Staging the Legacy of White Masculinity: A Dramaturgical Reading of Faulkner’s Light in August In Light in August, Faulkner adds an ensemble of characters to his fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Perhaps the most intricate of these additions are Lena Grove, a pregnant woman who enters Jefferson in search of her unborn child’s elusive father; Joe Christmas, a racially ambiguous man whose questionable blood triggers his alienation; and Reverend Gail Hightower, a defrocked minister whose obsession with the glory of his Confederate ancestry erodes his ability to live fully in the present. All three of these characters are unable to live peacefully within the rigid roles determined for them by the dominant white patriarchal structures
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Throughout the novel, Christmas shifts in and out of different roles and thus threatens their perceived legitimacy. As a young boy, Christmas is expected to follow a group of unnamed black boys as they take turns having sex with a young black girl. Wounded by a traumatic latent sexual experience from his childhood, Joe instead opts to strike the girl and the other four boys begin to fight because of “that spontaneous compulsion of the male to fight … over the partner with which he … is about to copulate” (Faulkner 157). Joe is omitted from this automated masculinity and instead slips through the fingertips of the other boys. They repeatedly try to catch him: “Now wait: here he is. Me and – … We got him here” (Faulkner 158). Joe eludes the attempts of other black boys to include him in their ritual of becoming men by losing their virginity. This may seem to entail that Joe cannot identify himself among black men, but he later intermittently inhabits black communities and earns considerable respect. Joe simultaneously manages to inhabit populations of white men without initially causing uproar. After having sex with a white prostitute from a local restaurant, Joe begins to smoke, drink, and “cock his hat as [the white men] did … in his loud, drunken, despairing young voice, calling [his woman] a whore” (Faulkner 199). Joe’s ambiguous appearance allows him to assume both the role of a white man and the role of a black man by mimicking their manners, the second component of Goffman’s ‘personal front’ (Goffman 15). His performance’s undoing is self-imposed as he repeatedly reveals to white women that he has black blood in him. In order to expunge their community of a member who defies its fixed roles, a group of white men engage in a ceremonial hunting of Joe Christmas after
Throughout the novel, Christmas shifts in and out of different roles and thus threatens their perceived legitimacy. As a young boy, Christmas is expected to follow a group of unnamed black boys as they take turns having sex with a young black girl. Wounded by a traumatic latent sexual experience from his childhood, Joe instead opts to strike the girl and the other four boys begin to fight because of “that spontaneous compulsion of the male to fight … over the partner with which he … is about to copulate” (Faulkner 157). Joe is omitted from this automated masculinity and instead slips through the fingertips of the other boys. They repeatedly try to catch him: “Now wait: here he is. Me and – … We got him here” (Faulkner 158). Joe eludes the attempts of other black boys to include him in their ritual of becoming men by losing their virginity. This may seem to entail that Joe cannot identify himself among black men, but he later intermittently inhabits black communities and earns considerable respect. Joe simultaneously manages to inhabit populations of white men without initially causing uproar. After having sex with a white prostitute from a local restaurant, Joe begins to smoke, drink, and “cock his hat as [the white men] did … in his loud, drunken, despairing young voice, calling [his woman] a whore” (Faulkner 199). Joe’s ambiguous appearance allows him to assume both the role of a white man and the role of a black man by mimicking their manners, the second component of Goffman’s ‘personal front’ (Goffman 15). His performance’s undoing is self-imposed as he repeatedly reveals to white women that he has black blood in him. In order to expunge their community of a member who defies its fixed roles, a group of white men engage in a ceremonial hunting of Joe Christmas after