner re-creates his mythical world to suit the needs of a particular narrative or theme. On his 1936 map of Yoknapatawpha Faulkner himself locates "Armstid's" in the hills to the northeast of Frenchman's Bend. According to "Spotted Horses" (1931) the Armstid farm is "about four miles" from Varner's store (178), though that text doesn't say in which direction. In three contemporaneous texts that question is answered in three different ways. In As I Lay Dying (1931), where the farm first appears, the Armstids live south of the Bend, on the north side of and very close to the river; the farm features a house, a barn, and a shed where the Bundren family stays overnight. A year later the farm appears again in two other fictions: in Light in August it's the place on the road into the Bend from the northeast where Lena Grove spends her first night in Yoknapatawpha; and in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," where the brief description of their "small mortgaged farm" on which they make "less than a bare living" from the soil, it seems directly north of the Bend (142).