That Time and That Wilderness

Abstract

The consequences of the Compsons’ failure in The Sound and the Fury are to be traced in Sanctuary (1931), which describes the final moment of collapse for the old South and the shocked reaction to it of a young man as he contemplates its replacement by a strange new mechanistic society. For him, this is no matter of simple opposition—women like Temple Drake court their own destruction because they no longer possess the will or the right to demand anything other while their opponents, the gangster Popeye chief among them, are but victims, men who have been subjected to the kind of life which makes their degeneracy inevitable. Such circuitousness of guilt dominates the book and encourages us to regard Temple and Popeye not as adversaries so much as answering extremes of the South’s behaviour, the one not only invoking but positively deserving the other. What happens between them is in large part what happens to the American Dream in the twentieth century.