Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2017-10-23 11:51
Mink's wife Yetti goes back to her "people" after he is sent to jail (104). (Faulkner seems to have forgotten the biography he created in The Hamlet for the woman whom Mink marries and brings to Yoknapatawpha; if you take that earlier account into account, it's extremely difficult to imagine who her "people" might be.)
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2017-10-23 11:49
According to Ratliff, the Greenwich Village sculptor who marries Linda Snopes is "not big, he jest looked big, like a football player" (190), and his "pale eyes" looked at you "missing nothing" (191). He is killed fighting for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. Several characters in the novel make it a point to mention that he is Jewish.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2017-10-23 11:45
The "landlord" Mink thinks about while in Parchman is a composite figure, the various property owners who over the years have hired and fired him and his family as tenant farmers (102).
Colonel Devries comes from "Cumberland County" (347), which the novel identifies as lying at "the opposite end" of the Congressional district from Yoknapatawpha County (338). In "By the People," Faulkner calls Devries' county Minton - like Cumberland, a fictional name - and locates it east of Yoknapatawpha.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2017-10-23 11:36
The mother of Eck Snopes is mentioned only in connection with her son's character. Because he doesn't see Eck and his sons as "Snopeses," Montgomery Ward "has always believed that Eck's mother" had conceived him adulterously (97). In The Town, published a couple years before The Mansion, Gavin Stevens suggests the same thing, for the same reason: Eck's decency seems incompatible with Snopes' DNA. But neither narrative provides any other basis for this idea.
Oxford is the real town in Mississippi where Faulkner lived and wrote for most of his life, and the original on which much of his fictional "Jefferson" is based; in other fictions Faulkner says the two towns are forty miles apart, but in The Mansion the distance is given as "fifty miles" (156). Oxford is the home of the University of Mississippi, which Faulkner left there when he imaginatively moved so much else of the town to Yoknapatawpha. Four characters in The Mansion attend the University.
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2017-10-23 11:32
Bilbo Snopes is only mentioned in passing in this novel, which doesn't make his relationship to the rest of the Snopeses clear. Elsewhere he is identified as one of the four sons of I.O. Snopes' second wife. (He is named after Theodore G. Bilbo, a Mississippi Governor and U.S. Senator who was a staunch defender of white supremacy.)
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2017-10-23 11:30
Vardaman Snopes is one of I.O. Snopes' sons. Unlike his brothers Clarence and Doris, he is only mentioned in this novel. (Like the other Vardamans in Yoknapatawpha, he is named after James K. Vardaman, who served one term each as Mississippi's Governor [1904-1908] and Senator [1913-1919]; James Vardaman was a militant white supremacist whom his supporters called 'The Great White Chief.')
Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Mon, 2017-10-23 11:22
The oldest named member of the Snopes clan, and the father of Flem. He features prominently in earlier stories, but only appears three times in this novel. Montgomery Snopes includes "old Ab" on his short list of Snopeses (97). Ratliff notes that Will Varner had to "evict Ab Snopes from a [tenant farmer's] house he hadn't paid no rent on in two years" (137).
