Moonshine and Magnolias: The Story of Temple Drake and The Birth of a Nation

Barker, Deborah

doi:10.1353/fau.2006.0008

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…As a literary work, and through its cinematic permutations, Sanctuary powerfully stages what W. J. Cash coined in the 1940's as the "Southern rape complex" (Barker, 2006) 4 . Said complex consists in a symbolic arrangement wherein "a black male rapist and [a] white female victim" allegorizes the threat that Southern civilization suffers at the hands of black individuals (Patterson, 2002: 142).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…New York: Vintage Classics 4 The two film adaptations of Faulkner's novel are The Story of Temple Drake(1931), directed by Stephen Roberts; and the eponymous Sanctuary (1961) directed by Toni Richardson. See DeborahBarker (2006) "Moonshine and Magnolias: "The Story of Temple Drake' and "The Birth of a Nation" for a powerful discussion on the 'rape complex' representation on screen through the cinematic adaptation of Faulkner's Sanctuary and Thomas Dixon Jr.'s The Clansman(1905).…”

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confidence: 99%

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“I told you all the time”: Revisiting the representation of Temple Drake’s traumatic abuse in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary

Dobre

2023

CLR

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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.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%