Oxford, Mississippi in The Mansion (Location)

Oxford is the real town in Mississippi where Faulkner lived and wrote for most of his life, and the original on which much of his fictional "Jefferson" is based; in other fictions Faulkner says the two towns are forty miles apart, but in The Mansion the distance is given as "fifty miles" (156). Oxford is the home of the University of Mississippi, which Faulkner left there when he imaginatively moved so much else of the town to Yoknapatawpha. Four characters in The Mansion attend the University. Both Gavin Stevens and Charles Mallison go to "the University law school over at Oxford" (145). Devries is also an alumnus, graduating "Number One in his ROTC class at the University" in 1940 (388). Charles was there at the same time, but after he "was unable to get into the government flight-training program course at the University" (281), learns to fly with "a crop-duster operating from the same [air] field" as the Army program (282). The University has been co-educational since 1882; although Gavin wants her to attend one of "the high select girls' schools up there close to Harvard" (154), Linda Snopes also attends the University briefly, as Faulkner himself did.