Jefferson+Townsfolk

Community plays a fairly large role throughout Faulkner's works. From the people who might look at the Compson family as a deteriorating empire in //The Sound and the Fury// to the small community of hill people who function as a kind of loosely formed town in //As I Lay Dying// communities create the background of the text and are mostly unobtrusive in the lives of the main characters. However, the people of Jefferson in //Light in August// are not a strictly geographical community. Instead, the town of Jefferson is almost its own functioning character with individuated thoughts and goals. The townspeople are one giant antagonist throughout the novel, more than any one single character can possibly be. The townsfolk serve as not only the town's living memory but also it's moral, or rather immoral, compass. The townsfolk of Jefferson act as one entity that is set out to punish those who go against the town's wishes. The townsfolk exist primarily to ensure that nothing ever changes in Jefferson; it is as though there must always be continuity in the town or else the town might unmake itself. This need to remain stagnant ultimately leads to the harshest punishments possible for those who transgress; those characters that choose to change the routine of the town are immediately exiled until they either leave or become effectively ignored into oblivion.

One might expect a community to be a place of progress and change. After all, communities are made up of people and people cannot possibly all share the same opinion on every single thing. It stands to reason that a place must change with the changing times or it risks becoming entirely abandoned and unwelcoming. However, the exact opposite is true of the town of Jefferson. Here, you must always agree with the town's opinion or be shunned or worse. Take for example Joanna Burden who has not really done anything wrong except to be born into her own family. Joana was certainly not involved 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" and yet she finds herself ostracized nonetheless (Faulkner 46-47). Her house is at a physical remove from the rest of the town but it has always been there and has always been a part of the town and yet since that moment sixty years prior to the beginning of //Light in August// the entire Burden line was sealed in the long memory of the town as being undesirable. Since you cannot send the KKK to beat a white woman nearly to death the townsfolk (many of whom are probably too young to even remember the incident that made them hate her in the first place) must satisfy themselves with the fact that she is forced to live as "a stranger, a foreigner, whose people moved in from the North during Reconstruction" (Faulkner 46). The town is entirely in capable of moving forward in time and so all of its inhabitants seem stuck replaying the same fights generation after generation.

The town, and therefore the townsfolk, are heavily invested in a racist ideology. Jefferson is not only a racist town but also a town that seems to thrive on its own racist impulses. This is the primary function of the town: to ensure that race mixing and sympathy towards the Other is never allowed within Jefferson. In his essay "Murder in the Communities: Ideology in and Around //Light in August//" John N. Duvall posits that though the community of Jefferson may appear benign beneath that facade "lurks sinister intention" (136). This is why the town begins to shun Byron Bunch as he falls deeper and deeper in love with Lena Grove and ultimately aids her in bringing her child into the world. Though Bunch had been to that point, nominally, a member of the majority his helping a woman who is bringing forth a child who threatens the very foundations of the Jefferson's racist ideology (a child who is mixed race and entirely Other) makes him immediately an outsider. Though they do not kill Burch outright they do acknowledge that he has "upset its [the town's] moral sensibility, and he is asked very politely to leave" and, as Duvall points out, he can look to Hightower's treatment to be reminded "of what happens to one who does not take the polite hint" (136).

Though the town is not openly vicious it most certainly can be. Nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of Joe Christmas by the entire town the moment they decide he has murdered Joanna Burden (a woman, we must remember, who the town did not even accept as one of their own until she became a white lady who was killed by a black man and therefore a usable symbol for their racist hatred). Christmas is convicted by the town immediately without regard to his actually being guilty because "Brown/Burch calls him a nigger, [...] [he] runs away, and, significantly, because Joanna is a white woman" (Duvall 144). Though Duvall posits that it may be "metaphorically correct" to call Christmas's killing of Joanna manslaughter because this category represents the "grey area between murder and self-defense" in the same way that Christmas "always stands in a grey middle ground" this criminal categroy will not serve the desires of the townspeople (144). They need blood and a reason to declare (once they can be certain that Christmas is in fact of mixed race and not simply a strange looking white man), "That nigger Christmas. They killed him" (Faulkner 442). It is disturbing that no one seems particularly disturbed by the manner in which Christmas is killed. When his death is first reported to Bunch the narration does not give any hint that the man in the wagon is at all troubled by this death. He is simply reporting facts. His calm relating of this news belies the actual horror of the death moment wherein Christmas is not only chased through town by a death squad but is subsequently shot five times and then castrated. His final moments are accompanied by the pronouncement, "Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell" (Faulkner 464).

The townsfolk of Jefferson put a great deal of effort to ensure that their racist agenda is never truly threatened by an outsider. As soon as a member of their own community appears to be sympathizing with the plight of their stated "Other" that person immediately becomes "Other" as well. The townsfolk serve as the protectors of their racism, ensuring that their long memories will continue eternally and that no one should ever be made to think that the South did not win the Civil War. It is a protection of a false and very disturbing "noble" ideal that is, in reality, nothing of the sort. But by the end of the novel the townsfolk are still there and anyone who dared go against that entity's shared wish is dead or has left town.

–Adrie Rappa

Works Cited: Duvall, John N. "Murder and the Communities: Ideology in and around //Light in August//." //Modern Critical Interpretations: William Faulkner's// Light in August. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. 135-157. Print.