Salomé in the Jazz Age: Faulkner, The Marionettes, and Sanctuary

Faulkner's 1920 dream-play, The Marionettes, opens with the illustration of a sleeping Pierrot, a glass of wine tipped over at his hand, a woman's abandoned slipper at his feet, and a round blank moon over-head. He is dreaming of Marietta. The play tells the story of that dream. Marietta, the illegitimate daughter of a fallen woman, now absent, roams restlessly in a walled garden just out of view of three maiden aunts who have carefully protected her from men. One spring, in Pierrot's dream, he appears sitting on the garden wall. He sings, seduces, and carries her away. In the autumn, she returns—sexually experienced, jaded, restless, and dying like the garden itself.

Numerous readers of Faulkner have traced the features of that dream-play to Faulkner's enthusiasm for fin-de-siècle decadence, to the Symbolists and other predecessors of literary modernism. Whether intended or not, a couple of assumptions have been derived from that work: first, that the young writer's enthusiasms inasmuch as they were for European literature, specifically French and British, marked him out as somewhat removed from his own American moment, that removal perhaps connected in some way with his southern provincialism¹; and second, that this apprentice work was largely left behind as he moved into his major phase with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929, although it is typically acknowledged that aspects of his early idealism would remain until the end of his career.² But Faulkner's early dream-play is deeply embedded in an American scene, in the American Jazz Age and the youth culture of the immediate post-WWI years, which itself embraced the fin-de-siècle. Sanctuary, published in 1931, has alternately been dismissed as trash or reclaimed as a noir thriller, a novel of Prohibition, a lamentation on the coming of modernity to the South, etc. and has occasionally been acknowledged as part of a trilogy with The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying—each one focusing in a different way on the modern woman. Nevertheless, Sanctuary retains its reputation as an outlier in the Faulkner canon, not least because of Faulkner's own assessment of the novel as "a cheap idea," but also as a result of the strong line of demarcation so many of Faulkner's readers have drawn between the "apprentice" and the "major" work. In other words, if 1929 marks the arrival of the mature Faulkner, what can we do with Sanctuary?

One of the things we can do with Sanctuary is to recognize that it is in many ways of a piece with Faulkner's work in the years preceding The Sound and the Fury. Noel Polk has seen it as part of a "single intertext" ("Space" 34) beginning with Mosquitoes in 1927, but its intertextualities reach further back. Decades ago, William Van O'Connor observed that Sanctuary "suggests the conventions of a highly stylized play" (161). As it does. But it suggests more than the conventions of a genre popular in Faulkner's youth; it recapitulates, with a difference, the scene and the subject matter of The Marionettes.³ In both we have the protected daughter of an absent mother, a restless young woman discontented in her own figurative "walled garden" of upper-class respectability, a girl with protectors, a girl who is carried away and returns—sexually experienced, jaded, still restless, and, in the final scene, spiritually dead and likened to the queens monumentalized by the statues in the Luxembourg Gardens. The heavy symbolism of the dreamplay is attenuated in Sanctuary, but elements remain: the opening scene of the novel—featuring the idealist Horace Benbow and the villain Popeye stilled and watching each other across a space—recapitulates to some degree the timelessness of the dream-play as well as its tension between the idealist and the debased. In short, if Sanctuary comes across as an oddity, that is because it is too often read against the background of the major work rather than as a...