White Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement, and the Homoerotic in William Faulkner’s Light in August

Abstract

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman White Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement, and the Homoerotic in William Faulkner’s Light in August L ight in August was originally about white people: Lena Grove, Gail High­ tower, and Byron Bunch were at the center ofWilliam Faulkner’s initial conception of the novel. The murder and near decapitation of Joanna Burden was to be the event that tied these three characters together. Joe Christmas became the central character of the novel when it became evident Faulkner that another element, an embodied racial signifier, was necessary to get at the heart of Southern history. In Faulkner’s text, the brutal murder of a white woman, followed by the quick capture and lynching of a (reputed) black man, exemplifies and encapsulates the ideological and cultural crisis of blackwhite relations in the post-Reconstruction era, as inflected by gender, class, and the then recent history of slavery in the South. In her article, “Persons in Pieces,” Nell Sullivan asserts, “Christmas became so compelling that Faulkner kept adding episodes to his early life in the flashback[s]. The shift of dramatic emphasis from Lena, Byron, and Hightower to Joe Christmas reveals Faulkner’s recognition of the Negrophobe myth at the heart of the (white) Southern con­ sciousness” (498). In writing Joe Christmas, Faulkner introduced a preoccupa­ tion he would continue to work out in such novels as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses: miscegenation and its relation to history, to slavery, and to American genealogies. For Faulkner, miscegenation serves, as Krister Friday remarks, as a “metonym for the tragic aftermath of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction” (41). The fact of miscegenation—of mixed-race bodies that could evade or straddle the color line and in their very embodiment recall the intimate and violent history of institutional slavery—provided Faulkner with a viable, living metaphor for the gruesome history, tumultuous present, and uncertain future of black-white relations in the post-Emancipation South. Many critics have analyzed miscegenation in Light in August in terms of Faulkner’s rendering of slavery and Southern history. This paper diverges from such standard readings to argue that miscegenation is not simply a metaphor for the messy, entangled racial history of the South; miscegenation is also the principal means by which Faulkner contemplates and represents the imperiled state of white masculinity in the post-Reconstruction era and the homoerotic desire and dread underpinning the white male obsession with black manhood. Generally sexualized, degraded, and debased, the black figures in Light in Au­ gust are placed in close proximity to white characters and spaces in order to demonstrate that, in the postslavery South, black and white communities are 176 The Faulkner Journal Fall 2006/Spring 2007 177 dependent on and, in some ways, mutually constitutive ofeach other. Joe Christ­ mas, however, is not simply someone whose racially inscrutable body reveals un­ certain but possibly mixed-race origins; he is Faulkner’s definitive (albeit white) “nigger.” Like many of the black characters in Light in August, Joe Christmas has little interiority and even less discernable motivation for doing what he does. Like the flat surface of a painting, he is a drawn figure. However, unlike the caricatured, illiterate black men who appear for mere seconds in the novel and abruptly leave, or the sexualized black females who are connected to Joe, or the mammy figures who raise other characters in the novel, Joe Christmas represents Faulkner’s meditation on the civic equality ofblack men in the post-Reconstruction era and its effect on the psyche of whites. Christmas acts out his historical moment and anticipates, if not precipitates, crises in the established economic, gender, and racial systems ofthat historical moment. This paper principally aims to understand the way in which Faulkner’s mixed-race figure in Light in August emblematizes the crisis of the post-Reconstruction racial order. I attend specifi­ cally to Faulkner’s linking of racial ambiguity and homoeroticism in the figure of Joe Christmas, arguing that Faulkner uses the historical fact of miscegenation and the perceived failure of white masculinity to critique Southern culture and history and to offer ways of revamping and reconstituting whiteness in the mod­ ern—meaning postslavery—moment. I. A...