Light in August

“All the men in the village worked in the mill or for it. It was cutting pine. It had been there seven years and in seven years more it would destroy all the timber within its reach. Then some of the machinery and most of the men who ran it and existed because of and for it would be loaded onto freight cars and moved away.” 

Faulkner quickly establishes the fragility of small towns in the South. The men in Lena’s hometown are dependent on a lone mill, a single industry, for economic viability, and the community is fragile because of this dependence. Tonally, the passage adds a sense of foreboding to the story by foreshadowing the inevitable depletion of the region’s timber, which will leave the town vulnerable. The last sentence utilizes “and” repeatedly to create a line that further intertwines the men, and the machinery they are dependent on, in a fluid and poetic way. 

“She dont care nothing about womenfolks. It wasn’t any woman that got her into what she dont even call trouble. Yes, sir. You just let one of them get married or get into trouble without being married, and right then and there is where she secedes from the woman race and species and spends the balance of her life trying to get joined up with the man race. That’s why they dip snuff and smoke and want to vote.” 

From the outset of the story, the characters in Light in August view men and women in a highly divided way. Here, the speaker, a townsperson, describes men as a separate race from women. He associates corruption with men, but, along with corruption, men also have the power in this society. They dip snuff and smoke, but they also vote, an act the speaker doesn’t associate with women. 

“A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he wont fail to see a chance to meddle.” 

This is another early passage that develops the gender expectations in the world of the story. Men are weak-willed, inclined to become entangled in other’s affairs, a point that foreshadows Byron Bunch’s unending desire to help Lena despite his better judgment.