Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 09:16
In The Mansion Jody Varner tells Mink Snopes that his father has gone to "look at a mill on Punkin Creek" (30). Although the text provides no details about where Punkin Creek is, it's likely that Faulkner is thinking of the actual "Pumpkin Creek" in southeastern Lafayette County.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 09:12
A major location in Intruder in the Dust (1948), in The Mansion "Caledonia Chapel" is only casually mentioned, as the place where Mink claims he sold his cow to "the Gowrie boys" (11). Curiously, Faulkner calls the part of Yoknapatawpha where the Gowries live "Beat Nine" in this novel (67), whereas it is repeatedly referred to as Beat Four in the earlier novel (and in no Yoknapatawpha fiction do the beat numbers assigned the county's administrative districts exceed 5). In any case, we have located this "Chapel" in the place where it stands in Intruder.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 09:05
Mink Snopes lives with his family in a "paintless repairless tenant cabin" (10) somewhere in the hills north of Frenchman's Bend. The area is described as "a section of small worn-out farms tilted and precarious among the eroded folds like scraps of paper" (458). The land Mink farms is owned by Will Varner. The property is not described in much detail, but the pasture around the cabin is described as "meagre," further accentuating Mink's poverty as a sharecropper (10).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 09:01
This "Negro's house" with its "empty yard" is where Mink takes his milk cow "to claim a second stand from the bull" after the first one failed to impregnate her (9). It is "three miles" from Mink's cabin, though we have had to speculate about the direction. The Negro who lives there with his family is prosperous enough to own a "scrub bull" that he hires out (9). But although the narrator calls his home a "house" three times in one paragraph, it is almost certainly what in other texts, and elsewhere in The Mansion, Faulkner calls a "cabin," a building with at most two rooms.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 08:59
This "Negro's house" with its "empty yard" is where Mink Snopes takes his milk cow in The Mansion "to claim a second stand from the bull" after the first one failed to impregnate her (9). It is "three miles" from Mink's cabin, though the novel does not say in which direction. The Negro who lives there with his family is prosperous enough to own a "scrub bull" that he hires out (9).
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 08:55
The only store in Frenchman's Bend is one of the many properties owned by Will Varner. This furnish store is both the place where the many tenant farmers on other Varner lands are expected to buy all their supplies and the hub of the hamlet's social life. Indeed, the store is a center of economic and social relations for the community, structured upon the lien-system that emerged during Reconstruction, according to which tenant farmers are equipped from the store and consequently saddled with a "furnish bill" (310) that they have to pay off at the end of each growing season.
Submitted by jburgers@gc.cuny.edu on Sat, 2017-10-07 08:45
The spot that Mink picks for his ambush is described as a "thicket" fifty yards down from where "the road from Houston's to Varner's store crossed the creek bridge" (42).
Jackson McLendon organized a company of volunteers from Jefferson for World War I and was elected captain of it. The first time he appears in Faulkner's fiction, on the other hand, as John Lendon in "Dry September," he instead recruits a gang of men from the barbershop to lynch a Negro.
Bayard's "twin brother" is never named in this novel, but readers of Flags in the Dust know his name was John (after his great-grandfather, Colonel John Sartoris), and know how Bayard did "grieve so over [his] death in battle" during World War I (149). During that war the brothers joined the British Royal Flying Corps, and John is killed in the skies over France.
This Bayard (the "Young Bayard" in Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, Flags in the Dust) is the grandson of another Bayard Sartoris (here called "Colonel Sartoris") and the twin brother of John Sartoris. Both brothers enter the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. Bayard survives and returns to Yoknapatawpha, but, as Charles puts it, "he couldn't settle down" (123); his 'lost generation' story is the central narrative of Flags in the Dust (1929). His fast driving is responsible for his grandfather's death.
