South Decline Research Articles

The Four Faces of Temple Drake: Faulkner's "Sanctuary", 'Requiem for a Nun", and the Two Film Adaptations

THE INITIAL POPULARITY OF FAULKNER'S NOVEL Sanctuary WAS NO DOUBT due to its more sensational aspects as a gangster story which duplicated the riotous times in which it was published. Based originally on a newspaper account of a criminal who raped a girl with a pistol, the novel, which Faulkner himself labelled a basely conceived potboiler and which he withheld in order to revise and thereby legitimize it, was released for publication in 1931, struggled to gain respectability, and today occupies a secure position in the family of Faulkner's fiction. Much critical effort has been expended on justifying this position, and in the course of continuing explication, numerous studies have exposed the richness and complexity of the novel: George Marion O'Donnell sees Sanctuary as an allegory of the South's decline; Andre Malraux, as a detective story with overtones of Greek tragedy; Richard Adams, as a reinterpretation of the Persephone myth; Olga Vickery, as an exploration of crime and punishment; Irving Howe, as literature of disgust; William Van O'Connor, as a hallucination composed of expressionistic images; Hyatt Waggoner, as macabre humor; and Cleanth Brooks, as a mood piece on the discovery of evil.' Very few studies,