Introduction
William Faulkner, sometimes called “the American Shakespeare”, is a very eminent and productive American southern writer of the 20th century, who during his lifetime has written 19 novels and hundreds of short stories and some film scripts in total. Another measure of Faulkner’s worldwide success and acclaim is that since his winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 the annual Modern Language Association Bibliography has listed almost 5,000 scholarly books and articles devoted to his works—on average, more than 100 per year. Among his contemporaries, only James Joyce has received as much critical attention.
As one of Faulkner’s best-seller work, Sanctuary maintains to be a special product among all his works. “If The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s “heart’s darling” among his novels, then Sanctuary, issued in 1931, was his wayward stepchild” (Hamblin, 341). Published as his sixth novel, Sanctuary is, as Faulkner himself admitted, first contemptuously written for an indiscriminate, thrill-seeking public, but with his later extensive revision to the novel he finally concluded that he managed to achieve a performance that would not embarrass his previous masterpieces. Indeed, “Faulkner’s ultimate assessment of his wayward child says more about his lofty aesthetic standards than it does about the quality of his efforts in Sanctuary” (Hamblin, 341).
Interestingly, the story in Sanctuary was not created out of thin air: the inspiration has been planted in Faulkner’s mind ever since he accidentally heard a woman’s account of a horrid crime of rape and kidnapping of a woman committed by a gangster named “Popeye” Pumphrey, who was also rumored to be impotent. Similarly, a very important plotline in Sanctuary mainly develops around how a seventeen-year-old girl Temple gets raped in a bootlegger’s base area called Old Frenchman’s place and then imprisoned in a brothel in Memphis, where she is sexually and psychologically tortured by her kidnapper Popeye. 文献综述中没用，可以在毕业论文开篇介绍部分使用
Despite the fact that Temple suffers substantially throughout the whole fiction, many critics still tend to blame her for being the existence of seduction in the male vision, and will march on her self-destructive path at any rate. For instance, Creighton claims in her analysis of the evil part in Sanctuary that “Gowan’s failure is obvious. More important is Temple’s guilty part in her seduction” and that even the low-born woman, Goodwin’s “wife” Ruby recognizes the basic superficiality and selfishness of the way Temple plays with sex and with life (262). Nevertheless, this paper is going to explore Temple’s sufferings through a feminist perspective and attempts to tentatively expose the specific causes to her traumas by defining her as a synthetic victim of sexuality, male-dominated family, and the deceptive male protection.
I. Victim of Sexuality
Sexual violence has always been a central issue of feminist debate. Both early and contemporary feminist thought has related the violation of women’s bodies to the denial of women’s personhood or subject position, though it is exactly in regard to subject position that nineteenth- and twentieth-century women differ. Central to the feminist debates on sexual violence has been and still is the question of whether rape is to be considered as a crime of violence or one based in sexual act, and Catharine Mackinnon, objecting to a separation of sexuality and power, has insisted on the convergence of sexuality, or specifically of male sexuality and violence. As Mackinnon added, “rape is not less sexual for being violent. To the extent that coercion has become integral to male sexuality, rape may even be sexual to the degree that, and because, it is violent” (Sielke, 23).
1.1. Male’s Sexual Violence “The common western patriarchal notion [is] that women were property and that the woman who had had unlawful sexual intercourse was damaged goods, no matter what the cause” (Marius, 76). In
