Scotland (Location Key)

Much of the white population of Yoknapatawpha is of Scottish descent, from the upper class families like the Compsons and the Mallisons to the folk who live in the "hill-country of McCallum and Gowrie and Frazier and Muir" and who brought Scottish words and customs with them "from Culloden to Carolina, then from Carolina to Yoknapatawpha" (The Town, 332). So the adjective "Scotch" appears in a great many of the fictions. But three in particular mention Scotland. Besides The Town, there is the "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote to The Sound and the Fury, which traces the Scottish roots of the Compson family back to Glasgow, the home of the printer who was Quentin MacLachan Compson's father; Perth, the city in central Scotland where his mother's family lived and where he was brought up after death of both parents; and Culloden Moor, where the Jacobites (including Quentin) were decisively defeated in a battle with Great Britain in 1746. And in Intruder in the Dust one of Gavin Stevens' quasi-racial theories is that the people of Beat Four, "the Gowries and Ingrums and Workitts" (28), settled in the hills of northeastern Yoknapatawpha because the landscape reminded them of their origins in "the Scottish highlands" (145) - a theory he repeats in The Town.