FALKNERIANA

Speranza

Sanctuary (or "Il Santuario", as I prefer) plays on the deep-seated fear of Southern males that their women will be stolen from them and defiled.

Temple Drake (whose first name suggests the idealized purity of southern womanhood -- although "it is a male name", as is her surname) is a college girl who accompanies Gowan Stevens (F.F.V.), a product of the University of Virginia, to a boot-legger’s lair near Jefferson.

Gowan Stevens, who represents the vanity and ineffectuality of the old S outhern aristocracy, gets drunk and beaten up, and abandons Temple to Pop-Eye Vitelli (modeled upon a real gangster known Pop-Eye in Memphis), a psycho-pathic little gangster from Memphis.

Lee Goodwin, the white-trash boot-legger, and Tommy, his feeble-minded and good-hearted flunky, attempt to protect Temple from Pop-Eye, who, despite his impotence, lusts after her.

Temple hides, cowering, in a corn-crib in the barn.

At this point, the narrative becomes very lurid indeed.

Pop-Eye shoots and kills Tommy.

He then rapes Temple with a corn-cob.

He then flees to Memphis with her as his prisoner.

In Memphis, Pop-Eye ensconces Temple in Miss Reba’s brothel, showering her with clothes, jewelry, and cosmetics.

He enlists Alabama Red, another local gangster, as his surrogate and sits panting and drooling at the foot of the bed while Alabama Red has intercourse with Temple Drake

Meanwhile, Goodwin has been arrested for Tommy’s murder.

Ruby, his common-law wife and a former prostitute, portrayed throughout the novel with a limp, comatose baby in her arms, seeks help from the lawyer Horace Benbow.

Horace is a good but deluded man who has been dominated for years by his cold wife and even colder sister, Narcissa.

Back in Memphis, Temple’s corruption is complete.

She develops a wild passion for Alabama Red.

Pop-Eye’s response is to shoot Red -- between the eyes.

Alabama Red’s funeral at a Memphis road-house is a masterpiece of black comedy.

Alabama Red’s lugubrious former employer unwisely gives free liquor to the mourners.

They begin to carouse, eventually to fight.

When the casket is knocked over, Alabama Red loses his cap, and the piece of wax plugging the bullet hole in his forehead pops out.

Temple Drake is rescued by those employed by her influential father, Governor Drake, of Jackson.

To keep the Memphis episode quiet, Temple Drake gives perjured testimony against Goodwin, who is wrongfully convicted.

A mob, inflamed by the introduction into evidence of the offending bloody corn-cob, breaks Goodwin out of jail and burns him alive.

Pop-Eye, on his annual pilgrimage to his mother’s home in Pensacola, Florida, is arrested for the murder of an Alabama police officer (ironically, one of the few he did not commit).

Like Goodwin, he is wrongfully convicted and subsequently hanged.

Temple Drake goes to Paris with her father to forget the sordid past -- in search for a 'sanctuary' in the Luxembourg Gardens.