The mother of Gavin and Maggie - Mrs. Lemuel Stevens, nee Maggie Dandridge - doesn't appear in person in the fictions, but various items associated with her do. In Intruder in the Dust the hat Eunice Habersham wears reminds her grandson Chick Mallison of her; it's a "round faintly dusty-looked black hat set squarely on the top of her head" (73); on both women, this looks "exactly right" (127). In "Knight's Gambit" Chick thinks of the books in his family's house as "the books . . . which his grandmother had chosen" (149).
Charles Mallison Jr. appears in nine texts, in all but one of them mainly as narrator, especially of the exploits and misadventures of the man he refers to hundreds of times, usually in an admiring tone, as "Uncle Gavin." Gavin is Gavin Stevens, and his nephew is thus a member of one of the older upper class families in Yoknapatawpha, the only child of Gavin's twin sister Maggie Stevens Mallison. Faulkner creates Charles ("Chick," as Gavin calls him once in "Tomorrow," the first time he's given any name) to serve as a kind of Dr.
Although he is mentioned in three short stories and actually appears in three novels, the father of Charles Mallison, Jr., remains an elusive character. He is dead in the first story that mentions him ("An Error in Chemistry") and almost irrelevant even in the texts where he appears: Intruder in the Dust, The Town and The Mansion. His wife, Maggie Stevens by birth and Gavin's twin sister, sometimes calls him Charley, and according to The Town he owns the livery stable in Jefferson (at a time when cars are displacing horses).
Margaret (Maggie) Mallison is Judge Stevens' daughter, Gavin's twin sister, Charles Mallison's wife and Chick's mother. The role she plays in the six late fictions in which she appears or is mentioned is largely defined by her relationship to these male figures, especially to her son, toward whom she is unfailingly protective despite his own restiveness with her concerns. She is well-educated, within the limits defined by her gender and her caste: she attended the Jefferson Female Academy, where she met and became friends with the woman whom Gavin would eventually marry.
Gavin Stevens appears altogether in seventeen fictions, making him one of Faulkner's most frequently recurring characters. Details about his past vary from text to text between "Hair" (1931) and The Mansion (1960) - "Hand Upon the Waters" describes him as the last remaining descendant of the original settlers of Yoknapatawpha; "Knight's Gambit" and The Mansion are the only texts to describe his service as a non-combatant in World War I. And in those two later texts he abruptly marries a former sweetheart, though elsewhere he appears to be a confirmed bachelor.
Mentioned only in The Town, the man who is the father of Gowan Stevens works for the U.S. State Department. When he is assigned to "China or India or some far place" (3), he sends his son to Jefferson to stay with his Stevens cousins.
We know Gowan Stevens had a grandfather, because in The Town Charles Mallison mentions that Gowan's grandfather was his own grandfather's brother, but that doesn't tell us if Faulkner - or Temple Drake - actually has this man in mind when in Requiem for a Nun she tries to cover up what she was actually saying by telling Gowan that "I was telling Uncle Gavin he had something of Virginia or some sort of gentleman in him too that he must have inherited from you through your grandfather" (51-52). These are the only two mentions of this grandfather in the fictions.
The Stevenses are an old Jefferson family that becomes a very big part of the story of Yoknapatawpha by way of Faulkner's fondness for Gavin. The first member of the family to appear in the fictions is "Judge Stevens" in "A Rose for Emily," but in Sanctuary Gavin's second cousin Gowan becomes the first Stevens to play a significant role. And in Sanctuary Faulkner's treatment of Gowan is scathing. He's a recent graduate of the University of Virginia who likes to claim that he learned there both how to hold his liquor and how to be a gentleman.
Gowan Stevens' mother never appears in person, but three Yoknapatawpha fictions mention her. If we re-arrange their order of publication as the sequence of events in her biography, her youngest mention occurs in The Town, where she accompanies her husband for the duration of his State Department assignment to "some far place" - which explains why she sends her son Gowan from Washington to Jefferson (3).
Lemuel Stevens - usually Judge Stevens, but "Captain Stevens" in "Tomorrow" (96) - is the father of Gavin, and probably, although scholars disagree about this, the son of another man named Judge Stevens. He appears or is mentioned in 7 different texts. We see him in his role as a judge, but the military title is confusing, since there is no evidence that any of the Stevens family serve in either the U.S. or the Confederate armies.
