Submitted by ben.robbins@fu-... on Wed, 2017-10-11 09:40
Physically Mink Snopes is a "small frail creature, not much larger than a fifteen-year-old boy" (55), but he carries around enough rage to claim two men's lives. He figures prominently in the first volume of the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet (1940), where he is cast as greedy and murderous. In The Mansion, Faulkner renders a more sympathetic picture of Mink as a struggling sharecropper, who was taken advantage of by Zack Houston, and then abandoned (at least in his own mind) by his cousin Flem.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 14:38
Bitterly evoking the idea of the war that would end all wars, Gavin Stevens describes World War I as an event that "killed eight million human beings and ruined a forty-mile wide strip down the middle of western Europe" (178). This location represents the various places in England and France that appear in the novel in the context of the war. Bayard and John Sartoris are trained in England to fly in the "Royal Flying Corps" (204). Though no combat is depicted, six French battlefields on which U.S.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 14:36
In this location we combine the novel's reference to "barbershop or poolroom" (203). As in The Town, the barbershop and the pool hall of The Mansion are virtually interchangeable, and are linked here as male environments where behind a "locked" door "at two oclock Sunday morning" the town's "boys" can be heard misbehaving in one way or another (203). For instance, Tug Nightingale has "his weekly bath in the barbershop on Saturday night," and then "gets a little drunk afterward" (203).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 14:33
Tug Nightingale and his father live in a "doll-sized house" with a "minute gallery" - i.e. front porch (203). We have to speculate about where in Jefferson it's located.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 14:32
In The Mansion Tug Nightingale and his father live in a "doll-sized house" with a "minute gallery" - i.e. front porch (203). We have to speculate about where in Jefferson it's located.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 14:30
This "little backstreet Hardshell church" is attended by Tug Nightingale and his father (203). The term "hardshell" refers to a branch of the Baptist religion that is extremely conservative. The novel also includes a Baptist Church in Jefferson, but that is almost certainly a larger, more mainstream branch of the faith - though throughout Faulkner's fiction the Baptists are portrayed as conservative.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 14:27
The Mansion's second paragraph briefly recalls the time Mink Snopes serves in the county jail, "his dirty hands gripping the grimed interstices of the barred window above the street" (3).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 14:21
The town of Saratoga, located on the eastern side of the Hudson River in upstate New York, was the site of an important American victory during the Revolutionary War. Ratliff's ancestor fought as a mercenary for the British and was taken prisoner here. "Bemis's Heights" and "Freeman's Farm" (198) were locations on which the battle's major fighting took place.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 14:18
The mansion in The Mansion originally belonged to the de Spain family. The novel does not give any specific location for it, and throughout the Yoknapatawpha fictions the de Spain residence moves around quite a bit; we have chosen to locate it in Jefferson. The original house was "jest a house: two storey, with a gallery [porch] for Major de Spain, Manfred's paw, to set on" (170). But when Flem takes it over, he determines to make it into a "physical symbol of . . . generations of respectability and aristocracy," like Yoknapatawpha's plantation mansions (171).
