Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-06-23 09:55
Jefferson seems to contain both an Academy and a Female Academy, though the distinction between these two private secondary schools grows less clear across the four texts that mention one or the other or both - if indeed they are two separate institutions. The "Academy" is mentioned first, in "Knight's Gambit," where it is described as a co-educational "prep school" (205). Charles Mallison attends it on the eve of World War II, but a generation earlier his mother and several other upper class girls attended "the female half of the Academy" (153).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-06-23 09:54
Early in Chapter 9 of The Mansion, Charles Mallison mentions "Munich," though his equivocation about whether "Munich" should be "observed or celebrated or consecrated" - and his uncle Gavin's subsequent comment, "It wont be long now" - probably won't explain themselves to most 21st-century readers (229).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-06-23 09:51
India is seen from a distance in The Town, when Charles Mallison explains that his cousin Gowan Stevens came to Jefferson for several years when his father, a State Department employee, is sent "to China or India or some far place" (3). India is also offstage in "Ad Astra," but one of the main characters in that story is from India, as are the troops serving with the English forces in the story he tells.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-06-23 09:51
Only two fictions mention China, and both treat it (to quote The Town) essentially as "some far place" (194). In The Sound and the Fury Jason Compson's self-deceived musings on the value of money include the example of the rich man in Jefferson who sponsored a "Chinese missionary" - by which he means an American who travels to China as a missionary (194); before the Communist revolution in 1949, there were hundreds of Protestant missionaries in China at any given moment.
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Wed, 2017-06-21 23:17
The character here called "Doctor Holston" (675) is probably the same man as the Alexander Holston who was one of the original three white settlers in Yoknapatawpha. He built the "Holston House," the hotel on the Square that continues to bear his name through the end of the Yoknapatawpha saga. (In calling him Doctor Holston, Faulkner seems, probably by a lapse of memory, to conflate him with Doctor Habersham, another of that original trio of settlers.)
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Wed, 2017-06-21 23:15
The officer leading the "first Yankee scouting party" to appear in Jefferson is obviously a gentleman: when told by Aunt Roxanne, one of the Compson's slaves, that a woman is in the privy behind the Compson house, he begs Roxanne's pardon, "raises his hat and even backs [his] horse a few steps" before turning away and ordering his men to leave (675).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Wed, 2017-06-21 23:12
General Compson's first name is not given in this story, but the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury (1946) identifies him as "Jason Lycurgus Compson," the third Jason on the Compson family tree. The Compson family is one of the most important in the Yoknapatawpha fictions; in at least one of these, General Compson is identified as the first member of the family to arrive in Yoknapatawpha. In this story he is referred to as probably "the only Jefferson soldier" the first Yankees to arrive in Jefferson had ever heard of, presumably because of his rank (675).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Wed, 2017-06-21 23:08
Mrs. Compson is the wife of General Compson (and so one of the grandmothers of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy in The Sound and the Fury). In this story she is only mentioned as the lady who saves the family silver by outsmarting the first Union troops who came to Jefferson.
