Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses a violent act of sexual assault and includes graphic depictions of domestic violence and lynching, as well as alcohol addiction. The depictions of female characters in the novel are often based on misogynistic ideas. The source text uses the n-word, antisemitic language, and misogynistic language. Such language is reproduced in this guide only through quotations.

“‘Don’t show me,’ Popeye said. ‘Tell me.’ The other man stopped his hand. ‘It’s a book.’ ‘What book?’ Popeye said. ‘Just a book. The kind that people read. Some people do.’”

Benbow and Popeye are at odds. Though this interaction is the only time they meet in person, Benbow spends most of the novel attempting to bring Popeye to justice for his crimes. Benbow’s intellectualism is here being juxtaposed with Popeye’s tendency toward violence.

“The house was a gutted ruin rising gaunt and stark out of a grove of unpruned cedar trees. It was a landmark, known as the Old Frenchman place, built before the Civil War; a plantation house set in the middle of a tract of land; of cotton fields and gardens and lawns long since gone back to jungle, which the people of the neighborhood had been pulling down piecemeal for firewood for fifty years or digging with secret and sporadic optimism for the gold which the builder was reputed to have buried somewhere about the place when Grant came through the county on his Vicksburg campaign.”

The Old Frenchman place is a symbol of Southern decline, showing how the history of Yoknapatawpha County has faded through time. The house is the home base of Goodwin’s bootlegging operation, representing the corrupting influence of vice on Southern tradition. That it is here that Temple Drake will be trapped, raped, and kidnapped ties together the decline of the “old South” (or Faulkner’s idea of it) and the decline of Temple.

“‘You see,’ he said, ‘I lack courage: that was left out of me. The machinery is all here, but it won’t run.’”

Benbow says this to Ruby, having just abandoned his family and been intimidated by Popeye and feeling out of place within the world. However, Benbow will go on to have enough courage to defy social conventions and popular opinion to try and help Ruby and Goodwin.