William Faulkner in Light in

¶ … William Faulkner in Light in August and Jean Toomer in Cane include characters who are in some way alienated from society because of their differences from the mainstream. As frequently noted, none of the main characters in Light in August truly belong to the community of Jefferson (Erikson 42).

The environment in which these individuals live is conducive to such isolation: A traditional rural society of the Deep South in the 1920s and 1930s, which has a tightly knit organization that expects everyone to follow specific values and cultural norms (Cleanth Brooks in Gwynn 117). Joanna Burden suffers because she has not followed these "unwritten" rules of conduct. She can only be scorned for not being a part of the whole. In Light in August, as in many of Faulkner's works, the individual and the larger group are in conflict.

"Like all great novelists, Faulkner was well aware that individuality and society were always locked in a relationship of reciprocity: no one, not even the outsider, is outside the jurisdiction of society; we are all within society, for no sooner are we born than society is within us and starts to pattern our lives (Andre Bleikansten in Millgate 82). Joanna "Burden," already tied down by her name, is preoccupied with the negatives of race because of her upbringing.

Her introduction into the evils of the world came very early in life when she and her father went to the cemetery. There, he explained about her grandfather and half-brother about the curse of the white race: Remember this. Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather on your brother or me or you were even thought of.

A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins. Remember that. His doom and his curse. Forever and ever. Mine. Your mother's. Yours, even though you are a child. Being brought up this way taught Joanna to see blacks as objects. "I had seen and known negroes since I could remember. I just looked at them as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep." With time, race and sex interrelated.

Joanna during one of her "wild throes of nymphomania" would call "Negro!" "Negro!" "Negro!" Likewise in the community sexism and racism go together. Woman and "Negro" are seen as one. The worst thing is the "womanshenegro." Joanna is just as bad. She fights her feminine identity in the sex scenes, guilty with the taboo of both lust and race. Added to this is the puritanical values of most of the Jefferson residents, who see such behavior as.