Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2013-12-21 11:05
Santa Fe itself was founded in 1608. At the period when Nathaniel and the mother of his son, Juana, travel there in an attempt to get married, it was a territory of the United States that had been claimed by Spain, Mexico, and Texas in turn. The novel describes it in the mid-19th century as a dusty place (247); these days it is the capital of the state of New Mexico.
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2013-12-21 11:02
Located in the center of the United States, Kansas is one of the places to which Nathaniel Burden travels between 1850 and 1866. During most of that time Kansas was a territory recently opened to American and European settlers. Following the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed territorial residents to decide the status of the state as slaveholding or free, Kansas was known as "Bleeding Kansas" for the violence of the conflicts between the two sides. It was thus a wild borderland when Nathaniel traveled there.
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2013-12-21 10:58
Colorado was not admitted to the Union as a state until 1876, and was not even organized into a territory until 1861 - details that the novel ignores when it says Nathaniel Burden wrote letters to his family "from Colorado" while he lived there in the early 1850s (243). "He did not say what he was doing" there - nor does the novel (243).
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2013-12-21 10:37
St. Louis, Missouri, is north of Yoknapatawpha and separated from Mississippi by Oklahoma. Before the Civil War Calvin Burden settles down here for a while with his family, though six years later, after killing a man in an argument over slavery, he has to move somewhere "westward" (242). When Joe Christmas' fifteen-year-long wanderings bring him into Missouri he probably spends time in or at least passes through St. Louis.
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2013-12-21 10:34
In Light in August Calvin Burden sails to California when he runs away from home at age twelve. This is several decades before the Gold Rush brought thousands of other Americans there. At the time California belonged to Spain, and young Calvin's experiences are shaped by that: he "turns Catholic" and lives "for a year in a monastery" (241); it is the Catholic "priests in California" who teach him how to read - but only in Spanish (242).
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2013-12-21 10:29
The 3 occurrences of Kansas in the fictions occur in chronological order, both historical and literary. Although Light in August doesn't use the term, for most of the time during Nathaniel Burden's travels in Kansas between 1850 and 1866, the territory was known as 'Bleeding Kansas.' During the decade preceding statehood in 1861, Kansas was the scene of violent fighting between pro- and anti-slavery forces. In The Hamlet, published seven years later, Jack Houston lives in Kansas for a while in the 1880s, working in the state's iconic wheat fields.
Submitted by cornellgoldw@fo... on Sat, 2013-12-21 10:29
3 different places in Indiana are mentioned in 4 different texts - but always in connection with 2 different illegitimate children. It's tempting to see a pattern here, perhaps revealing something about the associative way the human imagination works. In any case, the first child is the one Caddy Compson gives birth to in The Sound and the Fury. Because she is pregnant, she allows her mother to take her to French Lick, Indiana (with its own entry in this index).
