Ratliff's House in Jefferson (Location Key)

In The Hamlet, Ratliff lives with his sister in a house somewhere in Jefferson. In The Mansion, however, it appears that his bachelordom is inviolable apart from the occasional dinners he prepares for Gavin Stevens and Chick Mallison. Whereas there are virtually no details about the house in the earlier novel, in this novel Faulkner provides a rich description of its interior layout and governing aesthetics. Ratliff keeps an "immaculate little kitchen" (256) which is adjacent to "the little immaculate room he called his parlor, with the spotlessly waxed melodeon in the corner and the waxed chairs and the fireplace filled with fluted green paper in the summer but with a phony gas-log in the winter." In the center of the room, there is a "waxed table" supporting "a rack" upon which Ratliff stores his "Allanovna necktie" within a "glass bell" (256) - a kind of shrine to his adventure in New York City.