“The average man’s a coward,” Colonel Sherburn derides, standing atop his roof, shotgun in hand, facing a massed mob “swarmed” up upon his property after they tear down his fence in a collective fury (Twain 194). This classic scene from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn pictures a crowd gathered in an attempt to lynch the Colonel, after he had just killed an inebriated man in public, Boggs, who had accused Sherburn of some unnamed ‘swindling’. Sherburn, emphatically poised in contrast to the mob’s belligerent unruliness, literally stands in opposition to what he believes constitutes a travestied southern ‘bravery’. “The average man don’t like trouble and danger. You don’t like trouble and danger,” Sherburn taunts from the roof, “The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass” (195). The crowd, dispirited, withdraws, as Huck notes their leader trotting the rear looking “tolerable cheap” (195).
Twain has produced, in Huckleberry Finn’s picaresque fashion, the diffusion of southern “bravery” among the inhabitants of a small, rustic town. Sherburn’s accusation that the lone southern man is indeed as cowardly as any other, and can only find the semblance of courage in the mindless mass of a mob, wins out, as Sherburn is left alone perched with gun in hand as the crowd “tear[s] off every which way” (195). Although Sherburn is not technically in the right (does a debauched attack on one’s honor warrant the other’s death?),Twain’s commentary on the southern mob mentality, and a rather uncanny presaging of the KKK movement, marks a cultural phenomenon; the communal garnering of emotion, or the societal effects on one’s actions in proportion to the size of the group that particular one is in attendance. Essentially, an inverted take on the psychological concept of ‘diffusion of responsibility’.
Uh, ok…so what does this have to do with Faulkner’s Light in August? Well, Hightower’s life in Jefferson is manipulated by this very ‘diffusion of courage’ (I’m not terribly sold on the word ‘courage’, as I don’t believe the concept merely constitutes bravery in the face of intimidation, but as an influence on one’s actions as a persuasion to do what one would normally not do) among the townsfolk. As discussed in class, LIA is a highly individuating text: Lena Grove’s treatment as a near pariah due to her pregnancy outside of marriage; Joe Christmas’ muddled past and its affect on his current anxiety and psychopathic behavior toward others—women, in particular. But at the polar end, we have the townspeople that compose Jefferson as a rumor based, homogenous unit, guided by a mob mentality.
I noted before that Hightower’s slow decay stemmed from the diffused mob concept. His wife, upon returning home from the sanatorium, seemingly becomes the idyllic version of a minister’s wife: “She was now like the ladies had wanted her to be all the time, as they believed the minister’s wife should be…the ladies called upon her and she called upon them…while they told her how to run [her house] and what to wear and what to eat” (Faulkner 66). Hightower’s wife, regardless of her libertinism, was being molded into the same, homogenous mass of townsfolk. But, it could not last, and Hightowers’ wifes duplicitous nature eventually gets her killed in Memphis.
Strange rural homogeny aside, this is when the town’s collective conscious becomes rather insidious. After a passive-aggression ‘suggestion’ for Hightower to move out of town in the form of monetary collection, and Hightower’s thorny refusal of it, the rumor mill begins to turn, and it’s soon spread that “he had insured his wife’s life and then paid someone to murder her” (71). Even if no one really believed, his stubbornness in not being forced out of town forms a set of new scandals of how “he was not a natural husband,” with his negro servant being “the reason” his wife was forced to commit suicide (71).
Like Twain, Faulkner offers us an unpleasant truth about southern small town society: “in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, people can invent more of it in other people’s names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind” (71). Sherburn’s concept of diurnal cowardice (“if any real lynching’s going to be done, it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion”) is even vindicated through Faulkner, as Hightower’s cook eventually quits, as one “night a party of carelessly masked men [go] to the minister’s house and [order] him to fire her” (Twain 142, Faulkner 71). Later, the mob aggression intensifies as Hightower employs a male cook, prompting the villagers to take “the negro man out and [whip] him,” eventually kidnapping Hightower himself, leaving him “in the woods about a mile from town…tied to a tree and beaten unconscious” (72).
I’m well aware that this concept doesn’t necessarily limit itself to the south—I’m sure there are just as many demoralizing tales of hazing in rustic, northern small towns—but Hightower’s story reminded me of Twain’s harangue on the southern mob mentality, and, as this is the first of Faulkner’s novels where we’re foot planted into ‘the town’, I found it particularly disheartening. Maybe it’s better to live out in the wilderness/be the eccentric descendants of a decadent estate?
Faulker, William. Light in August. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print.
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Writings of Mark Twain: Vol. XIII. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912. Web. Oct. 9, 2013.
