Sally Hampton Priest

Sally Priest, an abused married woman, receives a corsage from Grenier Weddel and a black eye from her husband. According to Gowan Stevens' account, "you would even have thought she was proud of it" (81); according to Ratliff's, "she was" (82). Her maiden name, "Sally Hampton" (80), suggests she is related to the Hamptons who are county sheriffs in other fictions, but if Faulkner imagined her in that relation, the text gives no hint of it. (When The Town was reprinted in 1964, the names of the two Priests were changed to "Parsons," perhaps to avoid confusion with the many members of the very different Priest family who appear in Requiem for a Nun [1962] - though Faulkner did not usually worry about creating such kinds of confusion.)