Frenchman's Bend in The Mansion (Location)

Frenchman's Bend is "the hamlet" (in the novel with that title and many other fictions) where the story of Flem Snopes begins. Its role in this last novel in the Snopes trilogy is much diminished, but the narrative does end there. As a place it is crisply brought into focus when, at the start of the final chapter, Stevens and Ratliff pass through it at night: "Varner's store and gin and blacksmith shop, and the church and the dozen or so dwellings and other edifices" (458). In this novel the land around the hamlet is described, perhaps surprisingly, as "flat rich valley land" (458). Yoknapatawpha, like real Mississippi counties, is divided into administrative districts called "beats." In all the rest of Faulkner's fictions, the highest number assigned any beat in Yoknapatawpha is five, but in The Mansion there are nine. Beat Two comprises the entirety of Frenchman's Bend, which Ratliff describes as Will "Varner's own private Beat" (326), since the landowner controls not only the finances of this area, but also all the officials who serve there.