The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The spinster daughter of Old Major de Spain's sister and "the retired principal of a suburban Los Angeles grammar school" (463), this character is deeded the old de Spain mansion - 'the mansion' of the novel's title - by Linda Snopes Kohl.

The undertaker at Flem Snopes's funeral appears briefly in the text, directing the people at the end.

At Flem's funeral, Gavin Stevens notices three people whom he has never seen before, and he knows almost immediately that "they are Snopeses," with "country faces" that make him think of "wolves come to look at the trap where another bigger wolf . . . died" (463).

This icon represents the people in Yoknapatawpha who appear or are referred to as a group in various passages. According to the text, for example, "not just the town but the county came too" to Flem Snopes's funeral (461). In these references readers get some idea of the average living conditions for Faulkner's rural characters.

The narrator speculates that most bankers who die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound have just been visited by a State or Federal - or "maybe both" - bank inspector (461).

This is the younger of the novel's two Turpins. Like the older one, he is associated with Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the hill country. Gavin Stevens recalls that he failed to "answer his draft call" during World War II (459). He is presumably related to the older Turpin, and perhaps to the Turpin family that appears in Flags in the Dust at the earlier end of Faulkner's career, but The Mansion does not say how.

The only thing known about Varner's grandson is that he had a love interest whom the eighty-year old Varner ended up marrying himself.

Twelve years after his first wife's death, Will Varner marries again: his bride is a woman "of twenty-five or so" who was being "courted" by his grandson (458).

"They were picking the cotton now" (100) - this is the way Mink refers to the inmates at Parchman's, most of whom work as field hands on the farm around the prison.

Mink turns to "the prison doctor" for an explanation of how deafness works (454).