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Some
instances of Faulkner's making use of animals to record and
explore human nature are by now well-documented, such as the hunt for
the bear in Go Dawn, Moses or Gail Hightower's obsessive
visualizing and hearing of hoofbeats propelling his "heroic"
grandfather on horseback.1 When we turn to Sanctuary
in a critic's animal-hunting capacity, we are likely to remember Miss
Reba's yapping dogs, one of them mischievously named by Faulkner after
a chairman of the censorship board of Memphis and Shelby Counties (Rouselle
44)2; or we might remember Tommy's telling Horace Benbow
that Popeye shot Tommy's dog in cold blood. But other animals and
animal imagery abound in Sanctuary. In my note I want to show
Faulkner's characterization of Temple as a parrot.
Twice
in the novel Faulkner uses the word "parrot" to describe
Temple's speech. At the trial, when questioned by the District
Attorney, Temple "stared at him again, giving her parrotlike
answers" (300). At the Grotto, the dance hall, Temple is "murmuring to him [Red] in parrotlike underworld
epithet..." (252-53).
Throughout
Sanctuary, Temple repeats numerous short phrases as a parrot is
apt to do. That others are aware of Temple's limited and repeated phrasings is obvious from the townboys' aping
of her speech: "'My father's a judge,' the second said in a
bitter, lilting falsetto'" (31). "'My father's a judge,' the
other said . . ." (31). Some of Temple's repeated phrases, always
following closely after one another, include her calling Gowan Stevens
a pig three times, two of those times adding the adjective
"filthy" (38). Twice she blurts out at him the empty threat
of "You'd better" (38). At the dance hall. Temple twice
implores Popeye, to "Give it to me" and three times calls
him "Daddy" (249), asking him to have sex with her, crying
out "please" (253) four times. Temple twice tells Red that
she is "on fire" in her unsatisfied sexual frenzy (253).
Just before the scene at the Grotto, Temple tells Popeye three times "I wont," and twice, "You're
scared to!" while adding the slight, one-time variation of
"You're scared of him [Red]!" (243). Temple taunts Popeye
twice with, "He's [Red] a better man than you are" (243) and
complains twice, "You hurt my mouth" (244,245). She also
uses the phrase "Dont you wish" (245) three times in
taunting Popeye with Red's sexual prowess Popeye never will possess.
Finally, Temple calls out, "Oh, God; oh. God" (246), and
tells Popeye four times, "I'll go back" (246-47).
Looking
over the phrases just quoted, we see that they are hardly reflections
of a deep thinker or excellent communicator; they are snatches of
everyday speech bordering on or achieving cliché-status; just the kind
of oft-repeated speech a parrot would imitate. Temple is a ready
learner of such phrases, having, for example, picked up the notion
that her father is a judge and an important man from a nanny perhaps;
Temple may have learned the melodramatic sexual talk she uses on
Popeye and Red from cheap gangster stories. That Temple is this kind
of non-thinking phrase learner is evident when Ruby at the Old
Frenchman place tells of her hardships and of being called a whore;
Temple immediately whispers, "I've been called that" (61).
Not
only does Temple parrot the everyday rhetoric floating in the air
around her. Temple like a parrot is caged, metaphorically and
literally, throughout Sanctuary. First, she is a judge's
daughter, with an image to keep up. Likewise, she is bound by school
rules and maintaining a proper image there. She is a captive at the
Old Frenchman place and Miss Reba's whorehouse, and becomes a witness
at the trial so that society can have its justice performed; finally,
she is captive in the custody of her father: At the Luxembourg
Gardens, "Beside her her father sat, his hands crossed on the
head of his stick [emphasis mine], the rigid bar
[emphasis mine] of his moustache beaded with moisture like frosted
silver" (333). The stick and rigid bar make us think of an animal
trainer's tool and cage. Temple at the whorehouse is also kept in a
sort of cage, her room, where like an exotic and moody bird she
performs an occasional trick in exchange for food and liquor served by
Minnie, and gifts (treats) brought to her by Popeye. The description
of Temple's room, when she has been examined by a doctor upon her
arrival, is very much reminiscent of a darkened/blanketed bird cage,
in which the bird is to calm down and rest but inevitably will have
some inklings of outside goings-on: "In the window the cracked
shade, yawning now and then with a faint rasp against the frame, let
twilight into the room in fainting surges" (157). Temple is
"lying in the room's musty isolation" (166). "Now and
then she heard automobile brakes... once two voices quarrelling
bitterly came up and beneath the shade" (166). The china figures
of the clock, the only decoration Faulkner describes in Temple's
glance across the room, are like a caged bird's toy. Temple is also a
caged bird at the Old Frenchman place. Housed in a crib/cage,
"Sitting in the cottonseed-hulls, in the litter of gnawed
corn-cobs.
Temple
lifted her head suddenly toward the trap at the top of the
ladder" (106). The cottonseed-hulls and gnawed corn-cobs here
suggest the litter of a bird-cage; the trap and ladder are suggestive
of a bird cage ladder and door.
Temple
not only speaks like a parrot and is housed like one; throughout Sanctuary
she is very much concerned about her appearance, making one fine and
exotic bird or fashion-hound, to employ a mixed but telling metaphor.
At the trial, her bright and gaudy dress establishes her as an exotic
and wild creature, especially when we compare her to the conservative
demeanor of the town's citizens. In shock, like a recently captured
bird (she has just gone from one climate-atmosphere to another, from
whorehouse to courtroom, the latter a place where morals will
triumph). Temple has to be asked twice by the District Attorney what
her name is. This state of shock brought about by a new
climate-atmosphere we observe also when at the Old Frenchman place
Ruby startles Temple in the dark, who like a hysterical parrot cries
out, "I'll tell my father! . . . I'll tell my father!" (86),
thrashing from side to side. The final vision of Temple as a parrot in
shock, having to endure yet another climate-atmosphere change, occurs
at the Luxembourg Gardens, when sitting next to her father. Temple
looks into the mirror and sees "a face in miniature sullen and
discontented and sad" (333). Faulkner thus leaves us with a
fitting image of Temple as a human parrot that has never been allowed
to be completely and purely wild without any restraints
imposed by a society of repressed human beings whose rules of conduct
reflect just how unfit mankind is for civilized life; a society in
which those upholding the zoo's lawful rules are just as extreme and
dangerous as those engaging in the more "wicked," subversive
sexual aberrations.
Works
Cited
Alien, Mary. (1983) Animals in American Literature. Urbana: U of Illinois
Press.
Faulkner, William. (1987) Sanctuary. The Corrected Text. New York:
Vintage.
Rossky, William. (1982) "The Pattern of Nightmare in Sanctuary;
or. Miss Reba's Dogs." Twentieth Century Interpretations of
Sanctuary. Ed. J. Douglas Canfield. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, pp. 70-78.
Rouselle, Melinda McLeod.(1989( Annotations to William Faulkner's
Sanctuary. New York: Garland.
Notes
1For
a brief overview of Faulkner's use
of the bear, cow, horse, mule, and dog in his fiction, see Mary Alien's
"Animal Crazy: William
Faulkner/'
2See,
for example, William Rossky's
argument that "the experiences
of both Temple and Horace reflect to a degree the symbolic pattern
established by Miss Reba's poodles"
(76). Furthermore, "they
express, in their impotent fear before threatened annihilation by
their ostensibly secure but now erratic universe, the essence of the
human nightmare" (76). |