Goodhue Coldfield's father never appears in Absalom!, but Rosa distinguishes herself and her origins from Sutpen's parvenu status by noting that "our father knew who his father was in Tennessee" (11).
In Absalom!, Rosa's "spinster aunt" (46) lives with the Coldfields in Jefferson and, after Rosa's mother dies, raises the girl. According to Mr. Compson, this aunt is "that strong vindictive consistent woman who seems to have been twice the man that Mr. Coldfield was and who in very truth was not only Miss Rosa's mother but her father too" (49). "A virgin at thirty-five," when Rosa is born, she brings Rosa up in a "closed masonry of females," defined by rage against "the entire male principle" in general and Thomas Sutpen in particular - at least according to Mr.
According to Mr. Compson, the scene in Absalom! in the Sutpen graveyard with Bon's wife and child "must have resembled a garden scene by the Irish poet, Wilde" (157). Wilde - who died in 1900, nine years before Mr. Compson would have said this - wrote in many genres, but in particular his poetry was an important influence on the apprentice work of William Faulkner.
In Absalom! Mr. Compson imagines Bon's wife as someone "Beardsley might have dressed" and Bon's child as a figure "Beardsley might not only have dressed but drawn" (157). Like Oscar Wilde, mentioned in the same passage, Aubrey Beardsley was an important artist in late 19th century England. His decadent visual style was an important influence on the early drawings of William Faulkner. Beardsley's name is also mentioned in Light in August.
On a nocturnal hunt for raccoons in Absalom!, "the coon-hunter Akers" discovers the primitive way Sutpen's original twenty slaves sleep while building the mansion (27).
The "old Abraham full of years" to whom Shreve compares Sutpen in Absalom! is obviously the Old Testament patriarch (260). That figure is best known as the mythic father of the covenant between God and His chosen people, and as the human father whose faith was so great that he was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac in obedience to God's command. Shreve's "Abraham," however, seems entirely his own invention, who - in a quotation that sounds biblical but that Shreve makes up - "raised about me sons to bear the burden of mine iniquities and persecutions" (260).
Intruder in the Dust refers often to both the extended Gowrie clan and the larger white population of Beat Four as a specific sociological entity. The phrase "Gowries and Ingrums and Workitts" identifies the three largest familial groups in that area of Yoknapatawpha (28), though members of these families have intermarried repeatedly over the generations too. (Twice the novel adds "Frasers" to this list of names, 145, 146; another time it adds "McCallums," 33).
In the last decades of his career Faulkner several times creates lists of the major family names in various parts of Yoknapatawpha. In Intruder in the Dust he identifies five family names with Frenchman's Bend and its environs: Littlejohn and Greenleaf and Armstead and Millingham and Bookwright (146).
In the last decades of his career Faulkner several times includes lists of what, in "Appendix Compson," he identifies as "the oldest names in the county" (330) - or, as it puts it more grandiloquently in The Town, the "cognomens long and splendid in the annals of Yoknapatawpha County" (284). Here they are, organized chronologically by publication dates:
As listed in "Appendix Compson" - Holston and Sutpen, Grenier and Beauchamp and Coldfield (330), Compsons and Sartorises and their ilk (338);
In "Fool about a Horse" and again in The Hamlet, these "neighbor men" are in the habit of dropping by to see what kind of horse Pap (in the short story) or Ab Snopes (in the novel) has "brung home this time" (119) - or "whatever it was he had done swapped for" (34). It's likely that at least most of these men are tenant farmers on the Holland land too.
