The Hamlet

William Faulkner

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1940

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1

Book 2

Book 3

Book 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Money

Money symbolizes power throughout the novel. For Flem, and others like him, the allure of money supplants any possibility of compassion or love. When Flem takes over running the Varners’ store, one of the clearest differences between him and his predecessor is that while Jody Varner would make mistakes with money, both in his own favor and against, Flem was completely inflexible. This rigidity extends to his willingness to extend credit or make allowances, showing how Flem’s exacting attitude toward money harms the community. Ratliff, in contrast to Flem, makes his money through his charm and understanding of other people. He is an effective salesman because he enjoys interacting with other people. He thinks of business transactions as “the pleasure of the shrewd dealing which far transcended mere gross profit” (68). Ratliff also doesn’t conduct business with the same ruthlessness as Flem. He is persuasive, but he does not scam people.

Money leads less shrewd people to disaster. Mink Snopes is caught by the sheriff when he goes back to Houston’s body to search for his $50. Armstid’s willingness to spend his last $5 on Flem’s pony scam leads to suffering for his wife. But it is not only the presence of money that leads to these disasters—it is the lack of it. The town of Frenchman’s Bend is populated by poor sharecroppers. Flem’s schemes are appealing, and repeatedly work, because he is taking advantage of a population without means. The deals he offers are accepted because there are few to no other options.

The Old Frenchman’s Place

The Old Frenchman’s place symbolizes the past, its decaying extravagance a representation of the idea of an idealized state that existed prior to the present. It is described as “the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades” (3). The townspeople, even Ratliff, ascribe a mystique and grandeur to it in the form of the legend of the hidden Confederate treasure. In reality, it is just a dilapidated old house, nearly worthless in economic terms, valuable only as a symbol. The life of the “Frenchman” who lived there is more myth than reality now. He is noted mainly for his absence—“he was gone now, the foreigner, the Frenchman, with his family and his slaves and his magnificence. His dream, his broad acres were parcelled out now into small shiftless mortgaged farms for the directors of Jefferson banks to squabble over before selling finally to Will Varner” (4). The Frenchman stands for the dreams of the other white inhabitants of the town, representing an idealized past in contrast with the degraded present.

The Old Frenchman’s Place is most of all a fantasy. Just as the grand past never truly existed, there is no great future to be scraped from its ruins. The scheme of Ratliff, Bookwright, and Armstid to find the fabled treasure on the property leads them to disaster, providing Flem with a lure powerful enough to ensnare even Ratliff. This is foreshadowed in the description of how his land has been divided and finally sold piecemeal to Will Varner. Just as Varner displaced the Frenchman, Flem Snopes will displace Varner.

Cows and Horses

Cows and horses are used as motifs to reinforce the conflicts between masculinity and femininity that recur throughout The Hamlet. Cows are frequently used to represent femininity, and masculine aversion to cows represents a hatred or distaste for women. The Snopes girls are initially seen by Ratliff as “the two cows, heifers, standing knee-deep in air as in a stream, a pond, nuzzling into it, the level of the pond fleeing violently and silently to one inhalation, exposing in astounded momentary amaze the teeming lesser subaerial life about the planted feet” (47). Houston’s cow too represents femininity, as Ike Snopes’s love for the cow is a displaced version of a man’s love for a woman. Houston himself connects the cow to women and thus dreads going home to “milk the cow, the prospect and necessity of which had been facing him and drawing nearer and nearer all afternoon […] in conjunction with the savage fixation about females which the tragic circumstances of his bereavement had created in him” (189). He dislikes handling the cow for the reminder it brings of his dead wife.

Horses, on the other hand, are viewed as masculine. Men’s fixation on horses and horse trading is a major source of tension within the novel. The phrase “a fool about a horse” is used repeatedly to describe men of Frenchman’s Bend. By and large horses are depicted as wild and hard to pin down—the stallion Houston buys kills his wife; the ponies at the auction are a force of destruction. The rampant horse trading going on also represents the vices of men in Frenchman’s Bend, keeping them in a constant stream of cons and scams.