The Masculinity and Homoeroticism of Joe Christmas: Reading Across Gender and Sexuality in Light in August

William Faulkner’s 1932 novel Light in August centers on the town of Jefferson in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which is thrown into crisis by the arrival of Lena Grove. Lena comes to Jefferson searching for the father of her baby, Lucas Burch, and soon realizes that Burch has been living under the name Joe Brown and working at the town’s mill with Joe Christmas. The enigmatic figure of Christmas then becomes the main suspect in the murder of his former lover, Joanna Burden. The novel’s plot is further complicated by the revelation of Christmas’ undefined mixed racial identity and the homoerotic undertones in his relationships with the other male characters, particularly Joe Brown and Percy Grimm. Examining Light in August through a queer lens, particularly by focusing on the character of Joe Christmas and the instability that he brings to the town’s standards of gender and sexuality, allows for a new interpretation of Faulkner’s text. The formulation of Christmas’ gender builds upon his mixed race and his own understanding of the town’s expectations of his performance as either a Black or white man. Analyzing Christmas’ place in Light in August makes clear how he transforms conventional views of novel’s depiction of the traditionally heteronormative social boundaries of the South. 

As the novel’s central protagonist, Joe Christmas is at the core of the conflicts that arise in Jefferson, beginning with his complication of the gender boundaries in Jefferson. Faulkner develops Christmas’ characterization through flashbacks to his youth in an orphanage until he was adopted by the devout and abusive Mr. McEachern and his wife. After killing his adopted father, Christmas runs away from home. When he gets to Jefferson, he is seen as a white man by the town, but his own knowledge of his mixed racial identity soon reorients how his identity as a man is viewed. The inherent connection between masculinity and humor in American culture, as Deborah Clarke notes, has developed the reliance of white men on humor to perform their gender. Joe Christmas’ racial ambiguity plays a significant role in limiting the ability of Jefferson’s white men to police his masculinity. His mixed racial identity simultaneously emasculates him to white men and enhances his sexuality in its threatening of the town’s white masculinity. At the beginning of the novel, when Christmas is still viewed as a white man, he does not fit perfectly into his expected humorous role, with Faulkner writing that when Joe Brown would tell an anecdote while they worked at the mill, Brown “would laugh, shout with laughter, his head backflung, while beside him the other man [Christmas] worked with silent and unflagging savageness” (40). When Christmas’ mixed race is revealed to the town, he fails to fall in line with the town’s perceptions of the acceptable performances for either white or Black men. As Clarke writes, Christmas “does not act out the right role, and because there is no right role for him, the community is unable to laugh him off—though they try—as just another joke” (31). 

Christmas’ rebuffing of conventional masculinity and expectations for white or Black men in the South, in turn, makes his performance of gender to stand out as unusual in Jefferson. Jay Watson believes this turn away from traditional views of masculinity develops from Christmas’ “hypermasculinity,” which Watson defines as a simultaneous “overdoing and undergoing of masculinity” (161). This hypermasculinity, which threatens “the ‘law and order’ of Southern manhood itself,” instigates “an equally excessive response” from the town (Watson 161). As Clarke notes, the town’s perception of Christmas as a threat to the established boundaries of masculinity stems from his refusal to learn to perform masculinity. Christmas’ rejection of Jefferson’s rules of gender confuses and disturbs the town, rendering “white masculinity even more contested as a dominant cultural force” (Clarke 31). 

Christmas’ unconventional masculinity is additionally complicated by his sexual relationship with Joanna Burden and Judith Butler’s concept of ‘gender trouble’ that Melanie Masteron Sherazi sees arising in their relationship as lovers. While describing their relationship, Faulkner repeatedly emphasizes the confusion of gender roles that permeates the nature of their affair. In interpreting the ‘gender trouble’ of Joanna and Christmas’ relationship, Sherazi explains that Christmas experiences a “simultaneous attraction and repulsion toward Joanna’s female masculinity” throughout their time as lovers (490). Christmas thinks of their sexual encounters “as if he struggled physically with another man,” later noting to himself, “‘My God…it was like I was the woman and she was the man’” (235). A substantial part of this “gender trouble” seems to develop from Joanna’s crossing of gender boundaries, which Faulkner describes at multiple moments When Christmas finds Joanna sitting at a table, Faulkner writes that she was “a garment that looked as if it had been made for and worn by a careless man” (275). Joanna’s gender-nonconformity arises again just before she is killed when she asks Christmas to kneel with her in prayer. Joanna spoke the prayers “forthright and without hesitation, talking to God as if He were a man in the room with two other men. She spoke of herself and of him as of two other people, her voice still, monotonous, sexless” (280-281).

Christmas’ contradictory feelings on Joanna’s masculinity are particularly interesting when considering the implications of homosexuality surrounding him in Faulkner’s original text. In one such passage, Christmas thinks, “aloud now, ‘Why in hell do I want to smell horses?’ Then he said, fumbling: ‘It’s because they are not women. Even a mare horse is a kind of man’” (109). This seeming desire for something that is “not women” pairs with a moment in his cabin, when Faulkner notes that Christmas took a magazine from under his cot containing “either pictures of young women in underclothes or pictures of men in the act of shooting one another with pistols” (110). The description of the magazine in this line draws a parallel between the sexual images of young women and men shooting each other, instilling an inherent sense of homoeroticism in the latter description that is passed onto Christmas for having kept such an item underneath his cot.

Building from the confusions of gender and sexuality that arise in Christmas’ relationship with Joanna, his relationship with Joe Brown then becomes another central point in understanding the novel from a queer perspective. Faulkner makes clear that Christmas and Brown are perceived as “partners” by the town, with Brown himself telling the sheriff “how Christmas had been living with Miss Burden like man and wife for three years, until Brown and him teamed up,” seemingly replacing Joanna’s role in Christmas’ life (93). After Brown realizes that Christmas had been engaged in a sexual relationship with Joanna, he speaks to Christmas with a voice that is “gleeful though quiet, cautious, conspiratorial, as if he had already established his alliance and sympathy with Christmas, unasked, and without waiting to know what was going on, out of loyalty to his partner or perhaps to abstract man as opposed to all woman” (274). Similarly, Byron Bunch, a Jefferson resident who falls in love with Lena, explains to her that Brown and Christmas’ close relationship had been common knowledge to the town ever since Christmas “took Brown for a partner” (87). Their partnership takes on a deeper homoerotic sense with the sheriff’s comment about the two, when he says, “‘I aint interested in the wives [Brown] left in Alabama, or anywhere else. What I am interested in is the husband he seems to have had since he come to Jefferson’” (321). 

In interpreting Faulkner’s pairing of the two men, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman argues that this “homoeroticism framing the Joes’ liaison” is a signifier of “the vulnerability of white masculinity to penetration by black men in the social, economic, and political realms” (185). This is a particularly relevant reading of their relationship in regards to Christmas’ racial identity, which Brown reveals to the town in a moment of revelation that crucially disturbs the partnership they have formed. Abdur-Rahman writes that Brown’s disclosure of Christmas’ “black racial ancestry” reshapes the town’s prior perception of their relationship as Christmas being the dominant of the two, with Brown as his “disciple” (Abdur-Rahman 184, Faulkner 45). The disclosure of Christmas’ non-whiteness permits Brown to bring about his former partner’s ultimate demise by calling for the enforcement of the town’s existing divisions of public and private spaces along racial lines and the forbidden contact between African American bodies and white bodies (186). Nathan Tipton also notes that Brown’s exposing of Christmas’ racial identity should, in theory, allow “Brown the white power necessary to lord over Christmas, who has heretofore acted as the dominant male in their relationship” (380-381). However, Tipton concludes that it instead implicitly marks Brown as feminine and immediately ostracizes him from the town (380-381), which seems the more likely viewpoint given Brown’s completely unchanged social standing in the sheriff’s eyes. When the sheriff’s search party gets closer to Christmas and Brown protests that he had told the sheriff the truth, the sheriff is uncaring. Though Brown may not have succeeded in transforming the town’s view of his and Christmas’ relationship, his moment of revelation is still critical in leading Jefferson to become even warier of Christmas’ seemingly unbounded and changeable sexuality.

Just as Christmas’ multiracial identity perturbs his homoerotic relationship with Joe Brown, it also further complicates the town’s inability to comprehend his gender and sexuality. His lack of a single racial label appears to allow him to escape the binary, strict racial lines that Jefferson has historically drawn, with Abdur-Rahman noting that this mixed-race identity grants him the possibility of transgressing all sexual boundaries. Christmas “violates the brutally enforced restrictions on black male sexuality” because “the proper sexual object choice under the regime of compulsive heterosexuality was a person of the opposite sex and the same racial group” (Abdur-Rahman 183). His relationships with Joanna and Brown both reflect that violation of sexual restrictions, so that it is not just Christmas’ gender-nonconformity or homosexuality that Jefferson reacts to, but instead, as Watson describes, Christmas’ contradictory and consummatory portrayal of masculinity, which is viewed as containing a “predatory desire with the potential to extend itself in every direction throughout the social field” (153). Consequently, the “radically uncertain” nature of Christmas’ gender identity, which provides him an unlimited field of sexual opportunity, continually troubles Jefferson and its strict understanding of social borders (Watson 161).

    In the face of these disruptions to gender and sexuality that Joe Christmas brings to Jefferson, Jefferson reacts defensively. The predominant agent of this reaction is Percy Grimm, a young man living in Jefferson who emerges late in the novel as the self-appointed leader of a group of the town’s men who eventually find and kill Christmas. Faulkner primarily describes Grimm, a captain in the State national guard, as a self-perceived vigilante-like figure with an extreme patriotic zeal for the military. Watson argues that Grimm is primarily motivated by an anxious need to demonstrate his indisputable masculine identity (158-159). On the other hand, John Duvall describes Grimm’s intense need to kill and castrate Joe Christmas as a reflection of a “male homosexual panic,” driven by his desire to find a stable sense of masculinity by being accepted into the “homosocial world” of the men of Jefferson (62). Grimm and his men search for Christmas and question Hightower during the novel’s climax, which serves as a pivotal moment in many queer analyses of the novel: 

They held Hightower on his feet; in the gloomy hall, after the sunlight, he too with his bald head and his big pale face streaked with blood, was terrible. “Men!” he cried. “Listen to me. He was here that night. He was here with me the night of the murder. I swear to God—”

“Jesus Christ!” Grimm cried, his young voice clear and outraged like that of a young priest. “Has every preacher and old maid in Jefferson taken their pants down to the yellowbellied son of a bitch?” He flung the old man aside and ran on. (463-464) 

Grimm’s use of the phrase “taken their pants down” adds a sexual element to his anger, implying that there is a repressed homoeroticism motivating him in tracking down Christmas. As Tipton writes, Grimm’s rage at the idea that Christmas has engaged in sexual relationships with every man and woman in Jefferson except him sparks a crisis of sexuality, which overtakes his concerns of miscegenation following the revelation of Joe’s racial identity (379). As soon as Grimm comes upon Christmas in Hightower’s kitchen, he aggressively shoots him. However, Grimm does not stop there; he instead continues the violence by castrating Christmas. When the other men reach Grimm in the kitchen, they approach him “stooping over [Christmas’] body,” and “when they saw what Grimm was doing one of the men gave a choked cry and stumbled back into the wall and began to vomit…. Then Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife. ‘Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell,’ he said” (Faulkner 464). 

This bloody castration can be seen as Grimm’s attempt to forcibly make Joe female in the hopes of erasing the overdone masculinity he sees in Christmas (Watson 167). From this perspective, the extreme violence that Grimm engages in is directed specifically at the “bothness” of gender that Christmas occupies: “a living embodiment of the excluded middle,” with Grimm’s castration serving as “an attempt to split Joe and his excesses down the middle, to reduce them to a relatively comprehensible, even reassuring alterity” (167). However, the homoerotic nature of Grimm’s comments before he castrates Christmas implies a more sexually charged layer behind the violence that he seeks to enact. This perspective is supported by Abdur-Rahman, who explains that lynching is a “brutal enactment of homoeroticism and its panicked repudiation” because it functions as both a feminization of the black male body and a “‘communal rape’ of black manhood” (188-189). From that viewpoint, the lynching that Grimm conducts can be viewed as an assertion of his white masculinity in an attempt to dominate Christmas’ black manhood, resulting in this racially motivated and homoerotic encounter between the two (Abdur-Rahman 188). Thus, Grimm’s shooting and castration of Christmas serves as the ultimate conflation of homophobia and homoeroticism as Grimm both desires and endeavors to destroy Christmas (Tipton 382). 

    Despite Grimm’s gruesome efforts, Faulkner seems to imply that he ultimately fails to destroy any part of Joe Christmas’ identity. The imagery of Christmas’ body after the climactic moment of his murder is particularly striking, as Christmas’ “face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath.” Faulkner describes this rush of blood as “rush[ing] out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever” (464-465). Notably, the “serene” and “triumphant” nature of the “pent black blood” that Faulkner writes will suffuse through the town and remain in Jefferson’s memory paints a peaceful picture after the brutality of the castration (465). Faulkner’s transition from the past tense to the present in the middle of this passage also appears to support such an interpretation, pointing to the idea that Joe Christmas, like the “scream of the siren mounted toward its unbelievable crescendo, passing out of the realm of hearing” that closes out this scene, will remain in the town after his death (465). In a similar reading of this final moment in Hightower’s kitchen, Tipton believes that Grimm’s castration disperses Christmas’ memory throughout the town instead of destroying the “sexual ‘otherness in Jefferson,” which only further fractures the complicated nature of both race and homoerotic desire in the novel (381, 388). Similarly, Duvall concludes that Grimm’s castration of Christmas does not make Grimm a man, but instead cements his exclusion and separation from the other men of Jefferson (64). Grimm’s ultimate failure to take down Joe Christmas allows Light in August to suggest that Christmas’ role as a figure who is limited to none of the conventional societal borders of race, gender, and sexuality will continue to haunt the town long after his death. 

    Ultimately, interpreting Light in August from a queer lens centered on Joe Christmas’ straddling of Jefferson’s established social boundaries allows for new interpretations of one of Faulkner’s most widely recognized works. Christmas’ character complicates the conventional rules of sexuality and gender in the contemporary South. Through this perspective, the novel offers a valuable view on how Faulkner’s portrayal of Christmas as a racially ambiguous character can also be understood as illuminating other aspects of his identity, especially the complicated nature of his race and sexuality as it disrupts Jefferson.