My Name is William Faulkner, and I'm an Alcoholic

William Faulkner’s Sanctuary is, without a doubt, a heavy novel, filled with difficult and controversial topics. Among the vices and crimes in the novel are rape, murder, bootlegging, prostitution, perjury, children out of wedlock, drunken driving, major alcohol consumption, promiscuity, and more. Faulkner himself once claimed that Sanctuary was written simply for the sake of profit, which would explain the excessive amounts of controversy and shocking content. One of the vices in the novel that stands out, though, partly because it seems to be quite a large part of all of Faulkner’s novels, is alcohol: liquor, moonshine, booze.
Evidence suggests that William Faulkner may have been a bit of an alcoholic in his day. Not only do his personal letters and his biographies indicate this, but the fact that alcohol is an important part of almost every single one of this his novels also suggests a more than healthy relationship with liquor. In Soldier’s Pay, the characters get drunk in the first scene. Benjy and his keeper in The Sound and the Fury get drunk off what they think is sarsaparilla, but is actually champagne from Caddy’s wedding. And the alcoholic content of Sanctuary is no less. In fact, this may be Faulkner’s most alcoholic novel yet.
Alcohol is a big part of Sanctuary. To begin with, Lee Goodwin and Popeye are part of a bootlegging organization. Their jobs are totally and completely centered on booze. Tommy, the “halfwit” member of the Goodwin clan is also involved in this bootlegging scheme. One can only assume, then, that the lives of these men, as well as their families, were dictated by alcohol. The men had to be obsessed with it because it was their illegal job. And of course they imbibed of the sweet stuff themselves. It wouldn’t be a Faulkner novel if they didn’t.
Alcohol is also the catalyst for the entire storey. Gowan Stevens drinks too much moonshine the night of the dance with Temple Drake and subsequently misses the train to Starkville, forcing him to drive the two of them to the baseball game in his car. If Gowan hadn’t have drunk he wouldn’t have missed the train. Gowan also makes the decision to stop at the Goodwin house because of booze as well. He wants more liquor, and so decides to stop off at the Goodwin bootlegging house to replenish. If Gowan hadn’t have wanted to more alcohol then he wouldn’t have been near the Goodwin house. Also, because Gowan is already drunk while he is driving, he crashes into a tree near the Goodwin house. Because of alcohol, now the young couple are stranded in a strange house with strange, shady people, and, ultimately, Temple gets raped because of this. In the end, one could say that it was alcohol that led to Temple Drake’s rape.
Sanctuary is filled with many more evils than just liquor. And to say that alcohol led to Temple Drake’s rape is an overly simplistic explanation and in no way a justification. What I mean to point out is simply that alcohol is big part of Sanctuary, influencing the character development, action, and background of the story. I think that this is very telling of Faulkner, if not simply the time in which the novel was written. If nothing else, Sanctuary can be seen as a warning against the evils of liquor.