Sanctuary

"Dickey might not have existed if it hadn’t been for Faulkner — maybe none of us would. This 1931 novel about the consequences of entering the feral world of the moonshiner still brings chills to me no matter how many times I read it. Temple Drake: Do not get off that train."

"Yes, and, I must admit, I hated Sanctuary for a long time and only recently changed my mind. Sanctuary tells an extremely disturbing story: a young woman, Temple Drake, is held captive by a gang of bootleggers in an abandoned house known as ‘the Old Frenchman place’. The novel outlines Temple’s often futile attempts to escape the gang and find the elusive sanctuary Faulkner conjures up in the title. The reason why I’ve long been so ambivalent towards Sanctuary is because Faulkner was deliberately cruel in his depiction of Temple and, in my opinion, was too insistent upon shocking his reader; the novel has an infamous moment (which I won’t describe here) that led to Faulkner being nicknamed “the corncob man.” “Imagine Faulkner as a magician” I thought Sanctuary lacked the delicacy of more mature works like The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom! and I was baffled as to why he decided to write such a monstrous work. Recently, though, I’ve taken a different view. First, my opinion of Temple has completely changed. I was blinded by the cruelty she was subjected to in my first reading, but I overlooked the fact that she tries repeatedly to overcome and resist the abuse she suffers at the gang’s hands. Then, I was struck by how Temple seems to predict characters like Dolores Haze in Nabokov’s Lolita , a character who, like Temple, has been much maligned and misunderstood by her critics as being a willing participant in the abuse she suffers. In Sanctuary , Faulkner paved the way for authors like Nabokov to show us that, actually, characters like Temple and Dolores are resistant, they are not femme fatales that lead innocent men to their doom; they are actually icons in the fight against misogyny and patriarchal oppression. Lastly, I was astounded by the ways in which Sanctuary predates and predicts so many of the core tropes that were developed in the horror film genre: the spooky old house, the mysterious, predatory murderer, the resilient final girl. Yes, Sanctuary might outwardly appear pulp-ish and a potboiler, but there is so much more going on in the novel apart from that. Faulkner resented having to work in Hollywood, but with a family to support, he didn’t have much choice in the matter. The fact is that he made much more money as a screenwriter than as a novelist; nearly all of his books, prior to the publication of The Portable Faulkner , did not sell well and so he had to compromise by working as a screenwriter. Most of his contributions went uncredited, such as Mildred Pierce , but recent work by scholars such as Peter Lurie, Stefan Solomon, Sarah Gleeson-White, and Ben Robbins has been instrumental in uncovering the influence of Hollywood on his life and work. Plus, The Big Sleep is one of my favorite films, so when Faulkner was credited for his screenwriting work, he left a big impression!"