Compson Inset: Pasture|Golf Course (Location Key)

When the Compson property was an antebellum plantation it contained a square mile of land. By the time the Compson children are born at the end of the nineteenth century, most of that land has been sold, but during their childhood there is still a pasture beside the house. It is either a "twenty acre pasture" (35) or "forty acres" in area (174) - The Sound and the Fury is inconsistent on this point. Quentin and Caddy do consistently call it "Benjy's pasture," because going into it is apparently one of his main sources of pleasure as a child (174). But by 1910 this land has been sold to pay for Quentin to go to Harvard, and by 1928 it has been turned into a golf course, on the other side of a fence Benjy is not allowed to cross. During the novel Benjy spends a lot of time standing behind this fence, remembering the pasture or repeatedly watching the golfers, whose calls of "here, caddie" are a constant source of pain (3). The "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote sixteen years later notes that by that time even the golf course is gone.