Sanctuary

“The house was a gutted ruin rising gaunt and stark out of a grove of unpruned cedar trees. It was a landmark, known as the Old Frenchman place, built before the Civil War; a plantation house set in the middle of a tract of land; of cotton fields and gardens and lawns long since gone back to jungle, which the people of the neighborhood had been pulling down piecemeal for firewood for fifty years or digging with secret and sporadic optimism for the gold which the builder was reputed to have buried somewhere about the place when Grant came through the county on his Vicksburg campaign.”

The Old Frenchman place is a symbol of Southern decline, showing how the history of Yoknapatawpha County has faded through time. The house is the home base of Goodwin’s bootlegging operation, representing the corrupting influence of vice on Southern tradition. That it is here that Temple Drake will be trapped, raped, and kidnapped ties together the decline of the “old South” (or Faulkner’s idea of it) and the decline of Temple.

“‘You see,’ he said, ‘I lack courage: that was left out of me. The machinery is all here, but it won’t run.’”

Benbow says this to Ruby, having just abandoned his family and been intimidated by Popeye and feeling out of place within the world. However, Benbow will go on to have enough courage to defy social conventions and popular opinion to try and help Ruby and Goodwin.

“Townspeople taking after-supper drives through the college grounds or an oblivious and bemused faculty-member or a candidate for a master’s degree on his way to the library would see Temple, a snatched coat under her arm and her long legs blonde with running, in speeding silhouette against the lighted windows of the Coop, as the women’s dormitory was known, vanishing into the shadow beside the library wall, and perhaps a final squatting swirl of knickers or whatnot as she sprang into the car waiting there with engine running on that particular night.”

This quote introduces Temple Drake and establishes her character as a popular and beautiful college girl who likes to go out. Temple has a lot of privilege, and is well known, two things that should have protected her from her eventual fate. It also establishes that Temple has some agency and is willing to flout social convention to a degree as she sneaks around campus.

“Gowan filled the glass level full and lifted it and emptied it steadily. He remembered setting the glass down carefully, then he became aware simultaneously of open air, of a chill gray freshness and an engine panting on a siding at the head of a dark string of cars, and that he was trying to tell someone that he had learned to drink like a gentleman.”

Gowan talks obsessively about his time at the University of Virginia, particularly how he was taught to drink like a gentleman there. Coming from a rich and genteel Southern family, Gowan clings to his identity as a Southern gentleman, even as his relationship with alcohol becomes more and more untenable.

“Her hand touched the child’s face, then she flung her arms around the box, clutching it, staring across it at the pale door and trying to pray. But she could not think of a single designation for the heavenly father, so she began to say ‘My father’s a judge; my father’s a judge’ over and over until Goodwin ran lightly into the room.”

Temple, like Gowan, clings to her Southern aristocratic identity. Temple is not looking for self-assurance like Gowan, but instead for any shred of protection she can hang onto in a situation that is becoming increasingly dangerous. This scene highlights that Temple’s attempts to find sanctuary in the Southern aristocratic power structure are, in fact, useless.

“You’ve never seen a real man. You don’t know what it is to be wanted by a real man. And thank your stars you haven’t and never will, for then you’d find just what that little putty face is worth, and all the rest of it you think you are jealous of when you’re just scared of it.”

Ruby says this to Temple, having been condescended to continually—though not necessarily intentionally—by her over their different social classes. Ruby has been trying to convince Temple to leave and is trying to impress upon her just how incomprehensible the world she has entered is to her and how different it is from her previous experiences.

“From time to time he would feel that acute surge go over him, like his blood was too hot all of a sudden, dying away into that warm unhappy feeling that fiddle music gave them. Durn them fellers, he whispered, Durn them fellers.”

Tommy is Temple’s main defender among the men at the Old Frenchman place. He shows a natural desire to do the right thing, looking out for Temple and growing angry with how the others are treating her without being motivated by any outside force or possibility of reward.

“When they were about fifty yards from the house the woman stopped and turned and jerked Temple up to her, and gripping her by the shoulders, their faces close together, she cursed Temple in a whisper, a sound no louder than a sigh and filled with fury. Then she flung her away and they went on.”

Ruby is both angry with Temple and her presence at the Old Frenchman place and desperate to protect her from ending up like Ruby herself. This scene demonstrates that, as Ruby tries to protect Temple while also cursing her in anger.

“Town, the world, began to appear as a black cul-de-sac; a place in which he must walk forever more, his whole body cringing and flinching from whispering eyes when he had passed, and when in midmorning he reached the house he sought, the prospect of facing Temple again was more than he could bear.”

Gowan’s shame at having brought Temple into a dangerous situation and abandoning her there has come in full force. He has failed to live up to his ideal of the Southern gentleman, but instead of trying to right his mistake or feeling worried for Temple, he instead worries about the judgement he will face.

“She opened the door and peered out, at the house in the bright May sunshine, the sabbath peace, and she thought about the girls and men leaving the dormitories in their new Spring clothes, strolling along the shaded streets toward the cool, unhurried sound of bells.”

As Temple suffers more and more in the Old Frenchman place and at the hands of Popeye, she begins to dissociate back to her life at the university. Her thoughts of university emphasize the clash that is happening through Temple’s experiences, the meeting of upper-class gentility and poor criminality.

“She could hear silence in a thick rustling as he moved toward her through it, thrusting it aside, and she began to say Something is going to happen to me. She was saying it to the old man with the yellow clots for eyes.”

Popeye’s attack on Temple has been foreshadowed since Temple arrived at the house. Temple herself has been fearing it, and in the moment before it happens, she tries to contextualize it by calling back to her own expression of her fears after she arrived. She is also calling out to the old man, Pap, who is sitting on the porch of the house during her assault, but as he is blind and deaf, he does not respond. This connects to other instances of powerlessness and impotence in the novel.

“The face did not turn, the eyes did not wake; to the woman beside the road it was like a small, dead-colored mask drawn past her on a string and then away. The car went on, lurching and jolting in the ruts. The woman went on to the house.”

Ruby watches as Popeye drives Temple after he assaults her. The blankness on Temple’s face is a recurring motif of her character, particularly after her abduction by Popeye. She cannot reconcile her conception of herself to her new circumstances, instead retreating into herself.

“I can’t help it. She has nothing, no one. In a made-over dress all neatly about five years out of mode, and that child that never has been more than half alive, wrapped in a piece of blanket scrubbed almost cotton-white. Asking nothing of anyone except to be let alone, trying to make something out of her life when all you sheltered chaste women—”

Benbow is continually frustrated with the way the town treats Ruby and her child, showing his dissatisfaction with society. His main combatant is his sister Narcissa, a representation of the opinions of the town of Jefferson and tied to old Southern roots.

“Dammit, say what you want to, but there’s a corruption about even looking upon evil, even by accident; you cannot haggle, traffic, with putrefaction. You’ve seen how Narcissa, just hearing about it, how it’s made her restless and suspicious. I thought I had come back here of my own accord, but now I see that—Do you suppose she thought I was bringing that woman into the house at night, or something like that?”

Benbow wonders frequently about the nature of evil in the book and repeatedly expresses his disgust at the thought that he would only help Ruby in order to receive sexual favors from her. He is genuinely concerned with the nature of evil here, whereas Narcissa is more concerned with the appearance of it.

“She thought about half-past-ten-o’clock in the morning. Sunday morning, and the couples strolling toward church. She remembered it was still Sunday, the same Sunday, looking at the fading peaceful gesture of the clock. Maybe it was half-past-ten this morning, that half-past-ten-o’clock. Then I’m not here, she thought. This is not me. Then I’m at school. I have a date tonight with…thinking of the student with whom she had the date. But she couldn’t remember who it would be.”

Temple, having been installed by Popeye in Miss Reba’s brothel, is once again dissociating from reality back to her life at the university. She tries to put herself back in that life, but either because she has suffered too much or because her life at university was not truly substantial enough to offer refuge, she is unable to fully immerse herself.

“Little shirt-tail boys that think because Lee breaks the law, they can come out there and treat our house like a…Grown people are bad, but at least they take buying whiskey like buying anything else; it’s the ones like him, the ones that are too young to realize that people don’t break the law just for a holiday.”

Ruby’s words to Benbow once again highlight the class tensions in the novel, and the collision between the world of Southern gentility and the criminal underground. University students like Gowan, in particular, cause tensions, unable to recognize the humanity of the people who live different lives from them.

“I don’t care where you live. The question is, where I live. I live here, in this town. I’ll have to stay here. But you’re a man. It doesn’t matter to you.”

Narcissa has served as a representation of the town’s opinions and views for most of the novel, and Benbow pushed back against her without her giving specific reasoning. Here, she explains her own reasoning, making it clear that at least part of the reason she cares about societal pressures is because, as a woman and an inhabitant of Jefferson, she is stuck with them.

“That was the only part of the whole experience which appeared to have left any impression on her at all: the night which she had spent in comparative inviolation. Now and then Horace would attempt to get her on ahead to the crime itself, but she would elude him and return to herself sitting on the bed, listening to the men on the porch, or lying in the dark while they entered the room and came to the bed and stood there above her.”

Temple is still stuck on the fear and tension of her night in the Old Frenchman place, just as she was in the moments before Popeye’s first assault. Her discussion of this night with Benbow has the feeling of a tragic play to it, one where she knows the ending but can’t resist telling it over and over again.

“Perhaps it is upon the instant that we realize, admit, that there is a logical pattern to evil, that we die, he thought, thinking of the expression he had once seen in the eyes of a dead child, and of other dead: the cooling indignation, the shocked despair fading, leaving two empty globes in which the motionless world lurked profoundly in miniature.”

Benbow continues to muse on the nature of evil after hearing Temple’s story, and it calls to mind the eyes of the dead, implying that Temple herself has in a way died, reverting to blankness because of this spiritual death. This also connects to the Decline of the South Through Vice, suggesting that evil—represented in the novel by alcohol and violent figures like Popeye, as well as hypocrisy and corruption—will ultimately lead to the “deaths” of Southern tradition and moral virtue.

“She believed that it would be at the door that they would stop her and she thought of the pistol with acute regret, almost pausing, knowing that she would use it without any compunction whatever, with a kind of pleasure.”

This scene depicts just how much Temple has changed since her abduction. At the Old Frenchman place, she largely did what others told her to, hiding where Tommy and Ruby told her to. At Miss Reba’s, she not only is able, but desires, to enact violence to achieve her desired ends.

“After all, we’ve got to protect society, even when it does seem that society does not need protection.”

The conversation between the district attorney and Narcissa has shown them to be united in wanting to finish off the Goodwin case, but while Narcissa wants a return to the status quo, the district attorney’s desires seem to follow an even more fascistic bent. His reference to Benbow as a brother in arms and his desire to encourage the social policing going on hint at a Southern law system run on white supremacy and moral outrage.

“It’s not that. You know it’s not that. But can’t you see that perhaps a man might do something just because he knew it was right, necessary to the harmony of things that it be done?”

Benbow at last directly states his view on the world and morality, showing both his own compassion and his naïveté. He wants to do the right thing and has lived a sheltered enough life that he can’t comprehend that that might not be a common motivation.

“She sat in her attitude of childish immobility, gazing like a drugged person above the faces, toward the rear of the room. The old man turned to her and extended his hand. She did not move. The room expelled its breath, sucked it quickly in and held it again.”

At Goodwin’s trial, Temple remains in the detached state to which she has been retreating. Her suffering, up to this point, has been hidden from society. Here, with the reappearance of her father and a chance to return to her old life, it comes only with the view of an audience.