Gowan is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, and likes to claim that he learned there both how to hold his liquor and how to be a gentleman. In fact, his inability either to stay sober or to act chivalrously proves disastrous for Temple, and he is last heard from sneaking off into exile from Yoknapatawpha. Requiem for a Nun (1951) is in part the story of Gowan's belated attempt to redeem himself.
Identified as "the great aunt" of Narcissa's husband, "Miss Jenny" is "a woman of ninety" who lives "in a wheelchair" (23). Here she is a much less prominent character than in either Flags in the Dust or "There Was a Queen" (where she plays the "queen"), but Jenny Du Pre remains intellectually vigorous and conversationally tart. The only biological Sartoris left (except for Narcissa's 10-year-old son) she may be running the large family estate, but her main role in the novel is to offer incisive commentary on both Narcissa and Horace's behavior.
Born into one of Yoknapatawpha's leading families and married into another, Narcissa Benbow Sartoris is a widow with a 10-year-old son when she appears here for a second time in Faulkner's fiction. In Flags in the Dust the word the narrative continually associates with her is "serene." That word recurs in Sanctuary, but now it is paired with the word "stupid" (25). In the first novel she is largely passive, courted or stalked by men from three very different classes.
Lee Goodwin's career as a soldier included service along the Mexican border and in the Philippines as a cavalry sergeant and, after doing time in Leavenworth for killing another soldier, as an infantry private in World War I. Sometime before the novel begins he has somehow made his way to Frenchman's Bend, where he lives in the Old Frenchman place with Ruby Lamar and their sickly infant, and earns his living making whiskey which he sells to locals and to the speakeasies of Memphis.
She is the child of Belle's first marriage to Harry Mitchell. The novel does not say whether she kept her father's last name, but that seems likely. And although Horace still refers to her as Little Belle, his step-daughter is about 20 years old.
After divorcing Harry Mitchell in Flags in the Dust, Belle has been married to Horace for a decade. Both of them are clearly unhappy with the marriage, although her discontent is conveyed from long distance. She only appears directly in the narrative at the end, when Horace returns to Kinston and to her - an outcome she has clearly expected all along.
A former Memphis prostitute, Ruby appears in the novel as the devoted common-law wife of Lee Goodwin and conscientious mother of their very young child. Earlier she moved to San Francisco and New York to wait for Lee while he was serving overseas, and when he is sentenced to prison for killing fellow U.S. soldier in a fight over another woman, she not only moves to Leavenworth to be near him, but hires a lawyer for him, using her body as payment. When Lee is arrested for killing Tommy, she is prepared to pay Horace the same way.
Although Temple once calls him "that black man" (49), and Horace refers to "Popeye's black presence" (121), Popeye is white. A modern psychologist would label him a sociopath. Horace calls him one of "those Memphis folks" (21), the gangsters who buy homemade whiskey from Lee to sell in the speakeasies of the city. The novel describes him as someone with "that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin" (4). He was born on Christmas, in Pensacola, Florida.
The Benbows are one of Yoknapatawpha's oldest families, and Horace and his sister Narcissa are the first major characters whom Faulkner imaginatively recycles as major characters in a new novel. Horace is now "forty-three years old" (15), ten years older than he was in Flags in the Dust (1929), and the attraction he earlier felt for Belle has soured during the decade they have been married. Nonetheless he remains idealistic and squeamish, especially about sexuality.
New Orleans (where Faulkner lived at the beginning of his own artistic career) appears in many of his fictions. In Sanctuary it appears only in a phrase, as the place Popeye lived before moving to Memphis.
