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.

…bet you never thought you’d see that title, I bet. Florencia sent me a link to this bit from SNL, which is especially relevant in light of the section of the novel we read for yesterday, in which blackness seems to infect Christmas’s feet and grow, zombie-like, upwards.

Here the story is the same, if the mood is comic rather than tragic. If nothing else, the skit pulls back the veil that might make us thing that the citizens of Jefferson express ideas about race that are utterly foreign to 2020…

Christmas fetishizes his formative years by living out his traumatic experiences from the  eyes of the oppressor. This is first made apparent in the barn where Christmas’s friends are having their right of passage. This journey looks different for Christmas because to him becoming a man means only reclaiming the violence that his foster father put on to him. The adult in Christmas’s life beats him and so to stop being a child and taking pain he must instead cause this pain. Christmas stops thinking as “Something is going to happen to me” (ALIA  p109) and starts thinking “I’m going to do something”. This desire was made apparent when described “there was something in him trying to get out, like when he had used to think of toothpaste”. (ALIA  p103) Violence was engraved into Christmas and the satisfaction and sense of relief Christmas received from not being the victim for once got associated in his mind with a sexual desire. 

Christmas doesn’t always seek control though. The afore mentioned toothpaste incident was Christmas’s first ever look into sex so he associated the feelings of shame and belittlement with sexual desire as well. Which is why he frequently enjoys disclosing his race to prostitutes so they can berate him and he can feel shame and they can feel it with him and he can process his trauma.

It was this side of him which was infatuated with Joana and the race play they would engage in when she would make him sneak into her window, “and her wild hands and her breathing: ‘Negro! Negro Negro’. The part of Joe that was rooted in violence and toxic masculinity although, was starting to grow resentful to this, starting the acts of violence that would act as a foreshadowing, stating “he made a woman of her at last”. (ALIA p216)

He also states “Now she hates me. I have taught her that at last”, which is a nod to his relationship to Mrs. McEachern. Because Christmas was never shown proper love he was always on edge when good deeds would be done for him because he was expecting something bad to follow and so he hated Mrs. McEachern because he thought she was trying to catch him off guard and ruin his hard exterior. This inability to give and accept love transferred over to feeling relief in the thought of sabotaging his relationship with Joana. He wants to make her hate him because then at least he has the power to cause it to happen himself instead of waiting for it like an inevitability. 

Just like the one I think I know? Or maybe it’s not so white. The topic of this blog post will be that of Christmas and Faulkner’s commentary of his identity in A Light in August. Christmas as a character has always been somewhat of a mystery in the novel specifically not knowing his intentions or origin. But through bits and pieces, more details about who Christmas really is reveals itself. One of the major findings which adds to Faulkner’s larger work on the discussion of race relations in the United States’ Deep South is that Christmas himself being of mixed race origin. As just mentioned, Faulkner has commentated on race in the last three of his novels that we have read, particularly the dualities between “white” society and that of “black” society in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha county. But what happens when a character does not entirely fit in either of these societies? In the case of Christmas, he exists in that exact conundrum. It is learned that he passes as a white man but also does not feel comfortable abandoning his black heritage. This an interesting dynamic for a character to have, especially in the Jim Crow south, because identity is what bonds most groups of people in these very divided times. This is also a disguisable and important commentary, one much ahead of its time, about the absurdity of the identity politics of the Jim Crow south, especially as it is written 30 years prior to that of the civil rights movement.

One historical example of the South that comes to mind is that of the “one-drop rule,” in which a person with at least one drop of blood from African origin, was considered a black American, even if he or she looked entirely ethnically white or of another ethnicity. Individuals are complex, rigid, and unique, and these rules and social pressures only put people into boxes. The existence of the character of Christmas validates people who never could have even been accurately put into the boxes of Jim Crow, thus being isolated from an already repressive society. Moreover, Faulkner is also famous for implementing Christian symbolism and commentary of its virtues in his novels. Perhaps Christmas himself is somewhat of a Christ figure, isolated by all sides of society based on who he really is not as the member of a group, but as an individual in the world. Although he is plainly named Christmas, perhaps again it also reasonable to assume he is a Christ figure that is hiding in plain sight. But nonetheless, Faulkner raising the point about other groups of marginalized people living in 1930’s Jim Crow Southern States of America, such as mixed raced people, raises concerns and critiques about these rather strange times in American history. One that is raised is how do these people that do not belong strictly to one racial group survive in a time that is obsessed tribalism and with the separation of race?

Steve Jobs, the 2015 opera-cum-biopic penned by Aaron Sorkin–mawkish king of the neoliberal talk-picture (and I say that a mostly-fan)–is divided demonstrably intro three acts, each taking place on the day of a product launch of significance to its antihero’s arc. The plot does not turn on the launches–nor the products which, frankly, deserve the clever side-eyes the script gives them – but rather the question of what drives this mad man, who certainly perceives himself and is often heralded as a genius. The crescendo of Act One set in 1984, delivers one answer, with startlingly little subtext, as Steve talks backstage with John Sculley, Apple’s then CEO:

<sub>SCULLEY
“–are beyond your command”, I just lost a hundred bucks to Andy Hertzfeld.
He said you’d change it to that verse. We’ve got 45 seconds left and I want to use it to ask you a question. Why do people who were adopted feel like they were rejected instead of selected?

STEVE
That came out of nowhere.

SCULLEY
“Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly aging. So go fuck yourself ‘cause my name is Steve Jobs and the times, they are achangin’”.

STEVE
I don’t feel rejected.

SCULLEY
You sure?

STEVE
Very sure.

SCULLEY
‘Cause it’s not like the baby is born and the parents look and say,
“Nah, we’re not interested in this one.”
On the other hand, someone did choose you.

STEVE
It’s a song about progress.

SCULLEY
It’s about destroying the past.

STEVE
As long as clocks work the past will destroy itself by being the past.

SCULLEY
No, you have to consciously get rid of it or the past will be the present as well.

And STEVE’s so happy that someone’s articulated this–

STEVE
Yes! Yes! I was (testing you)–

SCULLEY (over)
Yeah.

STEVE
That’s exactly–see?–that’s exactly what–you’re the only one– God–that’s what I meant. You’re the only one who sees the world the way I do.
(beat)

What inspired Hertzfeld to make that bet?

SCULLEY
He was warning me that being your father figure could be dangerous.
I can start replacing the board with more Steve-friendly members.

STEVE (pause)
It’s having no control.

SCULLEY You’re the company, you have control.

STEVE
I wasn’t talking about the company.

(beat)

You find out that you were out of the loop when the most crucial events in your life were set in motion. As long as you have control…I don’t understand people who give it up.

(beat)

He said being a father figure to me was dangerous?</sub>

What repartee!

I bring this up not as an example of Sorkin’s ability to take an idea so obvious and make it engaging and alluring because of the dexterous way his dialogue can sing; nor is my purpose here to laud a film that SHOULD NOT WORK nearly as well as it does, failing (in my opinion) only at the author’s insistence on boiling it down to a father-daughter reconciliation, when it could have remained a more nuanced and ugly portrait of a man befitting that description. No, my reason for dredging up this scene from a half-decade ago is that is a sterling example of one of our most steadfast cultural cornerstones: Pop Psychology of the Freudian variety.

Our pal Sigmund came to the states only once, in 1909, to deliver a lecture at Clark University on his theories of Psychoanalysis, after which, it’s been noted, he was so horrified by the audience’s reception of his ideas, which he perceived as rapturous at the expense of an critical reckoning. But once was enough. Freud’s conceptual seed had planted itself firmly in the American Imagination, and by the post-war boom in which Faulkner conceived of and wrote his early novels, the trend towards the psychoanalytic in fiction, both overt and explicit, was commonplace.

As writers, Faulkner and Sorkin are different in nearly every respect, save for a shared affinity for particularly fanciful (and sometimes self-satisfied) flights of language, but when it comes to Freud they both demonstrate, again and again, a fascination with his theory of the Unconscious and with the Oedipal myth. In Faulkner’s case, throughout his early novels he seems increasingly curious about the ways that Oedipal psychology is magnified in the case of the Bastard or the Orphan (lest we forget that Ol’ Oedipus himself was given up at birth). In the reading we’ve done so far, nowhere does he dive deeper or more delicately into the matter (attempting to tackle the trauma of Race as well) than in the case of Joe Christmas in Light in August.

I’d say there is more nuance in his writing, but like Sorkin, Faulkner’s narrative voice in LIA seems determined that the reader be aware of the ways in which we are confronting Joe’s conscious and unconscious mind alike. The middle section of the book, dedicated to a selected backstory for Christmas, is buoyed by the refrain “memory believes before knowing remembers,” (LIA, p.119), echoed and mutated exactly a hundred pages later as “knowing not grieving remembers a thousand savage and lonely streets” (LIA, p.220). Here we are introduced to the guiding principles of Joe’s story: the question of what one knows of the world and of oneself. What does Joe know? What does Joe not know? What does Joe think or believes he knows? And what does Joe know without knowing? These questions and the language of knowing are the current on which his episodic narrative travel.

Faulkner doubles down again on Freud by arranging Joe’s picaresque arc not just on a foundation of conscious/unconscious knowledge, but around tentpoles of trauma that shape Joe’s tragic life up to the point of his encountering Joanna Burden. In no short order: his orphan status, which, when commingled with his unknown parentage and the question of Race, lead Joe to abnegate any rooted identity; the episode with the dietician – the initial conscious trauma which transmutes questions of race, sex and the feminine onto each other – where Joe experiences dissociation for the first time (“he seemed to be turned in upon himself, watching himself sweating, watching himself smear another worm of paste into his mouth which his stomach did not want” [LA, p.122]); the second professed loss of his life, after that of his mother, when his friend (and maternal figure) Alice goes away, though he does not know at the time that it is a less and never learns where she has been lost to (“she was telling him goodbye, but he did not know it…he didn’t know that she was crying, because he did not know that grown people cried, and by the time he learned that, memory had forgotten her” [LIA, p.136]”); his kidnapping by and short sojourn with the man he finds familiar but does not know to be his grandfather (perhaps an example of knowing without knowing);his suffering at the hands of McEachern, his adopted father, and the alter of religion; the rage he feels at Mrs. McEachern’s tenderness towards him, which he receives and rejects ad infinitum; the multiple trauma that occur throughout his entanglement with Bobbie the waitress – rife with the heartbreaking repetition of being confronted with one’s own not-knowing; the first white woman he sleeps with, once he has weaponized his assumed racial makeup, who does not balk, provoking a torrent of animal violence and id surprising to both of them (“he was sick after that. He did not know until then that there were white women who would take a man with a black skin.” [LIA, p.225]; and, finally, however the violence unfolds with Joanna Burden on the evening around which the novel turns (“something is going to happen to me“, what he cannot say). Faulkner choice of episodes certainly advances plot and character, but the intense psychological make-up of each and every passage up to the moment he meets Burden cannot be without intention. With the exception of the Catechism with McEachern, they are all organized around women, all suffuse with violence (sometimes emotional, mostly physical), and the twists in the narration around what is known by Joe align the reader with his emotional state as these trauma compound and the resultant emotional scar tissue does with it until he emerges at thirty-three, intractable and remote.

This is a man whose foundational unmooredness (I am ashamed at the potential for wordplay here) is the only trait around which he can organize his sense of self, other than violence. He chooses, or believes he chooses to, live between races, in rejection of both, raging at the profound lack that defines his life, but channeling that rage at anyone who dares try to mitigate it, to confine or define him. The lack of connection makes the world opaque to Joe and, though he thinks he understands much of it, he finds it hard to parse, so fused are his trauma, fear and desire. The syntax of his thinking often follows, words melting together unseparate, spaces and hyphens — all distinction!–both lost: “womanshenegro”, “womansmelling”, “nothungry, and even “thirtythree”. (the last of these is probably a formal choice by Faulker or some common way to print of his time, but as age is a means of classifying oneself, I choose to read this a potent signifier of Christmas’ psyche). One of the last thoughts of Joe’s that we are made privy to before he reaches the woods outside of Jefferson is “he thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself.” (LIA, p.226) There is, in this single sentence, everything about how much Joe has seen, how much he thinks he knows, and what he does not, cannot confront.

You could regard the methodical care with which Faulkner uses this persistent narrative framing as heavy-handed, but I think that would be short-sighted. Sorkin can write something as on-the-nose as the passage above and sell it on the virtuosic performances of his actors and the rat-a-tat rhythm of dialogue. This is in no small part due to the difference of form. Faulkner — though hitting some of the same notions, broadly — is working at something deeper, subtler, which long-form writing allows. He’s using the novel to try and attack the supposed pain incurred by the inciting incident of orphanhood, and the way that trauma’s repetition can create an ambiguous cacophony from which it grows exponentially hard to escape. Joe perpetrates acts of inhumanity again and again, but we bear witness too, to the way the deck has been stacked against him since the first. Through it all, it remains fascinating, and perhaps binds the empathy of the reader to Christmas, to watch Joe, startlingly honest about most of what he knows and does not, fail time and time again to reckon with himself.

Light In August, like many of Faulkner’s novels, is host to a variety of contradictory, distorted characters that seem to warp before the reader’s eyes. At least in my reading, I felt that that practically every pivotal character was never an archetype, as all of the novel’s characters from Joe Christmas to Hightower are realistically twofold. And although the novel seems to grow more and more complicated as it nears the end, I can’t help but find myself drawn to the beginning of the novel, and the odd, unexpected relationships that form. I’ll be focusing on the initial interactions between Lena Grove and Mrs. Armstid, yokanapedia style (inspired by a blog post I saw another student write), I will also discuss how the items and symbols that appear in these interactions implicitly hint at the nature of the relationship. 

When Lena Grove and Mrs.Armstid first meet, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the tense relationship between Caddy and her mother (although I was quickly proven wrong). Mrs.Armstid is initially presented as a seeming archetype. Faulkner complicates her character soon enough when he states, “They look at one another, suddenly naked, watching one another: the young woman in the chair…and the older one besides the stove” (17-18), and “Mrs. Armstid’s voice is neither cold nor warm. It is not anything at all” (18). Faulkner uniquely paints a generational divide between them, making even more apparent how striking the pregnant, unmarried Lena is in contrast to the traditional, married woman before her. I was also reminded of the scene where we see Byron Bunch and Hightower for the first time, where Hightower sits in an “ancient swivel chair”, and Byron sits in a meager “straight chair”. There seems to be some kind of significance in Caddy sitting, as she watches this older woman with a “savage screw of gray hair” labor at the oven. Lena may be naively innocent, but in sitting there and confidently speaking about her unmarried status, we see some version of a “new woman” forming. Mrs. Armstid, although less earnest than she appears, is shrouded by the archaic. Her face “carved in sandstone” seems to make her stagnant, like the isolated Hightower in his swivel chair.

This relationship is by no means a Caddy and Mrs. Compson parallel, a fact that’s sealed when Mrs. Armstid shatters her rooster bank and gives Lena its contents. When I initially read this scene I found it striking and beautifully described, but not knowing what “eggmoney” meant, the significance didn’t hit me in my first read. In writing my yokanapedia entry, I read the article “Egg money’ shaped farm women’s economy” written by Joe Rutherford, as was struck by how important eggmoney was as a starting symbol of suffrage. Rutherford states, “Eggs, however, served as women’s currency in the rural south for much of the twentieth century”. This “eggmoney” wasn’t just a piggy bank filled with a few coins found under couch cushions, but “a woman’s own province”, money that came from a woman’s hard work and was hers to distribute. The shattering and dispersing of Mrs. Armstid’s eggmoney isn’t just a kind gesture, but a shattering of a traditional value system.

Rutherford, Joe. “Egg Money’ Shaped Farm Women’s Economy.” Daily Journal, 24 July 2006, www.djournal.com/opinion/egg-money-shaped-farm-womens-economy/article_532ef91e-3b47-50c0-adf3-8abbad149eeb.html

The moment after Joe Christmas kills his father at the dance marks, arguably, the biggest turning point in his life. This moment propels him forward into an unknown world without the guidance of others. In the past, Christmas was sculpted by the people in his orphanage, and after adoption, Mr. and Mrs. McEachern. It’s almost refreshing to see Christmas do exactly what he wanted to do in the past. Earlier on, he has hoped to run away from his adoptive family and even got a rope to use as an instrument to realize his goal. However, he remained trapped under the watchfulness of the family. In a way, this nurturing, albeit abusive, upbringing that Christmas underwent was still structured and fueled a specific identity. Torn between his biracial identity, Christmas had a chance to become a well realized individual under the McEachern, but after killing his father and running away, Joe ultimately buried himself deeper in his own grave. The road became Joe’s new home, but this road wasn’t the road depicted by someone like Walt Whitman but more like a James Cain depiction of the road. Christmas’s road continues to be riddled with disillusionment and obscurity. “and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was not daring to ask.” (LIA 224) The narrator says once Christmas hitches a ride. This instance of the wagon driver not daring to ask who Joe is resonates throughout the rest of his journey. Ultimately, this road leads Joe to the mill where he is further a shadowy figure with no clear distinction. Joe becomes an empty figure that the mill workers fill with their own perceptions of who he is.

         The road in which Joe finds himself symbolizes his inability to identify with any side of his biracialism. He finds himself living in black communities for a time, then among white people and ultimately makes his way back down south. Therefore, a road that canonically mostly symbolizes a path to realization becomes a road that leads deeper down into an already crippling self-disillusionment. He is aimless, taking up a multitude of different occupations that serve no real purpose in his development as an individual. He becomes a wanderer with no family, no identification, and no future. His wanderings seem to find a place to stop when he finds Joanna Burden, but even then, Joe retracts back to his old ways. He kills her and starts back at square one. It’s almost as if Joe is living in a continuous loop where he finds a place in which he could possibly identify with then he succumbs to a violent act that ultimately sets him back on the dark road. Almost like it is his destiny is to be detached from any group. A life of continuous running stems from this initial instance of violence and follows him for the rest of his life. Ironically, a quest for the realization of his manhood becomes a curse that strips it away from him instead.

In Light in August, William Faulkner shows us a character who faces violence in his own family. Joe Christmas, who can be considered the main character of the novel, is presented as an angry man, not comfortable in either the black and white communities. Although Faulkner provides many details of Joe’s life, he is still a curiosity for the readers because there is no way to get close to him. He feels very distant and like a cold person. I believe Joe’s personality and attitude are due to his childhood with his violent father. 

Mr. McEachern, Christmas’s father, forces him to memorize catechism. It states, “He was looking straight ahead, with a rapt, calm expression like a monk in a picture. McEachern began to strike methodically, with slow and deliberate force, still without heat or anger. . . He struck ten times, then he stopped. “Take the book,” he said. “Leave your pants be.” He handed the boy the catechism” (LIA, 150). He uses violence to make the young Joe learn, but he is also violent with the wife because she appears beaten and we can assume it was Mr. McEachern because of the way he treats his son and wife. According to the way Faulkner introduces Joe’s learning of the catechism, we can determine that Joe is not able to memorize or learn because he was sitting with the book for about an hour and he still answers that he did not learn it. This leads the father to take him and hit him, pretending that in this way, Joe will definitely learn. His father attributes the aggressive way he is in the present since he grew up watching his father beat his mother and him. For Mr. McEachern, the only “effective” method of making Joe learn and get close to Jesus is through violence. This means that the fact that Joe is raised with this idea, makes him think that this is the way he will achieve things in his life. 

At present, we notice how Joe’s relationship with Joanna Burden, his lover is. She leaves food for him in the kitchen of her house for Joe to eat and then he leaves the house. He does not go beyond the kitchen even though they are lovers and she does not go to the kitchen while he is there eating. They see each other sometimes when he goes to her bedroom. Their relationship has a kind of pause, meaning that they are not direct to each other because when they are talking most of the time, they pause to respond to a question or comment that the other one makes. However, even having a relationship like this, Miss Burden wishes to formalize it and tells Joe that she wants to have a baby. Later when she is pregnant, she intends to help Joe get a better job and suggests that he takes over her job. Nonetheless, Joe is the complicated part of the relationship because he does not know how to react to kind actions. His past remains vivid in his memory and anything good that comes to him, it is reflected as negative for his life.

The people around them do not even know about their relationship because they are keeping it secret. On page 73, ““They? I understood that Miss Burden lived there alone.” . . . “No. In a old nigger cabin in the back. Christmas fixed it up three years ago. He’s been living in it ever since, with folks wondering where he slept at night” (LIA 83). In my opinion, this is not a set couple, as a way of saying, because Christmas does not want to compromise with Miss Burden. He is accustomed to mistreatment and in him, there is no possibility of having a more stable life. He has been living in the cabin for three years, eating the food that she prepares for him, and does not think about a life with her. Hence, his actions are because of the cruel childhood he had, so he has never been happy.