Content area
Full Text
EVEN THOSE WHO HAVE NOT read Sanctuary are likely to know two things about it: first, that in it a woman is raped with a corncob, and second, that Faulkner's preface disparages the book as "a cheap idea . . deliberately conceived to make money" (qtd. in Polk, Editors' Note 321-22). The relationship between these two elements, however, has so far gone unexplored. Critics discuss either the preface or the novel in depth, rarely examining connections between the story of the financially insecure white male writer and the story of the white female coed who is brutally raped.
I show here that the story Faulkner tells about writing Sanctuary, when read in conjunction with the novel, links gender and racial ideologies to economic change. By articulating the complexities of this relationship, and by pointing to the doubling of Faulkner (the writer) and Popeye (the rapist), I argue that these two texts together reveal deep anxieties about masculine identity in the midst of an economic transition that is amplifying gender instabilities already existent in the profession of Southern letters. As Susan V. Donaldson points out, "even though the Southern literary canon has always been defined as white, male, and conservative . . . the profession of letters in the South and its accompanying literary texts have always had a particularly haunted air, an aura of repressed ghosts besieging the white male writer and destabilizing his writing" ("Gender, Race" 493). I argue here that in Sanctuary and its preface this destabilization is caused by the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy. The story, told in Sanctuary, of the rape of a rich, white woman by a lower-class, "black" man signals Faulkner's attempt to impose ideological hegemony. By invoking the myth of the black rapist, Sanctuary implicitly reinscribes the gender and racial ideologies that supported the plantation economy. However, reading this reinscription alongside the story, told in the preface, of the transformation of the penniless writer into a writer of best-sellers, reveals how the decline of this economy and the rise of the mass market fractured these ideological constructions. Faulkner's self-presentation in the preface and the character of Popeye the rapist, then, both express the popular writer's anxiety about economic change through paradoxical, racially doubled, and...