Sutpen's father moves back to coastal Virginia after his wife's death, where he works ("or maybe supposes" to work, 185) on a large Tidewater plantation. He is characterized mainly by his habitual drunkenness, and his "harsh" belief in "his own worth" and "his own physical prowess" (186) - virtues that he seeks to establish by "whupping" a slave from a neighboring plantation (187).
When he is turned away from the plantation house door, Sutpen suddenly recognizes his responsibility to "all the men and women that had died to make him" and "all the living ones that would come after him when he would be one of the dead" (178).
"The first Sutpen" in North America, according to Quentin's narrative in Absalom!, "probably" arrived in Jamestown on a "ship from the Old Bailey" - i.e. a ship transporting convicted criminals from London to the British colony of Virginia (180). It's not clear who Quentin's source for this information is, or if it's reliable, what crime this Sutpen founding father was sentenced for.
Mr. Compson imagines Bon's wife as someone "Beardsley might have dressed" and Bon's child as a figure "Beardsley might not only have dressed but drawn" (157). Like Oscar Wilde, mentioned in the same passage, Aubrey Beardsley was an important artist in late 19th century England. His decadent visual style was an important influence on the early drawings of William Faulkner.
According to Mr. Compson, the scene in the Sutpen graveyard with Bon's wife and child "must have resembled a garden scene by the Irish poet, Wilde" (157). Wilde wrote in many genres, but in particular his poetry was an important influence on the apprentice work of William Faulkner.
A "consul" was the highest elected official in the Roman Republic. The "youthful Roman consul" traveling among "barbarian hordes which his grandfather conquered" is the symbolic figure with whom Mr. Compson compares Charles Bon, the urban sophisticate visiting the "isolated Puritan country household" of Thomas Sutpen (74).
When Bon and Henry enroll there in 1859, the entire University of Mississippi student body "numbered in two figures" (81). Included in that number are the "five or six" students, all like Henry "planters' sons," with whom Bon associates (76). It is also this small clique, presumably, who follow Bon's example and switch to the Law School.
There were thousands of uniformed "United States marshals" in the South during Reconstruction as part of the federal government's efforts to enfranchise and protect the rights of emancipated slaves and to enforce the punishments Congress imposed on former Confederate leaders and soldiers. Their role is the novel is described (by Shreve) as only punitive: he refers to the "taxes and levies and penalties" with which they encumber Sutpen's property (146).
This "woman" is the "nearest female kin" to the aunt whom Quentin's father tells him about (156). She looms very large in the mind of the aunt, but remains invisible in the text of the novel.
Mr. Compson tells Quentin about an "aunt" - whom neither of them ever saw - who is locked in what Mr. Compson calls one of those "inexplicable (to the man mind) amicable enmities" with "her nearest female kin" (156). It's possible that this aunt is a "Bascomb" rather than a Compson; Bascomb is Quentin's mother's maiden name.
