Wesley Snopes

Submitted by sfr on Sun, 2019-01-27 11:18
Character Key Number: 
228
Display Name: 
Wesley Snopes
Sort Name: 
Snopes, Wesley
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
Yes
Biography: 

Wesley Snopes is the father of Virgil and Byron. He appears as "the actual Snopes schoolmaster" instead of by name in The Town (42) and by name in The Mansion. In both novels, in addition to being the schoolmaster in Frenchman's Bend, he is a religious figure, a "revival song-leader" (Mansion, 79) "whose stage and scene were the scattered country churches and creeks and horse-ponds where during the hot summer Sundays revival services and baptisings took place" (Town, 43). According to the first novel, he does have "a good baritone voice and probably the last working pitch pipe in north Mississippi" (43), but in every other respect he is equally unfit for teaching and preaching. In both novels he leaves Frenchman's Bend after "a posse of enraged fathers caught him and a fourteen-year-old girl in an empty cotton house and tarred and feathered him out of the country" (43, 79).

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