The Benbow family is referred to generally as the antebellum owners of the slave Cassius (199). The only specifically named member of the family, however, is "Judge Benbow," who is mentioned in passing as the man who legally dissolved the partnership between Sartoris and Redmond after the Civil War (225).
While the Benbow house has stood in Jefferson since the 1840s, Faulkner here for the first time identifies the man who most likely built it and lived there first. "Judge Benbow" - he is given no other name - is the executor of Goodhue Coldfield's estate. He also looks out for Rosa Coldfield after the Civil War, and in return she cites him along with Quentin Compson's grandfather as a paragon of breeding and deportment (35).
This short story could be seen as the asymmetrical third installment in a hypothetical 'Benbow trilogy.' Set not long after the events of Sanctuary, it returns to the events of Flags in the Dust to explain how Narcissa recovers the obscene letters she lost on the eve of her marriage to Bayard Sartoris. A widow for the last decade, she and her ten-year-old son Benbow are living at the Sartoris plantation with Miss Jenny Sartoris du Pre, the queen of the title. Her brother Horace is mentioned, but not named.
Horace and Narcissa's sibling relationship is still close to the center of this novel, but the latent sexual passions that seemed to define it in Flags in the Dust have been pushed outside the family and made all-too-explicit in the book's sensational scenes of lust and voyeurism, prostitution and rape. Horace's relationship with his wife's daughter is contaminated by desires that he cannot acknowledge, but strictly speaking Little Belle Mitchell is not a Benbow.
In Flags in the Dust "family" is largely a way to define class. If Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction depicts the Sartorises as the county's closest thing to a hereditary nobility, Narcissa Benbow's family pedigree identifies her as a kind of town princess. The family home she and her older brother Horace live in was designed three generations earlier by an English architect, and features "mullioned casements brought out from England" (164).
The title of this story refers to John Sartoris' sister, Virginia Du Pre, and seems unequivocally to establish the family's aristocratic credentials (another title Faulkner had considered was "An Empress Passed"). The story begins by in effect calling the roll of Sartoris males as a kind of well-established noble lineage. But in its second paragraph the story adds a radically new branch to the family tree when it identifies Elnora, who in Flags in the Dust was referred to in passing as a "mulatto," as John Sartoris' unacknowledged daughter.
According to the narrator of Light in August (1932), the Stevens family is "old in Jefferson." In Intruder in the Dust (1948), Chick Mallison, whose mother is a Stevens, sees the landscape of Yoknapatawpha as "the dirt, the earth which had bred his bones and those of his fathers for six generations." Actually, if we count from the first Stevens to be born in Mississippi, Chick belongs to the fourth or at most the fifth generation, but in the short story "Hand Upon the Waters" (1939) Faulkner revises his usual account of Yoknapatawpha's settlement to include a Stevens alo
The Snopeses are the largest family in Faulkner's world: altogether at least 67 different Snopeses appear in twenty-one different fictions, including the three long novels (The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion) written as parts of a Snopes trilogy that Faulkner planned and worked on for decades.
Faulkner had already created the Sartorises, the Compsons and the Sutpens when he decided to add a fourth planter family to the census of Yoknapatawpha. Eventually the McCaslins become the largest of them all, with more than sixty members. They don't come into focus as a family until Go Down, Moses, a novel published in 1942, and the complex process, as much moral as imaginative, by which different characters, white and black, move toward each other in various stories over the previous decade is one of the most fascinating aspects of Faulkner's career.
In both Flags in the Dust (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), Faulkner spells the family name "MacCallum." When he brings them back a decade later - first in The Hamlet (1940), then five other texts - it's "McCallum." But the role the family plays in the Yoknapatawpha saga remains constant. To use the term that Faulkner inherits from Southern culture, they are yeomen.
