The Hamlet

Ratliff is an amiable and intelligent sewing machine salesman who observes and marks the Snopeses’ rise to power. A character in many of William Faulkner’s stories set in Yoknapatawpha County, he is a documentarian, recording the events occurring around him and acting as a witness. He also participates in the life of the town of Frenchman’s Bend, a staple in the town’s society despite his transient life as a salesman. This transience serves a narrative purpose—his travels around four counties tie the town of Frenchman’s Bend into the wider world of Yoknapatawpha County. Having known the Snopes family since childhood, when Ab Snopes and his family arrive in Frenchman’s Bend, Ratliff begins to observe them and their rise to power. His curiosity and intelligence aid him in this endeavor, allowing him to watch the Snopeses, particularly Flem, without being conned by them until the very end of the novel.

Ratliff is not only intelligent but kind and moral. He tries to end Lump Snopes’s peep show and helps to end Ike Snopes’s relationship with the cow. He takes in Mink Snopes’s wife and children after he is arrested. He continually advises the other men in town against engaging with Flem’s business practices. His compassion and observational skills also allow him to provide a more nuanced view of people, including the Snopeses. When Ab Snopes first arrives in town, it is Ratliff who gives background on him, complicating the townspeople’s negative view of him as a “barn-burner” by revealing how he has been “soured” by his own painful experiences in business. Ratliff is introduced to the story as an observer and confidant: As Will Varner plans a foreclosure, the reader is told that “it was only to an itinerant sewing-machine agent named Ratliff—a man less than half his age—that he ever gave a reason” (12).

His compassion and casual integration within the community are in direct contrast to the Snopeses’ predatory interest in the town of Frenchman’s Bend. If Flem is never present, Ratliff always is, to the point where his absence from any local event is treated as odd and questionable. The Old Frenchman’s Place scam, the one time Ratliff is taken in by Flem, is also the one time Ratliff is motivated by anger and personal desire. As is stated definitively at the end of the novel, “Couldn’t no other man have done it. Anybody might have fooled Henry Armstid. But couldn’t nobody but Flem Snopes have fooled Ratliff” (365).

Eula is the indulgent daughter of Will Varner. The youngest child in the Varner family, she spends the first few years of her life doing nothing more than sitting and eating in the Varner house. Her physical appearance is described as “suggest[ing] some symbology out of the old Dionysic times—honey in sunlight and bursting grapes, the writhen bleeding of the crushed fecundated vine beneath the hard rapacious trampling goat-hoof” (95). She is often connected to the natural world in descriptions such as this one of her teenage self:

[T]he youths of fifteen and sixteen and seventeen who had been in school with her and others who had not, swarmed like wasps about the ripe peach which her full damp mouth resembled (128).

The simile links her with abundance and temptation, suggesting that—like insects driven by instinct—the boys are powerless to resist her.

Eula is the main representation of sexuality and femininity within the novel. The descriptions of her emphasize her feminine features and attractiveness, qualities that the men around her use as justification for their violent thoughts and behaviors. Jody, her brother, uses her beauty as an excuse to control her, his fear sparked by her sexuality. The men who become obsessed with her are similar: Labove, the schoolmaster, feels driven to violence by his obsession with Eula. Though her laziness makes her appear to be untouchable and untouched by her circumstances, when looked at more closely her disconnect from the world seems to stem more from resignation. As her disinterest in any of the boys that surround her is depicted, “It was as if she really knew what instant, moment, she was reserved for, even if not his name and face, and was waiting for that moment rather than merely for the time for the eating to start, as she seemed to be” (128).

Eula’s marriage to Flem shows how men use her as a tool and a symbol. That Flem marries her not out of love or desire but for the financial and reputational benefits also shows the Snopesian mindset, antithetical to human relationships and wasteful of people. Her marriage also shows that she is capable of deeper understanding. Ratliff sees this after she marries Flem, with the description of her face as “not a tragic face: it was just damned” (265). Eula is not a symbol but a person, one who is not uncomprehending but instead apathetic.