Blackwell Reference Online

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Meta Carpenter, William Faulkner's Hollywood lover, called her memoir of their affair A Loving Gentleman (Wilde and Borsten 1976). Her description of a passionate, courtly, tender man provides a clear (and probably intentional) contrast to the public nickname that came to identify Faulkner after the publication of his shocking 1931 novel Sanctuary: the “corncob man.” In the novel, readers are led to believe that an impotent Memphis bootlegger named Popeye has vaginally raped a college flapper, Temple Drake, using a corncob. Near the end of the novel, a lynch mob anally rapes the man falsely convicted of the crime: “Only we never used a cob,” one says. “We made him wish we had used a cob” (1993: 296).In fact, Faulkner also imagined sexually anxious young white men, feminine or gay military men, love- and grief-stricken black men, sexual murderers, white spinsters with violent sexual fantasies, young boyish girls who look like saplings, maternal prostitutes, pregnant questers, vindictive bitches, and moralistic ladies along with rapists like Popeye. He questioned accepted beliefs about gender and sexuality with what seems an almost untrammeled sense of freedom. In his own life, too, he occupied risky and unconventional gender positions and geographies of desire. In his twenties, he masqueraded his way into the RAF in Canada and then circulated within what today we might call gay communities ... log in or subscribe to read full text