Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Mon, 2014-04-07 16:42
What the Compsons refer to as "the branch" is a small creek that runs alongside their property. As children they played in it. It is where Caddy got her "drawers" (underwear) muddy in 1898, and where she returns a dozen years later after having sex for the first time. It is also where, in 1928, an unspecified number of black women who do washing for the white people of Jefferson go for water to clean the clothes.
Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Mon, 2014-04-07 16:39
What the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury refer to as "the branch" is a small creek that runs alongside their property. As children they played in it. It is where Caddy got her "drawers" (underwear) muddy in 1898, and where she returns a dozen years later after having sex for the first time. In one of Faulkner's many ironies, it is also where Benjy sees a group of black women washing the clothes of their white customers. In a story Faulkner wrote half a dozen years after the novel he seems to add another strange chapter to the story of this branch.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Sat, 2014-04-05 17:52
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 in the opposite direction, west of Harvard (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).
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Sat, 2014-04-05 17:50
The three boys with whom Quentin talks at the bridge in The Sound and the Fury argue about whether to go to "the Eddy" and fish, or to "the mill" and swim (121). When he next sees them, they are swimming (136). They call the mill "Bigelow's"; if it is like the other mills built along the river to take advantage of water power, there is a dam across the river behind which the water would likely be quiet and deep.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Sat, 2014-04-05 17:44
Boston is the capital of Massachusetts and its largest city. Quentin spends part of the last day of his life there in The Sound and the Fury: in a restaurant, a jeweler's and a hardware store - those places each have a separate entry in this index, but it should perhaps be noted here that Faulkner uses Boston and its environs in that novel, first, as his equivalent to the Dublin that Bloom wanders through in Joyce's Ulysses, and also as a representation of modernity along the lines of T.S.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Thu, 2014-04-03 11:46
One of the worst natural disasters in American history was the flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. This occurred in 1889. Two decades later, Martha Hatcher still seems afraid the water will somehow reach Yoknapatawpha.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Thu, 2014-04-03 11:41
What in The Sound and the Fury Louis Hatcher calls that flood "way up yonder" took place, as Quentin Compson tells him, "way up in Pennsylvania" (114). This flood was one of the worst natural disasters in American history: the 1889 flood in Johnstown, in which over two thousand people lost their lives. Pennsylvania's two major cities - Pittsburgh and Philadelphia - are mentioned in Requiem for a Nun. Philadelphia is linked with "Chicago and Kansas City and Boston" as egregious examples of municipal political corruption in the U.S. (192).
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Thu, 2014-04-03 11:21
The bridge over the Charles River that Quentin jumps from to commit suicide is an important location in The Sound and the Fury, but there has long been confusion about its location. Decades ago an anonymous aficionado of Faulkner actually put up a small memorial plaque for Quentin on the Anderson Memorial Bridge in Cambridge, but that is much too close to Harvard (and was not built until five years after Quentin's death).
