Unnamed Suitors of Eula Varner

The young men of Frenchman's Bend who "swarm around Eula like bees around a honey pot" (166) appear in four different texts, beginning with "Spotted Horses," the text in which that quotation occurs. Their role in The Hamlet is the largest of the four. They court her for several years, "week and week and Sunday and Sunday" (148), during which time they are jealous rivals of each other until an outsider, an itinerant salesman, appears, and then they band together to drive him away. They cannot drive off Hoake McCarron, even though five of them "bushwack" him as he drives Eula home in The Town. After it is discovered that Eula is pregnant, two of them leave Yoknapatawpha hastily (though Hoake is the father of the child she carries; these two flee, the narrator of The Hamlet says, in "glorious shame of the ruin they did not do," (156). All are frustrated when she ends up married to Flem Snopes.