The Hamlet

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**Title** **The Hamlet**

Author	William Faulkner
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Snopes trilogy
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Random House
Released	1940
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	421 pp
ISBN	NA
Preceded by	The Wild Palms
Followed by	Go Down, Moses

The Hamlet is a novel by William Faulkner, published in 1940, about the fictional Snopes family of Mississippi.

[edit] Plot introduction

The Hamlet is the first of the "Snopes" trilogy, completed by the The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). For the idiot Ike Snopes, to enter a cow would seem to be tantamount to making love to a hole in the ground. Ike, via his loving bestiality, is intimate with the earth, Faulkner gives the cow a human equivalent in Eula Varner, daughter to the chief landholder of Frenchman's Bend, and her courting is central to Faulkner's great comic novel. Eula, for the male inhabitants of the hamlet, is little more than a uterus decorated with mammaries and a ruminant "damp mouth". Her marital fate allows Faulkner to explore the inheritance of Southern land, even as that land was subject to a class war, fought over for control over the means of production. During the 1880s and early 1890s, enclosure of common land forced a tenantry, unable to graze stock on the newly encolsed commons, to commit to the cotton cash crop, and in so doing to maximaze the profits of the landowning class and their own dependency on that class. Eula, impregnated and deserted, is given by her father to his commissary store clerk, the froglike Flem Snopes-a decision that indicates that the future belongs not to those who love the land, but to those who will capitalize it. Flem, named for what little he emits, is probably impotent and says virtually nothing during the entire novel, preferring to chew on nickels. The Hamlet records the early stages of his rise from cropper's cabin to banker's mansion.