Sources’ Summary that Will Be Used in the Final Research Paper on Reverend Gail Hightower (Note: the text in italics belongs to the cited paper while the other text belongs to me; this means that I won’t use quotation marks)
West, Ray B. Jr. “Faulkner’s Light in August: A View of Tragedy.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5-12. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable /1207135.
William Faulkner’s principal subject in all his fiction has been the rise and decline of Southern society. At its best, this society contained energy, honesty, and beauty; yet even at its height it embodied the seeds of failure in its history of human injustice in dealing with the native Indians and its Negro slaves. The weakness of this society consisted, in part, in its very aristocratic ideals, which denied the possibility of change, and the drama of most of Faulkner’s works results from this attitude; an attitude of arrogance towards the inevitable movement of time; a pride in the society it had created, which is both admirable and tragic, but doomed (West 5).
This is a very interesting point as Faulkner parallels Hightower with post bellum Southern society in their “denial of change” and “the inevitable passage of time”, reflected in his perpetual reliving of his grandfather’s exploits in the Civil War.
At its most general, then, Faulkner’s problem is one of permanence and change. It presents a contrast between a view of life as static, therefore putting little emphasis upon time, and a view that sees life as in constant flux… Yet whenever one of his characters attempted to remain in the world of past values, the result was, at its worst, pathetic, at its best, almost tragic (West 6).
Hightower is one of Faulkner’s characters that chooses to remain in the past and mentally revive, by the elevated window at twilight in his house of Jefferson, a moment his grandfather participated in the Civil War (although he was killed soon after the event Hightower rememorates, stealing chickens in a coop). In this case, there is no doubt that “both characters and events were celebrating a way of life that was dead or dying; they were not prefiguring a world that lived or promised to live” (West 6).
“Light in August, where the expiatory figure of Joe Christmas, combined with the innocent faith of Lena Grove, provide a moving and eloquent (though not uncomplicated) image of sacrifice and regeneration”―both sacrifice and regeneration replicate in Gail Hightower’s life, whose unresolved ills led to an isolated martyrdom that it is reversed by the end of the novel (West 6).
“Hightower had come originally as the minister of a local congregation in Jefferson, because the town had been forever imprinted in his mind as the scene of his grandfather’s heroic action during the Civil War, when he had come as one of a daring band of horsemen to burn the stores of the occupying General Grant. Hightower’s obsession with the past amounted to a fink of madness that tinctured his religion and drove his wife to debauchery and death” (West 9).
This quotation fits my paper (maybe part of it) because it explains the past event and Hightower’s fixation with it, as his grandfather is depicted as some brave hero of the South. His disregard of the ignoble end which his grandfather met (chicken stealing) reflects his denial of the realities of the death of the Southern way of life.
“It was like I was the woman and she was the man:” Boundaries, Portals, and Pollution in Light in August. Watkins, Ralph. The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 11-24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20078093.
This paper establishes that “beneath the apparent relations of society and community there exists a “structure of unconscious categories, which exercises powerful influence over human behavior” (Watkins 11). Watkins then indicates that “[t]he central theme of Light in August is not the individualized condition of alienated persons or outsiders but the placelessness of persons who have, either through their own efforts or because of some twist of fate, become located in the margins of society” (Watkins 11). Hightower illustrates the latter as he seeks to revive the grandfather’s role in the Civil War. Symbolic anthropology explains “the various ways in which a person or persons, places, and things become liminal―that is, at or on the threshold or boundary of a given social structure―occupying a status or place that is outside the normal patterning of society and, therefore, appearing to be placeless or perpetually out of place (Watkins 12). Hightower fails to conform to the chivalrous ideal of the Southern gentlemen, driving his wife to look outside the marriage for fulfillment and relegating him to outsider status amidst the definitions of polite Southern society. In Jefferson, outcasts exist in direct opposition to Southern honor, as there are those who are constantly watching to ensure the forces of propriety in a determined society are obeyed: Doc Hines is representative of this archetype. “Honor may be seen as a people’s theology, a set of prescriptions endowed with an almost sacred symbolism, whose chief aim was to protect the individual, family, group, or race from the greatest dread that its adherents could imagine,” Under the guise of maintaining honor, all the vile undercurrents of intolerance can be swept in order to “protect” the community from these “greatest dread” (non-traditional gender roles, racial equality), relationships inconceivable to the Southern sensibility, from which the group would need protection.
This paper explains how the novel even though it was written during the Great Depression, it does not allude to it: the long history of labor struggle in the Southern timber industry is not even mentioned (Neilson 446). Yet Light in August show the determining power of a very different kind of history. Hightower, who grew to ‘manhood among phantoms, and side by side with a ghost’ (474) and who preached sermons ‘full of galloping cavalry and defeat and glory’ (63), is defined by struggle with his grandfather’s martial legacy. History as ever in Faulkner’s fiction shapes the present. But in LIA this history appears in the form of romantic legend, a patrimony of honor haunting both Hightower and the South. “A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage… It’s the dead ones… that he can’t escape from” (75). This paper, in this quoted section, highlights many aspects related to Hightower that are relevant to my thesis, such as his fight with the past and his emotional incapacity of disconnecting with the dead; therefore, he neglects his present life.
Another point that the paper makes, though small but I will use it anyway, is the author’s own fears for the upcoming change that is reflected in LIA. The authors say: we see the novel as decidedly anti-radical, and thus mirroring Faulkner’s own fear of radical change (448).
