Youth Corrupted – How Horace Benbow’s Subconcsious Connects Little Belle and Temple Drake

Yes, Faulkner often wrote about people feeling inappropriate feeling for people they shouldn’t. But these characters usually don’t completely realize the things they’re feeling, and become psychologically tortured by them. Poor Horace Benbow is one of these characters.

The book starts with Horace on the road, hitchhiking to his childhood home in Jefferson, after leaving his wife and step-daughter. The excuse he gives for having left is that he realized, after 10 years of walking to pick up shrimp for his wife, that he’s never going to like shrimp.

The real reason, though, is his step daughter, Little Belle. He tells the gang all about her the night that he stays at the house. The way he becomes preoccupied by the sight of her outside on the hammock, he romantic exploits. Little Belle gets around, has had several “boyfriends”, and Horace knows a lot about them, quite a bit more than any  parent probably would, but perhaps it’s because he’s not actually her father that knows this. And that, naturally, makes his feelings for her even more tangled.

It’s her romantic life that sends Horace into the fit that makes him leave. They argue over her latest beau, someone she met on a train. She says she’s had worse, and he says he knows she has. He tries to convince her to send him away so that they can start over, and she points out that he’ s not her father, which really isn’t helpful to the situation.

Horace escapes to Jefferson, to his sister’s home, to his own form of sanctuary, hoping to forget his wife and step daughter. But once he takes Goodwin’s case, he is unable to block out thoughts of Little Belle any longer because of Temple Drake. Temple is about the same age as Belle, and her rape and kidnapping constantly remind Horace of both his fatherly feelings and his lustful feelings for Little Belle.

Horace is initially horrified by the thought of anything having actually happened to Temple the night of the murder. When Ruby finally tells him of Temple’s presence, and of seeing her in the car with Popeye the next morning, Horace repeats over and over, “But she was alright”, practically begging Ruby to tell him that Popeye was simply giving Temple a ride into town.

But it becomes clear, through the story and once he meets Temple, that she has been sexually assaulted, abused, and kidnapped. He sees how small and childish Temple seems the first time he interviews her, noting that the way she becomes almost excited at having an audience is the way a child would behave.

Temple has awakened the fatherly side of Horace’s feelings for Little Bell. Part of Horace’s interest in the men in Little Belle’s life is to protect her from the “wrong sort”, which he notes early on in the book that she has been involved with. Also early on in the book, he remarks that if a boy like that were to come into her hotel room, he would kill him, as a father would to protect his daughter’s virtue.

But when he returns home after his visit with Temple, he looks at a picture of Little Belle, and simply seeing a physical sign of her reawakens the lustful side of his feelings.  This scene is the most pivotal and disturbing in regards to Horace’s subconscious. He imagines that the picture is living, breathing in his hand, seducing him. He then begins to imagine Temple’s rape, both violent and passionate, and he ties it to his sexual feelings for Little Belle. He recognizes that perhaps he is more like Popeye than he wants to admit, that Popeye’s desires for Temple are not entirely unlike his for his stepdaughter.

After the trial closes, and after he’s seen what an empty, broken person Temple has become, Horace’s feelings for Little Belle continue to be tangled up, caught somewhere between fatherly and lustful. He returns home to his wife, but his first thought is of Little Belle, to call her, just to hear her voice.  In a fatherly way, he wants to make sure she is well and has not, somehow, become like Temple. But he also needs to hear her voice, in the obsessive way someone blinded by lust would.

There’s an oddness to the conversation between the two on the phone. They share the familiarity of a father and a child, but the way they refer to each other suggests something else.  Little Belle doesn’t refer to Horace as her step-father, or her mother’s husband, but as someone she “lives with”.  She also can’t get off the phone fast enough.

Both Temple and Belle have distorted the way Horace views young-womanhood. Much like Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury, Horace’s involvement with these young women who aren’t the angels society thinks they should be sends him into a tailspin, causing him to question his sexual morality, and making him think that it is merely the nature of young women to be immoral. This weakness will forever cause him to be the type of man who lives under the rule of women.