The Restoration Of Collective Consciousness In William Faulkner’s Sanctuary

Sanctuary remained for a long time a special one among William Faulkner’s works for the author has publicly acknowledged that it was written for making quick money. Compared with Faulkner’s other works, Sanctuary proves to be a reverse of Faulknerian novels in which linear narrative is employed and the elements of popular novels are easily to be detected. This perhaps explains why the novel is not well received by critics since its publication. Besides, all together nine murders are mentioned in the novel, along with rape, voyeurism, incest, and sadism, which make it a very controversial work. Since the1970s, the booming of feminism criticism and post-structuralism gave rise to scholars’ re-examination of Sanctuary. The culture criticism provided further spur to Sanctuary studies as the novel is replete with pop culture elements. These studies breed new interpretations of the novel and Sanctuary is now canonized as one of Faulkner’s best works.A survey of previous literatures on Sanctuary reveals that most sociological studies of the novel focus on the human viciousness, putting characters in the novel into a polarized pattern of good and evil. The framework set out in this thesis is based upon Emile Durkheim’s theory on collective consciousness and social solidarity. According to Durkheim, collective conscious refers to a set of values, norms and beliefs shared by the average members of a society. Society will achieve mechanical solidarity when all citizens accept and encompass the collective consciousness. In such way, social order and stability are maintained. When the binding effects of collective conscious are weakened, social institutions and community-based authority must intervene to punish and repress the threatening acts, thus ensuring that collective consciousness is internalized by each individual.This thesis argues that Sanctuary shows the conflict between collective consciousness and individual ones in Southern community. Set in the1920s, Sanctuary depicts the Old South in transition. The invasion of industrialism and consumer culture gives rise to the formation of a heterogeneous value system, threatening the social order. When discussing the social regulation, Foucault’s thoughts on social discipline and punish are brought to analyze how the collective authority "correct" aberrant behavior to reassert the collect consciousness. It is argued that both brutal punishment and the gentle way of punishment-discipline are employed to produce "docile bodies". The effect of such regulation is to permeate collective consciousness and make characters identify with it voluntarily. Thus, the characters in the novel cannot be simply categorized into good and bad, evil and benevolent. In fact, they are all subjects of a disciplinary society. While weaving the dynamic network of characters, Faulkner exposes to the reader how collective conscious is restored through social regulation, a process in which power is permeated into levels of social structure in southern community to ward off the challenge both from within and without. The end of the novel reveals a serene and tranquil scene with everything set back to order, yet Jefferson town is what Durkheim called "lower society" whose task is to create a common life as coherent as possible, in which the individual was engulfed. It is not advanced enough to establish the mission of social justice.