Foreigners, Drifters, Strangers, Orphans

I have to admit that I have not yet finished this novel. I am, in fact, just halfway through. The truth is, it is my favorite novel we have read in this class so far. Much as I loved The Sound & the Fury, I feel Light in August is the first purely good story I have read from Faulkner, unhindered by fancy language and confusing structure and incomprehinsible symbolism. Because I love it so much and because I am planning on writing my final essay on it, I am reading it slowly, savoring it to the end. Hopefully my nerdiness has been established enough so that this does not sound like an excuse, but as the slightly pathetic truth that it is.

Light in August is full of foreigners, drifters, strangers, orphans.

The foreigner/drifter/stranger/orphan who most interested me was Joe Christmas. One thing I found very interesting about Joe were his relationships with women, beginning with the dietician at the orphanage, who saw him as a person, albeit little, capable of destroying her. Ironically, innocent little Joe Christmas grows up a man who does destroy: who beats women and murders his father with only a chair and his rage. Of course, we are meant to sympathize with him. Only Faulkner could make it so that I sympathize with a woman-beater.

As an orphan, first arriving at the house of McEachern, Joe is unused to the kindnesses of Mrs. McEachern. This I found to be among the most interesting descriptions of his relationship with his adoptive mother:

"It was not the hard work which he hated, nor the punishment and injustice...He expected no less, and so he was neither outraged nor surprised. It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men. 'She is trying to make me cry,' he thought..."

It would appear that Joe Christmas is afraid of love, as cliche as that may sound. Tenderness seems to frighten him, perhaps because it is something he is not accustomed to. It could be that the unpredictable, unfathomable behavior of the dietician upset his understanding. Maybe it was simply the orphanage itself that hardened him and made him uncomfortable with kindness. It is more complicated than this, though, because he does grow very fond of the waitress. He grows angry at Ms. Burden for growing old and he cares for Bobbie, with whom he has sex. On top of this, he is outraged by the menstrual cycle. Maybe he can only care for a woman if she can be used for sex?

Another interesting aspect of Joe Christmas is his "foreigner" status. We learn fairly quickly that he is a black man, a "negro". He does not fully belong with the white people, as is made very evident by their reactions to him. They do not accept him. And while he may not care to be accepted by them, while he may wish to be part of the negro community, it is not the be either:

"...his white chest arches deeper and deeper within his ribcage, trying to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes, with each suspiration trying to expel from himself the white blood and the white thinking and being."

One reason for Joe Christmas's wandering ways is that he was "trying to escape...himself."

Besides Christmas, there is Lena Grove, an orphan who drifts into Jefferson with her swollen belly; Ms. Burden, carrying the burden of white people ("the curse of every white child that ever was born"), living as a foreigner, but not a stranger, in the south, a product of the drifting, foreign Burdens before her; Reverand Hightower, reclusive and unaccepted.

Oh, it is such a lovely book!