Similar to The Unvanquished and The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner’s Light in August depicts the destabilization of social structures and ideologies that organize Southern life in the early twentieth century, revealing their inherent contradictions and incoherencies. The novel’s principal characters, including Lena Grove, Joe Christmas, and Reverend Gail Hightower, are individuals who face marginalization in their communities because they disrupt the dominant social and cultural norms that shape notions of gender, race, class, religion and morality in the South. Throughout the novel, these three characters are objects of public speculation and shame. Members of the community ostracize them but are also intrigued by the air of mystery that surrounds their supposed moral failings and are equally as disturbed by their subversive attitudes towards notions of racial identity, faith and spirituality, and gender roles and relations. In the depiction of these tensions between the individual and the community, Faulkner portrays the fine line between private sin and public spectacle, social position and personal identity, mindless gossip and hate speech, casual conversation and oppressive discourse.

Given this premise, it becomes necessary to examine the social position of each character in question and the public discourse that surrounds them. On the one hand, Lena is an unmarried pregnant woman who travels from Alabama to Jefferson, Mississippi, to find the man who has left her with false promises. The father of her unborn child, Lucas Burch, also known as Joe Brown, is a conman and bootlegger who navigates society by lying and adopting a false identity. However, it is Lena who faces the consequences of their sin or moral transgression because she is pregnant out of wedlock. This is a taboo in Southern Christian society—even her own brother calls her a “whore” (10). Also, strangers such as Mr. and Mrs. Armstid speak in euphemisms as they help her when she hitchhikes to Jefferson, intrigued by her “shape” and story. Upon learning more, Mrs. Armstid looks at her with “an expression of cold and impersonal contempt” while there are several instances in which Mr. Armstid “apparently” avoids looking at or touching her (14-21). However, despite the stigma against pregnancy out of wedlock, these strangers still help Lena because she is a lone woman. The Armstids, for instance, feed and provide her shelter and transportation, but do not help or look at her beyond that, underscoring a side of Southern hospitality that is somewhat jarring and unsettling, as the community is full of unease.

Moreover, in the minds of these people, Lena disrupts the gender divide, or binary, and complicates it due to her position as an unmarried pregnant woman in need of help. Her actions cause Armstid to think about gender relations explicitly: “…she’ll walk the public country herself without shame because she knows that folks, menfolks, will take care of her. She dont care nothing about womenfolks. It wasn’t any woman that got her into what she dont even call trouble…You just let one of them get married or get into trouble without being married, and right then and there is where she secedes from the woman race and species and spends the balance of her life trying to get joined up with the man race. That’s why they dip snuff and smoke and want to vote.” (16-17) Armstid uses the language of racial (or biological) classification to demarcate differences between men and women. He suggests that Lena is able to make such a journey across the country, and in the process, make her sin known to the public (he noticed she didn’t have a wedding ring), because she knows that her social position as a single pregnant woman will push men to take care of her. By doing so, the men fulfill their gender role by protecting and providing for Lena. However, this kind of discourse also suggests a sense of prejudice against women, as he suggests that “marriage” or “trouble” (which may be a euphemism for sexual activity) causes women to become unwomanly, as they try to “join men” and engage in activities and liberties associated with masculine gender identity (such as, voting).

Based on this discourse, one could argue that Lena not only challenges feminine gender norms by (evidently) having sex before marriage but also complicates patriarchal gender dynamics when she decides to search for the father of her unborn child. Despite being weak, pregnant, and endangered without a male guardian, she is able to navigate this terrain and reach Mississippi. Her courage and resilience shows some sort of desperation, however, perhaps the possibility is not lost on Lena that Burch has deceived and abandoned her. In this case, her journey in search of him is significant because instead of accepting her fate, she attempts to hold him accountable and responsible as the father of her unborn child. She overcomes the limitations of her position and station as an abandoned woman and highlights the inherent contradictions in masculine, patriarchal gender norms in which a man is supposed to provide, protect, and be responsible for women. Where is Lucas Burch? By making both Lena’s vulnerability and strength public, Faulkner reveals the double standards between men and women, thus underscoring the contradictory and unstable nature of gender norms and ideals in Southern society.

On the other hand, Joe Christmas is a mixed race man with a mysterious identity and unknown origin. Similar to Lena, he also faces stigma as due to his racial ambiguity and heritage. He engages in illegal activities with Burch/Brown, and is also involved in sexual relations with an older white woman who is ostracized by the town for being a Yankee: “Folks say she claims n— are the same as white folk” (47). He is also involved in her murder, and despite his violent and aggressive nature, it is apparent that his anger and resentment stems from his complex identity as a mixed race individual, as indicated by the speculation of his African American heritage. His position as a traveler and name, which is also strange and lacks clear origins or indication of ancestry, points towards a biblical connection to Jesus Christ. Joe’s ethnic ambiguity highlights the nature of race as a social construct that upholds eurocentric and white-supremacist ideologies. The town’s reaction to his ethnic ambiguity also suggests that white-black or racially divided and stratified communities cannot make sense of racial identity without clearcut binary and hierarchical systems in place. He is constantly speculated to be a “foreigner,” thus highlighting the idea that he does not fit into this racial binary and is thus an outsider, living on the margins of this society (31-2). He is not quite “white” or “black” and remains unaccepted by both communities as he does not fulfill certain stereotypes, norms, and expectations of what an individual of a certain race is supposed to look like. It is ironic that the people of Jefferson are unsure and accusatory, hostile of his potential African American heritage, and yet unable to completely segregate him due to the nature of racial passing. His ethnic ambiguity and proximity to “whiteness” allows him to manipulate his racial identity, thus highlighting the instability of race as a social construct.

Similarly, Hightower is a disgraced minister who is shunned by the church-going community and entire town for his wife’s infidelity and suicide. As a “cuckold” in the eyes of society, he is emasculated by the scandal: “He is not a natural husband, not a natural man” (61). He is also, at one point, compared to Satan when the media bombards him (52). The treatment he faces by members of the community highlights how the town, the media, the public eye, oversteps boundaries, invades his privacy, and makes a spectacle out of personal loss and tragedy. The harassment he faces highlights the blurry line between the town’s gossipmongers and violent hate groups such as the KKK (62).  Hightower’s ambiguous position as a fallen minister thus exacerbates the anxieties of the people in Jefferson, who disgrace him due to suspicions about his failed marriage, his attitude towards black people, and his family’s past. As a representative of religion and morality due to his position as a minister, Hightower’s exile and marginalization is unsettling—what does it say about the spiritual state of this town?

In this manner, Faulkner suggests that the volatile and oppressive nature of discourse around race, gender, class, and religion serves as a reflection of a decadent society in need of renewal, transformation, and justice. This kind of prejudiced, racist, and sexist, and often violent and hateful discourse may stem from fear and uncertainty of the unknown, or from the anger and frustration that comes with social and cultural change. In any case, they are legacies of the past that influence the collective ethos of a community where, as Faulker demonstrates, Anglo-American, Christian, patriarchal, and white-supremacist values dominate society and shape the lives of its individuals. Lena, Joe Christmas, and Hightower each subvert these dominant values in their own ways.

After Armstid drops off Lena at Varner’s Store on her way to Jefferson, she has a brief interaction with Jody Varner in which he informs her that Lucas is likely not at the planning mill, and has been mistaken for a man with a similar sounding name. However, she persists on, and it is not clear in this instance if she is delusional or merely trying to convince herself. She has hope, even if the internal source of this hope is not certain. It is difficult for the reader to understand why she is continuing in such a state with little information to go on, but there is at least some sort of motivation apparent on her part (besides the obvious motivation of wanting to reunite with the father of her child) as she believes that “a family ought to be together when a chap comes. Specially the first one. I reckon the Lord will see to that” (Faulkner 21). Lena has her religious belief to drive her, which is seemingly her last source of hope, as in her vulnerable situation given her circumstances of being a woman pregnant outside of wedlock and the child’s father being absent, she is subject to contempt and rejection from her family. This is a significant commentary on Faulkner’s part, as a young vulnerable girl cannot depend on the support of her those close to her, and must take off on her own, where she receives the support of strangers, and only due to pity. While Lena is representative of the vulnerable figure that her religion teaches are closest to God, the reality of her situation is that she needs to find tangible support as the situation grows evermore dire as the baby’s birth nears. In having Lena struggle through this ordeal, especially considering her enduring, even aloof, disposition, Faulkner demonstrates the failing of cultural and social mindsets on women. Full responsibility for the pregnancy is placed on the woman, and her existence is seen as tainted, leading to awful treatment. With little options, Lena set out on her own to chase a slim chance, robbing the action of significant agency as it was prompted by her situation. Once she is away from that, she is still subject to judgment, though it is veiled with kindness and pity, as shown in the conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Armstid (21-22).

Returning to her interaction with Varner, his thoughts on her demonstrate the disposition which prompted her ordeal, “I would have done the same as her brother; the father would have done the same. She has no mother because fatherhood hates with love and pride, but motherhood with hate loves and cohabits” (26). He confirms that he would have treated her the same way had he been her father or brother. His cultural identity is confirmed despite his tolerance towards Lena. The next sentence presents an interesting idea and is even more intriguing due to its syntax. He personifies fatherhood, acknowledging that it is capable of hate, but seems to suggest that love and pride is the way in which hatred manifests in fatherhood. This is his attempt at explaining the cultural attitude towards a girl in Lena’s situation. It is because of the love and pride that a father holds for his child, which are both strong emotions, that he is able to manifest the equally strong emotion of hatred towards them. The father is so invested in those two emotions, that when something disrupts it, the feelings are corrupted. He does not continue the same syntax for motherhood, as motherhood is not directly personified, and “hate” is used as a noun instead of a verb. The reason for this change may suggest that motherhood is incapable of the direct action of hatred, but motherhood itself can still contain hatred. This highlights a belief in a distinction between men and women, and their individual parental institutions. Motherhood is attributed the verb “loves” and is said to “cohabit.” This gives a much different understanding motherhood compared to fatherhood and constructs an image of a bond or connectedness. Perhaps it refers to the deeper connection of mother and child because of the child beginning life as a part of the mother. Therefore, motherhood will always have the connection to the child that makes it incapable of the action of hate, but it can still contain hatred. In this way Varner shows the belief in significant dispositional differences between men and women, and is perhaps why he thinks what he thinks, but then treats her how he does. He does not have the personal stake in her situation, and so grants her pity, because he is aware of what she has gone through, and what she will go through as her role as a mother begins.

One of the many notable themes in Faulkner’s Light in August is how the marginalized characters transgress traditional notions of home. In John T. Matthews’ article, “From Rednecks to Riches,” in his book Seeing through the South, Matthews argues that Light in August depicts a “crisis of unhoming. Its principal characters leave homes, lose them, never have them, steal them, create makeshift ones – and, in a spectacular instance, burn one down.” (p. 159). Indeed, every character we meet in the novel has no home. As humans, we are often bound up in the notion of home, and when home ceases to exist or becomes the source of suffocation or even peril to a person, a profound instability arises. Using this notion of home, Faulkner seems to extend his considerations on how class frames race and gender by thinking about what a loss of home takes from a person, especially in a region long dominated by notions of home and place. There is so much to cover here, but for the interest of time, I will review how constructs of gender have begun to erode or are transgressed through the lens of the home.

For Lena Grove, home has become something of a prison. Early on, the narrator describes Lena’s home as “a four room and unpainted house with his labor- and childridden wife. For almost half of every year the sister-in-law was either lying in or recovering. During this time Lena did all the housework and took care of the other children,” (p.5). Lena recognizes her destiny in this overbearing woman, and soon after, she seems to have replicated it for herself. The narrator points out that no one, least of which her brother, really cares that Lena is pregnant or that she has left. Again, a stark contrast to Caddy in The Sound and the Fury. Matthews states that families like Lena’s “have less reason to value chastity, since their interests are less served by the sexual and racial barriers that guard privileged status” (p. 160). Off the bat, Lena’s unconventional behavior is startling, especially when taken into account that people, primarily men, are noticing a “strange young gal walking the road” (p. 13). Despite this strangeness and instability, a new form of home arises when Armstid, the farmer, offers Lena shelter for the night. His wife provides her with a sliver of home. At first glance, Mrs. Armstid is one of those labor- and childridden wives. She is resentful of her hard life and chides Lena for not being married and for violating social norms by parading around so blatantly. But Mrs. Armstid deeply sympathizes with Lena, a young woman who has left her cage of a home and is now exploring the country unencumbered. In an implicit show of female solidarity, Mrs. Armstid demands that Lena accept her stash money after smashing the china bank she keeps it in. In female solidarity, Lena has found a transgressive floating home that can be ever available to her in any female community she might find herself.

We see many other outwardly transgressive treatments in the classical notions of home. In her hometown, where her family has lived for generations, Joanna Burden endures ostracism as the price of challenging Jefferson’s social mores. Joanna is the lone survivor of a family of anti-slavery New Englanders who came to Jefferson after the Civil War to assist in the enfranchisement of black citizens:

 She has lived in the house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction. A Yankee, a lover of negroes, about whom in the town there is still talk of queer relations with negroes in the town and out of it, despite the fact that it is now sixty years since her grandfather and her brother were killed on the square by an ex-slaveowner over a question of negro votes in a state election. But it still lingers about her and about the place: something dark and outlandish and threatful, even though she is but a woman and but the descendant of them whom the ancestors of the town had reason (or thought that they had) to hate and dread. (p. 46–47)

Joanna is ostracized for her views and actions surrounding race and for being an undomesticated woman in Jefferson. The word “queer” highlights a sub-theme that links “deviant” sexual activity with disobeying racial traditions. Joanna is dismissed as a sexless, old maid for not associating with her “own kind” yet finds a new variation on home in her mixing in with black lives, arranging education and employment opportunities for Jefferson’s black community (although we are not given much detail yet whether is an appreciated act or if it is reminiscent of the white savior). Joanna is never forgiven for her transgressions on the socially acceptable constructions of home. When one day she is found savagely murdered, her body nearly decapitated, her ability to transgress is ceased. Her earthy body that seeks basic needs no longer exists and can no longer strive, push, or search. Matthews notes that the “town folks’ collective fantasy punishes Joanna sexually for her willingness to mix racially, but also for her refusal to confine herself to wifely domestic activities” (p.164).

Lena Grove’s major transgression as a wife is the fact that she is not one. Pregnant and wandering in search of her baby’s father, the man she knows as Lucas Burch, she is hesitant to correct townspeople who assume her to be Mrs. Burch. Her presence as a quasi-wife muddies the moralities of the men surrounding her. Byron Bunch, a man so honest he clocks out of work for any quick break he takes to sit down, finds himself lying to her about the other men’s whereabouts (or, if not outright lying, certainly hiding parts of the truth), and lying to himself about his feelings toward her. It is as if her mere presence, with her seeming failure to become a wife, taints the compasses of the men she encounters.

The first man Lena encounters in Light in August is Armstid, a man whose wife she will meet soon after. When she stays the night with the couple, Mrs. Armstid is unwelcoming on the surface, and repeatedly described as ‘savage’ in her severity. Speaking with Mrs. Armstid, Lena struggles to look her in the eye, instead focusing on her own hands in her lap. Mrs. Armstid seems to be the archetype of a good wife, weathered from the years of doing so, first described as Armstid’s “labor- and childridden wife” (5). Despite her coldness toward Lena, she silently gives her remaining eggmoney to the unmarried woman, helping her continue her journey. Certainly there is an element here of Mrs. Armstid wanting to keep Lena away from the house – her presence in it is a threat to the couple’s image and morality – but there is also a kind, quiet solidarity to this action. While her status as a ‘good wife’ prevents her from continuing to associate with a transgressor like Lena, and likely contributes to her cold demeanor when the two meet, she clearly has some sort of empathy for the societal strife Lena will face if she has the baby without becoming Mrs. Burch.

The archetypal ‘bad wife’ is introduced with the story of Gail Hightower’s late young wife. Unlike Mrs. Armstid, whose husband refers to her once as Martha, we are never given a name for Hightower’s wife. Perhaps this is due to the severity of her transgressions: Mrs. Hightower skips church frequently, despite the expectation that the Reverend’s wife be a pious member of the congregation. On top of this, she frequently travels to Memphis on the weekends, where she is presumed to have taken an extramarital lover. She is a bad wife not only to Hightower, but to the Jefferson community, as the Reverend and his wife are meant to be figureheads for the town and its reputation. After her scandalous death, the narrator describes the congregation during Hightower’s next sermon, “The old ladies and some of the old men were already in the church, horrified and outraged, not so much about the Memphis business as about the presence of the reporters” (68). Though the affair itself scandalizes the town and harms Hightower’s reputation, the fact that it brings reporters to the church is the real scandal for the congregation, as reporters mean publicity, and publicity means that everyone will know about the ‘bad wife’ at the heart of their community. It is also noteworthy that it is particularly the old ladies – presumably wives or widows – who are upset to see the reporters. Does the morality of the Reverend’s wife reflect on the morality of all the wives in Jefferson? Or are the townspeople merely embarrassed to be associated with such a heresy? Hightower’s unnamed, deceased wife gives the reader a window into the calamitous ripple effects of a ‘bad wife,’ raising questions about the role of women in the community and shedding light on the dangers Lena may face if she does not find a way to become not only a wife, but a ‘good wife.’

Throughout most of Faulkner’s work, a complex relationship between womanhood and southern culture is brought into the spotlight. In The Sound and The Fury, Caddy’s femininity is what drives the collapse of the southern-ideologically rooted family, and in The Unvanquished, the women—specifically Granny and Drusilla—serve as examples of what a delusional culture becomes as it unravels. Light in August is no different, and as Matthews suggests, Faulkner dives into “the desperate heartbreak of those seeking only to leave lives unburdened by the massive communal delusions of the past,” primarily through the “[negotiated] lives [of women] ruled by masculine authority,” (161). Women are, thus, a vehicle for Faulkner to describe what holds onto the South (cultural performance and chimera) and what ultimately leads to its destruction (the complete disregard of human nature, subordination of women, black people, and so forth). 

Light in August is teeming with these instances of women’s vanquishment, but I was most engrossed by the relationships between Reverend Hightower, the discharged minister, and the women in his life. Upon learning Hightower’s backstory, it became apparent that if Faulkner’s women were vehicles to the uncovery of southern delusion, Rev. Hightower was the man in the passenger seat serving as a witness to its demise. 

The most poignant relationship Reverend Hightower holds is the relationship with his deceased wife, of who we never learn a name, who Matthews describes as “a woman without purpose, her misery invisible to her husband’s preoccupations,” and who had “already been groomed by her seminarian father for duty as a pastors wife,” (163). The important word Matthews mentions is groomed, and I believe this relationship between the Reverend Hightower and the unnamed wife, though brief, speaks largely to what Faulkner understands as a cornerstone of the greatest failures of southern antebellum culture: anyone who is not a white man is raised like an animal to serve him and his honor. Faulkner enters this ideology carefully, yet directly, in Byron’s internal monologue, stating “women have to be strong and should not be held blamable for what they do with or for or because of men, since God knew that being anybody’s wife was tricky enough business” (62). 

Ultimately, Rev. Hightower’s unnamed wife falls out a window in a Memphis hotel during an affair, after having spent time in a sanatorium, and dies. As a result, the Reverends life falls apart, and he is boycotted at the church until he must step down, and even then the townsfolk attempt to push him out of Jackson, their distaste for him going as far as beating and death threats. In this scenario, where the Reverend’s wife faces feminine hysteria at her complete lack of freedom, Faulkner provides not only tragedy for the deceased, but for the surviving husband, who loses everything at the impossible southern customs. Furthermore, he directly correlates the collapse of the minister and wife’s life to Rev. Hightowers obsession with “his grandfather being shot from the galloping horse” (64) in Jackson during the war—the causation between past systems of social responsibility and a society becoming aware of its inequities is distinct.

Rev. Hightower also sits passenger to the tragedy of two other women—his cook, who faces rumors of sleeping with him and is forced to quit out of sheer survival—and his neighbor, who loses her baby in childbirth. His cook must lie and declare “her employer asked her to do something which she said was against God and nature,” to protect herself from the K.K.K., and so once again, at the hand of a southern idealists society which realized “all at once” that a woman spent time alone in the house with the Rev., who must not have been “a natural husband, a natural man,” (71). Comparatively, at the center of the pregnant neighbor’s tragedy, the Reverend is praised despite a dead child, the doctor and  father of the child “approving of Hightower’s work,” and the woman’s loss hardly highlighted at all (74). These women display the ways in which Reverend Hightower’s position in a delusional southern class system is both detrimental to him, in the case of his wife and cook, and benign or even praise-worthy, in the case of the mother and the deceased child. 

Throughout the opening chapters of Light in August, Faulkner formulates religion and religious practices into a social construct within his vision of life in the South. During the 1920s, engaging in religious practices was one of the ways in which communities in this region of the U.S. were able to come together. It provided people with a growing sense of stability as they navigated the ever-changing social norms that were beginning to arise during this time period. However, the ways in which many of Faulkner’s characters, especially Reverend Gail Hightower, perceived religion tends to be distorted. We begin to question whether Hightower’s “divine” status as a preacher in the Southern town of Jefferson is actually accredited, or if his social standing is tainted.

Upon our first meeting of Hightower in the novel’s third chapter, Faulkner sets the stage for how his reputation is fueled by local gossip surrounding the tragic death of his wife. More specifically, he frames this character’s introduction through the retelling of his life by an unnamed citizen in the town. They say, “’Then one Saturday night she got killed, in a house or something in Memphis. Papers full of it. He had to resign from the church, but he wouldn’t leave Jefferson, for some reason.’” (59). With these lines from the chapter in mind, it is particularly evident that the people of Jefferson were not exactly sure what to make of Hightower as an individual. They looked towards the central tragedy he has experienced as a defining factor of his demise as a preacher. The citizens wanted to maintain a clean-cut image of how they were able to utilize religion in everyday life, and with a preacher who has experienced an extreme amount of trauma, this was next to impossible. They did not want to be the ones associated with a person that has let his traumatic experiences fuel his teachings, but instead they wanted to stick to teachings that were borderline “traditional.” Here, this relates to another set of lines from the chapter in regard to how Hightower desired to stick around in Jefferson, even after his reputation is destroyed. These lines read “’That was pretty bad on the church, you see. Having strangers come here and hear about it, and him refusing to leave the town. But he wouldn’t go away.’” (59). It is perfectly clear that Hightower wanted to stand his ground in terms of remaining a part of the Presbyterian church, as he wanted to prove that he was not going to let this tragedy he has experienced define him. In a sense, he wanted to regain his divine status as a preacher by not running away from his issues. As readers, we can begin to slowly understand Hightower’s dedication to the people of Jefferson as well. If he were to just up and leave them, who else would the townspeople look towards as a valuable guide?

Hightower perceives “religion as though it were a dream,” as he utilizes his grandfather’s experiences fighting in the Confederate army as a launching point for his sermons (61). His title as a preacher becomes further ambiguous, as he does not reference the holy texts in his teachings. Instead, he tries to find a loophole to blend his family history and religious background together. Here, what Faulkner was trying to achieve is the blurring of the lines between the past and the present for Hightower in terms of his perceptions of religion. He is so passionate about his grandfather’s experiences in the Civil War because that is all he has ever known in terms of his familial history. Along with this, it is explicitly clear that Hightower perceives his grandfather as the primary “God-like” figure in his teachings. As a result of this, he defies some of the basic traditions of Protestantism, especially when thinking about the basics of the Ten Commandments. Faulkner writes, “It was as if he couldn’t get religion and that galloping calvary and his dead grandfather shot from the galloping horse untangled from each other, even in the pulpit.” (62). It is explicitly evident that Hightower was trying to put some sort of biblical emphasis on his grandfather’s legacy. Instead of preaching to the people of Jefferson about the importance behind praising God, he wanted to show them that God can be present in other important figures. Here, he is trying to bend the idea that within religious teachings, one should not worship any false idols. Hightower is somewhat accredited to his status as a preacher through how he is able to stand his ground, but it is explicitly evident that the people of Jefferson are able to see right through his act. As a result of this, he not only becomes deeply ambiguous, but also highly psychologically complex, causing us as readers to question his position throughout this first section of the novel.

As our class discussed Jason Compson’s character in The Sound and The Fury we were all in agreement about his despicableness. The nature of his character was clear but the road he took to become Jason was less clear. We had glimpses of his childhood in Benjy’s chapter, but we had to fill in the gaps to understand how Jason Compson became Jason Compson. In A Light in August Faulkner presents another troublesome character, Joe Christmas, and time machines us at the start of chapter 6 to present a memory of Christmas’s becoming. While the chapter does not scream: “This is why Joe Christmas is the way he is!” It gives us material to hypothesize the reasons he is who he is.

How does someone reach a stage of such detached hatred?: “Christmas put his hand flat upon Brown’s mouth and nose, shutting his jaw with his left hand while with the right he struck Brown again with those hard, slow, measured blows, as if he were meting them out by count” (120). Christmas’s nonchalant use of violence stems from the fear of his orphanage’s nurse and his brutal foster father. The Nurse’s act of cruelty, threatening to reveal Christmas’ black ancestry, is a direct result of her fear of sexist backlash. Reeling from Joe’s witness of her sexual intercourse (rape?) with a young doctor, she turns from bribery to treachery to remove a child from her life who has no idea what she is so afraid of. His supposed knowledge destroys her: “By the second day she was well nigh desperate. She did not sleep at night. She lay most of the night now tense, teeth and hands clenched, panting with fury and terror” (145). The physical anguish she describes is in fear of punishment for her sex out of wedlock. The young doctor is noticeably absent once he is done in the office. His absence represents the lack of concern he has, as a man, for being revealed. Alone and afraid, the nurse weaponizes racism against a five year old to avoid sexist punishment. In this moment the hate she feared is transferred onto Christmas. The sexism turns into racism which is absorbed by Christmas.

The description of Christmas’ beating of Brown is similar to the description of McEachern’s beating of Christmas: “McEachern began to strike methodically, with slow and deliberate force, still without heat or anger. It would have been hard to say which face was the more rapt, more calm, more convinced.” (160) The same way which Christmas was ‘meting’ his hits out, his foster father beats him ‘methodically’. The cycle of abuse is passed from what is given to the nurse, to what the Nurse and McEachern give to Christmas, to what Christmas gives unto the world. Chapters 5 & 6 give us the experiences that form Christmas, something to understand who he is, even if it does not justify his actions.

As John T. Matthews notes in Seeing through the South,  “Light in August depicts a crisis of unhoming” (159). As he also points out, pregnancy, birth, and loss of the mother all play a centered role in this depiction of a crisis of unhoming. If we see the mother as the primary home, we can see birth itself as the essential unhoming, one that in this text is often paired with the death of or ultimate separation from the mother. For example, we see this in the narrative of Joe Christmas, whose mother died in childbirth, leading him to an orphanage as an infant, and catalyzing his adult life of roaming, unsettled. We also see this in Lena Grove, who, after the death of her parents, “departed forever, ” language that suggests her own unending, perhaps existential, unhoming as a result of the loss of her parents (4). Faulker begins the book by introducing us to a pregnant (and parentless) Lena Grove as she travels hopefully to find the father of the baby she is expecting. Lena Grove is acting, then, as both a home to the unborn, and herself searching for a home. While Lena Grove herself reassures herself to remain calm, even detached, and hopeful that all will go according to plan and she will find the father of her baby, everyone around her identifies her condition (pregnant and alone) as a problem– one to which there is no solution, only pity. We see this, for example, in the treatment Lena receives from the married couple, Armstid and Martha, who give her shelter for the night. When Martha learns the details of Lena’s condition, she expresses “cold and impersonal contempt,” before gathering all of her personal savings and telling Armstid to give them to Lena and take her all the way to Jefferson (21-22). Lena Grove, while not a respectable white woman by the moral standards of her time, is ultimately protected by her womb– or rather, the role her womb occupies in the Jim Crow South. It is her reproductive labor that earns her safety. I am interested in the connections Faulker is able to make between womb, home, property, and commodity in this text. As countless historians have noted, in a time so marked by violent racial hierarchy, the womb, especially the womb of the white woman, becomes the central site of anxieties about that racial hierarchy. I think we can read Martha’s quick willingness to give away her savings to Lena perhaps not necessarily as charity, but anxiety. Anxiety for the wellbeing of a fellow woman, perhaps, but perhaps more politically, anxiety for the home or homelessness of the white baby. Lena’s unhoming and lack of husband, perhaps, evokes in Martha and other white people Lena meets along her travels a collective racial anxiety of hierarchical uncertainty post civil-war.

Joe Christmas is introduced towards the beginning of Light in August. He is described as stoic and distant. When he joins the group of men working in the mill, the narrator says, “he did not talk to any of them at all. And none of them tried to talk to him” (34).  While Brown engages excitedly with everyone, Christmas keeps his distance, physically and emotionally, “with brooding and savage steadiness” (39). Christmas passes as a white man, a “foreigner,” but it is suggested to the reader that he is mixed race. Brown calls him the n-word when scapegoating him for their bootlegging, and the dietician in his orphanage does the same in reaction to being caught in the act of adultery. In all of the times and places he appears, he seems to use distance to fight against not only his potential blackness, but also his status as mixed-race, one which is inherently fluid, complicated, and even feminine in its “slipperiness.” As Matthews argues, Joe must expel that something within him that is black and female, “in order to be (or become or remain) white and male” (165). 

Throughout the section, Christmas seems disgusted by blackness and its connections to fluidity and femininity. As he transitions between the racial purgatory of white and black neighborhoods, he starts to notice the fluidity of blackness around him. The narrator says, “the black life, the black breathing had compounded the substance of breath so that not only voices but moving bodies and light itself must become fluid and accrete slowly from particle to particle” (114). As he observes the space around him shift from, in his view, manly to something “hot” “wet” and “female,” he gets angry and begins to run away (115). He is repulsed, and uses distance as a means of protecting himself. He drifts in and out of the black neighborhood, and is eventually drawn to a group of black people. Christmas approaches them, yet is seemingly angered by their smell and the women’s haunting voices. After interacting with them, he notices that he has unknowingly pulled out his razor, and yells “Bitches!” (118). However subconsciously, he was drawn to fight this group of people, who for him, represent his own potential to “slip” into blackness. 

Christmas does fight when, as a teenager, he joins a group of white boys who plan to rape a black girl. When it is his turn, he stands, “smelling the woman, smelling the negro all at once; enclosed by the womanshenegro” (156). He looks at her (something he rarely does with others) and actually sees her: peering “down into a black well and at the bottom [seeing] two glints like reflections of dead stars.” In seeing the blackness and humanity in her eyes, and therefore reflected in his own, he becomes repulsed by the idea of having sex with her–  the ultimate act of fluidity and connection to the feminine– and instead beats her. In hitting her, he attempts to distance himself from those qualities he sees in himself. 

Christmas also denies his proximity to womanhood through physical distance and rejecting any kind acts from the women around him. Attempting to get away from Burden (and Brown), he goes to the horse stable to sleep one night.  Once there, he thinks “‘Why in the hell do I want to smell horses? […] It’s because they are not women. Even a mare horse is a kind of man’” (109).  Amidst the abuse from his adoptive father Mr. McEachern, Mrs. McEachern offers him food and money, which Christmas mostly denies. Interestingly, he likes the predictable hardness of the man, and criticizes the unreliable kindness of the wife. The narrator comments, “It was the woman: the soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men. ‘She is trying to make me cry.’” (169). He believes emotion and crying (a liquid act), which would require him to tap into his perceived femininity, are more evil acts than being punched; he would rather be beaten than be forced to face his innate femininity. 

His repulsion of all things fluid and feminine is foreshadowed as he watches the dietician have sex at age five. While watching from behind the curtains, he holds a tube of pink toothpaste he found in her room.  He squeezes the pink, oozing toothpaste, which may represent feminine bodily fluids or body parts. Christmas eats the pink toothpaste and vomits shortly after. He is literally sickened by a symbol of womanly liquids (122). His vomiting causes him to be caught, and he hears, perhaps for the first time, someone call him a “n– bastard.” After giving into the natural urges to watch the act of sex and eat the toothpaste, he is made to feel shame in his connection to the intertwined concepts of blackness, femininity, and sex.