Faulkner tends to have women, specifically Caddy, Quentin II, and Lena leave their homes and embrace their sexuality. Something that in the south has a load of cultural taboo and stigma attached to it. However, the text seems to imply that throwing away traditional femininity leads to having a better life. This can be seen when the librarian notes the reason why Dilsey pretended not to see the picture: “that was it she didn’t want to see it know whether it was Caddy or not because she knows Caddy doesn’t want to be saved hasn’t anything anymore worth being saved for nothing worth being lost that she can lose” (TSAF 338). With each of these characters, I wonder to what extent they play with their gender roles and how it affects their place in society versus their own personal happiness. To find evidence, I will look for secondary sources on Ebrary about Faulkner’s relationships to women and on the southern standards placed on women. My primary sources will involve anything relevant to Caddy, Quentin II, Lena, and Addie.

In his article Passing for Black: Anti-Miscegenation Hysteria and Undercover Operation in William Faulkner’s Light in August Kwangsoon Kim discusses many of the important themes in this novel like race, discrimination, and racial identity. These themes shape the novel, to include another major element and consequence of prejudice—racial passing. In his essay, Kim discusses the character of Joe Christmas, a character whose mixed heritage causes him to be immersed in this almost palpable strangeness and mystery; “ Christmas does have a claim to some kind of blackness, whether biological , physical, cultural, or what. Thus, Faulkner scholars have inevitably had their attention drawn to the constructed nature of racial identity in Light in August. There is no doubt that Christmas’s elusive racial identity interrogates and deconstructs the racial essentialism on which Southern society stood…the novel is full of evidence that Christmas feels that blackness is something that he should repress and negate”. (Kim 189) This novel endures because of its exploration of racial identity, mixed identity, and racism, making it a relevant work even today, almost 90 years after its publication. Many moments through out the novel we see Joe Christmas’s attempt to deny and suppress his “blackness”. Christmas, cannot reconcile his dual or split identity, and we follow his many moments of frustration, confusion, and fear. Joe Christmas seeks peace from his internal struggle, as he often says“All I wanted was peace” (AILD 112 ). As Kim reminds us, “Christmas does have a claim to some kind of blackness” yet, he is not able to accept this “blackness”, evidence of this is when Joe feels instantly relieved to be on the right (white) side of town. “Then he became cool. The negro smell, the negro voices, were behind, and below him now.” (AILD 115) At the heart of this novel, we have the contextual “racial essentialism on which Southern society stood”, yet, these themes of racial identity, mixed identity, and the feelings that accompany racial division/discrimination, go beyond the South. Theses societal maladies haven’t just affected the South, they surpass the history of the South, – they have in fact persevered to our modern society. This is why this novel continues to inform our discourse of race, mixed identity, and the complexities associated with dual identities. Throughout Faulkner’s narrative, Joe desperately searches for his place in society, yet his entire life he is only viewed as a stranger, and an enigma. Joe wants peace, yet sadly he doesn’t find it, partially because he doesn’t ever accept who he is. As long as he is in denial of his mixed heritage, he’ll never have the peace he wants so badly. As Kim discusses in his essay “Christmas has taken a role of a self-anointed upholder of racial lines” (Kim 190) yet at what cost? The internal racial conflict that Christmas suffers consumes him, and this novel is a powerful reminder of the pernicious affects of hiding from who we really are.

Kim, Kwangsoon. Passing for Black: Anti-Miscegenation Hysteria and Undercover Operation in William Faulkner’s Light in August CLA Journal Vol. 61, No. 3 (March 2018), pp. 188-206 (19 pages)

First, the facts. No one who sees Joe Christmas as an adult thinks he might anything but white. His only evidence for believing his is part black seems to be that the other children at the orphanage, and the dietician call him the n-word. We know that he does not know from his conversation with Joanna Burden. He tells her one of his parents was part black, and when she asks how he knows, he tells her he does not: “He didn’t answer for some time. Then he said: ‘I dont know it.’ Again his voice ceased; by its sound she knew that he was looking away, toward the door. His face was sullen, quite still. Then he spoke again, moving; his voice now had an overtone, unmirthful yet quizzical, at once humorless and sardonic: “If I’m not, damned if I haven’t wasted a lot of time.’ ” (586)

Near the end of the novel, we find that his mother was Milly Hines and father was a traveling circus worker. His father may actually have been part black, according to Milly’s mother Mrs Hines, who reports in a conversation with Byron and Rev. Hightower that the circus owner told her as much (678). Though we might doubt the veracity of this report, as Mrs. Hines does herself, the matter is largely irrelevant inasmuch as Christmas does not have access to this information until possibly the last few days of his life.

So why doesn’t Joe attempt to pass as white? More curiously, why does he hang on to his possible mixed-race heritage as though it were a certain fact? From his conversation with Joanna, he is intellectually aware of the possibility he may be all white, but he quickly dismisses the idea and it never comes up again. This seems to be to be the deepest mystery of the novel. I would propose that if Joe clings to the supposition that he is of mixed-race heritage, despite lack of tangible evidence and at considerable cost to himself, he must be getting some kind of benefit, consciously or unconsciously, from the supposition.

How would this work? Well, I’m still trying to figure that out, and I’m planning to explore my ideas more fully in the final paper, but here’s a quick sketch of my current theory.

As a young child, Joe interrupts the dietician in flagrante delicto, and when he is discovered, she calls him “you little n***** bastard!” The dietician is as much of a mother-figure as Joe has in his life, and her rejection of him is now linked explicitly to his ambiguous ethnic heritage. According to psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, in her seminal essay “Envy and Gratitude,” when a young child feels rejected rejected by the good object (i.e. the mother), the child fantasizes about spoiling the object, attacking it and ruining it for everyone else. This is Klein’s definition of envy, which goes beyond our usual use of the term. In Joe’s case, the scope of his envy seems to encompass all aspects of femininity, external and internal. Instances of Joe’s animus toward the feminine are too numerous to count. His method of spoilage is (the possibility of) his mixed-race heritage–the perfect weapon, since it was implicated in his initial rejection, and then reinforced with his experiences with Bobbie. Nearly everyone Joe tells about his heritage (as though it were a fact) is a woman with whom he’s had sex. In many instances he does so explicitly to get a negative reaction. And in order to make this fantasy of pollution as realistic as possible, he has to believe it himself. A consequence of Kleinian envy is guilt, and even before he murders Joanna Burden we can extrapolate through the life that he lives that Joe has little regard for himself. The certainty of mixed-race heritage then serves a dual purpose, as a way of punishing himself as well.

With Joanna Burden, he finds a woman that accepts him, and especially accepts his desire to spoil her, since she seems to share the same fantasy, crying out “negro” when they have sex. This alleviates Joe’s guilt somewhat, and gives him a safe space to begin to process his feeling about himself and race, at one point ruminating uncharacteristically, ” ‘Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?’ ” (589) When Joanna’s sexual desire for him flags, however, the hatred returns, both inwardly and outwardly directed, with disastrous consequences.