Faulkners Light in August - Setting :: Light August Essays

wild in marvelous - Setting Most of Light in August is set in the towns, villages, and countryside of the early 1930s Deep South. It is a bena of racial prejudice and stern religion. Community ties are still strengthened an outsider is really identifiable, and people gossip about their neighbors. In this constituent of the country, the past lives on, even physically. For example, the cabin in which Joe Christmas stays and in which Lena plantation gives birth is a slave cabin dating back to to begin with the Civil War. And finally the South of this epoch is still close to nature. proper(a) outside the town are the woods. All these aspects of the setting lend themselves peculiarly well to Faulkners favorite themes, for example, the relationships between the community and the individual and between the impart and the past. But Faulkners setting is quite specific. Faulkner modeled his fictional Yoknapatawpha County on Lafayette County, Mississippi, and the metr opolis of Jefferson on his hometown, Oxford, and perhaps on neighboring Ripley as well. He describes his regions smells, sights, and sounds in loving detail its chirping insects, its summer heat, its unique light. Some of Jefferson is a quite accurate rendering of Oxford--for example, the hilltop over which Lena first sees Jefferson in the distance, the regorge in which Joe Christmas briefly hides when pursued by Percy Grimm, almost all of the travel plan Joe Christmas walks from the town barbershop through Freedman Town and back, and even the schedule of the Jefferson string that the Hineses take. (Note that the farther Faulkner gets from Jefferson the less detailed his descriptions of setting often become.) Still, Faulkner felt dispatch to modify his sources whenever it suited his fictional purposes. He removed Oxfords intellectual center, the University of Mississippi. And Presbyterians are a larger percentage of fictional Jefferson than of real-world northern Mi ssissippi. This change helps Faulkner explore his interest in Calvinist and Puritan forms of Christianity. Of course, you must also remember that Mississippi in 1932 was quite different from what it is today. At that time racial segregation was enshrined in law blacks were not permitted to vote, and many brutal lynchings occurred. special(prenominal) residences are almost always Faulkners fictional creations.