The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

The novel mentions both the University of Virginia, which at the time that Gowan Stevens is preparing to enroll there was all-male, and "the Virginia schools at which Southern mothers seemed to aim their daughters" (220-21), which at the time of the novel would include all-female colleges like Mary Washington and Sweet Briar.

Like many other characters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, two characters in this novel end up buried in the town cemetery. Eck Snopes, or all that was recovered of him - the neck brace that is found "hanging in the telegraph wires about two hundred yards from where the tank had been" (116), is laid to rest here by the Masons in charge of the funeral (117). Eula Varner Snopes is also laid to rest there, in a "new" section in that is "empty except for the one raw excavation" (360).

Cedric Nunnery is playing here, "about a half mile away" and "up the track" from the depot, when the explosion occurs (116).

Mrs. Nunnery lives with her son Cedric in "a little house just up the hill from the depot" (115).

The novel associates "Mexico" with lawlessness in two different ways. Chick Mallison says Byron Snopes "escaped to Mexico" after robbing Colonel Sartoris' Bank (113) - and later imagines Flem might do the same thing. And the mother of Byron's children, who seem completely untameable, is "a Jicarilla Apache squaw in Old Mexico" (379).

New York City is mentioned as the place from which Gavin Stevens catches a ship to Europe as a young man before the war. And the specific part of the City known as Greenwich Village is where he arranges for Linda to go after her mother's death; Gavin describes it to Chick as "a place with a few unimportant boundaries but no limitations where young people of any age go to seek dreams" (367).

The place where Gavin Stevens changes trains to "catch the express from Memphis to New York" in this novel is identified as "Mottstown junction" (107). (In Faulkner's other Yoknapatawpha fictions, this change would occur north of Yoknapatawpha, in the town he calls "Memphis Junction.") Mottstown is the seat of the county just south of Yoknapatawpha, so it may also be the town "in the next county" where Flem and Eula marry (6), though that is also confusing; several other fictions state that they marry in Jefferson.

More fully described in The Hamlet as being near a ford, the "dark road" in Frenchman's Bend is where the Eula's suitors ambush McCarron and Eula in the buggy.

A "slough" is a swamp, though in this case it refers specifically to the pool of stagnant water into which Mink Snopes throws his shotgun after killing Zack Houston; the gun is later found by "some fish-grabblers" - i.e. people who are trying to catch fish with their bare hands (84).

Mink kills Houston on a road that that runs beside a "thicket" somewhere between Houston's land and Varner's Store in Frenchman's Bend (83-84).