This sequel of sorts to Sanctuary stages a confrontation between three members of the Stevens family: Gavin, Gowan, his wife - the former Temple Drake, whom Gowan has married in an attempt to atone for his failures in the earlier novel.
When Faulkner decided to excerpt a section from the manuscript of Requiem for a Nun and publish it as a short story in 1950, he added an opening paragraph featuring Gavin Stevens and his unnamed nephew. Knight's Gambit, in which four of the six Gavin stories had been narrated by or told from the perspective of his nephew, had just come out the year before, so Faulkner could expect readers would be very familiar with the phrase "Uncle Gavin," the second and third words in the text.
There are two marriage plots in this novella; only one involves the Stevenses, but both involve the same potential bride, a widow named Mrs. Harriss. She is a childhood friend of Gavin's sister (referred to as "Charles' mother" by the narrative), and a fully credentialed member of Yoknapatawpha's gentry (born on a plantation, attended Jefferson Female Academy). Although this story (and even its characters) only refer to her as "Mrs.
The adolescent protagonist of this novel is the youngest member of the Stevens family, Charles Mallison, Jr. - or Chick. He steps into the roles of detective and crusader that previously he had watched his Uncle Gavin play, and here his quest initially takes him away from home, toward a new counter-cultural family and a reckoning with his southern conditioning. In the novel's second half, however, Uncle Gavin and his voice take over the narrative, and at the end Chick rides home with his uncle and mother in the family car.
Another of Faulkner's detective stories, featuring Gavin Stevens as the detective and narrated by his unnamed nephew (elsewhere identified as Chick Mallison). The narrator seems to be studying for a legal career under Uncle Gavin's instruction. Based on the larger history of the Stevenses, this might have furnished an occasion to explore the significance of family traditions. But the only time the narrator mentions his grandfather and his deceased father is to set up the way the murderer's identity is exposed by not knowing how Southern men make "cold toddies."
When Faulkner republished "Go Down, Moses" as the last story in the novel of the same name, he revised it slightly. Interestingly, he made the theme of family more overt when he added a sentence to the white lady's account of her relationship with the black grandmother: "We grew up together as sisters would." But there is still no reference to Gavin's own family, past or present.
This is another story that centers on family relationships, or at least fathers and sons and family traditions, but the family is the McCallums, not the Stevenses. Gavin Stevens is only mentioned, when the McCallums consult him for legal advice. (You can see the McCallum family trees elsewhere in this exhibit.)
Family ties - biological and otherwise - are central to this story about a poor black grandmother who remains connected with and loyal to her grandson across many years and hundreds of miles, and the elderly white lady who grew up with and defines herself as that grandmother's sister. It could be said that the role Gavin plays in it - the upper class white male who looks after the culture as an act of humanity and noblesse oblige - is one he inherited from his familial past, but that connection goes unmentioned.
Faulkner's third detective story again features Gavin as the detective, and as his father it brings back the mayor Stevens who was called "Judge" in "A Rose for Emily" and is referred to here once as "Captain Stevens" - the only indication anywhere of military service in the family's past.
This is the text which puts "Stevenses" among the founders of Yoknapatawpha, when it identifies Gavin as descended from one of the first three white men to travel on horseback from the Carolinas, through the Cumberland Gap, and down into Mississippi, where they played key roles in turning the wilderness into civilization. Gavin's role in the modern Yoknapatawpha is to expose the man who murdered the sole remaining descendant of one of the other two founders, but the role "family" plays in this detective story, if any, remains below the surface.
