Sartoris Plantation in The Unvanquished (Location)

Throughout the novel, there is little specific description of the Sartoris mansion. From the minor descriptions of the rooms - the porch, the dining room (12), kitchen (14), a room "which [Father] and the negroes called the Office" (15) but Granny calls the library "because there was one bookcase in it" (16), back gallery (17), Granny's and Bayard's room upstairs - the house seems to be a typical antebellum two-story house in the middle of the Sartoris plantation. It is located at the end of a "big road" where there is a gate, is next to a hill, has a back yard, and is surrounded by a well house, woodpile, stable (also referred to as the barn), pasture, stock pen, orchard of apple trees, various negro cabins, and a fence. When the house is burned by the Yankees, Bayard passes by the "ash pile and the chimneys standing up out of it" (79). In "Skirmish at Sartoris," Bayard describes the process of rebuilding the mansion: "getting the cypress and oak out of the bottom to build the house" (192). In "An Odor of Verbena" the rebuilt house is complete: "Father had rebuilt the house too, on the same blackened spot, over the same cellar, where the other had burned, only larger, much larger" (220). Indeed, the descriptions of the new house are much more ornate, and specifically the parlor - "the formal brilliant room arranged formally for obsequy" - where John Sartoris is at rest with a "festive glitter of chandeliers" (219) and a piano (240). Bayard, moreover, expands on this description on his arrival home: "I could see the lights, the chandeliers - hall, parlor, and what Aunt Jenny . . . had taught even Ringo to call the drawing room, the light falling outward across the portico, past the columns" (232) and the "brilliant door and windows" (234). Other rooms are mentioned such as the dining room, Father's office, Drusilla's room upstairs, and Bayard's room where he finds the spring of verbena on his pillow.