Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Fri, 2014-04-11 16:50
Before the Social Security Act of 1935, many localities in the U.S. had 'poor houses' or 'poor farms' to give destitute elderly or handicapped people some place to live (at poor farms they were often required to work for their support). In Flags in the Dust Will Falls lives at "the county Poor Farm," which is three miles out of town (3). All we know for sure about "the poorhouse" where Old Het lives in "Mule in the Yard" is that it is "a three-mile walk" from Mrs. Hait's house in Jefferson (264).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Fri, 2014-04-11 16:40
Mrs. Hait's house is located on the edge of town near the railroad tracks. The house has a basement which can be accessed via an outside wooden entrance and is painted in "that serviceable and time-defying color" which also covers "the railroad station" (253).
Submitted by dorette.sobolew... on Fri, 2014-04-11 16:14
Mrs. Hait's house is one of several residences in Yoknapatawpha that burn down. Unlike most of the others, it's a lower class residence, not a mansion, and while the others are lit on fire by Yankee soldiers or members of one or another of Faulkner's dysfunctional families, Hait's is burned down by a mule. At the beginning of the episode in both "Mule in the Yard" and The Town, the house stands on the edge of town near the railroad tracks. It is a "little wooden house painted the same color that the railroad company used on its stations and boxcars" (243).
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Thu, 2014-04-10 23:22
There are two Compsons named "Quentin" who appear in the novel, the second (a female) born not long after the first (a male) commits suicide. Miss Quentin is the illegitimate daughter of Caddy Compson and an unknown father; her last name is never actually specified in the novel, though presumably she attends school - when she is not playing hooky - as "Quentin Compson." In the 1946 Appendix to The Sound and the Fury Faulkner describes her as "The last. Candace's daughter.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Thu, 2014-04-10 22:48
On the interurban that carries him back to Cambridge, Quentin self-consciously notices how the other passengers in the car are all "looking at my [black] eye" (170). One passenger is individualized: looking at his reflection in the window of the car, Quentin sees superimposed on his own face the reflection of this woman sitting across the aisle from him, wearing a hat "with a broken feather in it" (169).
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Thu, 2014-04-10 22:37
Three Memphis policemen: that is how many it takes, according to the story Quentin heard, to subdue the naked Negroes who disturb the peace in the throes of a religious trance.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Thu, 2014-04-10 22:08
Mike is presumably the owner of the Boston gym where Gerald Bland has been learning to box. Shreve tells Spoade that Bland has "been going to Mike's every day, over in town" (166).
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Thu, 2014-04-10 21:53
Natalie is a girl about Quentin and Caddy's age who lives near their house. Caddy calls her "a dirty girl" (134) after catching her and Quentin naively exploring their sexualities together in the barn, but their behavior would probably seem natural enough to anyone but Quentin. Natalie does, however, take the lead in this exploration, and given the contemptuous way Caddy treats her (calling her "Cowface," for example, 136), the novel might be suggesting she is lower class.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Thu, 2014-04-10 21:29
Wilkie is mentioned by Mrs. Bland, when she tells the young people in her car about Gerald's grandfather back in Kentucky, who insisted on picking "his own mint" for his juleps: "He wouldn't even let old Wilkie touch it" (148). It seems safe to say that Wilkie was a servant in the Bland family.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Thu, 2014-04-10 11:09
In the early twentieth century most of the Italian immigrants in Boston lived in the densely populated North End, east of Cambridge and right up against the harbor. The neighborhood full of "new Italian families" that Faulkner creates is more likely in the opposite direction (129). Quentin is led into it by the mysteriously silent little girl he encounters in the bakery. Its "shabby streets" with broken sidewalks lead to houses like the one with a "pink garment hanging in the wind from an upper window" (131).
