South Circular
The Gothic: order and control in William Faulkner’s Light in August
Jacob Page Year 12
n the mid-eighteenth century, underneath the rationality and reasoning of the Enlightenment, the Gothic emerged as a dark response to the Romantic. The Gothic brings into focus the more evil aspects of humanity – the primal and asocial characteristics that often we bury deep down. One of these fears, but one that also questions how humans coexist, is the dissolution of order and control. The frightening concept of an order-less world that the individual – or society as a whole – has no control over is explored extensively by Faulkner in Light in August . From Joe Christmas’ indeterminate racial heritage to Faulkner’s dissonant presentation of women, Light in August is a tangled and lawless depiction of early twentieth-century southern American culture and its transgressive shortcomings. Faulkner presents his protagonist, Joe Christmas, devoting his whole life to finding order and control over himself, a characteristically Gothic trope in its exposing of the atavistic and irrational elements of the human consciousness. Unfortunately for him, this obsession is pitted against his lack of racial identity, leading to a disordered and lawless life that eventually destroys him. The importance of race in the Southern States is absolute at a time where KKK lynch mobs and the Jim Crow laws were in full force, and the ‘parchment’ coloured Joe Christmas has the impossible decision of branding himself as white or black, a choice that he constantly reneges and denies. At times, he vents his blackness, whistling a tune ‘plaintive and negroid’: an outgoing act of defiance against the whitewashed Jefferson and potentially an expression of pride in his own self-diagnosed negritude. Furthermore, Joe’s habit of telling prostitutes I
that he ‘was a negro’ to antagonise and disgust them seems to be an attempt to remove order and control from the white population. In a fiercely segregatedMississippi, Joe utilises his supposed blackness as an abject weapon with which he can dismantle the racial order established in Light in August. This is a common Gothic trope: in its broader canon, the Otherly physical appearance of more liminal characters is similarly seen to terrify the public. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula , the titular vampire’s appearance in London frightens and unnerves the public in the same way that Joe’s racial ambiguity baffles and frightens the townsfolk. To them, race is literally a case of black and white, and Joe’s undercutting of this threatens to
In a segregated Mississippi, Joe utilises his supposed blackness as an abject weapon with
which he can dismantle the racial order
undo the ideology behind the ingrained racism in a Deep South governed by the Jim Crow laws. They see him as ‘ruthless’ and ‘lonely’, unable to understand him and a paradoxical ethnicity which leads the critic Andre Bleikasten to describe him as a ‘walking oxymoron’. In this way, both texts – and others in the Gothic as a whole – show that the Other, an order-less and out of control being, is able to disrupt and damage society. However, Faulkner’s discussion of race as an issue with the capacity to negate order and control is twofold. It also tears Joe himself apart, his oscillating race taking the course of his life out of his own hands and ultimately precipitating his death when
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