Gowan Stevens
SanctuaryGowan Stevens is the young man whose cultivated image of privilege and masculine assurance is exposed by a single catastrophic act: after taking Temple Drake to the Old Frenchman place, he gets drunk and runs away, leaving her behind. He is associated with education, Virginia gentility, fashionable social life, and the confidence that such credentials will shield him from consequences; the narrative instead makes his disappearance a measure of the protection enjoyed by a well-born or well-presented man when a vulnerable woman bears the danger he has created.
Identity and Social Performance
Gowan appears in the Benbow household as a recognizable member of the privileged Southern social world. He is introduced with a sleek head and a plump, assured face, and he greets Miss Jenny by bending to kiss her hand while complimenting her youth and beauty. His charm is not merely personal but ceremonial: he knows how to enact the manners expected of a gentleman, and others understand him through those manners before his conduct is known.
His education is part of that performance. He had attended the University of Virginia, though his conversation briefly nearly identifies him as being from Virginia before he corrects himself to Jefferson. At a drinking gathering, he boasts that the school teaches people how to drink. The claim connects institutional prestige to a practiced style of masculine sociability, while the correction from Virginia to Jefferson reveals his awareness of the social meanings attached to origin and status. He wants the prestige of the former even as the latter is his actual local identity.
The same performance appears in his plans and reputation. Gowan goes frequently to Oxford, where he has a girlfriend, and he is expected to attend a University dance on Friday night. He also plans to go to Starkville for a baseball game on Saturday. These movements place him within a circuit of college dances, romantic appointments, drinking, and sport. His life seems organized by leisure and access: he can move between towns, institutions, and social occasions while treating each commitment as part of an apparently consequence-free routine.
Plot Trajectory and the Drinking Scene
Gowan's confidence becomes dangerous when he joins the men drinking near the road. He complains that liquor made in the region is inferior to what is available at school, reinforcing his belief that his education has given him superior taste and authority. When asked where he is from, he again invokes the University of Virginia as a place that teaches drinking, then accepts a fruit jar of liquor whose pale, innocent appearance disguises its force.
The result is a rapid reversal in his apparent control. He drinks, returns to his car, and discovers that the train has already left. He drives across the square at forty miles an hour, takes the Taylor road at increasing speed, drinks again without slowing, and reaches Taylor just as the train is pulling away. Temple springs from the train and runs briefly beside it while an official shakes his fist at her. Gowan has managed to intercept her, but he arrives with a wild face and hair and a ruined collar and shirt. Temple immediately identifies his condition as drunkenness and condemns him as filthy.
This sequence turns gentlemanly confidence into visible disorder. The car, the train, and the fruit jar become instruments of a frantic pursuit rather than signs of freedom. Gowan's drinking is not an isolated indulgence; it changes the practical conditions of the journey, making Temple dependent on a man who has impaired himself and has begun to lose control of time, movement, and responsibility.
The Old Frenchman Place and Abandonment
The decisive episode is connected to the Old Frenchman place, the gutted plantation ruin standing among unpruned cedar trees and land that has returned to jungle. The house carries a history of Civil War violence, rumored buried gold, and decades of piecemeal destruction. Gowan brings Temple into this decayed space, where the social protections represented by education and respectable appearance are stripped away.
After he gets drunk, Gowan runs off and leaves Temple there. The plainness of the action is its moral force: he does not merely fail to protect her or misjudge a situation; he abandons the person he carried into the dangerous place. Temple's escape is then facilitated by the woman at the house. Moving barefoot and silently, the two women cross the porch toward the barn, and the woman stops to grip Temple's shoulders, curse her in a furious whisper, and then continue guiding her through darkness. In a grain-scented room a rat rushes nearby, and Temple panics, clinging to the woman and demanding that the door be opened.
Gowan's absence therefore structures the scene even when he is not present. His departure leaves Temple exposed to confinement, fear, and the threat represented by the ruin, while another woman assumes the immediate burden of getting her away. The contrast is stark: Gowan's cultivated masculinity is associated with transport, drinking, and escape for himself; the woman's rough, furious care becomes the practical means of Temple's survival.
Reputation, Judgment, and Consequences
Horace Benbow later learns what Gowan did and reacts with sustained outrage. He describes Gowan as having carried a little fool girl to the Old Frenchman place, gotten drunk, and run away, emphasizing that the offense would have had even worse consequences without the intervention of the woman there. Horace's anger is directed not only at the abandonment but at the impunity surrounding it: Gowan can continue walking through the world because he wears a formal suit and has undergone the supposedly astonishing experience of attending Virginia.
This judgment exposes the social mechanism that protects Gowan. His clothing, education, and manners function as credentials capable of replacing accountability in the eyes of the community. The same traits that make him appear assured in the Benbow household help conceal the weakness revealed at the ruin. His polished identity survives socially even though his conduct has demonstrated that it cannot bear responsibility when circumstances become frightening or inconvenient.
The episode also alters how Gowan is remembered in relation to Temple. What might otherwise have been a courtship or a conventional journey becomes the source of trauma and condemnation. His later reputation is not built through a public confession or punishment described in these scenes; it persists through Horace's anger and through the knowledge that Gowan is still free to return, travel, and participate in ordinary social life. The consequence is thus both personal and structural: Temple suffers the danger, while Gowan retains mobility and the possibility of social reintegration.
Relationships and Narrative Significance
Gowan's relationship with Temple is defined less by mutual intimacy than by asymmetry. He takes her with him, controls the movement toward the remote house, drinks, and then abandons her; she is left to negotiate the consequences of decisions in which his privilege and irresponsibility have placed her. Their connection consequently reveals how the book's social world distributes risk along lines of gender, reputation, and access.
His relation to the larger community is equally revealing. At Miss Jenny's house he is remembered as a young man with university connections, dances, a girlfriend in Oxford, and an appetite for gentlemanly drinking. In Horace's account, those same features become evidence of a society that excuses him. The contrast between the charming visitor and the abandoned Temple is not a minor inconsistency in characterization; it is the point. Gowan's decisive trait is the distance between the role he performs and the responsibility he refuses.
Gowan thus functions as a concentrated example of inherited or institutional respectability without ethical substance. His story follows a descent from social confidence to drunken panic and abandonment, but the descent does not necessarily destroy his public standing. Instead, it leaves a more disturbing result: the woman he endangered must escape through darkness, telephone the sheriff as Mrs Goodwin, and live with the consequences, while the man who created the crisis remains associated with education, travel, and the privileges of a gentleman. His narrative significance lies in showing that the most consequential form of cowardice may be protected not by invisibility, but by an impeccably visible social identity.
