Sanctuary , Sexual Difference, and The Problem of Rape

Abstract

To simply learn the word 'rape' is to take instruction in the power relationship between males and females. --Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will Traditional criticism of Sanctuary tends to see it as a novel about moral depravity, casting Temple Drake as the personification of evil. Recent challenges to that approach have attempted to rescue Temple's reputation, pointing out that she is not the agent but rather the recipient of harm. Traditional criticism and feminist criticism divide, then, in terms of where they locate the victim and victimizer in rape, one maintaining that Temple brought the rape on herself and the other arguing that Temple was a victim of it. But the reversals of subject/object, victim/victimizer do little to probe the novel's commentary on rape, gender relations, and social structures of power. Criticism of the novel is locked into this binary opposition because of its shared assumption that sexual difference is a biological reality. In order to move beyond reading Sanctuary and its characters in terms of categories that can find no safe harbor in the novel itself, sexual difference, specifically its articulation in rape, needs to be investigated. Women are essentialized in Sanctuary criticism as inherently rapable, always in one way or another asking to be raped. Elizabeth Kerr writes: By her disobedience in going with Gowan and her refusal to leave the Old Frenchman's Place, Temple initiated and stimulated the events leading to her rape.(1) Likewise, men are essentialized in the novel's criticism as brutes who have naturally violent desires.(2) Lawrence Kubie illustrates how naturalist ideas of sexuality provide the framework through which critics think about the novel: It is the uttermost limits of sour irony that this impudent, tantalizing, and provocative young girl, who had played fast and loose with the men of her own world without ever giving them the gift she kept dangling in front of them, should escape the relatively erotic purposes of the healthy members of the band, only to taunt the impotent and tortured figure of Popeye into committing a criminal assault upon her by artificial means.(3) Temple is a tease; men, with their healthy natural desires, are either tortured by her teasing or honest enough to molest her. As John Duvall points out in his discussion of Faulkner criticism and women, critics often rearticulate the sexist ideologies of the characters in the text.(4) Thus, while the text itself performs an insightful critique of these positions, the critics reinscribe them as viable--to the point of implicating their readers in their compliance with the gang rape presented in the novel.(5) In opposition to the naturalist discourse that attends most of its criticism, Sanctuary reveals an awareness of the social underpinnings of violence against women. The idea of sexual difference works as the ground for sexual violence--the inevitable result of innate, unchangeable biology. Sexual difference is in fact the excuse for sexual violence. Colette Guillaumin points out that society is divided into men and women, but that this is not based in biology: For there do exist in fact two groups in the heart of the society in which we live, two classes which are born of a social relationship, and whose social existence is masked by anatomico-sexual division (emphasis in the original).(6) The mask of biological sexual difference shields the face of social oppression. Monique Wittig concurs, when she explains that sexual difference expresses a social relationship of dominance and not a biological reality.(7) In Sanctuary rape is a matter of social bodies and not biological ones. The novel mocks the premise that biology is responsible for the discrepancies of power between men and women and instead locates sexual difference in social configurations of power. …