Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Burdens of the Past
History—in the broad, abstract meaning of the term, as
well as in the sense of personal history—looms large in Light
in August. Miss Burden and Reverend Hightower each inherit
a complex legacy of familial pride, struggle, and shame. Miss Burden
lives her life as a personal sacrifice to a cause, feeling an obligation
to honor her family’s staunch commitment to abolition and then black
equality. It is ironically her charity itself that causes her undoing,
as the man she tries to help, Joe Christmas, brutally murders her
when he resents and feels threatened by her patronizing impulse
to control and improve him. Reverend Hightower, meanwhile, is trapped
in the past, torn between the romantic image of his grandfather,
the heroic cavalryman killed while stealing chickens, and his father
the pacifist. His unresolved relationship with his personal history
compromises his effectiveness as a spiritual leader and a husband
and plays a part in his eventual defrocking.
Joe Christmas is on the opposite footing: he is a man
without a history, beyond the personal reserve of memories that
form a painful pattern of violence, abuse, and neglect, both self-inflicted
and visited on him by those charged with his care. The past, of
which he is personally unaware, proves to be too powerful a force
to escape or resist. Joe’s misanthropic, homicidal nature is partially
explained when his origins become clear. The grandfather he knew
only as the janitor at the orphanage proves to have much in common
with his grandson. Both are violent men prone to antisocial behavior
and murder.
Lena Grove emerges as the only figure able to sidestep
the oppressive burden of the past. She is a child of nature, unencumbered
by personal stigma or shame. Like Christmas, she is an orphan, but
rather than run from the past—or be symbolically imprisoned by it—in
the end she heads optimistically to an unscripted future.
The Struggle for a Coherent Sense of Identity
Although the novel explores issues of gender and race
specifically, these particular thematic currents intersect to become
part of Faulkner’s larger, more all-encompassing inquiry concerning
the nature of identity and how it is influenced by history, nature,
society, and individual lives. The residents of Jefferson have resolved
a tacit acceptance of Reverend Hightower, Joanna Burden, and Joe
Christmas, but each of these characters deliberately resists or
abandons the distorting influence of a rigid social and moral order.
Society, as embodied in Faulkner’s collective voice of the community,
attempts to superimpose simplistic, restrictive notions of identity
based on broad categories, such as race and gender. Whereas some
individuals need these external cues to provide
themselves with a sense of clarity, order, and definition, others
struggle under the weight of what are often intrusive attempts to
restrict and classify. For Joe Christmas, the lack of a stable and
identifiable sense of self assumes tragic dimensions. His wanderings
become a symbolic journey to find out who he is, a search for wholeness
and self-completion, but they are tragically and ultimately an illusive
and elusive quest.
The Isolation of the Individual
Light in August is filled with loners,
isolated figures who choose or are forced to inhabit the fringes
of society. Byron shields himself from the outside world with his
unconscious strategy of detachment. Lena is an abandoned mother-to-be
who, in seeking the support of Joe Brown, finds she is able to stand
alone and is better off for it. She is the catalyst that facilitates
Byron’s final and delayed entrance into the world of human interaction
and contact. Though their vague and nontraditional family is still
forming in the novel’s final chapter, they are the only characters
who are able to solve the riddle of their own estrangement and loneliness.
Reverend Hightower and Joe Christmas both are described
as living outside of time, inhabiting their own temporal order and
a world of their own making. After the betrayal that Christmas experiences
at the hands of Bobbie Allen, replicating the abandonment and neglect
that marked his childhood, he lives an unfettered and rudderless
existence, deliberately sabotaging any opportunity to establish
an emotional tie or connection with another. His one potentially
auspicious attempt at human contact—his developing relationship
with Miss Burden—ends not in greater intimacy and connectedness
but in murder and displaced rage.
