Novel: The Mansion

Overview
Published in 1959, The Mansion completes William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, bringing to a close the long invasion of Yoknapatawpha County by the grasping, resilient Snopes clan. The novel centers on Flem Snopes, the icily ambitious striver who has maneuvered himself into wealth and social position, and on two figures who ultimately unmake his dominion: Linda Snopes Kohl, the stepdaughter he cannot control, and Mink Snopes, a poor kinsman whose memory of a slight ripens into lethal revenge. The book is both a capstone to Faulkner's social chronicle of Jefferson, Mississippi, and a meditation on the hollowness of power gained without love, honor, or community.

Setting and Structure
Faulkner returns to Jefferson and the wider Yoknapatawpha landscape, moving between the courthouse square, bank offices, back roads, and prison farms, with time shifts that reach from the 1910s into the post–World War II years. The narrative voice alternates among V.K. Ratliff, the sardonic traveling salesman; Gavin Stevens, the county lawyer and self-appointed moralist; and Charles "Chick" Mallison, Gavin's observant nephew. Their overlapping testimonies create a layered portrait in which rumor, memory, and fact constantly refract one another.

Plot
At the start, Flem Snopes has attained what he craved in The Hamlet and The Town: control of the bank and occupancy of the de Spain mansion, the town's emblem of old privilege. Yet triumph exposes a void. The community tolerates him but never embraces him; his wife Eula is dead; and the house he coveted becomes a chilly monument to his isolation.

Into this uneasy equilibrium returns Linda Snopes Kohl, Eula's daughter and widely presumed to be Manfred de Spain's child. Partially deaf since childhood and further injured in the Spanish Civil War, where her idealist husband was killed, Linda comes back hardened and clarified. Flem's attempt to manage her, through money, through silence, fails. Taking his allowance, she spends it publicly and purposefully, a steady, humiliating drain that converts Flem's hoarded capital into civic and charitable outlay. Her presence rekindles Gavin Stevens's old, unrequited passion, and their fraught bond, part romance, part mentorship, part argument, becomes a forum for Faulkner's debate over honor, responsibility, and the uses of power.

Running alongside is the bleak odyssey of Mink Snopes. Decades earlier he murdered Jack Houston in a feud over a cow and went to prison expecting clan loyalty to free him. Flem never lifts a finger. In the penitentiary's slow grind Mink's grievance cools into a single purpose. He claws his way to release on a technicality and returns, starving and ragged, to Jefferson. Where the law and Gavin's homilies can only circumscribe Flem, Mink acts. He stalks his cousin and kills him, an act at once sordid and inexorable. In the aftermath, Mink offers no defense, almost serene as he faces the gallows, having settled a private ledger the courts could not.

Characters
Flem is rendered as negative space: a will to acquisition without joy, a man whose power comes from opacity. Linda stands as his antithesis, spending as counterpower and wielding memory as weapon. Gavin remains the county's eloquent conscience, capable of insight yet paralyzed by scruples and desire. Ratliff supplies the skeptical common sense that keeps the narrative grounded. Mink, brutish and implacable, becomes the novel's harsh instrument of rough justice.

Themes
Faulkner opposes money's abstract arithmetic to older currencies of honor and belonging. The mansion itself, won from the de Spains, is a hollow trophy, a symbol of arrival that cannot confer legitimacy. Revenge, both Linda's slow moral expenditure and Mink's bullet, serves as a distorted path to equilibrium in a community that never musters collective justice. The book probes narration's role in shaping truth: three voices argue over what Flem means, yet history is finally rewritten by deeds rather than talk.

Significance
As the trilogy's coda, The Mansion dismantles the Snopes ascendancy not through courtroom triumph or communal uprising, but through the converging pressures of conscience and vendetta. It seals Faulkner's long account of a South remade by opportunism and modernity, leaving Jefferson chastened, the great house emptied of its usurper, and the county's storytellers to reckon with what has, and has not, changed.