The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Now "a plantation of barely accessible worn-out land containing the weed-choked ruins of a formal garden and the remains (what the neighbors had not pulled down plank by plank for firewood) of a columned colonial house" (283), "in the old time" the Old Frenchman place "had dominated and bequeathed its name to the whole section known as Frenchman's Bend, which the Varners now owned" (8). Will Varner gives to Flem Snopes as Eula's dowry. Believing in the myth of buried money in the garden, Ratliff swaps his share of his restaurant in town for the Frenchman Place.

Texas is referred to as a destination or origin several times in the novel, usually in connection with frontier lawlessness or uncivilized behavior. For example, when Eula Varner gets pregnant, her three suitors "left the country suddenly by night too, for Texas it was said, or anyway west, far enough west to be longer than Uncle Billy or Jody Varner could have reached" (7). Eula herself goes to Texas with her new husband, Flem, to have the child.

Also referred to as "Uncle Billy's house," this is the home owned by Will Varner, the main property owner of Frenchman's Bend.

Another of Will Varner's properties in the Frenchman's Bend area, the blacksmith shop was run by Old Man Trumball for fifty years. Two years after Flem Snopes arrives in Frenchman's Bend, I.O. and Eck Snopes take over shop.

Frenchman's Bend is a very rural community about twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. Its population is almost entirely white. The local landowner is Will Varner who "just about owned the whole settlement and district" (5). It has a specific significance to the Snopes saga: the Bend is where Ab and Flem Snopes first appear in Yoknapatawpha, when they rent a worn-out farm from Varner, and it is from the Bend that Flem and the various other Snopes launch their migration to Jefferson.

A farm owned by Will Varner in Freshman's Bend and rented to a man "who seemed to be" Flem Snopes's father: "It was a farm so poor and small and already wornout that the most trifling farmer would undertake it, and even they stayed only one year" (5).

The pan-European landscape of the World War I era appears in the novel in a number of different places and ways. Gavin Stevens earns a doctorate from Heidelberg University, in Germany, just before the War begins. At one point he planned to volunteer "as a stretcher bearer with the German army," but on his way back to the U.S. through "Amsterdam," he "admitted to himself that the Germany he could have loved that well had died somewhere between the Liege and Namur forts and the year 1848" (109). Germany conquered both these Belgian forts in the early stages of the war.

Oxford, Mississippi - where Faulkner himself lived most of his life - appears in The Town in two different ways. Both Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes attends the University of Mississippi there, Gavin as a law student and Linda as an undergraduate. And while she is in Oxford, Linda consults an Oxford attorney named Stone, who was Faulkner's close friend for most of his life. Other texts describe Oxford as 40 miles from Jefferson. In The Town Faulkner increases the distance to "fifty miles" (303).

Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the oldest university in the United States and one of the institutions that the highly-educated Gavin Stevens attends.

Flem Snopes moves to Jefferson as the new owner of the "small back-alley restaurant" previously owned by V. K. Ratliff and Grover Cleveland Winbush. Although it is sometimes still referred to as "Ratliff's cafe" (131), he swapped his half to Flem in exchange for the Old Frenchman place at the end of The Hamlet. Both Flem and Eula work there for a while, but it isn't long before Flem acquires the other half from Winbush, and brings additional Snopeses in from Frenchman's Bend to run it.