De Spain Mansion in The Town (Location)

The De Spains, father and son, appear often enough in Faulkner's fictions and the history of Yoknapatawpha to make the family one of the county's more important ones. In fact, the titular Mansion of the novel that follows The Town in the Snopes trilogy is the "big wooden house" that Manfred de Spain's father built (14) and that he lives in in this novel, until Flem moves in at the end. However, it's not possible to be sure where to put this mansion on a map. Faulkner moves it around quite a bit in the seven texts that include it. In "Barn Burning" and The Hamlet, for example, it's clearly a plantation with tenant farmers someplace in the county, but in "Shall Not Perish" it's close enough to Jefferson's Courthouse Square for Mrs. Grier and her son to walk there. Since Manfred is the major of Jefferson in this novel, it seems reasonable to assume that Faulkner imagined him living in Jefferson, but beyond that our decision about its location is speculative.