Horace Benbow attends Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. It is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. The novel's description of its campus and the life Horace lives there is very idyllic, emphasizing its cloisteral seclusion from "the world's noises" (176).
The full name of the college that both Horace Benbow and his father, Will, attended as "honor men" (176) is Sewanee: The University of the South. Affiliated with the Episcopal Church, it is located in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Faulkner's hometown in Mississippi was named 'Oxford' as part of a campaign by three early inhabitants to make it the site of a college. The original 'Oxford,' of course, is in England, and is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Horace Benbow attends that Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. The brief account of the place and his life there in Flags in the Dust is very idyllic, emphasizing its cloisteral seclusion from "the world's noises" (176).
The full name of the college that is mentioned in Flags in the Dust is Sewanee: The University of the South. Affiliated with the Episcopal Church, it is located in Sewanee, Tennessee. Both Horace Benbow and his father, Will, graduated from it as "honor men" (176) .
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Wed, 2013-02-27 11:30
At least two characters called "Major de Spain" appear or are mentioned in a number of Yoknapatawpha fictions, and it's not always possible to say which one is meant, but this is the Major de Spain who served in the Civil War as a Confederate officer. He appears in this story, however, as the Sheriff of Yoknapatawpha County. In Go Down, Moses (1942) readers learn that after the War he bought the fishing cabin where so much killing occurs in this story, and turned it into a hunting camp.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Wed, 2013-02-27 10:29
This white boy finds the body of Thomas Sutpen lying outside the tumble-down fishing camp. After "a mesmerized instant" in which he looks at Wash looking at him through a window in the camp, he runs off to report the crime (546).
Mentioned only as Flem Snopes' "baby" (166), with neither a name nor a gender, this character will become a major figure in the three novels of the Snopes Trilogy (where readers learn that the child is a daughter named Linda - and that she is not, in fact, Flem's child).
Although mentioned only in passing, when the narrator says that Flem Snopes once lived in a tent with "his wife and baby" when he first came to Jefferson (166), this character - nee Eula Varner - will play a major role in both The Hamlet and The Town, and become one of the major female figures in the Yoknapatawpha fiction.
Horace Benbow's description of the glass-making craftsmen he saw in the caves of Venice is suitably picturesque: "At first they're just shapeless things . . . shadows on the bloody walls . . . And then a face comes out, blowing . . ." (165).
