This is the first of the four 'Bayards' on the Sartoris family tree. When Colonel John Sartoris' sister Virginia (Aunt Jenny) Du Pre comes to Yoknapatawpha from Carolina, she brings with her the story she loves to tell the younger members of her family about her bother Bayard's death in the Civil War. To her, at least, and in these stories, this Bayard is an incredibly romantic figure, likened to "Richard First . . . before he went crusading" (11). During the Civil War he is Gen. J.E.B.
The first published Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust, begins by conjuring up the spirit of Colonel John Sartoris. Dead since 1876, he haunts much of that text and many of the others; the 21 texts he appears in is the most of any inhabitant of Faulkner's imaginative world. As Faulkner acknowledged, his story is basely on the life and death of Colonel William Falkner, the author's great-grandfather. His fictional biography is established in that first novel. He came from Carolina to Jefferson around 1837, where he built a large cotton plantation four miles north of town.
The mother of John and (the first) Bayard Sartoris and Virginia Du Pre is never named, and only mentioned in three texts, each time briefly. "There Was a Queen" notes that the "Cal-lina" (Carolina, probably South) mansion she lived in was burned down by the Yankees during the Civil War (732).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-01-10 16:59
Temple Drake, the principal character in Sanctuary (1931), and later Temple Drake Stevens in Requiem, is an adventuresome, independent woman who seems in both novels to loathe her confinement within Jefferson's small-town standards of moral behavior. In the first novel, the daughter of a respectable Jefferson family, and in the second a presumably respectable wife and mother, she seeks dangerous excitement from various men, whose character flaws range from lacking respectability to living as criminals.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-01-10 16:49
"A man named Compson" (11) - this is how the first Yoknapatawpha member of one of Faulkner's best-known families is referred to in the prose section of Act I, where although a recent arrival he becomes the community's unofficial leader: preventing the bandits from being lynched and heading up the committee that rescues the new settlement from a legal difficulty by arranging to call it "Jefferson" (24).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-01-10 16:37
First identified simply as by his position as the "special rider" who carries the U.S. mail from Nashville to the Mississippi settlement, Thomas Jefferson Pettigrew is described in three separate passages. He is "a frail irascible little man weighing less than a hundred pounds" (9); he is "frail and childsized, impermeable as diamond" (19); he is "small, frail, less than boy-size, childless and bachelor, incorrigibly kinless and tieless" (24).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-01-10 16:29
Alexander Holston's lock became "presently the oldest unchanged thing in the settlement . . . . Older than the town, since there were new names in it now even when the old blood ran in them" (8). In addition to Compson, these new family names include: "Sartoris and Stevens, . . . and McCaslin and Sutpen and Coldfield" (8).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-01-10 16:27
The Mississippi wilderness is occupied by potentially dangerous "wild Indians and wilder white men" (7). Both groups apparently live outside the region's tribal and settlement communities. The wildness of such outlaws is reflected in their treatment of inexperienced travelers: "[F]or no more than the boots on his feet, men would murder a traveler and gut him like a bear or deer or fish and fill the cavity with rocks and sink the evidence in the nearest water" (10).
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-01-10 16:16
In the prose introduction to Act I, the Chickasaw woman who marries Doctor Habersham's son and "emigrates" with him to Oklahoma in the 1830's is identified as "one of Issetibbeha's grand-daughters" (7). In the prose introduction to Act 3, however, the "bride" of Doctor Habersham's son is "Mohataha's grand-daughter" and the daughter of Ikkemotubbe (170). Issetibbeha and Mohataha are siblings, but there is no suggestion of incest, and therefore no explanation for the inconsistency except as a lapse of Faulkner's memory.
Submitted by mdennis@ku.edu on Thu, 2019-01-10 16:13
The "motherless" Habersham boy is eight years old when he first arrives at the Mississippi settlement with his father (7). As a grown man, he becomes the government's local Indian agent and marries a Chickasaw woman whom the novel identifies first as Issetibbeha's granddaughter (7), then as Mohataha's (170).
