Courthouse and Square in Requiem for a Nun (Location)

"The courthouse: the center, the focus, the hub" (32). The county courthouse and the Square around it are at the center of Jefferson, and together this site appears more frequently in the fictions than any other location. In Requiem it is a significant location in both the prose and the dramatic sequences. The brief first scene of the play is set in the "Courtroom" (38), represented in stylized fashion as an "intermediate . . . stage" in society's system of "justice" (39). The prose sections that introduce Act I and Act III trace the history of the structure that contains the courtroom from its origins in "a grove of oaks" opposite "the tavern and the store" that formed the nucleus of the original settlement (31) to the building of the "by-neo-Greek-out-of-Georgian-England edifice" (167), through the burning of the courthouse and the buildings on the Square by the Union Army during the Civil War, to the rebuilding that followed. In 1900, the local "U.D.C. ladies" (members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy) erect a memorial to the Confederacy on the south side of the courthouse. And "now," the narrator notes, in the middle of the 20th century, all the roads around the courthouse are "paved" (191) and the "courthouse yard" is "dotted" with benches and "potted conifers" (199).Our project also uses the "Courthouse and Square" as the default setting for events that take place at otherwise unspecified places in Jefferson.