Light in August

Light in August

First edition

Author William Faulkner

Language English

Genre Southern Gothic,

modernist

Publisher Smith & Haas

Publication date 1932

Pages 480
Dewey Decimal 813.52

Preceded by Sanctuary

Followed by Pylon

Light in August is a 1932 novel by the

Southern American author William
Faulkner. It belongs to the Southern gothic
and modernist literary genres.

Set in the author's present day, the

interwar period, the novel centers on two
strangers who arrive at different times in
Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County,
Mississippi, a fictional county based on
Faulkner's home, Lafayette County,
Mississippi. The plot first focuses on Lena
Grove, a young pregnant white woman
from Alabama looking for the father of her
unborn child, and then shifts to explore the
life of Joe Christmas, a man who has
settled in Jefferson and passes as white,
but who secretly believes he has some
black ancestry. After a series of
flashbacks narrating Christmas's early life,
the plot resumes with his living and
working with Lucas Burch, the father of
Lena's child, who fled to Jefferson and
changed his name when he found out that
Lena was pregnant. The woman on whose
property Christmas and Burch have been
living, Joanna Burden, a descendant of
Yankee abolitionists hated by the citizens
of Jefferson, is murdered. Burch is caught
at the scene of the crime and reveals that
Christmas had been romantically involved
with her and is part black, thus implying
that he is guilty of her murder. While Burch
sits in jail awaiting his reward for turning in
Christmas, Lena is assisted by Byron
Bunch, a shy, mild-mannered bachelor who
falls in love with her. Bunch seeks the aid
of another outcast in the town, the
disgraced former minister Gail Hightower,
to help Lena give birth and protect
Christmas from being lynched. Though
Hightower refuses the latter, Christmas
escapes to his house and is shot and
castrated by a state guardsman. Burch
leaves town without his reward, and the
novel ends with an anonymous man
recounting a story to his wife about some
hitchhikers he picked up on the road to
Tennessee—a woman with a child and a
man who was not the father of the child,
both looking for the woman's husband.

In a loose, unstructured modernist

narrative style that draws from Christian
allegory and oral storytelling, Faulkner
explores themes of race, sex, class and
religion in the American South. By
focusing on characters that are misfits,
outcasts, or are otherwise marginalized in
their community, he portrays the clash of
alienated individuals against a Puritanical,
prejudiced rural society. Early reception of
the novel was mixed, with some reviewers
critical of Faulkner's style and subject
matter. However, over time, the novel has
come to be considered one of the most
important literary works by Faulkner and
one of the best English-language novels of
the 20th century.

Plot
Photograph of a real planing mill in the 1930s, similar
to the one depicted in the novel.

The novel is set in the American South in

the 1930s, during the time of Prohibition
and Jim Crow laws that legalized racial
segregation in the South. It begins with the
journey of Lena Grove, a young pregnant
white woman from Doane's Mill, Alabama,
who is trying to find Lucas Burch, the
father of her unborn child. He has been
fired from his job at Doane's Mill and
moved to Mississippi, promising to send
word to her when he has a new job. Not
hearing from Burch and harassed by her
older brother for her illegitimate
pregnancy, Lena walks and hitchhikes to
Jefferson, Mississippi, a town in Faulkner's
fictional Yoknapatawpha County. There
she expects to find Lucas working at
another planing mill, ready to marry her.
Those who help her along her four-week
trek are skeptical that Lucas Burch will be
found, or that he will keep his promise
when she catches up with him. When she
arrives in Jefferson, Lucas is there, but he
has changed his name to Joe Brown.
Looking for Lucas, sweet, trusting Lena
meets shy, mild-mannered Byron Bunch,
who falls in love with Lena but feels honor-
bound to help her find Joe Brown.
Thoughtful and quietly religious, Byron is
superior to Brown in every way but his
shyness prevents him from revealing his
feelings to Lena.

The novel then switches to the second plot

strand, the story of Lucas Burch/Joe
Brown's partner Joe Christmas. The surly,
psychopathic Christmas has been on the
run for years, ever since presumably killing
his strict Methodist adopted father.
Although he has light skin, Christmas
suspects that he is of African American
ancestry. Consumed with rage, he is a
bitter outcast who wanders between black
and white society, constantly provoking
fights with blacks and whites alike.
Christmas comes to Jefferson three years
prior to the central events of the novel and
gets a job at the mill where Byron, and
later Joe Brown, works. The job at the mill
is a cover for Christmas's bootlegging
operation, which is illegal under
Prohibition. He has a sexual relationship
with Joanna Burden, an older woman who
descended from a formerly powerful
abolitionist family whom the town
despises as carpetbaggers. Though their
relationship is passionate at first, Joanna
begins menopause and turns to religion,
which frustrates and angers Christmas. At
the end of her relationship with Christmas,
Joanna tries to force him, at gunpoint, to
kneel and pray. Joanna is murdered soon
after: her throat is slit and she is nearly
decapitated.

The novel leaves readers uncertain

whether Joe Christmas or Joe Brown is
the murderer. Brown is Christmas'
business partner in bootlegging and is
leaving Joanna's burning house when a
passing farmer stops to investigate and
pull Joanna's body from the fire. The
sheriff at first suspects Joe Brown, but
initiates a manhunt for Christmas after
Brown claims that Christmas is black. The
manhunt is fruitless until Christmas
arrives undisguised in Mottstown, a
neighboring town; he is on his way back to
Jefferson, no longer running. In
Mottstown, he is arrested and jailed, then
moved to Jefferson. His grandparents
arrive in town and visit Gail Hightower, the
disgraced former minister of the town and
friend of Byron Bunch. Bunch tries to
convince Hightower to give the imprisoned
Joe Christmas an alibi, but Hightower
initially refuses. Though his grandfather
wants Christmas lynched, his grandmother
visits him in the Jefferson jail and advises
him to seek help from Hightower. As police
escort him to the local court, Christmas
breaks free and runs to Hightower's house.
A childishly cruel white vigilante, Percy
Grimm, follows him there and, over
Hightower's protest, shoots and castrates
Christmas. Having redeemed himself at
last, Hightower is then depicted as falling
into a deathlike swoon, his whole life
flashing before his eyes, including the past
adventures of his Confederate grandfather,
who was killed while stealing chickens
from a farmer's shed.

Before Christmas' escape attempt,

Hightower delivers Lena's child in the
cabin where Brown and Christmas had
been staying before the murder, and Byron
arranges for Brown/Burch to come and
see her. Brown deserts Lena once again,
but Byron follows him and challenges him
to a fight. Brown beats the braver, smaller
Bunch, then skilfully hops a moving train
and disappears. At the end of the story, an
anonymous man is talking to his wife
about two strangers he picked up on a trip
to Tennessee, recounting that the woman
had a child and the man was not the
father. This was Lena and Byron, who were
conducting a half-hearted search for
Brown, and they are eventually dropped off
in Tennessee.
 Characters
Major characters

Segregated movie theater in Leland, Mississippi in

1937, a result of de jure segregation of black and
white people in the South; Joe Christmas lives
between the two racially segregated societies.

Lena Grove – a young pregnant woman

from Alabama who has traveled to
Jefferson while looking for Lucas Burch,
the father of her unborn child.
Byron Bunch – a bachelor who works at
the planing mill in Jefferson, who meets
and falls in love with Lena when she
arrives in town. She has been told that a
man named Bunch works at the mill and
assumes it is Lucas, because the name
sounds similar.
Gail Hightower – the former minister of
Jefferson, forced to retire after his wife
was discovered to be having an affair in
Memphis and committed suicide. He is
a friend and mentor to Byron.
Lucas Burch/Joe Brown – the young
man who fathered Lena's child in
Alabama and ran away when she told
him she was pregnant. He has been
living in Jefferson with Joe Christmas in
a cabin on Joanna Burden's property
under the name Joe Brown and working
with Christmas and Byron at the planing
mill. He is also a bootlegger.
Joe Christmas – a man who came to
Jefferson three years prior to the events
in the novel. He lives in a cabin on the
property of Joanna Burden and has a
secret sexual relationship with her.
Although he has light skin and is an
orphan with no knowledge of his family
background, he believes that one of his
parents are of African-American
ancestry, and this secret has caused him
 to be a habitual wanderer. He is
employed at the planing mill until he
begins to make a profit as a bootlegger.
Joanna Burden – the sole survivor in
Jefferson of a family of abolitionists
from New England who came to
Jefferson after the Civil War. She is
unmarried, lives alone in a manor house
outside of Jefferson, and is secretly
engaged in a sexual relationship with
Joe Christmas. She is murdered,
presumably by Christmas, at the start of
the novel, and her house is burned
down.

Secondary characters
Eupheus "Doc" Hines – the grandfather
of Joe Christmas. He hates Christmas
and gives him away to an orphanage
when he is born, staying on as a janitor
there in order to monitor the boy. Later,
when he hears that Christmas is being
held on suspicion of murdering Joanna
Burden, he travels to Jefferson with his
wife and begins to incite a lynch mob to
kill Christmas.
Mrs. Hines – the grandmother of Joe
Christmas. She has never seen
Christmas after the night of his birth and
travels to Jefferson to ensure that her
husband does not successfully have
him lynched, because she wants to see
him again once more before he is tried
for murder.
Milly Hines – the teenage mother of Joe
Christmas. She conceives after a tryst
with a member of a traveling circus,
whom she claims is Mexican. She dies
in childbirth after Eupheus Hines refuses
to call a doctor for her.
Mr. McEachern – the adoptive father of
Joe Christmas. He is a devout
Presbyterian and tries to instill religion in
the young orphan he has adopted. He
disapproves of Christmas's growing
disobedience and is presumably killed
by his adopted son when the boy is 18.
Mrs. McEachern – the adoptive mother
of Joe Christmas. She tries to protect
Christmas, though he hates her and
pulls away from her attempts to be kind
to him.
The dietitian – a woman who worked at
the orphanage where Joe Christmas
was raised. After he accidentally sees
her with a man in her room, she tries
unsuccessfully to have him transferred
to an all-black orphanage.
Mr. Armstid – a man who picks up Lena
on her way to Jefferson, lets her spend
the night at his house, and then gives
her a ride to the city on his wagon.
Mrs. Armstid – Armstid's wife, who
gives Lena money in spite of her disdain
for the young woman.
Bobbie – a waitress at a restaurant in
Memphis whom the adolescent Joe
Christmas falls in love with and
proposes to on the night that he kills his
father at a local dance. She scorns him
and leaves him.
Gavin Stevens – an educated man and
district attorney who lives in Jefferson
and offers commentary on some of the
events at the end of the novel.
Percy Grimm – the captain of the State
National Guard who kills Joe Christmas
 and castrates him.

Style and structure

Faulkner's home Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi,

where he wrote the novel and, based on a casual
remark from his wife Estelle, changed the name from
"Dark House" to Light in August.[1]

Due to its naturalistic, violent subject

matter and obsession with the ghosts of
the past, Light in August is characterized
as a Southern gothic novel, a genre also
exemplified by the works of Faulkner's
contemporary Carson McCullers, and by
later Southern writers like Flannery
O'Connor, and Truman Capote.[2] However,
critics like Diane Roberts and David R.
Jarraway view Faulkner's use of Southern
gothic genre tropes, such as the
dilapidated plantation house and the focus
on mystery and horror, as self-conscious
modernist commentary on man's "warped
relationship with the past"[3] and the
impossibility of determining true identity.[4]

According to Daniel Joseph Singal,

Faulkner's literary style gradually
developed from 19th century Victorian to
modernist, with Light in August more firmly
grounded in the tradition of the latter. The
novel is characteristic of the modernist
fascination with polarities—light and dark,
good and evil—the burden of history on the
present, and the splintering of personal
identity.[5] The plot is also divided into dual
currents, one focusing on Lena Grove and
the other on Joe Christmas, a technique
that Faulkner continued to use in other
works.[6] The narrative is not structured in
any particular order, as it is often
interrupted by lengthy flashbacks and
constantly shifts from one character to
another. This lack of organization and
narrative continuity was viewed negatively
by some critics.[7] As in his other novels,
Faulkner employs elements of oral
storytelling, allowing different characters
to lend voice to the narrative in their own
distinct Southern idiom.[8] Unlike some of
the other Yoknapatawpha County novels,
Light in August does not rely solely on
stream-of-consciousness narration, but
also incorporates dialogue and an
omniscient third-person narrator that
develop the story.[6]

Title

The title refers to the fire of the house that

is at the center of the story. The whole
novel revolves around one event, the fire,
which is visible for miles around, and
happens in August.

Some critics have speculated that the

meaning of the title derives from a
colloquial use of the word "light" to mean
giving birth—typically used to describe
when a cow will give birth and be "light"
again—and connect this to Lena's
pregnancy.[9] Speaking of his choice of
title, Faulkner denied this interpretation
and stated,

. . .in August in Mississippi there’s

a few days somewhere about the
middle of the month when
suddenly there’s a foretaste of
fall, it’s cool, there’s a lambence, a
soft, a luminous quality to the
light, as though it came not from
just today but from back in the
old classic times. It might have
fauns and satyrs and the gods
and—from Greece, from Olympus
in it somewhere. It lasts just for a
day or two, then it’s gone. . .the
title reminded me of that time, of
a luminosity older than our
Christian civilization."[1]
Within the novel itself, the title is alluded to
when Gail Hightower sits at his study
window waiting for his recurring vision of
his grandfather's last raid. The vision
always occurs in "that instant when all
light has failed out of the sky and it would
be night save for that faint light which
daygranaried leaf and grass blade
reluctant suspire, making still a little light
on earth though night itself has come."[10]
The story that would eventually become
the novel, started by Faulkner in 1931, was
originally titled "Dark House" and began
with Hightower sitting at a dark window in
his home.[11] However, after a casual
remark by his wife Estelle on the quality of
the light in August, Faulkner changed the
title.[1]

Themes
Alienation

All of the protagonists in the novel are

misfits and social outcasts surrounded by
an impersonal and largely antagonistic
rural community, which is represented
metonymically through minor or
anonymous characters. Joanna Burden
and Reverend Hightower are hounded by
the people of Jefferson for years, in a
failed effort to make them leave town.
Byron Bunch, though more accepted in
Jefferson, is still viewed as a mystery or
simply overlooked. Both Joe Christmas
and Lena Grove are orphans, strangers in
town, and social outcasts, though the
former draws anger and violence from the
community, while the latter is looked down
upon but receives generous assistance in
her travels. According to Cleanth Brooks,
this opposition between Joe and Lena is a
pastoral reflection of the full spectrum of
social alienation in modern society.[12]

Christian allegory
There are a variety of parallels with
Christian scripture in the novel. The life
and death of Joe Christmas is reminiscent
of the passion of Christ, Lena and her
fatherless child parallel Mary and Christ,[13]
and Byron Bunch acts as a Joseph figure.
Christian imagery such as the urn, the
wheel, and the shadow, can be found
throughout.[14]

Light in August has 21 chapters, as does

the Gospel of St. John. As Virginia V.
James Hlavsa points out, each chapter in
Faulkner corresponds to themes in John.
For example, echoing John's famous, "In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God", is Lena's insistent faith in
the "word" of Lucas, who is, after all, the
father. John 5, the healing of the lame man
by immersion, is echoed by Christmas's
repeatedly being immersed in liquids. The
teaching in the temple in John 7 is echoed
by McEachern's attempts to teach
Christmas his catechism. The crucifixion
occurs in John 19, the same chapter in
which Christmas is slain and castrated.[15]
However, the Christian references are dark
and disturbing—Lena is obviously not a
virgin, Christmas is an enraged murderer—
and may be more appropriately viewed as
pagan idols mistakenly worshipped as
saints.[14]
Race and sex

Faulkner is considered one of the

foremost American writers on race in the
United States, and his novels, including
Light in August, often explore the
persistent obsession with blood and race
in the South that have carried over from
the antebellum era to the 21st century.[16]
Christmas has light skin but is viewed as a
foreigner by the people he meets, and the
children in the orphanage in which he was
raised call him "nigger." Chapter 6 begins
with the oft-cited sentence: Memory
believes before knowing remembers and
gives an account of the five year old
Christmas amongst the uniform denim of
the other children. The first reference to
him though is not by these children but by
the dietitian who gave him a dollar to not
tell about her amorous adventure with an
intern doctor. However suspicion must fall
on Doc Hines Joe's deranged grandfather
who placed him in the orphanage and
stays on as the boilerman. It is he who
may have whispered the lie about the little
boy's origins to the other children. Because
of this, Joe Christmas is fixated on the
idea that he has some African American
blood, which Faulkner never confirms, and
views his parentage as an original sin that
has tainted his body and actions since
birth.[12] Because of his obsessive struggle
with his twin identities, black and white,
Christmas lives his life always on the road.
The secret of his blackness is one that he
abhors as well as cherishes; he often
willingly tells white people that he is black
in order to see their extreme reactions and
becomes violent when one white Northern
woman reacts nonchalantly. Though
Christmas is guilty of violent crimes,
Faulkner emphasizes that he is under the
sway of social and psychological forces
that are beyond his control and force him
to reenact the part of the mythical black
murderer and rapist from Southern
history.[17]
Christmas exemplifies how existing
outside of categorization, being neither
black nor white, is perceived as a threat by
society that can only be reconciled with
violence. He is also perceived as neither
male nor female,[18] just as Joanna Burden,
whom Faulkner portrays as "masculinized,"
is also neither male nor female and is
rejected by her community.[19] Because of
this, an early critic concluded that
blackness and women were the "'twin
Furies of the Faulknerian deep Southern
Waste Land'" and reflected Faulkner's
animosity toward life.[20]
However, while women and minorities are
both viewed as "subversive" and are
restricted by the patriarchal society
depicted in the novel, Lena Grove is able to
travel safely and be cared for by people
who hate and mistrust her, because she
plays on the conventional rule that men
are responsible for a woman's
wellbeing.[21] Thus, she is the only stranger
who is not alienated and destroyed by the
people of Jefferson, because the
community recognizes her as the
embodiment of nature and life. This
romantic view of women in the novel
posits that men have lost their innocent
connection to the natural world, while
women instinctively possess it.[22]

Class and religion

In Light in August, as in most of the other

novels set in Yoknapatawpha County,
Faulkner focuses mainly on poor white
Southerners, both from the upper and
lower classes, who struggle to survive in
the ruined post-war economy of the South.
The characters in Light in August—who are
mostly from the lower classes, with the
exception of Reverend Hightower and
Joanna Burden—are united by poverty and
Puritanical values that cause them to
regard an unwed mother like Lena Grove
with disdain. Faulkner shows the
restrictiveness and aggression of their
Puritanical zeal, which has caused them to
become "deformed" in their struggle
against nature.[23]

Reception
When it was first published in 1932, the
novel was moderately successful; 11,000
copies were initially printed, with a total of
four printings by the end of the year,
although a significant number of copies
from the fourth printing had not been sold
by 1936. In 1935, Maurice Coindreau
translated the novel into French.[24] In the
same year, it was translated into German
along with several other novels and short
stories by Faulkner. These works initially
met with approval from the Nazi censors
and received much attention from German
literary critics, because they assumed that
Faulkner was a conservative agrarian
positively depicting the struggle for racial
purity; soon after, however, Faulkner's
works were banned by the Nazis, and post-
war German criticism reappraised him as
an optimistic Christian humanist.[25]

According to Michael Millgate, though it is

not typically considered Faulkner's best
novel, Light in August was recognized early
on as being "a major text, central to any
understanding or evaluation of his career
as a whole."[24] He argues that many of the
early American critics, most of whom were
urban Northerners who viewed the South
as backward and reactionary, focused on
Faulkner's technical innovation in the field
of narrative but missed or ignored the
regional details and interconnectedness of
the characters and setting to other works
by the author.[26] Some reviewers saw
Faulkner's narrative techniques not as
innovations but as errors, offering Faulkner
recommendations on how to improve his
style and admonishing him for his
European modernist "'tricks'".[27] Critics
were also displeased with the violence
depicted in the novel, pejoratively labeling
it "gothic fantasy," despite the fact that
lynching was a reality in the South. In spite
of these complaints, the novel came to be
viewed positively because of its violence
and dark themes, as this was a contrast to
the sentimental, romantic Southern
literature of the time.[28]

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Light in

August 54th on its list of the 100 best
English-language novels of the 20th
century. Additionally, Time magazine
included the novel in its TIME 100 Best
English-language Novels from 1923 to
2005.[29]

Notes
1. Ruppersburg, p. 3.
2. Lloyd-Smith, p. 61.
3. Roberts, p. 37.
4. Martin & Savoy, p. 57-59.
5. Singal, pp. 357-360.
6. Yamaguchi, p. 166.
7. Millgate, p. 10.
8. Anderson, p. 11.
9. Brooks, p. 375.
10. Faulkner, p. 60.
11. Hamblin & Peek, p. 228.
12. Brooks, pp. 49-50.
13. Hamblin & Peek, p. 69.
14. Hamblin & Peek, p. 231.
15. Hlavsa 1991.
16. Fowler & Abadie, pp. 2-4.
17. Fowler & Abadie, p. 21.
18. Fowler & Abadie, p. 165.
19. Brooks, p. 57-59.
20. Millgate, p. 18.
21. Kartiganer & Abadie, p. 113.
22. Brooks, pp. 67-68.
23. Brooks, p. 47.
24. Millgate, p. 12.
25. Hamblin & Peek, pp. 146-7.
26. Millgate, p. 15.
27. Karem & 35.
28. Karem & 36.
29. Lacayo 2005.

References
Books
Anderson, John Dennis (2007). Student
Companion to William Faulkner .
Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-
0-313-33439-9.
Brooks, Cleanth (1963). William
Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country .
Louisiana State University Press.
ISBN 9780807116012.
Faulkner, William (1990). Light in August.
The Corrected Text. Vintage Books.
ISBN 0-679-73226-8.
Fowler, Doreen; Abadie, Ann (2007).
Faulkner and Race. University of
Mississippi Press. ISBN 1-93411-057-4.
Hamblin, Robert W.; Peek, Charles A.
(1999). A William Faulkner
Encyclopedia . Greenwood Publishing
Group. ISBN 978-0-313-29851-6.
Hlavsa, Virginia V. James (1991).
Faulkner and the Thoroughly Modern
Novel. University of Virginia Press.
ISBN 0-8139-1311-X.
Karem, Jeff (2004). The Romance of
Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of
Regional and Ethnic Literature. University
of Virginia Press. ISBN 0-8139-2255-0.
Lloyd-Smith, Allan (2004). American
Gothic Fiction: An Introduction.
Continuum International Publishing
Group. ISBN 0-8264-1594-6.
Kartiganer, Donald M.; Abadie, Ann J.
(1999). Faulkner and the Natural World.
Univ. Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-
57806-121-0.
Martin, Robert K.; Savoy, Eric (2009).
American Gothic: New Interventions in a
National Narrative. University of Iowa
Press. ISBN 978-1-58729-349-8.
Millgate, Michael (1987). New Essays on
Light in August . Cambridge University
Press. ISBN 978-0-521-31332-2.
Roberts, Diane (1994). The Myth of Aunt
Jemima: Representations of Race and
Region. Psychology Press. ISBN 0-415-
04919-9.
Ruppersburg, Hugh (1994). Reading
Faulkner: Light in August. University
Press of Mississippi. ISBN 0-8780-5732-
3.
Singal, Daniel Joseph (1997). William
Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist .
Univ of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-
0-8078-4831-9.
Yamaguchi, Ryūichi (2004). Faulkner's
Artistic Vision: The Bizarre and the
Terrible. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press.
ISBN 0-8386-4014-1.
Web
Lacayo, Richard (16 October 2005). "All-
TIME 100 Novels" . TIME Entertainment.
Time Inc. Retrieved 18 November 2012.

Further reading
Jukko, Risto (2016). Culture, Translation,
and Intertextuality: An Exploratory
 Rereading of Cultural-Religious Southern
Elements in William Faulkner's Light in
August and its Translations in Finnish .
Helsinki: University of Helsinki.
ISBN 978-951-51-2483-8.

Novels set in Succeeded by

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Sanctuary
County Absalom!

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