Light in August (Themes)

Themes

Destructive Righteousness

The community of Jefferson is predominantly Presbyterian or Calvinist, following the strict doctrines of predestination and of original sin, which become its excuse for the persecution of others. Characters in the novel who adopt this puritanical point of view refuse to forgive human frailty or to act with charity. The stern and implacable Eupheus Hines and Simon McEachern, extreme versions of this type of righteousness, insist that they are the representatives of the wrathful God, and so they take it upon themselves to determine Joe's fate. When these two men are disobeyed or thwarted on their path to redemption, they become violent, using Old Testament scriptures as justification. One of the great ironies of the novel is the fact that Joe is named "Christmas" and becomes the character most pursued and ultimately destroyed by Christian faith.

Joanna Burden's faith is just as fanatical but has a different focus. She has been taught through her strict religious upbringing that blacks are God's cursed race and so their torment can never be eased. As her name suggests, she becomes obsessed with the "burden" this ideology places on whites who suffer from the resulting guilt. Her relationship with Joe reflects this sense of righteousness as she struggles to redeem him. Her own guilt over her masochistic sexual relationship with Joe, coupled with his refusal to allow her to impose her spiritual vision on him, eventually results in her death.

Percy Grimm displays a patriotic righteousness as he envisions himself not as God's representative but as America's. Due to their promotion of their own rigid rules of conduct, the people of Jefferson "accepted Grimm with respect and perhaps a little awe as though somehow his vision and patriotism and pride in the town, the occasion, had been quicker and truer than theirs." Grimm's patriotism, like the others' religious righteousness, convinces him that he has the right and obligation to persecute Joe for breaking the rules of a racist white society.

When she discovers that she is pregnant, Lena Grove faces the consequences of religious righteousness when her brother throws her out of the house, but later she is able to exist outside the strict boundaries of its doctrine. She is accepted in Jefferson as an unmarried, pregnant woman, most likely because she has been abandoned by Brown and she tries to convince him to marry her. When she cannot accomplish that goal, she leaves with Byron, moving beyond the reach of the town's rigid views of sexuality.

Misogyny

Misogyny, or the hatred of women, is generated by religious fanaticism and male insecurity, and it often results in violence. Hines allows his daughter to die in childbirth because he spurns her as a whore. When her mother tries to go for a doctor, he aims his shotgun at her and warns, "get back into that house, whore's dam."

McEachern teaches Joe a similar view of women, which is evident in his response to his discovery of menstruation. Like Hines who regards this biological function as "God's abomination of womanflesh," Joe, when told about it by his friends, becomes outraged that women's "smooth and superior shape in which volition dwelled [was] doomed to be at stated and inescapable intervals victims of periodical filth." His obsession with this function turns to outrage. A few weeks later, he shoots a sheep and covers his hands with its blood as it is dying.

Joe's belief that women's biology and sexuality are an abomination results in his attacks on a young black girl and on Bobbie. He savagely beats the black girl with whom his friends encourage him to have sex, and he strikes Bobbie when she tells him that she is menstruating. His attitude toward sex becomes evident when his retreat into the woods after hitting Bobbie becomes a phallic landscape: "he entered, among the hard trunks hardfeeling, hardsmelling," where he envisions "a diminishing row of suavely shaped urns in moonlight, blanched. And not one was perfect. Each one was cracked and from each crack there issued something liquid, deathcolored, and foul." This image of female sexuality causes him to vomit. Ironically, the cessation of menstruation, with its accompanying reduction of sexual desire, is one of the factors that prompt him to kill Joanna.

Joe also rejects feminine compassion as evident in his treatment of Mrs. McEachern, whom he considers an enemy. He refuses to accept her offers of comfort in response to her husband's cruel treatment of him, as when she brings him food after a severe beating, insisting that she wants to weaken him with her pity. As a result, he feels no remorse when he steals money from her.

His self-hatred becomes evident when he beats almost fatally a white prostitute who is not upset when he tells her that he is part black. The thought of a white woman agreeing to have sex with a black man sickens him so much that he stays ill for two years. Joe's misogyny appears to stem from his own victimization by a society that values neither blacks nor women.

Racism

The characters' failure to recognize the humanity and rights of blacks, coupled with their sense of righteousness, leads to Joe's persecution and ultimate destruction. The people of Jefferson have been able to ignore successfully the blacks who live on the margins of their town as long as they keep their distance from the white population. Joe becomes dangerous to them when he crosses this line, so he must be destroyed. Their fear of any black encroachment into white territory is illustrated in their response to Joanna and her ancestors' civil rights activities when they ostracize the former and kill the latter.

The town accepts Eupheus Hines's involvement with the black community because they determine him to be "an old man" whose behavior is "harmless"; however, if a young man acted similarly, he would have been "crucified." As a result, "the town [blinded] its collective eye" to the black women who brought food to Hines and his wife, probably from the white homes in which they cleaned and cooked. The town will not look away, though, when they are told that Joe is black and has murdered the white woman with whom he had a sexual relationship.

Topics for Further Study

• Choose one of the themes discussed in the fiction section and write a poem or a short story that explores that theme in a different way.
• Read another one of Faulkner's works, like Sanctuary, that is set in Jefferson and prepare a PowerPoint presentation about how the setting in each becomes an important part of the work.
• Research and write a report analyzing attitudes toward blacks in the South during the time that the novel was written.
• The novel has never been filmed, probably due to the complexity of its narrative. How would you depict the novel's disrupted chronology and the intertwined stories in a film? Write a screenplay of a portion of the novel that cuts back and forth between at least two characters.