Light in August: Memory and Identity

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter shows how in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) tradition, legacy, heritage, nostalgia, as well as collective and cultural memories are often connected with traumatic events and experiences, influencing (individual and group) identity in the 1930s American South. The storylines of the novel’s three main characters—Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower, and Lena Grove—demonstrate how memory highly impacts the identity search in the whirl of commingled past and present events. The chapters of the novel dedicated to Joe Christmas place his search for identity within the Southern collective memory of whiteness as a property ideology as well as the Southern cultural memory of the black rapist myth. The chapters of Light in August focusing on the life path of Lena Grove reveal how cultural memories such as the Cult of True Southern Womanhood, even though part of collective identity and built on formative and normative texts, objects, persons, myths, and places, sanctified, and eventually canonized through religion, art and history, do not necessarily make up individual identity and can be challenged, subverted, and transgressed. The storyline of the novel’s third protagonist, Gail Hightower, revolves almost entirely around his postmemories of the Civil War and his grandfather.KeywordsMemoryIdentityThe American SouthPostmemoryWilliam Faulkner Light in August