Sexual Ambiguities in Light in August

NOTES SEXUAL AMBIGUITIES IN LIGHT INAUGUST Judith Halden Pennsylvania State University William Faulkner casts the memorable "romance" of Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden not only deep within the impenetrable shadows of Light in August1 but also "dead center" in the novel. Having perceived that Joe and Joanna's problems lie at the heart of the book, critics offer various diagnoses of the strange couple's ailments, focusing on the two characters individually and adding together Joe and Joanna's psychoses to yield the sum total of a sick affair. However, no one critical statement sufficiently defines the bizarre nature of the couple's "union" and, furthermore, many critical approaches are too limited in their outlook. Therefore, compilation and extension of the criticism concerning Joe and Joanna's affair are in order. Most critics attribute central importance to both race and sex in any discussion of the unusual lovers' personality problems. Not knowing whether he is white or black, Joe Christmas becomes, in Alfred Kazin's estimation, "an abstraction seeking to become a human being."2 Joe's compulsive, solitary wanderings, instigated by his racial ambiguity, signify to Kazin the "most extreme phase of American loneliness."3 Expanding Kazin's suggestion to classical proportions, John Longley, in his essay "Joe Christmas: The Hero in the Modern World," views Joe as a modern Oedipus4 born of a mysterious heritage who unwittingly lives only to fulfill his self-destructive destiny. Longley casts Joe as the tragic hero and Joanna as his doomed, middleaged Jocasta. Longley concludes his article with the broadest and hastiest expansion of all: Joe Christmas is "the modern Everyman."5 The thought of a miserable creature like Joe Christmas signifying universal human experience is as horrifying as considering Joanna a symbol of Womanhood. The psychological dilemmas of both characters are special and acute, so much so that they disqualify both Joe and Joanna from attaining universal stature. The torturous ambiguities of Joe Christmas's own heritage leave him without any identity as an individual ; in the case of Joanna Burden, a too strictly defined heritage wilts her natural sexual identity. 210Notes Critical stances toward Joanna vary considerably, but racial guilt and sexual repression are commonly cited as the bases for Joanna's gradual corruption during her affair with Christmas. Kazin claims that Joanna only affirms Joe's insubstantial, shadow-like nature: Joanna Burden . . . shows us how much of an abstraction Joe Christmas is when she makes love crying to him "Negro! Negrol" Whether the "Negro" represents the white man's guilt or the white man's fear, he is always a thought in the white's mind, and—in the South—an obsession.6 Kazin, like many other critics, places a great emphasis on Joanna's religious and racial guilt: Joanna Burden feels so guilty that she has remained an alien in the Southern town in which she was born, accepting her isolation as the price of her identification both with her Abolitionist forebears . . . and with the Negroes, on whom a curse must have been laid.7 Cleanth Brooks, on the other hand, points up Joanna's repressed sexuality , diagnosing Joanna as having been warped by the pressure of events away from the fulfillment of her nature. She has been forced to bury a part of herself; but the needs and desires are there, and when they are awakened too late for normal fulfillment in children and a home, something very terrible happens to her.8 Brooks states that Joanna is the victim of her sexual repression and that when her sexual passions are finally aroused, she falls prey to "being compelled to her actions by a self that she had scarcely known existed."8 He compares Joanna to "a stunted autumnal plant frantically trying to bloom and seed itself before the killing frosts. . . ."10 But Joanna's blossoming fails and an icy Christmas overtakes her in August. Joe and Joanna, Michael Millgate asserts, use each other "primarily as a means of attacking some personal problem."11 That personal problem in both of their cases is sex. For both lovers, sex represents the final madness: their sexes, the only true and definite aspects of their existences , become indistinguishable. Racial distinctions...