Social Predestination In Light In August
Society provides commonality to individuals and unites their ideologies to form one collective. Conversely, society can limit progress and destroy the lives of those who attempt to deviate from the defined normality. Cleanth Brooks, a preeminent critic of Southern literature, emphasizes the social element which permeates throughout the works of William Faulkner and often dictates the destinies of his characters. “The community . . . is the powerful though invisible force that quietly exerts itself in so much of Faulkner’s work. It is the circumambient atmosphere, the essential ether of Faulkner’s fiction” (Brooks 52). The social predestination within Faulkner’s novel, Light in August, is evident and often difficult to rupture, as it threatens the ideological foundation upon which southern society is built. In the novel, the town of Jefferson alienates the three protagonists because of its inability to place them in a constrictive category, but while Joe Christmas and Hightower retreat into their own stagnant realities, Lena Grove frees herself from her social identity, thus persevering.
Jefferson automatically estranges Faulkner’s three protagonists from society due to its innate racial and religious predispositions, therefore confining them to their individual stereotypes. Modern Faulkner critic André Bleikasten paints Jefferson as “a traditional rural society, such as could still be found in the Deep South of the twenties and thirties . . . whose stability is guaranteed by unanimous acceptance of inherited values and unquestioning compliance with established cultural codes” (315). Such values and codes as racism and Puritanism brand the three main characters as intrinsically antithetic. At this time, white Southerners were near completion of the seemingly inviolable barrier separating races, explaining Jefferson’s reaction to Christmas’s mixed identity (Watkins 13). Joe Christmas evades defining himself as either white man or black throughout his life, and hence, citizens of the race-structured community lack understanding of his purpose and place in society. Labeled as a black man by the white community and a white man by the black community, the anomalous nature of Joe Christmas increases. He is expelled from society because of his placelessness without having a say in his own identity.
Reverend Hightower’s wife cheats on him and later commits suicide, and his placid reaction disgraces the Church. Consequently, the straitlaced Puritanical society decries Hightower as “Gail Hightower Done Damned in Jefferson,” and he lives exiled for his transgression of Jefferson’s religious tenets (Faulkner 61). In addition to the scandal with his wife, Hightower maintains a fixation on the past, unable to let go of his grandfather, a glorified war hero of the Civil War. This inability is noted and Jefferson isolates Hightower from the collective community on account of his differences.
Lena Grove, an unwed mother traveling alone, accepts extensive scrutiny from complete strangers on her journey to Jefferson, breaking several societal decorums. The boarding house owner, Mrs. Beard, contemplates Lena and her swollen body with “eyes [that] were not exactly cold. But they were not warm” (85). Those in Jefferson pass silent judgment on Lena due to her complete disregard for normality. She flaunts her young pregnancy in the form of her foolish search for the father of her child, ignorant to the fact that he has abandoned her. Throughout the novel, her only support comes from Byron Bunch, whose attempts to gain her affection are even discouraged by Hightower. Given these considerations, the three protagonists of Light in August all enter the Jefferson society with inherent disparities, differing only in their responses to their confinement to the margins of society.
Christmas fights against the social identity that he has been given but ultimately surrenders to it and consequently accepts his fate. In stark contrast to the fifteen blurred years between Joe Christmas’s adolescence and adulthood in which he traveled as a vagrant, Jefferson imposes the harsh constrictions of a black man in the South upon him; he is continuously coerced into accepting his socially defined identity while his will to fight against it diminishes. Ironically, his first sign of acceptance occurs as he attempts to escape from Jefferson after Joanna Burden’s murder. Christmas physically and metaphorically walks in the shoes of a black man to evade being tracked and can feel himself being pulled “into the black abyss which [has] been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him and into which now and at last he [has] actually entered” (331). He gradually internalizes the identity that he has opposed throughout his life as he submits to the collective. Christmas’s realization of his black identity consumes him, and his surrender to Jefferson’s ideologies and the ensuing stagnation destroys him.
Joe Christmas’s unmitigated acceptance of his socially dictated racial identity transpires with his castration. His personal identity is unimportant, the only thing of consequence being Jefferson’s interpretation of his character. For Christmas, “time, the spaces of light and dark, had long since lost orderliness. It would be either one now, seemingly at an instant, between two movements of the eyelids, without warning” (333-334). Christmas rejects the base system of day and night, revealing his greatest separation from society. He realizes that Jefferson will never change its perception of him, so he stops attempting to fight against his social identity. Hence, his newfound sense of freedom stems from his submission to social impositions. Christmas is rendered vulnerable by his marginalization, and Percy Grimm slaughters Joe Christmas as a final result of his cessation. He wears an expression of peace on his face as he bleeds to death, complacent to Jefferson and his role in society. Believing that there is no way to alter his socially predisposed fate, Christmas consequently succumbs to it.
Unlike Joe Christmas, Hightower never resists his ostracization and condemns himself by withdrawing from social progress and retreating into his own reality. Adams, an authority on English literature, argues that “we take snapshots . . . of the passing reality and string them together to approximate the process of change” (111). Reverend Hightower managed to capture individual moments, but he was never able to create one cohesive timeline that would allow progression. From the inception of Hightower’s isolation from Jefferson, he does not attempt to reverse his situation and only realizes what he has done when death is upon him. He remains in his home on the outskirts of town, his study “so hidden . . . that the light from the corner street lamp scarcely touches it” (Faulkner 57). The street light represents the reach of society, of which Hightower only envisages a sliver, blocked by the sign in front of his house. Because of his separation from the community as a result of his history of scandal, he reinforces the collective thought that he should remain in seclusion. Emasculated by his wife, Hightower recedes into a world that no longer exists inhabited by those who are long dead. In addition, his fixation on the past further alienates him from society, demonstrating how his stagnation leads to his downfall. Left to the workings of his fantasy world, Hightower “[feels] himself losing contact with earth, lighter and lighter, empty, floating. ‘I am dying,’ he thinks” (492). Hightower finally comes to the realization that he has wasted his life by accepting his social identity instead of attempting to break free of societal norms. Unlike Joe Christmas, it is only as Hightower dies that he perceives his mistakes and shows regret about his past actions, knowing that his inaction throughout his life caused his ruination.
Dissimilar to both Christmas and Hightower, Lena’s prosperity stems from her rejection of the identity that Jefferson assigns her, allowing her to progress and endure. Throughout the novel, Lena is constantly in motion, symbolic of her progression and ability to let go of the past. Her hope for the future remained even though “this was the first time she had ever been further away from home than she could walk back before sundown in her life” (507). She is the one who, in the end, leaves Jefferson full of optimism. Congruous to the other two protagonists, Lena is assigned to a social category in the Puritan community as an unwed mother, but unlike them, she breaks the identity that has been placed upon her. In doing so, Lena fully transforms into the socially unacceptable yet change-provoking version of herself. The underlying reasons as to why Lena perseveres are her ability to remain unaffected by societal constraints and her constant movement. Both of these things provoke social development which is necessary for human perseverance and advancement.
Of Faulkner’s three protagonists in Light in August, Christmas and Hightower climatically perish as a result of their acceptance of their socially predisposed identities, yet Lena prospers. She breaks free from the restrictive category she has been placed in and remains unaffected by stereotypes formulated by the community. Faulkner demonstrates how the overarching presence of the community crafts the fate of the individuals inhabiting it with the individual responses of the three protagonists to social rejection. Even though the collective similarly condemns all through social impositions, all three characters respond with vastly different approaches. Where Joe Christmas and Hightower deteriorate by submitting to the will of the community, Lena looks to the future and herself to determine her identity and therefore endures.
