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TEMPLE DRAKE: FAULKNER'S MIRROR FOR THE SOCIAL ORDER Donald A. Petesch* In her study of women and madness, Phyllis Chester recalls the myth of Demeter and Persephone.1 The primal relations embodied by the myth, along with the primal violence, serve as part of the backdrop for her study of the ways in which madness is defined, viewed, and treated in a male-dominated society. William Faulkner adapted the same myth for his own ironic purposes in Sanctuary. Richard P. Adams has written that "Temple Drake is a savagely humorous caricature of the classical Persephone, and she undergoes a horribly uncouth rite amongst the Mississippi corn."2 The ironic paralleling is extensively developed by Faulkner. Temple's return to Jefferson—unlike Persephone's, or even EuIa Varner's return to Frenchman's Bend in The Hamlet—does not bring spring, rebirth, and new life. Rather, Temple returns in the summer and her return causes the death of Lee Goodwin. Faulkner employs the myth, as he often employs myth in his works, to satirize contemporary society and to suggest the limits such a society imposes upon the potentiality for mythic grandeur. In such a world, Hades' chariot becomes Popeye's automobile; Persephone's first menstruation becomes the blood shed by Temple following the corncob rape; Hades' nether world becomes the Memphis underworld; Demeter's queenly state becomes Temple's occupancy of a brothel. But Faulkner's Temple Drake is more complex than the technique of ironic paralleling would suggest. Temple serves not only to suggest the mythic but also to reveal the corruption of contemporary society by embodying that corruption in her person. But Faulkner, by so using Temple, is not judging her; rather, he is judging society, which defines reality and which has made her its creature. She is, in Shakespeare's terms, Faulkner's mirror held up to nature, and the reflection is damning .3 This distinction is important since critics have tended to view Temple Drake either without reference to the social order, or as simply one more manifestation of a corrupt society. Some critics, possibly influenced by Temple's statement in Requiem for a Nun, have declared 'Donald A. Petesch, e critic end poet, is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. 38Donald A. Petesch that Temple liked evil.4 Temple Drake's problem, however, is not an excess of will, but an absence of self. Thus, Sanctuary is at the same time both a condemnation of the middle-class social order and a revelation of the shallowness of the woman's role within that order. In her own person Temple Drake exhibits the conflict between appearance and reality, between the forms of respectability and the evil those forms mask, central to the thematic structure of the novel. Sanctuary is Faulkner's most unrelieved indictment of the middleclass social order, which is shown to be a world of appearances. One of Senator Clarence Snopes' statements could well serve as the social order's motto: " 'When I'm here, in Jefferson, I'm one fellow; what I am up in town with a bunch of good sports aint nobody's business but mine and theirn.' "5 In this world of appearances the principal institutions maintain only a formal relationship with the ideals they embody. The church, for example, manifests hate and exclusiveness, rather than Christian love and charity. The Baptist minister believes, according to Horace Benbow, that " 'Goodwin and the woman should both be burned as a sole example' " to their child (p. 123); and it is the "Christian " church ladies who force the hotel proprietor to evict Ruby Lamar. It is a commentary on the institutions of marriage and the family that only the unsanctioned relationships of Lee Goodwin and Ruby Lamar and of Miss Reba and Mr. Binford seem strong and enduring. Horace Benbow's marriage to Belle is dull and uninspiring, and he has left her at the beginning of the novel; only Belle's daughter seems to draw from him sensual and sexual responses. His relations with his sister, Narcissa, often lack those ideal qualities associated with the institution of the family. Family loyalty, for example, weighs very lightly with Narcissa...

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