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).   

How did Hightower overcome the traumatic legacy that had him trapped in the past and isolated from Jefferson’s community in order to rejoin the land of the living by the end of the novel?

Sources

Bell, Katie. “Dickens and Faulkner: Saving Joe Christmas.” Dickens after Dickens. White Rose University Press, 2020. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv12fw7r4.8.

Doyle, Laura. “The Body Against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race.” American Literature, vol. 73, no. 2, 2001, pp. 339-364. MUSE.jhu.edu/article/1668.

Feldman, Robert L. Feldman. “In Defense of Reverend Hightower: It Is Never Too Late.” CLA Journal, vol. 29, no. 3, 1986, pp. 352-367. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44321908

Hasratian, Avak. “The Death of Difference in Light in August.” Project Muse, vol. 49, no. 1, 2007, pp. 55-84. MUSE.jhu.edu/article/233131.

Hayes Tully, Susan. “Joanna Burden: ‘It’s the dead folks that do him the damage.’” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4, pp. 355-371. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26475418.

Howell, Elmo. “Reverend Hightower and the Uses of Southern Adversity.” College English, vol. 24, no. 3, 1962, pp. 183-187. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/373282.

            Williams, John S. “’The Final Copper Light of Afternoon’: Hightower’s Redemption.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 13, no. 4, 1968, pp. 205-215. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/440929.

In Benjy’s opening section, the reader, who is suddenly immersed in a cascade of “sights and sounds and events,” learns not only how the thirty-three-year-old Compson brother understands the world around him, but also how he copes with the “anguished loss of his sister” whose return he still awaits (Porter 40-41).  Although he lacks the ability to distinguish between past and present or dream and reality, his capacity for interacting with the world through his senses is profound, probably developed as the result of his mental disability and his incapacity to speak.  This deficit allows him to perceive his surroundings on his own terms without the deceitful interference of others or of constructed language.  Unquestionably, this statement highlights how narrow the band of communication of the civilized adult world is, as nature and childhood are both left behind.

Benjy thrives in the outdoor environment and is in great discomfort indoors, where his family is found.  Brother and sister held hands and “ran through the bright rustling leaves” towards the house, showing the painful transition from the “bright cold” outside to the “dark cold” inside (7).  Outdoors is emotionally vibrant whereas indoors is emotionally stagnant, except for Caddie’s love and care for Benjy.  When Caddy offers to carry Benjy, their mother tells her “Well, I dont want him carried, then.  A five-year-old child.  No, no.  Not in my lap.  Let him stand up” (63).  Mother nature welcomes Benjy unconditionally, but his biological mother does not.  Humans reject, fear, taunt, threaten and torture him.  The incident with the “Burgess” girls, which ends up with Benjy’s castration, demonstrates the result of dread of him―the stranger (52).  In addition, Luster menaces Benjy with future in an asylum, assuring him that it is the place where he will end his days after Caroline’s passing.  “They going to send you to Jackson, where you belong,” says an annoyed caretaker as he “knock[s] the flowers over with his hand,” which demonstrates the lack of security, peace and comfort under the Compson’s roof (54).  Furthermore, a depressive atmosphere reigns indoors, which is embodied by the self-centered adult members of the Compson family who operate almost completely under the influence of alcohol.  There are multiple references to Uncle Maury “putting the bottle back in the sideboard” or “offering his sister a toddy” (5, 7).  But, how does Benjy handle this mistreatment?  By fully engaging with Mother Nature whose warming embrace, especially in the form of flowers, is ever present.

Although Benjy does not interpret the world on the basis of linear time, his experience of the world is more truthful even than Caddy’s.  When the siblings deliver the letter Maury wrote to his lover, Mrs. Patterson, each has a radically different interpretation of the situation.  “Mrs. Patterson came across the garden, running.  When I saw her eyes I began to cry,” says Benjy, using his ability to see people’s souls through their eyes.  In contrast, his sister’s interpretation of the secrecy of the errand is inaccurate, as it is based on a mistaken use of time.  In fact, Caddy unites two things that occur in different moments as if they had happened simultaneously.  “You know what I think it is.  I think it’s a surprise for Mother and Father and Mr. Patterson both,” a conclusion that is based on the fact that “Mr. Patterson sent you some candy” not recently, but “last summer” (13).  Faulkner’s inversion of the expected conclusion reached by these two characters seems to put into question who the real “looney” is” (53).  Is it Benjy or the reader?  In another example, later, an angry Mrs. Patterson, who screams at Benjy, “You idiot” gets her “dress caught on the fence” in a similar fashion to “the deef and dumb” (as Luster describes him) whose memory evokes two similar scenes, one with Luster and the other with Caddy, at the beginning of his narration (13, 49).  Caddy liberates her brother in the memory evoked by Benjy, but Mrs. Patterson remains trapped.  In Roskus’ words, Benjy “know[s] lot more than folks thinks” (31). 

 “The effect [of Benjy’s section] is a vivid but puzzling sensorium” that seems to be screaming at the reader: When did you lose the capacity of interacting with the world around you through your senses? (Porter 40).  “[C]hild or adult, Benjy inhabits a world that is “primitive” in an important way, because his world is one that historical man, as well as individual man, moves away from,” says James M. Mellard in his article entitled “Caliban as Prospero: Benjy and “The Sound and the Fury.”  For Faulkner, “nature [is] the underlying source of humanity, as the seed is of the plant” (Mellard 235).  In short, “Faulkner uses Benjy to “indicate how much baser the corruption of the civilized can be than the bestiality of the natural” (Mellard 243).