Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Sat, 2019-02-02 21:32
France appears in two very different contexts in the story: as the Western Front during the First World War, and as part of Gavin Stevens' romantic biography. Gavin himself serves for "three years as a stretcher-bearer in the French army" (154), and gives his nephew a pretty grim description of what the war itself was like, for both the soldiers in the trenches ("the groundling") and "the airman" who fought in the skies above them: "a four-year tunnel of blood and excrement and fear" (242-43).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Sat, 2019-02-02 21:23
As in other texts, such as The Town, "Mexico" in this story is associated with lawlessness. Specifically, here, it is where the local "spinster aunts" assume Harriss has absconded when they think he has left his wife (157).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Sat, 2019-02-02 21:14
New Orleans, Louisiana, is where Mr. Harriss is from and where he and Mrs. Harriss go on their honeymoon, "as everyone in that country at that time did who considered his marriage legal" (155). It is rumored that he is a bootlegger who smuggles "whiskey up from the Gulf to New Orleans" (162).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Sat, 2019-02-02 20:27
Heidelberg University, in the German city of the same name, had been famed as an educational institution for over five hundred years by the time Faulkner sent Gavin Stevens there to "finish his Ph.D." (152).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Sat, 2019-02-02 20:11
The "Academy" in Jefferson is "a prep school," which distinguishes it from the public high school (205). In other fictions it is specifically referred to as the "Female Academy." In this story, however, it is co-educational. Mrs. Harriss attended "the female half of the Academy" for "three or four years," along with Charles Mallison's mother and several other girls "who had been the nearest thing she had to friends" (152), but a generation later it is where Charles himself goes, and where he is the "cadet lieutenant colonel" of the R.O.T.C.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Thu, 2019-01-31 20:15
Memphis, Tennessee, is the closest city to Yoknapatawpha, and a place where locals frequently go for a variety of reasons (149). In this text, Max Harriss uses it as an alibi when he checks into the city's Greenbury Hotel. According to Gavin Stevens, "there was a saying in North Mississippi that the state begins in the lobby of the Greenbury hotel" (202). "The Greenbury" is Faulkner's imaginative reference to the famed Peabody Hotel in Memphis, the original source of Gavin's saying.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Thu, 2019-01-31 19:22
Jefferson was built at the center of Yoknapatawpha, and at the center of Jefferson is Courthouse Square - or "square," as the the narrator alternately does and doesn't capitalize this site (see 199 vs 210, etc.). Around it are located the town's main businesses and offices, for example the movie house and Gavin Stevens' office. In particular, it is where the townspeople see Mrs. Harriss and her children when they drive through it in their automobiles.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Thu, 2019-01-31 19:09
The office where Gavin Stevens practices as a lawyer and serves Yoknapatawpha as the County Attorney is located on the Square. Like other professional offices around the courthouse, it is one flight up from the street. A set of outside stairs leads to a gallery that overlooks the street, and the office is off of that (237).
The Sartoris twins enroll at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, but when the family decides to "separate 'em," as Jenny puts it, Bayard remains here while his brother Johnny is sent to Princeton (380).
Johnny Sartoris is sent to Princeton University in New Jersey after the family decides the twins have to be separated; according to Jenny, "they shot dice or something," and "Johnny lost," so he had to leave the University of Virginia (380-81).
