Joan Heppleton

In Flags in the Dust, Joan is Belle Mitchell's younger sister who comes to Jefferson while Belle is away getting a divorce, to see what Horace Benbow is like; during the week she spends in town she and Horace have an affair. By the time she gets to Jefferson she has had a wide experience, both of the world (having lived in Hawaii, Australia and India, among other unnamed "random points half the world apart," 322) and of men (having been married a least twice and lived with at least one other man). There is "an indefinable something in her air, her carriage" that causes people in both Jefferson and her home town to stare (316). Horace associates it with big cats, like the tiger he once saw in a circus. Faulkner may expect contemporary readers to associate it with the "new woman" of the Twenties. (Her character was edited out of the novel when it was originally published as Sartoris in 1929.)