Melissa Tyndall Dr. Barnes Southern Fiction Spring 2004

The Grotesque in Modern Literature: Children on Their Birthdays and Sanctuary

Modern literature is saturated with the grotesque whether it be pertaining to

characterization or setting. In Children on Their Birthdays and Sanctuary, the female

protagonists experience, epitomize, and witness the grotesque in what can be considered

southern gothic stories. Miss Bobbit in Children on Their Birthdays is grotesque and freakish

due to her non-childlike demeanor and the way in which she carries out her everyday affairs (in a

town which views her as a freak). Similarly, Temple Drake is surrounded by a story full of

murder, false accusations, and rape--making her experience the grotesque. The rationale behind

the author's choice of the grotesque is that the freakish and extraordinary further the story with a

modernist perspective--by including feelings of despair, disillusionment, and alienation as

reflected through those grotesqueries.

Children on Their Birthdays begins with the grotesquerie, "yesterday afternoon the six-

o'clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit" (58). From the beginning of the story, the ten year old girl

was freakish, for she arrived in the small town wearing a "lemon-colored party dress, she sassed

along with a grown-up mince, one hand on her hip, the other supporting a spinsterish umbrella"

(58). While Miss Bobbit was in no way physically grotesque, as characters often are in

(southern) gothic works, she was psychologically freakish. Perhaps what was most peculiar

about Miss Bobbit was her desire to be an adult and the way in which she foiled her mother.

Melissa Tyndall Dr. Barnes Southern Fiction Spring 2004

Miss Bobbit introduces herself as "Miss Lily Jane Bobbit, Miss Bobbit from Memphis,

Tennessee" thereby alienating herself from the "Country children" she introduced her mother to.

Lily Jane Bobbit's relationship with her mother is grotesque in the way she speaks for her

mother, as if she was the adult or they had switched roles. In addition, the young girl's obsession

with money and business displaced her and those around her as she manipulated the feelings of

Billy Bob and Preacher and spoke of loving and calling on the Devil (a character associated with

distortion, evil, and the grotesque).

Similarly, Temple Drake is surrounded by the grotesque in Sanctuary. Popeye, Temple's

rapist, epitomizes the grotesque more physically than Miss Bobbit. While modern writers

generally utilize the bizarre to illustrate psychological and social flaws of their stories' characters,

William Faulkner also reveals the grotesque physically through Popeye. It is Popeye's physical

deformity and dysfunction that acts as a catalyst and foreshadows Temple's rape. The

description of Temple at the District Attorney's office, "her mouth painted into a savage and

perfect bow" furthers the idea that the modern world contains a clash of the grotesque with what

people consider ordinary and normal (284).

Both the novel Sanctuary and the short story Children on Their Birthdays illustrate the

grotesque through the female anti-hero of the story. The purpose of the grotesque in these stories

in to further illustrate the characteristics of modern fiction while also depicting a more

psychological reality within literary works. In addition, the grotesque describes the

abnormalities of human nature, furthering the modernist idea of alienation, isolation, and despair.