This article examines William Faulkner's representation of traumatic abuse through his (anti)heroine Temple Drake (Sanctuary, 1931). First, I bring to the fore the material dimension of the character's traumatic rape, as opposed to its classical consideration as a multi-valent cultural metaphor (Patterson, 2002). Aided by insights from the field of trauma studies (Caruth 1995; Davis and Meretoja, 2020; Herman, 2015), I examine the clinical import the sexual assault had on the character's psyche through a close reading of her dissociation-induced traumatic memories. Second, I turn to the way in which the text deals with the representation of an event fraught with referential impasses. Specifically, in dealing with the elision of Temple's violation, disclosed not at the moment of its occurrence, but in the last scenes of the novel, I establish a parallelism between the aesthetic encoding of the traumatic event and its psychological processing. I argue that the purported narrative effacement of the abuse parallels the way in which the protagonist mentally absents herself from the scene of the attack, thus failing to adaptively integrate said attack into consciousness. Further, I posit that the author counters the narratorial silencing of the rape via metonymic indexes enmeshed in the textual fabric referencing the assault. Thus, the novel retains the same fragmentary reminiscing of the abuse as the character exhibits. Finally, I conclude that, in eliding the violation scene, Faulkner carries out a prima facie process of erasure of a traumatic event, only to reckon with its representational demands. 

William Faulkner's fifth novel, As I Lay Dying (1930) (henceforth AILD) is the author's tour the force as he delves into the depths of the family sphere and skilfully portrays the complex, almost pathological universe of several individuals. Narrating the vicissitudes which the Bundrens face on their journey to the city of Jefferson, where they are to take the matriarch Addie Bundren's dead body, the family's nine-day trip concludes with a ruinous end for almost all of its members. For Darl Bundren, this price is the confinement in an insane asylum. As a consequence, literary criticism has frequently read Darl Bundren as a mentally deranged individual. The aim of this paper is to challenge the label of insane attached to Darl, interpreting him as a traumatized subject instead. Using Contemporary trauma theory as a critical tool, we will bring forward those symptoms which account for Darl suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a state triggered by his participation in WWI. Moreover, we will examine those aspects accounting for the complexity of his trauma, as the maternal abandonment he has been exposed to. Finally, our argumentation will allow us to dismiss the assumption that Darl is a schizophrenic. We will conclude by emphasizing the relevance trauma theory has in Darl's characterization and suggesting further research contributing to unveiling the construal of the character's insanity.