Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Fri, 2019-03-15 15:59
Referred to in the script as "GOVERNOR" and addressed, by Gavin, only by his first name - "Henry" (90) - the man who meets with Gavin and Temple in Act II to hear an informal appeal on behalf of Nancy is referred to as "the last, the ultimate seat of judgment" (89). In the stage directions he is identified not with Mississippi but with a "mythical" State, "the State of which Yoknapatawpha County is a unit" (89) - though elsewhere in the novel there is no ambiguity about the literary 'fact' that Yoknapatawpha is in Mississippi.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Fri, 2019-03-15 15:51
Faulkner often alluded to or quoted from his main literary rival, as when Temple alludes to Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls to explain that a woman who has been sexually assaulted could be in denial that it had happened to her: "it had never actually happened to a g-- woman, if she just refused to accept it, no matter who remembered, bragged" (121).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Fri, 2019-03-15 15:30
Temple Drake Stevens' description of her ancestors to Gavin Stevens mockingly points to "long lines of statesmen and soldiers high in the proud annals of our sovereign state" (95).
