Anderson Evans

Southern Gothic Literature/ Paper #1

Clone Saga
Tresspasses of moral duality in popular and academic culture according to Faulkner’s

Sanctuary

There is a dense subtext caged within William Faulkner’s infamous potboiler Sanctuary that can be

viewed through many lenses. Initially tossed aside by many critics for being an exploitative pulp-novel

brimming with deviant actions and supposition, devoted Faulkner aficionados have since suggested this

work has as deep a reward in the realm of psychological character study; That Sanctuary is as rich for

study as any of Faulkner’s acclaimed masterpieces. For as many relationships that contextualize

Sanctuary’s discussion of morality and nature as there are, there is none so blatant as the connection

between upstanding lawyer Horace Benbow and criminal ruffian Popeye... Within the blatancy of the

connection between these two characters is a complexity that suggests a spiritual balance of good and evil

within both the illustration of axiomatic good and the illustration of axiomatic evil.

The initial pairing of Popeye and Benbow is introduced without pervasivity as the men provide both a

dark and a light reflection in the spring. Popeye has his gun, Horace has his book:

Across the spring they looked at one another. The cigarette wreathed it’s faint plume

across Popeye’s face, one side of his face squinted against the smoke like a mask carved

into two simultaneous expressions (Faulkner, 1968: 16)

As in most potboilers the audience is given to suspicion of the protagonist with his tools of virtue and a

dark hazy antagonist with his enigmatic and troubling demeanor foreshadowing trouble. As Sanctuary

moves forward, however what is presented is a book without protagonists in the traditional heroic sense.

The villainous qualities of Popeye are all too real, but as the text moves forward only the reader that takes

Horace’s self-grandizing as implicit makes the mistake of equating Horace’s decisions as virtuous or

heroic. “To trust Horace implicitly is to share his cognitive and ethical confusion, and to join him and

Popeye in spitting into the spring” (Yamaguchi 157). The nature of morality in the context of Hero vs.

Villain is parodied by Faulkner throughout his novel, and the cruel satirization of good triumphing over

bad ebbs and flows through the conduit of the female as a temple damned to her own desecration. What

this desecration of the female truly symbolizes is the matter of much discourse between Faulkner scholars.

Some cite latent homosexuality:

“Popeye and Horace never meet again, but the effect of their encounter remains strong as each

plays out his homosexual desire through Temple Drake’s body. Popeye’s violent rape of Temple

starts the novel’s movement-a movement from country to city, from natural to social... Her rape

and the corruption of her innocence represent a further appropriation of social power by Popeye to

achieve a certain status-namely

heterosexuality” (Polchin 152-153).

Others however propose that both Benbow and Popeye are merely fated to their own self-defining

ignorance and point to a collection of circular and natural inevitability. Ryuichi Yamaguchi points at two

specific cycles within Sanctuary. Specifically referencing Benbow and Popeye he suggests that while

Benbow fears Popeye, Popeye fears the nature Horace is merely nauseated by, so while Popeye’s fear

pushes him toward active perversion, Horace’s nausea pushes his fascination with what he fears, that
being his double Popeye (157). Yamaguchi’s other observance of perpetuity doesn’t deal singularly with

Benbow and Popeye, yet it very clearly illuminates what they stand for:

“That evil urge itself is to pervert fertility into filth, exhibit that filth publicly in the name of

purity, and purge it, thereby imposing sterility as the highest possible good. The instruments to

realize that urge are corncobs, mirrors, fig leaves, and the writing on the wall...” (Yamaguchi

159).

This evil urge prevailing over any final syntax of good is an even harsher thumb to nose from the author.

Faulkner understands that in the world of commercial fiction the rule is that some semblance of good is at

least comprehended, even if not embraced by even an anti-hero. In the ironically titled Sanctuary the

closest thing to a moral lesson is that spiritual emptiness causes perhaps less illustrious pain, but springs

from a reflection of the aggressive action caused by physical emptiness.

Vincent Allan King goes into detail stating his belief that Popeye and Horace are meant to satirize

both pop and academic culture as both give to delivering moral warnings to their audiences. Horace’s

discovery of Bovary’s use of arsenic to commit suicide in connection to cinematic heroines scorned make

Popeye a “pop culture paragon” (Moreland 310). In the case of Benbow’s preoccupation with

“modernism” and “high art” King purports that these ‘virtues’ are conveyed as “more sympathetic,” than

Popeye’s active participation in egregious acts of deviance, but Benbow’s preoccupation with imagined

virtue should be seen as cowardly because it represents a “fleeing” or an escape from natural evil, not a

confrontation and/or destruction of the malevolent force. This reinforces Yamaguchi’s point that

Sanctuary is unable to transcend any character beyond the point of sterility in regards to goodness.

(Moreland 309-312) Cleanth Brooks makes mention of Horace Benbow in relation to Faulkner’s
alienation and isolationism, suggesting that perhaps goodness is impossible in a world where a man is

“homeless among his own people” (339).

While Benbow is consistently taken to discussing both the social abnormalities of both Popeye and his

desecration of Temple Drake, his own moral complexion becomes even more muddied in his reflections

on his own temple-symbol Little Belle. His constant fear of her corruption gives away his unnatural

desires for her in a fantasy realm just as the corncob incident gives an impotent yet active Popeye self-

actualization in the physical realm in relation to his unnatural desires toward Temple. This gives the

following words from Benbow to Tommy an extra sense of significance, “I’d be scared of it too... if his

shadow was mine.” (Faulkner 1968: 285)

When exchanging the magnification of the scholar’s lens on the lawyer and his gangster

doppelganger for the lens of reflection given by the work itself as a whole it seems that this iconic piece

of Southern Gothic literature creates a world where the natural instinct toward progress offers it’s

practitioners only entitlement in victimization. Paradoxically it demands its audience give credence to the

possibly absurd challenge of finding sanctuary. In the end were these concepts merely a “sick joke”

(Yamaguchi 311)? It’s possible as in the end the villain, Popeye, is punished not for the sexual

destruction of his metaphorical temple, but instead for a crime far less self-defining. Horace is pushed

back into the marriage he was initially fleeing, a marriage that makes his voyeuristic sin of unnatural

fantasy inescapable. Temple, the most hard-hitting double-entendre of Sanctuary finds sterility in a world

that has no definition for a term like vengeance. Both Benbow and his ‘other,’ representatives for time,

begin the tale as they started it, as alienated men that will continue to view women, nature herself, as

corruption from the beginning as definition for the corrupted body, and they will place their blame for the

misery they cannot realize their life is mired in ruggedly into the hands of the effete.
 WORKS CITED

Brooks, Cleanth. The History of Southern Literature. Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

Print.

Faulkner, William. Sanctuary. New York: Random House, 1931. Signet Modern Classics, 1968.

Print.

Moreland, Richard C. A Companion to William Faulkner. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. Print.

Polchin, James. Faulkner and Gender: Faulkner’s Sanctuary as Psychosexual Test. Univ. Press

of Mississippi, 1996. Print.

Yamaguchi, Ryuichi. Faulkner’s Artistic Vision. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2004. Print.