Joanna+Burden

//"She had lived such a quiet life, attended so to her own affairs, that she bequeathed to the town in which she had been born and lived and died a foreigner, an outlander, a kind of heritage of astonishment and outrage, for which, even though she had supplied them at last with an emotional barbecue, a Roman holiday almost, they would never forgive her and let her be dead in peace and quiet. Not that. Peace is not that often."// —//LIA// 289

Before we meet one of //Light in August//’s central figures, Joanna Burden, we learn about her from a remove. She is characterized through others as a Yankee who’s more than worn out her welcome (46); hear about a pair of oddball "foreigners," Joe Brown and Joe Christmas, who are running a bootlegging operation out of the cabin behind her house; and, perhaps most significantly, entering Jefferson with Lena Grove we even see Joanna's house burning down (30) before we’ve met her. These details all work to establish her as a loner and an outsider, which makes it all the more interesting that the people Jefferson seem to consider her a grave threat. What’s the big deal about a spinster living on the outskirts of town? Burden’s stark ambivalences – she is a northern southerner, a virgin nymphomaniac, neither man nor woman – destabilizes the categories upon which gossipy Southern society structures itself. Indeed, within a "Southern culture [that] is deeply purist and intolerant of mixtures," (Andrews 4) she contains multitudes. Because she can be classified as neither northerner nor southerner, man nor woman, nor virgin nor whore, Joanna Burden's very existence poses a fundamental threat to the order of the South, which is restored with the cleaving of her head from her body, which symbolizes the restorative bifurcation of the binaries she challenges.

Burden's mix of Northernness and Southernness constitutes a threat to the town. Among the first information we find out about Joanna is that, while she was born in Jefferson, she is not quite a citizen of Jefferson. “She has lived in the house since she was born,” Faulkner writes, “yet she is still a stranger, a foreigner whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction.” The town’s unwillingness to accept her extends both from her personal support of black causes -- most notably, her support for "a dozen negro schools and colleges through the south" (233) -- and from her family’s strong abolitionist history, which culminated when “her grandfather and her brother were killed on the square by an ex slaveowner over a question of negro votes in a state election.” (46-47) As Byron Bunch notes, the Burdens moved to Jefferson “in the Reconstruction, to stir up the niggers.” (53) (Her father was a John Brown-style radical abolitionist figure who carried a pistol.) Indeed, they were carpetbaggers, which, as the article on this site notes, were seen as “a meddling force that sought to overturn the traditional social structure of the South for their own financial or political gain,” particularly through their support of Southern Blacks. We might link this past with Burden’s alienation from the town to illustrate the oft-quoted Faulkner line that “the past isn’t even past.” Decades after the Civil War has ended, “it still lingers about her and about [her house]: something dark and outlandish and threatful, even though she is but a woman and but the descendant of them whom the ancestors of the town had reason (or thought they had) to hate and dread.” (46-47) The threat posed to the south by her northernness is crystallized in the image of a Civil War pistol, with which she tries to shoot Christmas, and makes Faulkner's point clearly that the violence of the Civil War is "not past." The war rages on, with Burden in the thick of it.
 * Between northern and southern**

Burden's uncanny ability to embody masculine traits also threatens the established Southern order. It's important to note first that Burden does embody female traits. Christmas notes, for example, her "apparently endless succession of clean calico house dresses and sometimes [that she wears] a cloth sunbonnet like a countrywoman" (233). But hints of her masculine energy come almost immediately: Where, we are told, most women are talkers, she is virtually silent: "There was no feminine vacillation," Faulkner writes describing Christmas' early encounters with Burden, "no coyness of obvious desire and intention to succumb at last. It was as if [Christmas] struggled physically with another man for an object of no actual value to either, and for which they struggled on principle alone" (235). A woman with the sexual power to morph into man poses a threat to the established Southern order on two levels, first, because it allows her to subjugate Christmas to the position of woman (235), and, second, because of the danger it poses to all southern men: namely, her very existence comes to suggest that all the heterosexual intercourse they've been enjoying all this time was actually gay sex.
 * Between man and woman **

Faulkner also places Burden between masculinity and femininity by dramatizing her menopause because it signals the end of a woman's childbearing age. In addition to several references to Joanna as being "impregnable" (261), Faulkner links Burden with pregnancy early in the novel, referring to Lena's pregnant belly referred to as a "swelling and unmistakable //burden//" (9). The verbal linkage signals us to think of Joanna Burden as if something is gestating within Joanna, as well -- for in the language of the book, her name, in effect, means "pregnancy." Yet her name, along with her menopausal status, calls to mind something more like the Yeatsian "rough beast, its hour come round at last" than a baby. Her perception of procreation bears this out even further, as she ties her disturbing vision of crucified white babies to the primordial sin of slavery: "And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they dew breath," she says, "to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but beneath them too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to a cross" (253). The darkly ironic burden-Burden linkage along with her vision of violence against children suggests that Joanna's relationship with Christmas has produced not a baby but a kind of stillborn darkness that manifests as the novel's climactic acts of violence, which restore order to Jefferson.

Further complicating our placement of Burden is that she is not constant in her sexual behavior, which Faulkner tells us is broken into two phases, the first marked by her imperviousness and the second by a kind of sexual mania (Andrews 5). We might look at these through the lens of the virgin-whore continuum along which the South places its women (with Mrs. McEachern on the former, and Lena and Hightower's wife on the latter, for example). The sense we are given that Burden "aint old" and "aint young neither" (227) doesn't allow us to use age as a metric to judge her perceived innocence/virgin-ness. Similarly, despite their constant sex, Christmas begins to feel it is impossible to take Burden's virginity: "Even after a year it was as though he entered by stealth to despoil her virginity each time anew," Faulkner writes. "It was as though each turn of dark saw him faced again with the necessity to despoil again that which he had already despoiled—or never had and never would" (234). This nightly replenishment of her virginity suggests two readings: First, she represents the Virgin Mary to Christmas' Christ, as well as the conflation of maternal and amorous interests in Christmas' greater Oedipal drama. Second, perhaps she approaches sex with Christmas as an actress would her nightly performance, their sex merely an endlessly repeating scene in the South's larger racial drama, wherein the black man rapes a white virgin in her home. Yet Burden's performance of this drama is complicated by her inability or unwillingness to play the role of white woman being raped by a black man; indeed, Christmas complains that when he goes to "show the bitch," it is "almost as though she were helping him" (236). Because the "psychological impetus for racial segregation was the great fear" of black men having sex with white women (Andrews 4), Burden's ability to toggle between virgin (sexually violated by the black intruder) and "whore" (willing participant in no-strings-attached sex with a black man) undermines the basic fear of miscegenation around which Southern society organized itself.
 * Between virgin and whore**

Burden's near-decapitation represents not only an insular community's heartless extirpation of an outsider it perceives as dangerous; the separation of Burden's head from her body suggests that murder is her punishment for intellectualizing a place whose order and circumstances — and shortcomings — can only be understood by its own people. Decapitation also may stand in in for the separation of the powerful binaries that fail to describe her: As both a Southern-born carpetbagger, a woman with man's powers, and a virginal figure who is nonetheless in a sexual relationship with a black man, Burden seems to reflects the South’s greatest social anxieties, and, indeed, Burden seems to understand that her position in Jefferson will lead to her death. When Faulkner notes that in a safe "along with her will, reposed the written instructions ... for the disposal of her body after death," (234) this is the moment, we are told, that Christmas fully understands how the town feels about Burden. So Burden's brutal end is described as an "emotional barbecue, a Roman holiday, almost," (289) we begin fully grasp the social violence Jefferson wages with "foreigners." As Burden and Christmas are both erased one gets the sense that nothing has changed; it is as if, for the people of Jefferson, the bloody, horrific tale has unfolded on a stage. As the curtain closes, the order of the South is restored.
 * Burden's murder**

–Andrew Cedermark

Works cited

Andrews, Karen. "The Shaping of Joanna Burden in "Light in August"." Pacific Coast Philology. 26.1/2 (1991): 3-12 . JSTOR. Web. 30 Oct. 2013. Faulkner, William. //Light In August//. New York: Vintage International ed, 1990. Print.