Freedom is a very important concept in Light in August. This is unsurprising, considering that the novel is set in a society still reeling from the relatively recent abolition of slavery, and one governed by strict social norms. While many of the characters seem to possess an intense desire for freedom, others seek to curtail freedom—whether their own or someone else’s. Some characters do this by enforcing the strict social codes designed to limit the freedom of black people and white women. Others turn to faith, attempting to suppress their own impulses through religious devotion. However, few of these attempts to suppress freedom are entirely successful. Ultimately, the novel shows that the human desire for freedom is irrepressible, but that it is also dangerous, as it can lead to cruel, brutal behavior.
In some ways, the novel presents a positive view of freedom. For those whose actions have been constricted by the legacy of slavery, the emerging Jim Crow laws, and the unwritten laws of racism and sexism, freedom is extremely important—the ultimate luxury and object of desire.
Moreover, through the use of nature metaphors, the novel suggests that freedom is the natural state for mankind. At the beginning of the novel, Lena’s journey on foot to find Lucas, the father of her child, is described as follows: “She went out of sight up the road: swollen, slow, deliberate, unhurried and tireless as augmenting afternoon itself.” Here Lena’s radical assertion of freedom—although scandalous to those around her—is shown to be as ordinary and natural as the afternoon. Similar language appears when Byron Bunch is described as “just living on the country, like a locust.” The freedom that both Byron and Lena exhibit is a peaceful form of existence, a way of being in harmony with their natural impulses and with the world around them.
However, at other moments in the book freedom is portrayed in a much more dangerous and disturbing light—particularly through the many acts of violence that appear across the narrative. In order to understand the prominence of violence in Light in August and its relationship to freedom, it is important to consider the historical context of the time and place in which the book is set. In 1932, the rural South was still recovering from the aftermath of slavery and the Civil War. During Reconstruction, efforts to compensate and support newly freed black people clashed with the vicious white supremacist beliefs that still ruled the South, and this led to gruesome outbreaks of violence. Meanwhile, the First World War provided another shocking reminder of the brutality of which humanity was capable.
Modernist works of literature such as Light in August grapple with the bleak side of human freedom revealed by violence, war, and destruction. Violence is everywhere in the novel, including the murders of Mr. McEachern, Joanna Burden, and others, the burning down of Joanna’s house, and the lynching of Joe Christmas. This gives the impression that too often, humans tend to abuse the freedom we possess, using it to harm others.
This depiction of the abuse of freedom might indicate that humanity needs discipline in order to escape violence and chaos. However, the novel portrays discipline in a disturbing light too. Racial violence such as lynching is carried out in the name of curtailing the supposed threat of black male violence. However, in reality this threat is an invention used to excuse white supremacist violence and the ongoing oppression of black people. While some of the characters in the novel use their freedom to enact violence, others—and particularly black characters—find that they are violently prevented from exercising their freedom in the first place.
The close relationship between social control and violence is further developed through the novel’s depiction of religion. Rather than being a way of existing in peace and harmony with the world, religion is portrayed as a disturbingly violent and oppressive force. This is shown most emphatically through the passages describing Joe Christmas’s early life with his strictly religious adoptive family, the McEacherns. Joe’s father, Mr. McEachern, turns to violence as a way of disciplining Joe. For example, when Joe is only eight, Mr. McEachern whips him with a belt in order to force him to learn the catechism. Not only does this show that violence is often used as a force of social control, but it also serves as another reminder of the cyclical nature of violence. Traumatized by his violent upbringing, Joe comes to despise religion, and when Joanna becomes devout and asks Joe to pray with her, he kills her.
Overall, therefore, the novel indicates the bleak idea that neither freedom nor discipline are reliable ways to escape violence—indeed, both freedom and discipline are more often ways to enact violence.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Freedom, Discipline, and Violence ThemeTracker
Freedom, Discipline, and Violence Quotes in Light in August
A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from.
‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Go on. Accuse me. Accuse the white man that’s trying to help you with what he knows. Accuse the white man and let the nigger go free. Accuse the white and let the nigger run.’
[…]
‘The folks in this town is so smart. Fooled for three years. Calling him a foreigner for three years, when soon as I watched him three days I knew he wasn’t no more a foreigner than I am. I knew before he even told me himself.’
“Christmas. A heathenish name. Sacrilege. I will change that.”
“That will be your legal right,” the matron said. “We are not interested in what they are called, but in how they are treated.”
But the stranger was not listening to anyone anymore than he was talking to anyone. “From now on his name will be McEachern.”
“That will be suitable,” the matron said. “To give him your name.”
“He will eat my bread and he will observe my religion,” the stranger said. “Why should he not bear my name?”
The child was not listening. He was not bothered. He did not especially care, anymore than if the man had said the day was hot when it was not hot. He didn’t even bother to say to himself My name aint McEachern. My name is Christmas There was no need to bother about that yet. There was plenty of time.
“Why not, indeed?” the matron said.
And always, sooner or later, the street ran through cities, through an identical and well nigh interchangeable section of cities without remembered names, where beneath the dark and equivocal and symbolical archways of midnight he bedded with the women and paid them when he had the money, and when he did not have it he bedded anyway and then told them that he was a negro. For a while it worked; that was while he was still in the south. It was quite simple, quite easy. Usually all he risked was a cursing from the woman and the matron of the house, though now and then he was beaten unconscious by other patrons, to waken later in the street or in the jail.
They hated us here. We were Yankees. Foreigners. Worse than foreigners: enemies. Carpet baggers. And it— the War— still too close for even the ones that got whipped to be very sensible. Stirring up the negroes to murder and rape, they called it. Threatening white supremacy.
Remember this. Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of. A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race’s doom and curse for its sins. Remember that. His doom and his curse. Forever and ever. Mine. Your mother’s. Yours, even though you are a child. The curse of every white child that ever was born and that ever will be born.
He was not yet thinking of himself as having been frustrated by a human agent. It was the fire. It seemed to him that the fire had been selfborn for that end and purpose. It seemed to him that that by and because of which he had had ancestors long enough to come himself to be, had allied itself with crime.
Halliday saw him and ran up and grabbed him and said, ‘Aint your name Christmas?’ and the nigger said that it was. He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad. For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer, let alone a nigger too.
The black blood drove him first to the negro cabin. And then the white blood drove him out of there, as it was the black blood which snatched up the pistol and the white blood which would not let him fire it. And it was the white blood which sent him to the minister, which rising in him for the last and final time, sent him against all reason and all reality, into the embrace of a chimaera, a blind faith in something read in a printed Book. Then I believe that the white blood deserted him for the moment. Just a second, a flicker, allowing the black to rise in its final moment and make him turn upon that on which he had postulated his hope of salvation. It was the black blood which swept him by his own desire beyond the aid of any man, swept him up into that ecstasy out of a black jungle where life has already ceased before the heart stops and death is desire and fulfillment. And then the black blood failed him again, as it must have in crises all his life.
