Joe Christmas is a threat. He cannot be claimed or tamed by any community because he refuses to signify himself as black or white and take an assigned place in a group. John T. Matthews notes Faulkner’s focus in Light In August on the “ways societies reproduce themselves” necessitating that individuals accept “communal conventions through volitional acts of identification with the possibilities on offer” (Seeing Through the South 165). Communities exist through shared signifiers that separate “us” from “them.” Though some variance across the signified may be tolerated, borders must be identified. The borders of the small Southern town of Jefferson that the “rootless” Joe Christmas wanders into are strained by, “new historical conditions” and “anomalous individuals” (Matthews 165). Eric J. Sundquist highlights the centrality of the racial line in LIA, noting that the novel was published in 1932 appearing “approximately at the crest of a forty-year wave of Jim Crow laws that grew in part out of a threatened economy, in part out of increasingly vocal demands for black equality during and after World War I, and in greater part out of reawakened racist fears that had … simmered restlessly for a generation between Reconstruction and the twentieth century” (The House Divided 68). These tensions pressurize LIA and intensify the danger from any outsider who is unidentifiable, unlabeled, and unsignifiable, threatening the fragile stability of this community warped by racist fear.

Byron Bunch describes Joe Christmas’s face as “parchment color” and notes that his arrival in town only draws attention from the mill workers when his odd name can’t be classified (33-34). Christmas is the blank page that must be written upon, but there is no word for him. It is the failure of a signifier, language that will classify him, that dooms Joe Christmas. There is no word to signify his place, he is alien, outside definition. We have seen in the story of the Hightowers that this community punishes those who will not conform. Faulkner highlights Joe Christmas as a dangerous blank in the scene where he is caught in the headlights of an oncoming car and watches “his body grow white out of the darkness like a kodak print emerging from the liquid” (108). This is one of Faulkner’s many uses of light and dark in the novel to complicate the binary of black and white and the inherent interdependence and shifting borders of these signifiers. Sundquist interprets this scene and the anxiety of “passing” the color boundary it generates as a “figure of simultaneous concealment and revelation, a figure that marks with explosive precision, at a point of passing from one to the other, the ambiguity of Joe Christmas, who—like Jim Crow, yet with the doubled ironic pressure of already appearing to be what he must but cannot become—virtually is a figure rather than a person” (Sundquist 71). Joe Christmas is both black and white and neither, he is a threat to the boundaries of the community and embodies its fear and trauma. He is an example of the paradox of the fluid boundary and the forbidden mixing of signifiers.

As a figure and not a person Joe Christmas is one-dimensional and has no depth. He cannot become a person without a signifier, without a word to define him. Joe Christmas has not been integrated into society, moving from orphan to adopted son to violent nomad, he has been warped, like his society, into a twisted fear of race and sexuality. The distortions of his traumatized society alienate Joe Christmas as he searches for his signifiers, but rejects choosing. Matthews describes socialization as the process by which “individuals become aware of the possibilities they have been trained to believe they must choose among,” followed by a “process of recognition” where “each subject answers a call to claim certain elements of identity, to personalize a script from the social archive” (Matthews 169). Joe Christmas cannot choose, cannot write the script that socializes him. Again it is signifiers that fail, language is insufficient to identify Joe Christmas.

Faulkner’s focus on the modernist struggle of language and meaning, between signifier and signified is written into the scene where Joe Christmas sits in the woods reading a magazine. The moment is pastorally described as this “yellow day opening peacefully … into a still chiaroscuro without urgency” (111). Faulkner’s use of the word “chiaroscuro” here is interesting. Chiaroscuro in visual art is a technique that uses light and dark shading to create depth and dimension. But, as we’ve seen, Christmas is a figure who cannot achieve depth through shading or highlighting, since he refuses any core identity to be accentuated. As he eats his breakfast of a tin of potted meat (111) [Does anyone else see Leopold Bloom: “What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete. With it an abode of bliss” (Ulysses 61)?] the act of reading gives him hope, but it is a false and fleeting hope. The murder of Joanna Burden is just a couple of days away. Time is suspended for a moment as Christmas is “arrested and held immobile by a single word which had perhaps not yet impacted, his whole being suspended by the single trivial combination of letters in quiet and sunny space, so that hanging motionless and without physical weight he seemed to watch the slow flowing of time beneath him, thinking    All I wanted was peace    thinking, ‘She ought not to started praying over me’” (112). Christmas’s reading of the magazine is Faulkner’s text acknowledging itself as words on a page, black ink on a white page attempting to create a world. Faulkner cannot write out the seething rage of racial history and the fear generated by shifts in modern society, they are written into this community. Faulkner suspends the relentless forward movement of time in this novel to prompt the reader to experience herself as reader, reading his text, and then reading the text through Christmas’s reading, as he oddly reads a magazine as a novel. Finishing “the last and final page, the last and final word,” Christmas strikes a match and lights fire to the magazine, destroying the word that held him, prefiguring the lack of and power of the words that doom him. Another light in August burns. Matthews said of Faulkner’s sentences that they arced across centuries and uncannily rendered “characters’ private thoughts as readable script” in his “nearly inhuman devotion to making language exceed itself” (Seeing Through the South 5). Joe Christmas exists as the signifier of the South that is the fire consuming itself in the early twentieth century.

Works Cited

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Matthews, John T. William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Sundquist, Eric J. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

In the third paragraph of The Light in August, the reader encounters the first neologism of Faulkner’s text, wherein he describes “a bugswirled kerosene lamp” (4). This is the first of many such coinages, all of which are immediately understandable compounds, and most of which, as it turns out, are decidedly less poetic. In the first chapter alone, Faulkner describes:

• “a stumppocked scene of profound and peaceful desolation” (5)
• “a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars” (7)
• “slow and mileconsuming clatter” (10)
• “heavy, manlooking shoes” (11)
• “sagging and brokenspringed seat” (12)
• “distance perhaps roadcarved and definite” (13)
• “inwardlistening deliberation” (15)
• “shirt of sweatfaded blue” (16)
• “manhard, workhard [woman]” (16)
• “an inwardlighted quality of tranquil and calm unreason” (18)
• “hunched, bleacheyed” (24)
• “slowspitting and squatting men” (26)

There are also a few places where Faulkner semi-coins a word by eliding a space or a dash. These, too, are usually adjectives. They include “Postoffice Department annals” (5); “apparitionlike suddenness” (5); “labor- and childridden wife” (5); “a leanto room” (5); and the least characteristic “eggmoney” (21), which is a noun. There are only two other places where Faulkner coins nouns in the first chapter: he writes of “the bleak heritage of his bloodpride” (6) and how “she sat down on the ditchbank” (7).

The vast majority of Faulkner’s neologisms are adjectives, and among these, the majority include verbs in their construction. These are active adjectives, that specify exactly what kind of swirling, wheeling, pocking, listening, and spitting is going on. Looking at the above list, too, one is struck by how characteristic of Faulkner’s setting and characters the above coinages feel: they describe work, wear, imperfections; landscapes and clothing that are worn, bleached, desolate, and masculine.

Perhaps the most famous neologist of the previous century – whose works were not published until the 1918, making him an odd sort of almost-contemporary of Faulkner’s – Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of “disremembering,” “beak-leaved boughs dragonish”, “throughther” “tool-smooth,” “selfstrung, selfwrung” (“Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”); “heaven-roysterers,” “roughcast,” “Shivelights and shadowtackle,” “yestertempest,” “manmarks treadmire,” “Footfretted,” “clearest-selved,” “firedint,” “Manshape (“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection”); “dovewinged,” “Carrier-witted,” “womb-life” (“The Wreck of the Deutschland”) and more. In reading his poetry (and there is some reason to think that Faulkner also read it), one can sense how Hopkins must coin new words to encompass his sense of the sublime, and of the destructive, awe-inspiring beauty of nature that seems to call for the invention of a new language, a new grammar, a new sense of rhyme, a new way of counting meter. Hopkins does all of these things, with extraordinary results.

But what becomes evident through this comparison to Hopkins is the strangeness of Faulkner’s neologisms: Faulkner insists upon the same necessity of invention to describe the mundane, the worn, the everyday. Faulkner is also largely describing landscapes, but in something of the opposite way: his coinages insist on the non-sublime, on the mundane and worn, on the everyday, the broken, and the ugly. Hopkins writes of “Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; / And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim”, while Faulkner writes of a “stumpocked scene” (5) and a “sagging and brokenspringed seat” (12). Hopkins elevates the mundane; Faulkner insists upon it, with the occasional flash of poetry  (“inwardlighted” [18]).

It would be easy to suggest that in coining new words to describe his Yoknapatawphan landscapes, Faulkner is working to elevate the everyday, to make it worthy of a second look and closer examination. But this does not feel quite right. Rather, Faulkner’s language–even the coinages–seems decidedly everyday, familiar rather than sublime. To write of a “Postoffice Department” or “eggmoney” rather than “Post office” and “egg money” – it’s as though Faulkner gently picked up part of American English and rotated it a few degrees before setting it back down again, much as he does when he turns Lafayette County into Yoknapatawpha, and Oxford into Jefferson. And his coinages are generally more concentrated in the early pages of each chapter, as though to signify to that the reader that they are in a different but familiar place.

In the sixth chapter of Light In August Faulkner begins the chapter with the line “Memory believes before knowing remembers.” This perplexing line is the opening to a childhood story of Joe Christmas, an equally perplexing man. The placement of this line is significant to the beginning of the story of Joe Christmas, a man who has to rely on his subjective memory since he knows so little about himself.

In order to understand this quote I think it needs to be broken down by each word. Memory is the subjective recollection of a personal event. Belief (Believe) is when you have faith that something happened, even when you don’t necessarily have the facts to back it up. Knowing is the understanding of something as a fact and certainty. Remembers is a present realization of a memory. Given a break down of these words and the story that follows I take the line to mean that in order to know something you first have to believe the memory of it as a fact. However, given that memory is subjective you can never really know something to be real or not, which is shown through the incident between Joe Christmas and the dietitian.

What seems like an insignificant event of a child sneaking off to taste some toothpaste became the moment that created the woman hating Christmas we see as an adult. Since we are presented with this memory in a third person narrative we get both sides of the story, which shows how subjective memory can be. On pages 124-125 we see a moment where the dietitian tries to bribe 5 year old Christmas but he doesn’t take the bribe. She asks “Are you going to tell?” to which he thinks “that anyone should have known that the last thing in the world he would do would be to tell about the toothpaste, the vomit.” And when she tried to give him the dollar the text says “He didn’t know what she wanted him to do” (125). To the dietitian this was the moment when she caught 5 year old Christmas snuck into her room to spy on her and watch her get intimate with a man, and she bribed him to keep quiet. However, to Christmas this was the moment when he got in trouble for eating toothpaste and someone tried to give him money for reasons he could not figure out.

This chapter also gave us reasoning behind why Christmas thinks he is black. Since Christmas does not know anything about himself, including his racial background or even his birth name, everything he knows about himself is from the memories of how other people treated him. In the orphanage he gets called “nigger” by the other children, though they also know nothing of his racial background. When the dietician hears this she brings it to the attention of the matron so he can be sent to a black orphanage so she doesn’t have to worry about him telling on her. Though he was only five years old at the time, remembering it as an adult it signifies the time when he was removed from somewhere (the orphanage he grew up in) because of the color of his skin.

In this chapter we have a little boy sneaking around, being called nigger, and being mistreated by a woman. These memories developed into Christmas’s truths about him self. From this memory he knows that he must stay in the shadows, distrust women, and acknowledge that he is black. He believes in these memories and they become his knowlege. exp

[Blog 4]

The way in which the character Joe Christmas interacts with his adopted parents demonstrates that he is most comfortable viewing and dealing with the world in a purely rational manner and on a physical, rather than emotional, plane.  Despite the master/slave dynamic that exists between father and son, the novel reveals that they understand one another in a way that is inaccessible to the mother.  The young Christmas’ relationship with his adopted mother is strained largely because of the emotion that she brings to it.  Evidence of his preference for the logical and dislike of the emotional is visible in this character’s interactions with others in the novel.

Joe Christmas’ relationship with his father is characterized by a mutual understanding that each share concerning the logic of action and reaction.  Reason brings a set of stable and predictable expectations to their interactions.  It forms something of a contract or agreement between these two characters since both can expect that certain actions on the boy’s part will elicit specific reactions on McEachern’s part.  The novel reads, “The man [McEachern]…merely depended on him to act in a certain way and to receive the as certain reward or punishment, just as he [Christmas] could depend on the man to react in a certain way to his own certain doings and misdoings” (LIA 168).  For instance, when the boy fails to learn his religious lesson, he incurs a severe beating from his father.  The young Christmas accepts and complies with this punishment since this is the determined consequence of his failure.  This action/reaction dynamic forms a seal or bond between the father and son that the mother cannot penetrate.  When she attempts to interrupt an impending beating by calling out “Pa,” both men completely ignore her.  The novel registers their mutual complicity and disregard for Mrs. McEachern as it reads, “Neither of them so much as looked at her.  They might not have heard, she might not have spoken, at all” (LIA 148).  Furthermore, the way that the punishment is accepted and doled out without emotion indicates the purely rational grounds on which they interact.  This interaction resembles the matter-of-fact way that Joe Christmas performs his work and relates with others at the mill.  He arrives on time, speaks little, and works steadily—i.e. with a “brooding and savage steadiness” (LIA 39)—in exchange for a definite amount of pay.  The only time he does speak is to ask Byron Bunch how much the mill compensates for overtime (LIA 35).  Christmas performs the action (work) in order to exact a specific reaction (pay).

In addition to its rational nature, the relationship between McEachern and Joe Christmas is largely physical.  Because the father approaches the boy on a physical level, he does not engage the mental process that would promote conscientiousness and respect for the boy.  Such a process would likely invite temperance on the part of the father, the physically stronger party.  Instead, he exercises extreme dominance over the boy simply because he is physically superior and hence can do so.  And, Joe accepts his punishment knowing that he is the weaker party.  This arrangement provides a stable relationship framework between the man and boy.  It is not until the child ages and presumably presents a stronger physical challenge to his father that McEachern curbs his physical abuse.  This occurs when McEachern discovers that Christmas sold his cow and lied about it.  His father strikes him twice but stops when the son warns, “Don’t you hit me again” (LIA 165).

While his father’s purely physical behavior offers a constant set of expectations for the boy, his mother’s affection introduces an element of emotion that the boy reviles.  The novel contrasts his feelings towards his parents in this way: “It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice…He expected no less, and so he was neither outraged nor surprised.  It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men” (LIA 168-169).  Christmas believes that the emotional element that the woman brings to interpersonal relations constitutes an added complication that muddies the interaction.  He claims that the woman adds a “faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions” (LIA 168).  The boy despises the emotional kindness that his adopted mother shows him.  He illustrates this by dumping out the tray of food she covertly offers him.  Accepting the food without McEachern’s knowledge would have bound Christmas to a contract of secrecy and trust with the mother.  Mrs. McEachern already forces him into such an agreement when she shows him her secret monetary savings hidden in the attic.  Forced to maintain this secret, the boy finds himself mentally subject to his mother’s power and dominance since divulging the secret would subject himself and his mother to the father’s wrath.  Also, the woman’s show of compassion constitutes another form of subjection in the way it coerces a sense of indebtedness on the recipient’s part.  This element of power, woven into the act of compassion, is likely part of what causes Christmas to reject Bunch’s offer of food stating, “I aint hungry.  Keep your muck” (LIA 35).  Accepting the food would demand an emotional bond—however slight—between the men thereby tainting and introducing a power dynamic into Joe’s straightforward and rational relationship with Bunch and his workplace.

Through his relationship with his parents, the novel reveals that Joe Christmas prefers physical and rational over mental and emotional forms of interaction.  Such relationship styles are turn up in his interactions with other characters throughout the novel.  For example, like his relationship with his mother, Joe Christmas is disturbed by Miss Burden’s show of compassion when she starts “praying over” him (LIA 106).  Instead, similar to his relationship with his father, he seems most comfortable maintaining a physical, sexual relationship with her in which he can “waken her with his hard brutal hand and sometimes take her as hard and as brutally before she was good awake” (LIA 106).

In his nobel awarded novel Light in August, William Faulkner interweaves characters’ conflicts into intricate parallel plots and sub-plots. Lena Grove’s fist journey in search of her alleged Lucas Burch and her complete unawareness of his treachery and denial to recognize his untrustworthiness sets the tone for Hightower’s dilemma and Joe Christmas’s anger outburst. It is through Jefferson’s ‘rumor cycle’ that Faulkner develops his different yet similar characters’ conflicts and their struggle through unawareness, denial and acceptance.

Lena’s justification of Lucas Burch’s absence reflects her willing unawareness of her situation,  her dialogue with Mrs.Armstid highlights her blinded views of Lucas Burch ” Like as not, he already sent me the word and it got lost on the way.”(p.19) and “But me and Lucas do not need no word promises between us.”(p.20) She even gives him credit for leaving her because “Lucas always did like excitement.He never did like to live quiet. That’s why it never suited him back at Doane’s Mill. Why he-we decided to make a change: for money and excitement.”(p.25)  Faulkner emphasizes this state of unawareness with his repetition of ” she is not listening….she is not thinking”(p.260). The “he-we decided” sums it all.

The murmuring gossip around Lena’s pregnancy and her gullible search for the ‘trustworthy’ Lucas Burch is but a preparation to the’ barbershop mentality’ we will face in Jefferson. Through the name switch between Burch and Bunch, Faulkner introduces the Jefferson community, a community which lives on cycles of rumors where each member performs his expected role in the cycle till the rumor rests and settles to an accepted end. The symbolic significance of names is clear and builds up the knots that are intermingled between the different characters. Joe Christmas’s name ties up with his search of his true identity. “He was left on the doorstep here on Christmas eve will be five years this two weeks.”(p.142) ” Christmas. A heathenish name. Scrilege. I will change that.”(p.144) “My name ain’t McEachern. My name is Christmas. There was no need to bother about that yet. There was plenty of time.”(p.145) It seems that in Chapter 6 & 7, Christams had ample of time and reasons to prove that he was Christmas and not  McEachern. It was a pleasing moment to have Faulkner present Mrs. McEachern as the only one who could reach out to Christmas and attempt to break this detaching cycle.” It is she who trusted him, who insisted on trusting him as she insisted on his eating: by conspiracy, in secret, making a secret of the very fact which the act of trusting was supposed to exemplify.”(p.168)

However, Hightower’s reaction to his wife’s scandal exemplifies the willing unawareness, denial and acceptance. ” Soon they didn’t even see the minister’s wife on the street anymore. And he still acting like there was nothing wrong.”(p.62)  Same as Lena, he tried to justify his wife’s absence ” he would tell that she had gone to visit her people downstate somewhere.”(p.63) Then, with his wife’s church outbreak and her constant blasphemy and tragic death, his denial felt out of place. ” They said he was not watching his congregation leaving; he was not looking at anything.”(p.68). Finally, Hightower was left to live in his high tower when Jefferson’s rumor cycle reached its final destination ” As though the entire affair had been a lot of people performing a play and that now and at last they had all played out their parts which had been alloted to them and now they could live quietly with one another.”(p.73) I wonder how the Jefferson community would have ended their Hightower rumor cycle, had he agreed on leaving the town? Would they have still accepted his story and his wife’s as part of Jefferson’s life? or Would it have been easier to cast them as outsiders and continue the act with the Utopia facade projected in everyone’s mind?

Race relations in Jefferson are toxic to sat the least. While Brown is being interrogated it’s clear to the reader that there is more to the story than Brown lets on. He is talking faster and faster and is really trying to implicate Christmas. As soon as Brown is in a bind he pulls out his secret weapon, Christmas’ racial identity. Even though Brown appears to be guilty, the marshal says, “You better be careful what you are saying if it is a white man you are talking about, I don’t care if he is a murderer or not” (LIA, 98). This moment highlights the severity of the race relations in Jefferson. Even though Christmas is being accused of murder, accusing him of being black is just (if not more severe) than being accused of being a murderer. Jefferson’s racial divide separates and alienates black townspeople as well as people that don’t prescribe to the town’s views (Hightower, Burden, Christmas, Lena).
Focusing on the alienation I was drawn to Joanna Burden. She was elusive in the first couple chapters. Everything we know about Burden is through word of mouth. As the reader, I felt like one of the gossiping town members about what Burden does in that house all alone. Joanna Burden like her name is a Burden to the town of Jefferson. Her identity as a Northerner (even though she has lived in the town her whole life) and her relationship with black townspeople isolates her and puts her in this ostracized part of town.

Byron tells the Lena Burden’s story, about her family’s involvement with the Reconstruction and her relationship to African Americans in the town. He ends with, “Folks says she claims that niggers are the same as white folks. That’s why folks don’t never go out there. Except one” (LIA, 53). Burden is physically isolated, by living in a house outside of town. She is also isolated from other people in town. No one goes to visit her or speaks to her accept the two misfits in Jefferson, Christmas, and Brown. The reader sees the extent of the isolation after the fire, it is said that Burden was hurt in the fire multiple times. But, it isn’t until Byron is telling his account that the reader finds out that she was a little more than hurt. The ostracization of Burden pushes the town to not burden themselves with what happened to her. She is more of a mythological creature or an idea than an actual person in these early chapters. She is considered a thing rather than a human. She is in the distant background of the minds of the townspeople.

When they find her body in the house Faulkner writes, “So he run back into the house and up the stairs again and into the room and jerked a cover off the bed and rolled her onto it and caught up the corners and swung it onto his back like a sack of meal and carried it out of the house and laid it down under a tree” (LIA, 92). Burden in one sentence is reduced to an ‘it’. She is rolled up into a blanket and her ‘self’ is reduced to a sack of meal. She is metaphorical ‘meal’ for the town. The town salivates and gorges on the gossip and reputation of Joanna Burden.

Ultimately, Burden’s borders between the African American sphere as well as the white sphere in this novel. She cannot successfully habitate both spheres. She is an object in both of them. She is an object of gossip and obsession in the white sphere and an object of obsession and wealth in the African American sphere (specifically with Christmas).

In the novel, Light in August, Faulkner questions why we help others. I think other characters see something in Lena they neither know nor understand, but nonetheless admire it anyway. Because they do not understand her, their words and thoughts evoke pity, they think her looking for the man who is the father of her unborn child is a useless, ridiculous idea, because they think he left her by choice. In spite of this, their actions are to help her, as if they disapprove of what she is doing, think it a hopeless cause, but her unusual unflagging determination still draws them to her. She repeats over and over how “‘Folks have been kind. They have been right kind”’ (12). She does not ask for help, and I do not think she expects it from everyone, but neither is she surprised when people do. When she encounters Armstid as he is driving his wagon, it is without hesitation that he stops the wagon to let her get on,
“And no one could have known that he had ever looked at her either as, without any semblance of progress in either of them, they draw slowly together as the wagon crawls terrifically along toward her in its slow palpable aura of somnolence and red dust in which the steady feet of the mules move dreamlike and punctuate by the sparse jingle of harness and the limber bobbing of jackrabbit ears, the mules neither asleep nor awake as he halts them” (11).
When he learns she is trying to get to Jefferson, he insists she sleep at his house for the night. Faulkner has him think something interesting on this ride home, about how once a woman gets in “trouble” like Lena, it is expected that all men help her since it was a man’s fault for getting her into said trouble in the first place, “Her own self one of the first ones to cut the ground from under a sister woman, she’ll walk the public country herself without shame because she knows that folks, menfolks, will take care of her” (14).  It seems like everyone will help, but women do not feel the emotional pity for Lena the same way men might.  It is an interesting comparison between the genders in seeing how or why they help Lena.
It makes me wonder what, if anything, Faulkner is trying to say about human nature and relationships. The characters in the book so far do not seem particularly friendly or generous, with a few exceptions, but they almost all help Lena in one way or another, without really thinking about it. Or maybe they are thinking about it, are aware of their inward desire to help her, do not like this awareness, but cannot help but help her anyway. When Armstid brings Lena to his house and his wife Martha, he is aware that she will help Lena without question, but not happily, “I reckon I do know what Martha’s going to say. I reckon womenfolks are likely to be good without being very kind” (12). And Martha does help. Not only does she host Lena for the night, she gives her all the money she has from selling eggs, money that she was probably saving for a long time. But she refuses to say goodbye to Lena the next day, as if she is embarrassed for helping her, or, angry with herself for helping.
Maybe what they admire is her simple unwillingness to be the damsel in distress. Women in similar situations to Lena’s, unmarried pregnant women, most of the time accept that the man will not be coming back for them, they accept this as a fact they cannot do anything about, and so they do nothing. Lena is different. Whether or not she believes what she tells people about how sure she is Lucas would come back for her, she does not just accept his leaving her to a fate of unwed mothership. It is unclear so far if Faulkner is praising humanity or criticizing it, so I am interested in how Lena’s journey will end.