Light in August

by

William Faulkner

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Race, Gender, and Transgression Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Race, Gender, and Transgression Theme Icon
Freedom, Discipline, and Violence Theme Icon
Names and Identity Theme Icon
Strangers, Outcasts, and Belonging Theme Icon
Haunting and the Past Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Light in August, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Gender, and Transgression Theme Icon

Light in August is set in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, at the beginning of the Jim Crow era, and chronicles white people’s intense anxiety about preserving white supremacy during this period of transition. Many of the characters in the novel are desperate to uphold race as a fixed and essential quality, yet other characters, like Joe Christmas—who believes he has black ancestry yet passes as white—show that race is actually an arbitrary invention. Meanwhile, the meaning of gender is also in flux during this period, and many of the characters betray a similar hysteria about changing gender roles, particularly female sexuality. Indeed, the novel shows that anxieties about racial and gender transgression are inherently intertwined, as racism is deeply rooted in fears about gender and sexuality—particularly the fear of white women having sex with black men.

The novel ultimately shows that the attempt to uphold strict gender/racial roles and categories is doomed because these categories are arbitrary inventions, which makes it inevitable that real people will transgress them. Indeed, insisting on policing gender and racial categories will only lead to more chaos and brutality, as is shown by the many gruesome murders and other acts of violence that take place in the novel. The novel indicates that it is better to accept and forgive supposed transgressions, as Byron Bunch does at the end of the narrative when he takes care of Lena and her baby despite the fact that the child is not his.

Of the many acts of transgression in the novel, the sexual relationship between Joanna and Joe is the most scandalous, in part because it involves both racial and gender transgression. Although in Jefferson Joe lives as a white man, he believes that he has black ancestry and at other points in his life has identified as black and lived within black communities. This racial flexibility is itself very scandalous, and makes his relationship with Joanna, who is white, horrifying to a community in which sexual relations between black men and white women are the greatest taboo.

Through Joanna and Joe’s relationship, the novel shows that race and gender/sexual categories—and thus race and gender/sexual transgression—are intimately intertwined. After the two start sleeping together, Joe observes: “My God… it was like I was the woman and she was the man.” This gender reversal mimics the inversion of racial identities the pair represent. Joe may be a black man yet passes as white, whereas Joanna is a white woman whose sympathy toward black people and family history of abolitionism lead others to call her a “N_____ lover.”

Joanna and Joe’s relationship indicates that acts of sexual transgression lead to more forms of transgression. Not only are the couple engaged in a racially/sexually scandalous relationship, but Joe is also involved in an illegal bootlegging operation with Joe Brown, while the two live inside a cabin on Joanna’s property. Each of these acts violates the norms of the society in which they live. The fact that Joanna and Joe’s relationship eventually leads to Joe murdering Joanna—after she tries to force him to pray with her—again confirms the notion that acts of racial/gender transgression lead to violation of other social norms and rules. It also seems to confirm the racist view espoused at the time that black men posed a violent threat to white women.

At the same time, one can also interpret the novel as showing that the existence of strict racial and gender categories in the first place makes transgression (and violence) inevitable. Contrary to the beliefs of the book’s racist characters, Joe does not murder Joanna because he is black (indeed, it is never confirmed that he even has black ancestry, and throughout most of the novel he lives as a white man). Instead, he kills her due to the trauma and resentment he has incurred from living in such a strict, repressive society, which has left him feeling frustrated, isolated, and vengeful.

The storyline about Lena’s baby further shows that rigid social categories inevitably lead to transgression. In the world of the novel, it is seen as shameful for a woman to have a child alone—even if it is because, as in Lena’s case, the child’s father has abandoned her. Armistad articulates the warped thinking behind this prejudice when he observes that women who have children out of wedlock are trying to leave the “woman race” and become part of the “man race.” This shows that having a child alone is perceived as an act of gender transgression akin to acts of racial transgression such as passing or interracial sex.

Yet the book makes it painfully clear that Lena is not responsible for this act of “transgression,” as she was abandoned by the father of her child (Lucas Burch, who later renames himself Joe Brown). Furthermore, when Lucas leaves, Lena is left with no opportunities to redeem herself. Her decision to seek Lucas out on foot is seen as strange and scandalous. Lena is stuck in an impossible situation: abandoned by Lucas, she is condemned both for having a child alone and for trying to find her child’s father.

In this sense, the book emphasizes that rigid social categories of race and gender make transgression inevitable. It also shows that such acts of transgression tend to accumulate, often culminating in violence and chaos. Attempting to police race and gender categories as well as other social norms will lead to a society that is more broken and violent, not less. Instead, it is better not to enforce such categories and norms so rigidly, as Byron Bunch does when he accepts and cares for Lena despite her being pregnant with the child of another man.

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Race, Gender, and Transgression ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Race, Gender, and Transgression appears in each chapter of Light in August. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Race, Gender, and Transgression Quotes in Light in August

Below you will find the important quotes in Light in August related to the theme of Race, Gender, and Transgression.
Chapter 2 Quotes

“His name is Christmas,” he said.

“His name is what?” one said.

“Christmas.”

“Is he a foreigner?”

“Did you ever hear of a white man named Christmas?” the foreman said.

“I never heard of nobody a-tall named it,” the other said.

And that was the first time Byron remembered that he had ever thought how a man’s name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time.

Related Characters: Joe Christmas, Byron Bunch
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:

She has lived in the house since she was born, yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction.

Related Characters: Joanna Burden
Related Symbols: Joanna’s House
Page Number: 46
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

‘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.’

Related Characters: Lucas Burch / Joe Brown (speaker), Joe Christmas, The Sheriff
Page Number: 97-98
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

“You noticed my skin, my hair,” waiting for her to answer, his hand slow on her body.

She whispered also. “Yes. I thought maybe you were a foreigner. That you never come from around here.”

“It’s different from that, even. More than just a foreigner. You can’t guess.”

“What? How more different?”

“Guess.”

Related Characters: Joe Christmas (speaker), Bobbie (speaker)
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Joe Christmas
Page Number: 224
Explanation and Analysis:

He now lived as man and wife with a woman who resembled an ebony carving. At night he would lie in bed beside her, sleepless, beginning to breathe deep and hard. He would do it deliberately, feeling, even watching, his white chest arch 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. And all the while his nostrils at the odor which he was trying to make his own would whiten and tauten, his whole being writhe and strain with physical outrage and spiritual denial.

He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself.

Related Characters: Joe Christmas
Page Number: 225-226
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Joanna Burden (speaker)
Page Number: 249
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Nathaniel Burden (speaker), Joanna Burden, Calvin Burden, Sr., Calvin Burden, Jr.
Page Number: 252
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

The town looked upon them both as being a little touched—lonely, gray in color, a little smaller than most other men and women, as if they belonged to a different race, species—even though for the next five or six years after the man appeared to have come to Mottstown to settle down for good in the small house where his wife lived, people hired him to do various odd jobs which they considered within his strength.

Related Characters: Mr. Hines / The Janitor, Mrs. Hines
Page Number: 341
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Joe Christmas
Page Number: 350
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Gavin Stevens (speaker), Joe Christmas
Page Number: 449
Explanation and Analysis: