Starkville

Starkville functions less as a fully inhabited setting than as a charged destination whose imagined pleasures drive several characters into motion. It is associated with a Saturday baseball game, a young woman whom Gowan Stevens has promised to take there, and the social freedom of a trip without a chaperone. Yet the closer the characters move toward it, the more decisively the promise of leisure gives way to intoxication, delay, jealousy, and coercive danger.

College-Town Destination

Starkville is presented through its relation to the University and to the rituals of student and town life. Gowan Stevens says that he must reach it before the special train, while explaining that he has a date to take a girl there. The destination therefore carries a precise temporal pressure: the journey is governed by the arrival of a train and by the schedule of a public sporting event rather than by an abstract wish to travel.

The social world surrounding Starkville is sharply stratified. Students at the University are not permitted to keep cars, so town boys provide the automobiles and wait outside the women’s dormitory. Temple Drake is seen running from the lighted windows of the Coop, a coat under her arm, and springing into a waiting car. On other occasions, town boys watch the formal dances and Letter Club dances from outside, while students enter the gymnasium with her. Starkville thus gathers together collegiate privilege, town resentment, flirtation, surveillance, and the automobile’s new power to carry people beyond institutional control.

The Journey and Its Promise

Gowan’s movement toward Starkville begins in a mood of masculine performance. He boasts that the liquor made at school is better than what is available locally and identifies his education at the University of Virginia with the ability to drink “like a gentleman.” In a confectionery-lunchroom, he constructs a whiskey sour, fills his glass repeatedly, and treats drinking technique as evidence of refinement. His declaration that he has learned in “a good school” turns the route to Starkville into an extension of collegiate identity: he is not merely traveling to a baseball game but displaying the manners and knowledge he believes distinguish him from the men around him.

That performance collapses before he can arrive. After drinking heavily, Gowan loses consciousness in a car and wakes amid sickness, weakness, and panic, still trying to explain that he must reach Taylor before the special arrives. He remembers a girl’s name and his proposed Starkville trip, including the fact that there will be no chaperone, then falls asleep again. When he finally understands that time has passed, he runs toward the station in a stained dinner jacket, with a burst collar and broken hair, only to find the siding empty. Starkville remains the goal, but his supposed gentlemanliness has produced the exact failure that makes the goal unattainable.

Temple’s Imagined Starkville

For Temple Drake, Starkville is initially a vivid scene of anticipated pleasure. As Gowan drives her through the countryside, she imagines the train already there, the pennants, the crowded stands, the band, the shining bass horn, and the green diamond where players crouch and call to one another. Her version of Starkville is not described as a neutral town but as a concentrated spectacle: color, music, athletic movement, and the promise of participation in a public Saturday ritual.

That imagined destination also represents a form of personal autonomy. The trip is linked to a girl’s freedom to go without a chaperone, and Temple’s expectation depends on reaching the game before the train and its passengers. The distance between the fantasy and the road becomes increasingly violent. Gowan, hungover and physically degraded after drinking hair oil at Dumfries, insists that he will obtain another bottle and still get her to Starkville before the train. His promise is measured against the already-lost event, while his accusations about her other companions and a name written on a lavatory wall turn the destination into an instrument of jealousy rather than pleasure.

Failure, Delay, and Consequence

The Starkville trip is repeatedly displaced by detours and practical obstacles. Gowan needs to drive to Taylor early enough to meet the special, but he stops with local men to obtain liquor and later continues drinking in the depot lunchroom. His claims about school-bred drinking contrast with the bodily evidence of collapse: sweating, vomiting, sleeping, staggering, and finally missing the train. In this structure, Starkville’s value shifts from anticipated freedom to humiliating absence.

The destination also remains connected to the wider movement of the plot even when characters do not reach it. Gowan’s failure to keep the appointment helps create the circumstances in which he and Temple travel onward in a distressed and increasingly dangerous condition. Later, the narrative’s geography expands toward the Old Frenchman place, a gutted pre-Civil War plantation house whose abandoned fields and gardens have returned to jungle. A telephone call from Tull’s house identifies that place to the sheriff after a dead man is reported, while the route eventually carries Popeye and Temple to Memphis. Starkville therefore belongs to a network of roads, cars, trains, telephones, and improvised stops in which modern mobility increases access but does not guarantee control.

Narrative Significance

Starkville’s importance lies in the contrast between destination and result. It is imagined through sport, music, youth, collegiate glamour, and unchaperoned movement, yet the attempt to reach it produces intoxication, missed transportation, accusation, and danger. The town’s social setting likewise contains a contradiction: the University represents discipline and status, while the prohibition against students owning cars makes town boys indispensable to the very excursions that evade institutional oversight.

As a remembered or anticipated place, Starkville becomes a measure of failed modern freedom. Cars, trains, alcohol, and telephones connect the characters across the landscape, but each system also magnifies vulnerability: the car becomes a site of reckless control, the train becomes a deadline that can be missed, alcohol destroys the traveler’s agency, and the telephone delivers catastrophe rather than rescue. Starkville is consequently less a refuge than a bright point toward which the characters travel while the structures supporting their confidence and safety steadily collapse.