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

IF 1 Q2 CULTURAL STUDIES
E. Dobre
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

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.   
“我一直告诉你”:重新审视威廉·福克纳的《圣所》中坦普尔·德雷克创伤性虐待的表现
本文通过威廉·福克纳(反)女主人公坦普尔·德雷克(Sanctuary,1931)探讨了他对创伤虐待的再现。首先,我突出了这个角色创伤性强奸的物质层面,而不是它作为多元文化隐喻的经典考虑(Patterson,2002)。在创伤研究领域的见解的帮助下(Caruth 1995;Davis和Meretoja,2020;Herman,2015),我通过仔细阅读角色分离引发的创伤记忆,研究了性侵对其心理的临床意义。其次,我转向文本处理充满指称障碍的事件的表现方式。具体地说,在处理坦普尔违规行为的省略时,我在小说的最后一幕中没有披露,而是在它发生的那一刻,建立了创伤事件的美学编码与其心理处理之间的平行性。我认为,所谓的叙事对虐待的掩盖与主人公在精神上离开袭击现场的方式相似,因此未能将所述袭击自适应地融入意识。此外,我认为作者通过转喻索引来反驳强奸的叙事沉默,转喻索引嵌入了提及袭击的文本结构中。因此,小说保留了与角色表现出的一样对虐待的零碎回忆。最后,我得出的结论是,在消除侵犯场景的过程中,福克纳对一个创伤性事件进行了表面上的抹去,只是考虑到了它的代表性要求。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
1.00
自引率
25.00%
发文量
12
审稿时长
24 weeks
期刊介绍: CULTURE, LANGUAGE AND REPRESENTATION (CLR) is a biannual scholarly publication devoted to the field of Culture and Linguistics Studies, whose scope is aimed at the international academic community. Alternatively, each issue deals either monographically with a relevant aspect of the linguistic representation of culture in its various manifestations (social, political, educational, literary, historical, etc.) or encourages interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to language and culture research. The Journal is committed to academic and research excellence by publishing relevant and original material that meets high scientific standards. Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. Articles will undergo an independent evaluation by two external referees, who will advise the Editors on the suitability of their publication. Publishing elsewhere an article included in CLR needs the author''s acknowledgement that it has first appeared in the Journal. If in doubt, authors are advised to contact The Editors.
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