Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-09-29 11:43
This icon represents the "back streets around the edge of town" where Ratliff is driving while telling Chick about Montgomery Ward Snopes' "canteen business" (120).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-09-29 11:34
In "Miss Zilphia Gant" Zilphia's mother occasionally searches the "less frequented streets and lanes on the edge of town" after the adolescent girl begins going off on her own (374). In The Town Ratliff drives on the "back streets around the edge of town" while trying to tell the five-year-old Chick Mallison about Montgomery Ward Snopes' "canteen business" in France during World War I (120). (See also the entry for Jefferson Courthouse and Square, which is the default Location we use for events that take place at a place in Jefferson that is not identified at all.)
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-09-29 11:31
Located somewhere in Frenchman's Bend, this "empty cotton house" is where the "a posse of enraged fathers" finds the Snopes who had teaching the school and holding "revival services and baptisings" having sex with "a fourteen-year old girl" (43).
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-09-29 11:23
The wooden bridge over which one of "them wild Snopes ponies" (35) escapes is located "just this side of Bookright's turn-off" - i.e. the road that leads to Bookright's farm (36). Because Ratliff can hear the horse's hooves as it crosses, the bridge must be fairly close to Mrs. Littlejohn's.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-09-29 11:05
The church in Frenchman's Bend is run by Mrs. Varner "with the cold high-handedness of a ward-boss" (289). Our decision about where to located it is based on a passage in The Hamlet: when Mrs. Armstid looks "up the road" from Varner's store, she sees (in this order) Mrs. Littlejohn's, the school, and then, the church.
Submitted by jjoiner@keuka.edu on Fri, 2017-09-29 10:53
Owned by Uncle Noon Gatewood, the Jefferson blacksmith shop is located "on the edge of town" (68). Gatewood is described as "yellow," a term which identifies him as a light-skinned Negro - making this one of the few black-owned businesses mentioned in the fictions.
Gavin Stevens' determination to send a corsage to Eula Varner Snopes begins what Charley Mallison calls the "Mrs Rouncewell panic" (81). Mrs. Rouncewell is Jefferson's florist: "She ran the flower shop; not . . . because she loved flowers nor even because she loved money but because she loved funerals; she had buried two husbands herself and took the second one's insurance and opened the flower shop and furnished the flowers for every funeral in Jefferson since" (73).
General Compson was a Confederate brigadier and for two days governor of Mississippi (72-73). These positions explain the only detail about him the novel provides: the many floral arrangements at his funeral. As the grandfather of Quentin Compson, he plays a crucial role in Absalom, Absalom!, and he is the character who appears most frequently in the collected Yoknapatawpha fictions.
