Gaunt – adjective
- (of a person) lean and haggard, especially because of suffering, hunger, or age.
In the first third of Light in August, readers are introduced to characters with faces that are insufferable, frozen, tight, grave, and perhaps the most recurring descriptor of them all, gaunt (32, 63, 69, 79, 89). Naturally, this leads me to raise a question with regard to the denizens of the novel’s hub: why the long faces?
As things would appear, there’s a lot more to Jefferson and its inhabitants than meets the untrained eye.
One of the most resonant themes in the novel presents itself in the Jeffersonian’s association of blackness with heathens. Indeed, the townsfolk cause a dramatic scene on minister Hightower’s premises on the notion “that he had that negro woman in the house alone with him all day” (71) blaming her for the suicide of his wife while the matron of the white orphanage expresses shocked disbelief at the knowledge that they’d been housing a black orphan and urgency to send him away. Even that very same orphan, Joseph Christmas, suggests the undoing of his foster father would be the knowledge that “he has nursed a nigger beneath his own roof” (169) and he is hunted after for the death of Mrs. Burden simply on the basis that “he’s got nigger blood in him” (98).
Black characters in the novel are persecuted when they are found out and as a result, bystanders are rendered sullen and droopy-faced as they are inevitably entangled in the society’s racist ideology just as German civilians during a Naziist regime.
Perhaps the most revealing character to examine for this phenomenon of widespread gauntness is Joseph Christmas. We are introduced to the character when he first steps on the scene in Jefferson’s mill community in raggedy clothes and upon closer examination, Byron describes that, “his face was gaunt, the flesh a level dead parchment color” (34).
When thinking about where Joseph’s gauntness comes from, it’s important to remember that the closest he had to any sort of tender loving figure was Alice who was torn away from him at a tender age of three. While Mrs. McEachern tries to take on that substitutive role as a nurturing foster mother, Joseph mentally and physically cannot bring himself to accept her caring even making a display of flipping her tray of food over and eating the scraps after she departs the room (155).
When I think of the type of gaunt face that Joseph bears, I think of a weathered face that has suffered lack of love and excessive physical labor, so much so that it even stands apart from the weathered faces of millworkers. Minister HIghtower is also described as having a long face and oddly enough “gaunt shoulders” (79) but when I think what weighs down his features, I think moreso about how he suffers the mental burden of painful knowledge such as that of his wife’s death or his dead grandfather. This sense of burden carries over when he begins thinking about how Lena, the one person who comes bursting on the scene without a trouble to boot, will fare amidst the troubled faces in the small world of Jefferson.
I do want to close on some questions that stood out to me. When the town (Jefferson) recounts the tale of Hightower refusing to evacuate town and the townsfolk lobbing accusations at him, the passage reads: “that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind” (71). What words came to your mind when you read that section? What sentiment do you think passes from person to person when a tragedy like the suicide of his wife occurs? Can you connect this moment to the one where Christmas is chased down for murdering Burden?
