Abstract
The essay links the novel's bovine elements (Mink Snopes' scrub bull, Houston's cow, Eula Varner), to constitute a figurative series through which Faulkner addresses the continuity of archaic relations between land and the citizenry of Frenchman's Bend. The autochthonic elements of the novel are drawn from hiding as a subterranean narrative countering and disrupting the novel's more generally recognized account of modernization, associated with the rise of Flem Snopes. The tension between residual and emergent economic strains is set within the economic context of the 1880s and 1890s, in relation to the enclosure movement, and populist issues of common use rights and open range. Close reading explores how economic conflict may be thought to generate the formal strategies of a text.
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