Professional paper
Social change and Southern Paranoia in William Faulkner’s Light in August
Barbara Surjan
Abstract
The paper deals with the relationship between race and class in William Faulkner’s 1932 novel Light in August. Through an analysis of the narrative arcs of its central characters, all from the margins of 1930s Southern society, the paper examines the change of the social structure in the South happening at that moment. The Civil War and the Great Migration radically changed Southern society which resulted in the creation of the “color line” and, among rural whites, a fear of finding themselves on the wrong side of it. This resulted in lynchings and other violent racist crimes. These issues are exposed in the novel through the character of Joe Christmas, a man whose race, or rather his assumed race, determines his fate. By comparing him to the character Lena Grove, a young white woman in search of her child’s father, the differences in their position in society and the root of these differences are examined. The paper discusses how ideology is used to separate communities, in this case those in the American South. Further, it examines how these relations are rebuilt in Faulkner’s novel.
Keywords
social change; margins; color line; ideology
Hrčak ID:
318481
URI
Publication date:
17.11.2022.
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