Lena+Grove

One of the triptych of main characters of LIA, Lena opens the novel as a young, white, pregnant woman wandering from Alabama to Jefferson in search of the father of her child, a man named Lucas Burch who has been using the pseudonym Joe Brown.

Lena is perhaps the quiet hero of the novel. The book begins and ends with Lena, who is simply "traveling," ostensibly in search of Lucas Burch, the father of her child, but by the end of the novel we realize it is Lena's journey that matters, not the actual conquest of finding and securing Burch. And more importantly she herself has seemingly come to this awareness. The victory that might come with finding Burch has become irrelevant, because Lena has proved that she is fully capable of attaining the help she needs from others. In this way she resembles Anse from AILD, except that her methods involve a patience and softness that attracts help, rather than the manipulative tactics of Bundren. Instead of seeking out help, help seems to come to her. The slow progress she makes and her determination to continue moving forward in search of a home, a family, becomes a universal, deeply human theme of the novel. As our concluding narrator, the nameless furniture repairer and dealer, says to his wife at the end of the novel: "I think she was just travelling. I dont think she had any idea of finding whoever it was she was following." (LIA, 506)

The book's end mirrors its beginning with one vital difference: Lena has secured, without any conniving of her own, a partner in the form of Byron Bunch. Bunch is not the typical winning suitor but he is devoted and has a sense of paternal duty that stands in contrast with the other male figures in the novel, especially Old Doc Hines and McEachern. One of Lena's most significant and admirable qualities -- unique for a typical hero -- is her patience. Lena makes more progress than anyone in the novel, and seemingly does this without any struggle. And in typical Faulkner fashion, she has made this progress while at the same time remaining in the same situation at the end of the novel as at the beginning. Thus the symbolic motion of the wheel slowly turning on its axis in the wagons that carry Lena onward -- a theme that fittingly comes full circle at the beginning and end of the novel: "Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress." (LIA, 8) It is the difference between what is and what appears to be that is a constant Faulknerian theme. In a novel where characters rarely look at each other, until the looking, the seeing, strikes them profoundly to the core in a moment of sudden revelation, Lena's slow and steady movement underlines all of the action and sets the pace of the book.

Biblical allusions emerge as much in LIA as in any Faulkner work, and Lena is certainly suggestive of Mary in search of Bethlehem and a stable where she can carry out the birth of Christ. Some critics have referred to her as a "mendicant Madonna." As in TSAF, Faulkner's tragedy is always precariously balanced by elements of hope, often in the form of female characters, and we see this in the birth of Lena's child about 12 hours prior to the death of Christmas (see a helpful chronology of the action of LIA here). In fact, we might assume Faulkner's intention to make those events both take place at 5:00, the birth at 5am and the death at 5pm: birth and death being two sides of the same coin. It is because of this that Lena's character shines as a small light in an otherwise dark and hopeless story, and it is easy to see her reflection in the novel's title.

In an interesting thesis, J. Hunter Hoskins has argued that part of the reason Lena emerges as a quiet hero who is still "psychologically whole" by the end of the novel is because she "never had a past worthy of mythologizing." (Hoskins, 1) However, I think Faulkner would argue that anyone's past is capable of being mythologized, and the details of Lena's past, albeit briefer than the other main characters, are enough to situate her in what Carolyn Porter refers to as "the socioeconomic world from which all the Lenas and the Burches have emerged." (Porter, 91) We know that Lena, like Joe Christmas, is an orphan, and her middle-of-the-night excursions with Burch from Doane's Mill have gotten her pregnant and abandoned. As Porter stresses: "Even so young and uncomplex a character as Lena has a past, which must be adduced for us to understand her." (Porter, 90)

It is crucial to our understanding of Lena's character to recognize that her and Christmas are closely intertwined.Lena's primary role, as I see it, is to contain the story of Joe Christmas. As such her pregnancy is a metaphor for Christmas's story. The major difference between the beginning of the novel and the end, as far as Lena is concerned, is that what she is carrying has moved from the internal to the external. This deliverance is symbolic of the release of Christmas's spirit, whose death can be seen as a kind of sacrifice for the sins of the town. It is important to note that the action Faulkner focuses on when detailing Lena's past is her crawling out of her bedroom into the night, a kind of emergence from the womb of repression, youth, and sexual ignorance, into the darkness of night. Similarly, Christmas, prior to his first contact with Joanna Burden, who lives in a "big house set in a grove of trees," emerges from the womb of a copse, an obvious reference to Lena's surname: "He lay in the copse, on his belly on the dark earth. In the copse the darkness was impenetrable..." (LIA, 226, 228) It is from this womb-like copse that Christmas is "born again" so to speak, into the full tide of adulthood: "He lay perfectly still in the copse for more than an hour before he rose up and emerged. He did not creep." (LIA, 229) Christmas finds a grove in the fertile earth that he has unconsciously regressed to, and it mirrors the psychological state of Lena, whose deliverance of a child becomes the literal manifestation of Christmas's spiritual deliverance.

–Herbert Plummer

Faulkner, William. //Light In August//. New York: Vintage International ed, 1990. Print. Hoskins, J. Hunter. "Rediscovering Lena Grove in Faulkner's //Light in August//". 2006. MA Thesis, University of Georgia. Porter, Carolyn. //William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies//. Oxford University Press. 2007. Print.
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