Focusing on the Margins: Light in August and Social Change

In William Faulkner's Light in August (1932), a number of figures actively engaged in social change are introduced as Joanna Burden narrates to her lover Joe Christmas the history of her ancestors, and as the defrocked minister Gail Hightower reflects, while sitting in the window of his study, on the history of his family, which was narrated to him by the family's ex-slave when he was a child. Hightower's father was an abolitionist even though "he would neither eat food grown and cooked by, nor sleep in a bed prepared by, a negro slave" (355, 351). Joanna's ancestors received a commission from the government in Washington to go down to the South "to help with the freed negroes," and two of them were shot dead by the slaveholder John Sartoris over a question of Negro votes in a state election (189). Joanna, the last Burden in the South, carries on with this "commission" until she is killed by Joe Christmas.¹

The appeal of the engagement with social change in Faulkner's text does not lie in these characters, however, and the way the Burdens perform their commission remains, after all, questionable. Instead, the force of Light in August derives from its ability to dramatize the social and racial contradictions, which are set in motion by Joe Christmas's indeterminate racial origins. The need for, if not the inevitability of, social change in racial relations is made even more pressing through Faulkner's demonstration of how the racial ideology that holds this society together is the same ideology that will tear it apart. The determination of the white community in Jefferson to guard the binaries of their ideology and maintain the fixity of its categories, we come to know, is no other than its unwillingness to admit the vulnerability of the very basis of its ideology and the malleable nature of its categories, as the incident of Joanna's death has revealed to them.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas, who interprets rituals relating to the human body by regarding the body as a symbol of society, observes that "all margins are dangerous…. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins" (Purity 115, 121). Douglas's observation is helpful in understanding the way Light in August dramatizes the process of social change by demonstrating the vulnerability of the southern "structure of ideas" at its margins. Faulkner's text chooses its main characters from the margins of the white community in Jefferson and makes the way these marginal characters engage with their community's "structure of ideas" the subject of the community's verbal exchange. As John N. Duvall notes, "marginal" members of the white community in Faulkner's texts function to counter racist and patriarchal proscriptiveness (Faulkner's xvii). As it dramatizes social relations in the form of "talk," or verbal exchange of meanings and values, Light in August examines social change on a linguistic level as a shift in the semantic weight of categories and binaries toward a performative view of race, in contrast to the biological concept that the community's "voices" are desperately trying to maintain. Social change is examined further in the overall structure of the book in the way the three stories of Lena Grove, Joe Christmas, and Gail Hightower are juxtaposed. Christmas's violent story is framed by the more optimistic stories of Hightower and Lena, which not only dramatise examples of the possibility of breaking free from the fetters of society, be it in the form of racist and patriarchal ideology, institutional religion, or the ghost of the past in the form of dead father figures, but also of contributing positively to social change and looking forward to a new social order based on love and acknowledgment of human needs and emotions. In contrast to the violent deaths of Joanna and Christmas, positive change in the stories of Hightower and Lena is suggested by both the birth of Lena's baby and the rebirth that both Byron Bunch and Hightower experience as Bunch falls in love with Lena and as Hightower acts...