@article{oai:nagoya.repo.nii.ac.jp:00027895,
 author = {Mori, Arinori},
 journal = {IVY},
 month = {Oct},
 note = {This essay aims to consider how and for what purpose the social classification in Light in August functions. The Southern society found in the novel is dominated by the Christian-white­-male-centered rules. In the society social classification depends especially on racial differences, and there anyone must be specified either as a dominant white or as a dominated black. For that kind of society, people who, like Joe Christmas, the protagonist of the novel, have an uncertain racial identity become problematic, for there they remain beyond definitions. In order to divide the society clearly into the dominant and the dominated, the white community forces such beings to accept some racial identity, and the compelling process is represented by Joe's lifelong quest for identity. Joe's racial ambiguity has caused his desperate struggle with circumstances. He is racially defined only when he kills a white spinster named Joanna Burden, although that is retrospectively given to him by the Southern society just as a token of his cruel character which is the stock figure of the black people in the society. Because of the given identity, Joe is persecuted by the society and finally lynched as a black traitor to the Southern community. However, the lynching is necessary to both Joe and the society for the following reasons : for Joe, it is a rite of recognition as a member of the society and thus that of self-definition, even though that is lethal one ; for the Southern whites, it symbolically means to defy their fear of miscegenation which may nullify their racial purity and supremacy. On the other hand, defining Joe as a Negro has another significance in Light in August. The society consists of the postbellum generations, which are not able to have their own social standards and thus cannot help observe those of the Southern ancien régime, although the older ones cannot cope with the postwar South any more, especially with people like Joe whose racial ambiguity is never definable. Murdering Joe thus means the extermination of such indefinable beings : first defining him as a Negro of the stock figure and making him visible or perceivable for the society, then the society executes him. By so doing, the society tries to deny the racial plurality Joe potentially contains in his mixed blood and keep itself unchanged. However, this is to defy the real situation of the postwar South and, in a broader sense, of the United States. Murdering Joe means, therefore, the utter refusal of accepting the true changing figure of America. Joe's life history shows this reaction formation of the Southern white community to the social change toward a pluralistic society. At the same time, however, we can find another figure which is also potentially threatening the South but escapes its harsh extermination : Lena Grove. She also could threaten the social frame of the community with her lawbreaking actions as equally as Joe does, with her premarital childbearing, but since she is always not conscious of her own latent danger and thus does not actualize it, she can eludes the strict censorship of the community. We can see in her a figure that survives and leads us to the present America., This essay is an expanded and revised version of the paper presenter at the 46th General Meeting of the Chubu branch of the English Literary Society of Japan on October 1, 1994.},
 pages = {45--68},
 title = {Murdering America : Segregation and Racial Consciousness in Light in August},
 volume = {28},
 year = {1995}
}