Sanctuary

Twisted, twisted, twisted.

This is really a story about a serial killer, and once again the white woman is at the center of the plot. I read this novel in two days, so I'm with Faulkner that he wrote it for mass consumption. I'm not really disturbed by this story, not half as much as As I Lay Dying, or Absalom! I'm a little ways into The Sound and the Fury, and it is REALLY hard to read.

But back to Sanctuary, isn't this the novel that won the big prize? Wait. No. Other works received the Pulizter, but he did with the Nobel Prize for LIterature. There are lines in Santctuary that are pure Faulkner -- especially in the mouth of Miss Jenny, and when Horace has learned has to learn his lessons with Ruby. A few characters really stand out -- one character that caught my attention was the old man. Blind and deaf, he is a relic from the old South, and he is powerless to help Temple. I also think Ruby was a strange one. Why does she keep telling Temple that she'll be alright? I like when Horace tells Ruby that her actions seem to dictate what is going to happen -- the violation of Temple, the lynching. There is also a lot of symbology going on with the name Temple, the fact that although she was known as a slut in town, she really was a virign, and the associations with virgin and temples, contrasted with the defilement of white (crazy, deluded, serial killer types, who were addicted to something, alcohol, or cigarettes) men who, impotent, seek to violate what they can't possess. I'm a little surprised at the tone toward's alcohol in general in this novel. When Hemingway is writing what could be called his Odes to the Still, Faulkner is writing this horror story about the evils of moonshine, especially concerning Gowan, the half villain who's hangover almost gave me a headache. I love how Faulkner describes him trying to read something when he is blind drunk -- Gowan tries to focus and he mentions something like trying to hold his eyeball still in order to focus.

And Narcissa? Lovely name. I get more a feeling for Mrs. Tull, the preachy woman from Dying, when the Baptist women of the town go around gettin' things done. I sense the big country/townsfolk rifts. I think the point about sex and violence is driven home by the manner in which Goodwin was lynched, after being in some heinous way violated sexually, those people couldn't wait to do it to him, and people who are from out of town wonder that they had a trial at all. There is also Popeye's mutilation of the animals, the "love birds" and the "kitten." These animals are symbols of sexuality, but innocent, and pure. Popeye reveals an early lust for domination by killing them so brutally. I struggle to find Popeye's real purpose in the novel. I know he's the prinicpal villain, and he is creepy, but what is his purpose? I like how Gowan struggles to protect Temple, mumbling about her "honor" and how he needed to protect it. Popeye is impotent. He still manages to violate Temple, in a rather excruciating way. He then watches as Red has sex with her. Temple starts to call Popeye "Daddy," increasing his pimp status, but really hates him and desires Red. Popeye kills Red, after he finds out that Temple has feelings for him. Somehow Temple gets away, rescued by her father, tipped off by Snopes? I can't remember. Popeye is a bad man, for sure, born sick from a mom with VD, and not right, from the beginning.

I reread the beginning. Was Popeye pimping out Ruby to Goodwin? Maybe that makes more sense. She had come from money, just like Temple. Also -- maybe Little Belle is at the center of this whole thing. She is who Horace thinks of while at the French House, and who he talks to and the end of the novel. Horace is scared that what happened to Temple and Ruby could happen to her, too. Horace is perpetuating the White Womanhood myth in a way. Ruby knows it to be a farce, she tells Temple that she will be writhing in the mud and muck for more treatment. Horace is really in a jam. He doesn't want to keep walking those shrimp to his wife, but he at the end it appears he feels the need to protect his white women. Popeye cold be a symbol for lust and power or sexual violence, and its seductive quality, that it emerges out of the lions of a sexualy diseased womb -- a white womb, I might add -- and is constantly overcompensating for what it percieves as a loss of manhood. Then the novel could be a metaphor for the loss of slavery to the south, and how white men were exposed as the real culprits of sexual violence, and how white women were doomed to forever pay for the masculenity lost when white men were no longer legally entitled to protect their women from black advances. Something too, about the ways in which the two men were so disgusted at the prospect of the black women in the "colored" whorehouse. This is where Snopes like to hang out, but the younger white men have no interest there. They're interest is in the white women of Memphis. I'm really spun on this story, folks.

There's Temple herself. Faulkner is really fascinated with women, and the feminine. I can see a lot of Sanctuary in Tennesse Williams, the stuggle for dominance between the male and female esp. Perhaps I'll write my next paper on Streetcar vs. Dying, and see if I can't come up with something about the white woman myth.

*4/5/07 Edit*

The more I think about this book, it becomes more of an ode to the South, post-reconstruction era. It's all there, loss of manhood, prostitution, alcoholism (which is not unique to the South, but the way the back woods moonshiners are presented is so Deliverance, and the way that the book describes the little boy getting drunk off of the beer and vomiting and Gowan's binging, it's not exactly Jake sitting in a cafe in Paris drinking Pernod out of a glass), crooked and racist politics, domestic violence, religious zealots who do nothing but practice antiChristianity, and the typical Faulkner character, who can't accept this life as reality, and is powerless to do anything about it, forced to watch his client, not just hang, no, no, but be raped and burnt to death.

So the ode that Faulkner sings is bluesey, and the only solace whatsoever is the jungle, the nature that is claiming the land again. It's no place for Temple's high heeled slippers, Popeye's suit is covered with mud at one point, the weeds almost guard the French House. It's a wild place, and the civilization that tried to tame it with stolen lives forced into perpetual servitude is rotting in the mire and covered by the vines. They are violated by the crops they forced others into raising for themselves. Speaking of slavery, the only time Horace ever seems to have peace of mind is when he cleans his own house. (I think Faullkner really like this expression, this metaphor -- "clean the house" or "cleaned my house.") Horace remarks that he didn't know it would be that hard -- he thought any body with an arm and a bucket could do it. The only people who would have felt that way were privildged whites, who never had to do any of the housework. Horace gets to experience some pride from this hard work. It's harder work than any of the men in the novel do, except for the moonshiners, maybe, but that work isn't honest.

I'm still mulliung over Horace's last acts of going back to his wife and calling his step-daughter to see if she is "okay." I don't know if this is a cheap, sentimental ending, or if he is revealing white man's weakness in the face of his animalistic desire to protect his white woman and child...I'm not sure if this is to regualte Horace as a character, and show that he is trapped by his culture, or at least no better than it. His wife and step-daughter could be seen as metaphors for the south itself -- abandoned by America, unchaperoned, in need of protection, both in society and nationally. Horace leaving them could be seen as the government abandoning the South after the civil war, leaving behind the micro-civil-wars of the cities that were collasping in on themselves, like the South was in chaos from the civil war, then the First World war was fast on its heels, ready to take the men away again (as in the case of Goodwin). There is scant justice in Sanctuary. Even Horace's return to his wife is a little sketchy -- although he has been talking about her the whole time -- especally to the people of the French House.

There are also several orphan-types in the novel -- Temple (maternal), Popeye (Paternal), Little Belle (Paternal), Horace and Narcissa (they're holding on to Aunt Jenny, though). Any paternal (the law/Judge figures, and maybe the old man), or Maternal figures (the Mistress where Temple lived, and Miss Jenny), are really powerless, unless they are corrupt. You have Snopes, the D.A., and the Madame, and they are only looking out for #1. There is no real justice, and the ethics are questionable. This is a people, starving, like Temple, for attention, and morality. Any leftover morality (like the religious fanatcism), is selfish fuel for violence. Everything that was on the fringe in Dying is fully examined here. The rapist-type boys at the drugstore, the abortion-wish, the corrupt and lustful preacher -- these are not kept back, like in Dying. They are the main attraction. I wonder if anyone has even made a mural of the fictional county that Faulker created? You have the Bundren's over here, minus a recently deceased wife and committed child, with the daughter pregnant picking cotton, and the youngest now a mute fisherman, the French house over here, with now only a not even widow raising a baby that is a narcoleptic, and a man that seems cannot die, and a rusting and useless still in the back, she can be seen on very rare occasions counting pre-war gold coins by candlelight, and somewhere I have to find Quentin and Co. We'll get to that today.