Light in August takes place in a later historical moment in the South than what we have seen so far in TSAF and The U that is defined by, among other things, a changing relationship between men and women. As Southern women begin to escape their societal enclosures by flouting traditional ideas of virginity and chastity, Southern men attempt to figuratively add stronger locks to the cage by way of violence and manipulation. One character in particular who embodies the austere masculine patriarch in Light in August is Joe Christmas’s adopted father, Mr. McEachern, who teaches Joe Christmas about the systematic deployment of violence to attempt to maintain control over a person. Values in the town of Jefferson in Light in August vary among the many characters, but ultimately toggle back and forth on a fixation of “goodness” and “badness” that is innate or taught, for women in particular. This framing of the moral qualities of women (and men) informs Joe Christmas’s choice to beat a young black girl whom he is about to have sex with, tying together the relationship between sex and violence in this Southern setting.  

Throughout the first seven chapters, characters muse on the moral qualities of men and women. As Byron and Mooney are discussing recent hire Joe Brown (alias Lucas Burch) at the saw mill, Byron says, “I reckon that being good is about the easiest thing in the world for a lazy man,” to which Mooney responds, “I reckon he’d be bad fast enough…if he just had somebody to show him how” (LIA, 39). Although they are talking about Joe’s lack of competency at shoveling sawdust and losing his paycheck to a game of dice, this theme of guiding somebody to be “bad” recurs, and raises questions about whether somebody is born “bad” or if they are taught to be “bad”. Byron attributes “goodness” for men to be innate, as being good comes easily to a man who is “lazy,” or puts no effort into being good. But Mooney comments on how men can be bad “fast enough” when they are corrupted, showing how easy it is for men to be guided into being “bad”. Joe Christmas is a prime example of a child who grew up too fast and was guided into being “bad” by his strict adopted father’s violent tendencies and harsh rules about religion and sex as sin. 

On the female side, women are characterized to possess innate qualities of “badness”, with “badness” relating directly to sex. Once the dietician realizes that she may be outed for having sex with her colleague, she “became quite calmly and completely mad..[and] behind that calm mask her fear and fury had turned her psychic along with her natural female infallibility for the spontaneous comprehension of evil” (LIA, 126). On other occasions like on page 66, the narrator gives a small speech on how “good” women are fooled by seeming “goodness” that is actually “evil”, but “evil itself can never fool her” (LIA, 66). It may be worth inserting “men” in front of these personified abstractions of good and evil to think more deeply about the triangulating relationship between sex, morals, and gender at the time. When being or understanding “evil” is associated with sex, women are painted as innately sexual beings who possess an inherent corruption due to their own internal sexual desire. These characterizations of women demonstrate the burgeoning complications of women’s relationship with sexual autonomy and misogynistic societal norms. For the dietician, the idea of being caught having sex even though she is twenty seven years old and not a virgin, is still enough to make her “completely mad”, revealing the narrator’s biases that women who have sex for their own pleasure possess qualities of “evil”. 

Finally, all of these ideas converge in the scene where Joe Christmas beats a young black girl who was recruited by some boys for a perverse sex ritual. Because Joe’s adoptive father has hammered into him the ideals of the strictest type of Catholicism, Joe fixates on receiving “the same whipping though he had committed no sin as he would receive if McEachern had seen him commit it” (LIA, 156). In the moment before he enters the shed, Joe is already associating the act or even the mere suggestion of sex with painful acts of violence doled out by Mr. McEachern. When he is beaten, Joe takes great care to hide his vulnerability, standing like “…wood or stone; a post or a tower upon which the sentient part of him mused like a hermit, contemplative and remote with ecstasy and self-crucifixion” (LIA, 159-160). These complex feelings that Joe experiences of “ecstasy and self-crucifixion” while being beaten help him to weave pain and pleasure together, all while mentally dissociating from his bloody reality. When Joe is confronted by the black girl’s vulnerability as a sexual being through her smells and her eyes as “two glints like reflections of dead stars,” he reacts violently by kicking her and “feeling her flesh anyway” while he continues to beat her (LIA, 156). 

What is most disturbing about this scene is the aftermath. When the other boys join in the fighting as they realize that something has gone amiss originally to stop Joe from beating the girl, the girl is completely forgotten, as Faulkner writes, “There was no She at all now” (LIA 157). Her body effectively disappears, “as if a wind had blown among them, hard and clean,” and her assault is not mentioned again. (LIA, 157) The rejection of womanhood and vulnerability through sex is transformed into a spectacular display of male violence in order to assert masculinity. While the young girl is basically left for dead, the boys act as if nothing has happened, telling Joe that they will see him tomorrow at church. This chilling violation of a woman’s body represents this squashing of “evil” that is inherent in female sexual desire vis-a-vis male violence as a method of control and restoring order.

In Light in August, Faulkner depicts a South that is increasingly uncomfortable with individuals who seemingly rebel against strict norms and expectations, particularly as they apply to notions of gender and race. Joe Christmas, a bootlegger who enters into an ill-advised venture with Joe Brown (Lucas Burch), struggles to understand who he is as a man with mixed ancestry, feeling like an outsider from the Black community and an imposter within the white community. As a result, Christmas is unable or unwilling to settle down, and roams the county in search of clarity.  

On one such evening, after spying on Brown in the barbershop, Christmas finds himself wandering away from town resembling “a phantom, a spirit” who has “strayed out of its own world, and [is] lost” (114). It is not until he reaches “Freedman Town,” the Black neighborhood in Jefferson, that he feels as though “he found himself,” and yet even here he does not feel as though he belongs (114). Christmas hears the “voices of invisible negroes” as the sounds envelop him, “murmuring talking laughing in a language not his” (114). Mirroring Christmas’ own self-conscious awareness of the racialized environment in which he lives, Faulkner’s descriptions of Freedman Town emphasize the darkness that pervades the area, noting cabins that are “shaped blackly out of blackness,” noticeable only by the “sultry glow of kerosene lamps” (115). As much as Christmas may want to interact with the people here, he knows he doesn’t belong, so he settles for the comfort provided by simply moving through the area in an effort to experience contact with the Black community, even if in an indirect manner.

Upon exiting the neighborhood, Christmas notes the “cold hard air of white people” as he enters the well-lit area containing “houses of white people,” many of whom are on their porches surrounding card tables and sitting on chairs in their lawns (115). Here it is the “white faces,” and “bare arms of the women glaring smooth and white” that he notices and which prompt him to think that this was all he ever really wanted in life – to be a part of a community – which to Christmas, “dont seem like a whole lot to ask” (115). The focus on lightness and darkness, whiteness and blackness pervade this section of text, and as Christmas walks towards an elevated vantage point, the narrator notes his “white shirt” juxtaposed against his “pacing dark legs” (116). Surveying the town below, he notices all the “individual lights where streets radiated from the square” in the white section of town, as well as the “black pit from which he had fled with drumming heart and glaring lips” in the Black section of town which he views as “impenetrable” and an “abyss” itself (116). Christmas doesn’t feel comfortable in either setting. It is almost as though he feels too exposed in the light of the white neighborhood – too on display and vulnerable – while simultaneously unable to see into the dynamics of the Black neighborhood, a place that due to his upbringing remains mysterious, foreign, and unreachable. 

Ironically, it is unclear if Joe Christmas actually contains mixed ancestry, emphasizing further that so much of the South’s focus on identity is tied to perception as opposed to reality. In fact, even though it is Joe Brown who informs the police that Christmas is of mixed ancestry, it is he and not Christmas who is repeatedly described as being “dark complected,” and yet his ancestry does not appear to be up for debate (55). As a child, Christmas is repeatedly described as having a “parchmentcolored face” (123) and “parchmentcolored finger[s],” (119) yet it is the rumor and suggestion that Christmas is of mixed ancestry that prompts the other children to call him “N—” and for the dietician who fears his honesty to call him “n— bastard” (127, 125). These accusations are enough to seemingly convince Christmas that he does have mixed ancestry, and thus, true or not, his own sense of identity is forever altered, leaving him in a state of insecurity and doubt over who he is, where he fits, and how to live a meaningful life while trapped within the confines of an unforgiving binary. It also seems that the strict enforcement of racial awareness that is meant to create and maintain order in the South is the same system that ultimately causes Christmas to live violently, aggressively, and dangerously.