As a text concerned with transgressions and transgressors, Light in August maps its explorations of power and progress onto and within specific geographies of the text. From the beginning, the image of progress the novel presents is one of motion pictures—-of stillness yielding into moments of animation. Consider, for example, the description of Lena’s initial journey as “a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes…through which she advanced” (7). Within this initial image, Faulkner presents the dynamic of progress within the novel—a train-like “succession” of “undeviating changes” that enable a movement of advancement. However, as his juxtaposition of “through” with the character of Lena suggests, within this vacuum-like space of progress, there is space for transgressors: for those who would move through this continuous space of progress. In particular: Lena Grove and Joe Christmas.

Transgressing figures apply particular weight to these spaces of progress by troubling how they operate. Within the physical space of Jefferson, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas prove to be troublesome figures in part because of their difficulty to locate and to place, to pin and secure. Ralph Watkins has examined their impact through a specific attention to boundaries and borders, linking Joe Christmas and Lena through their preferred means of egress—the window. The window is crucial as it represents “points of exit and entry for persons of low esteem” (Watkins 15). Exploring the symbolism of the role of the window, Watkins notes “these openings are vulnerable and therefore pose a danger to those who are inside the social structure” (16). Yet if these portals represent spaces where power dynamics become (potentially) further destabilized, then how Lena and Christmas move through these openings become as significant and interesting as the openings themselves. How they move through them, of course, is by climbing: Lena climbs out of her brother’s home, Joe “climbed from his window” to meet with Bobbie, and first enters Joanna Burden’s home by climbing “into the window” and “flow[ing] into the dark kitchen” (6, 186, 229-230). Climbing is an interesting image of entry or exit because it suggests an upward motion. For Lena and Joe, however, climbing is frequently an act of descent as much as ascent–both physically and within concerns of social and moral dynamics of power.

For example, consider Joanna Burden’s explanation regarding her commitment to racial justice and recompense: “I had seen and known negroes since I could remember. […] But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. […] At last I told father, tried to tell him. What I wanted to tell him was that I must escape, get away from under the shadow, or I would die. ‘You cannot,’ he said. ‘You must struggle, rise. But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you. But you can never lift it to your level’” (253, emphasis mine). In congruity with the images of climbing, Burden’s representation of racial dynamics is reliant also on motion along a vertical axis: the blacks “fall” as a literal burden upon the whites who must struggle to “raise” and “lift” them, but appropriately (meaning never to match their own place). Not only does this seem to bear quite literally on the parameters of Joe and Joanna’s relationship, it also shows the difficulty and imprecision in attempting to maintain the balance of power. There is a necessity to uplift the blacks, at least, within Joanna’s consideration, but this must never be so sharp as to place them as equals.

Within the space of his relationship with both Joanna and Bobbie, Joe Christmas is positioned against this vertical axis–albeit, in different directional movements. Christmas’ relationship with Bobbie is one wherein his blackness is revealed as something revolting and vile, resulting in his physical beating, a reminder and re”place”ment of his body into the racial power order. In the depiction of the fight, there is continual emphasis placed on his low position (literally on the floor, having been knocked out) as well as the direction of his perspective. Having been rendered immobile, all Christmas can do is look “up at the two men” who are equally immobile (218). Then one of the men “lean[s] down and lift[s] his head from the floor” in order to hit him again (219). In his last glimpse of the scene, Christmas observes a raised hand that “did not fall” before realizing that it being held back by Bobbie. Within this scene, the “lifted arm” is invested with disciplining racial power. Notably, the arm is not indicated as being lowered or dropped, but remains suspended in the air, in its “lifted” state. Bobbie, in stopping the hand, only stays its motion by holding it, but does not correct its position in the air. Further, in relating the movements of characters, the white attackers are shown to be moving in a downward direction, “lifting” Christmas only so far so that he may be attacked.

In contrast, Christmas’ relationship with Joanna is defined by her attempts to push him higher, which complicates his own understanding of his social power. For example, before we are introduced to the complex nature of their relationship, Christmas repeats that her mistake was because she “started praying over me. […] She ought to have had better sense than to pray over me” (106). Again, there’s an image of posturing presented: Burden is positioned as being “over” him, a position with moral significance due to her act of praying. As in the scene with the beating, the location of the body as “over” his yields implications of power as well. In this instance, it is not a racial disciplining per se as it is in the beating, but rather a kind of moral disciplining – one which Christmas takes severe issue with.

As Christmas reveals, his relationship with Joanna is instead defined by an image of raising. Upon his first entrance into her home by climbing through the window, Christmas notes that she makes him repeat the gesture for an entire week (259). The racial dynamics within their relationship are thus defined by an upending: as opposed to the immediate and violent response of Bobbie and her defenders to discipline Christmas for his acts of climbing down from his own window to be with her, Burden specifically invites the transgression, compelling him to repeat it for a week. While the image is one imbued with connotations of racial violence and transgression, the emphasis on the upward motion of the climb, in conjunction with Burden’s presentation of her particular peculiar burden to raise black people, suggests greater complexity to the image, one of redress, though not equal standing.

However, Burden generates an extremely charged space of racial instability for Christmas, one which fundamentally threatens his sense of identity. By inviting him to communicate his identity and to enter the ranks of the educated black by sending him to a black law school, the charged, unstable space of their relationship breaks down, which is also tracked along the images of posture and vertical position:

“‘Tell them,’ she said.
‘Tell niggers that I am a nigger too?’ She now looked at him.
[…] He leaned down. She did not move” (277)

This culminates in a fight: when Joanna strikes him with her hand, he retaliates by striking her back. Unlike the earlier beating he receives at Bobbie’s, there is no clear disciplining and no clear delineation of boundary afterward. While Joanna strikes him, he answers with reciprocity, and, in so doing, evinces his authoritative (masculine) power. Upon striking her, “[she] fell huddled onto the bed, looking up at him, and he struck her in the face again and standing over her spoke to her the words which she had once loved to hear” (277). Within the unstable space of power of their relationship, Joanna has granted Christmas the tools with which to enact discipline of his own. In comparison to his climbing into the house through the window during the height of their relationship, here, within one of its troughs, Christmas forces Joanna into the lower position: she suffers a fall of her own, which is then reinforced through the image of her “looking up” at him, standing over her. The words, which she had once requested and “loved to hear”, are then returned to her in force, becoming additional ammunition.

While Faulkner’s boundaries and portals illustrate the containment of individual spaces, the very actions of transgression yield interesting revelations regarding the dynamics of relationships and characters within these spaces. Given the specific rhetoric of Joanna Burden’s aims of uplift, the ways in which the posturing and perspectives of sight shift between points of her relationship with Christmas illustrates the ways in which power is being contested throughout the novel; a power not just racially indicative, but also socially charged, motivated and defined through a conception of the proper that these transgressive bodies (Lena and Joe) then permeate and violate.

Watkins, Ralph. “‘It Was like I Was the Woman and She Was the Man’: Boundaries, Portals, and Pollution in ‘Light in August.'” The Southern Literary Journal 26, 2, 1994, pp. 11-24, www.jstor.org/stable/20078093.