The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Armstid's farm is one of the examples of how Faulkner re-creates his mythical world to suit the needs of a particular narrative or theme. On his 1936 map of Yoknapatawpha Faulkner himself locates "Armstid's" in the hills to the northeast of Frenchman's Bend. According to "Spotted Horses" (1931) the Armstid farm is "about four miles" from Varner's store (178), though that text doesn't say in which direction. In three contemporaneous texts that question is answered in three different ways.

Tull's farm is one of the Yoknapatawpha locations that Faulkner moves around to suit the demands of his various fictions. On the map of the county that Faulkner himself drew in 1936, Tull's farm is located north of the Yoknapatawpha River, and northeast of Frenchman's Bend; this is where it seems to be located in "Shingles for the Lord," published in 1943. In two earlier novels, however, it seems to be in two other places in the Frenchman's Bend part of the county.

In her section of As I Lay Dying Addie remembers the first time she met Anse, and mentioned his "good farm" (171). Apparently that and his "new house" are important factors in her decision to marry him. There's no suggestion in the novel that the Bundrens are sharecroppers - i.e. they own the farm and its fields - but like many of the other small cotton farmers in their part of Yoknapatawpha it's clear that they have to struggle for subsistence. Physically, the Bundren farm sits below the bluff that the house is built on top of.

The 'old Frenchman place' is the third plantation 'big house' Faulkner creates. The first - Sartoris in Flags in the Dust - is still intact and prosperous over half a century after the Civil War. The second - the Compson place in The Sound and the Fury - is falling into decay by then. The old Frenchman place has already fallen by the time it first appears, in Sanctuary. The novel actually describes it as if for the first time twice, from Gavin Stevens' point of view and then from Temple Drake's.

Varner's country store is the established center of both the economic and social life of Frenchman's Bend, the hamlet usually located about twenty miles southeast of Jefferson. It is one of the many properties owned by Will Varner, for whom many of the Bend's inhabitants work as tenants on small farms he also owns. Since it is the only store in the area, and owned by the man they rent from, these 'sharecroppers' are expected to buy all their supplies and necessities there.

This spot is one of those Yoknapatawpha locations that changes dramatically, depending on Faulkner's imaginative concerns at different points in his career. On Faulkner's two maps of Yoknapatawpha the spot is home to two families, with three different names: the MacCallums (in Flags in the Dust), whose name is spelled McCallum in two later texts; and the McCaslins (in Go Down, Moses and elsewhere).

The scene of the car accident where young Bayard is surprised by the sudden appearance of another vehicle and old Bayard Sartoris suffers a fatal heart attack is described first in Flags in the Dust as a sharp curve on the valley road, but three decades later, in The Town, as just over a hill. The other vehicle is a Ford in the first instance, and a wagon carrying a Negro family in the second.

This camp in the wilderness on the southern side of the Tallahatchie River appears in a dozen different fictions, and is the scene of a number of major events - including the deaths of six human characters and a dog named Lion.

Sutpen's plantation has its origins in both Gothic fiction and Southern history. It first appears in the short story "Wash," where there is nothing to distinguish it from other Yoknapatawpha plantations with a "big house" and slaves (537). In the novel Absalom, Absalom!, though, it becomes "Sutpen's Hundred," the "biggest single" cotton plantation in antebellum Yoknapatawpha (56), "a hundred square miles of some of the best virgin bottom land in the country" (26).

Eventually there are two recognizable 'monuments' in the Jefferson public cemetery. The first appears in the first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust. Colonel John Sartoris' imposing "effigy and statue" stands tall on a height overlooking the railroad he built, wearing a frock coat and an expression described as that "haughty arrogance which repeated itself generation after generation with a fateful fidelity" (399). There seems to be no question but that Faulkner based it on the statue of his great-grandfather, William C. Falkner, in the cemetery at Ripley, Mississippi.