William Faulkner’s Light in August follows multiple characters who currently in Jefferson, Mississippi by describing both their current actions and memories of the past, to show the connection and influence of past events on current situations. In the case of Reverend Gail Hightower, a defrocked minister in Jefferson, his current life is completely determined by past town scandal that involved his wife’s dubious behavior.
Although Hightower is introduced in Chapter 2 in the context of Byron Bunch’s weekly, mysterious journeys, we are provided only with an incomplete snapshot of Hightower as “a man of mystery… and the fifty-year-old outcast who has been denied by his church” (Faulkner 49. ) Despite his initial characterization, his character is more fully developed in the beginning of Chapter 3 (pg. 60-61), where the audience is exposed to the history of his life in Jefferson and the current ramifications of the scandal that he continues to endure today.
The information provided in this passage provides the basis for future plot advancement involving Hightower, including the climatic death of Joe Christmas. At the beginning of the passage, we learn about Hightower through the eyes of Byron Bunch and his first encounter with Hightower’s property and his handmade lawn sign “Gail Hightower D. D. Art Lessons Christmas Cards Photographs Developed” (60). After Bunch’s confusion over the meaning of D. D, all information that he receives, and therefore we receive, is from gossiping townspeople.
Multiple times in the passage, the narrator says how “they told him” details of Hightower’s life, distancing the information that we receive from the most accurate and direct source possible, leading to the potentially skewed view that the audience receives of Hightower, especially because Byron “believed that the town had had the habit of saying things about the disgraced minister which they did not believe themselves” (74). Within the framework of gossip, the audience learns that “Hightower had come straight to Jefferson from the seminary, refusing to accept any other call” (61).
Although we do not learn until later why he had such a fixation on the town of Jefferson, it is obvious that his zeal for Jefferson was rooted in self-fulfilling reasons rather than those to serve the people of Jefferson. Hightower seemed to acknowledge his illogical excitement for Jefferson as he immediately tried to convince “the old men and women who were the pillars of the church how he had set his mind on Jefferson from the first… telling them with a kind of glee of the letters he had written… he had used in order to be called here” upon his arrival in the town (61).
However, despite his efforts, the townspeople did not want him there, for they understood that he talked as though he “desired to live in [the town] and not [serve] the church and the people who composed the church” (61). This passage positions Hightower as an outsider to Jefferson by placing contrasting feelings towards his arrival in his love and excitement and the townspeople’s cold unwelcoming attitudes. The theme of being a foreigner in Jefferson is seen in many of the other main characters, including Lena for being pregnant out of wedlock, Christmas for being racially ambiguous, and Joanna Burden for her northern roots.
In Hightower’s case, he is initially an outsider due to his own folly (zealous and unfounded love for Jefferson), but is cemented into the position because of his wife’s wrongdoings, his apathy towards them, and his reaction afterward. Toward the middle of the passage, there is an interesting fragment that Hightower acted “As if he did not care about the people, the living people, about whether they wanted him here or not” (61). In this fragment, there is no subject to let the audience know who is making that judgment on Hightower, making it sound like a universally held statement.
Here, Faulkner also brings in Hightower’s contrasting attitudes of current and past people and events. The townspeople have already established that he did not care about them and their congregation, but we now know that he rather cared more about the dead people of Jefferson and his connection to them. Following this information, the audience receives more details about his connection the Jefferson through “his grandfather, a cavalryman, who was killed” (61). Hightower never knew his grandfather, but only knew him through the glamourous Civil War stories which fueled his fixation on the past.
Much farther in the novel, the narrator describes that Hightower “found no terror in the knowledge that his grandfather on the contrary had killed men… as he was told and believed… No horror here because they were just ghosts, never seen in the flesh, heroic, simple, warm” (477). Here, Hightower acknowledges his obsessive and burdensome connection to the past, as he thinks “that [he] skipped a generation. It’s no wonder that [he] had no father and that [he] had already died one night twenty years before [he] saw light… [his] only salvation must be to return to the place to die where [his] life had already ceased before it began” (478).
In this section, Hightower’s reflection on his grandfather later in the novel is described with images of phantoms and ghosts, further elevating the importance of the past. Just as Hightower is connected to the past and the Civil War on a personal level, Jefferson is also connected on a larger scale in terms of their ever-present issues of violence in the context of racial differences, especially the culminating event of Joanna Burden’s murder. Just like in the Civil War that Hightower is so outwardly obsessed with, the whole town is characterized by its fixation on the Civil War and the racial divides that were part of its cause.
However, Hightower is punished for his fixation as it appears to be founded on illogical obsession, whereas the larger society is representing engrained values that have existed since the country’s inception. In the final section of the passage and for the remainder of the chapter, the audience learns a fuller picture of his wife’s scandal which leads to Hightower’s downfall and recluse. In this passage, we discover both his wife’s unhappiness in the relationship and his own obliviousness to her sadness.
Once again, all this information was told to Bunch from the townspeople, including that “the neighbors would hear her weeping in the parsonage in the afternoons or late at night, and the neighbors knowing that the husband… did not know what was wrong” (62). Like other parts of the overall passage, this one provides a foundation that is built upon throughout the development of Hightower’s character. Hightower will be impacted by his wife’s actions for the rest of his life, which arguably begin with her unhappiness and his actions as “the kind of man a minister should be” (62).
This passage is followed by a long description of his wife’s affair and eventual death, followed by the town’s cold reaction of running Hightower out of the church, eventually locking him out completely. Rather than focusing on these passages, ones that speak to Hightower’s reaction shed light on his character. After the scandal, Hightower was “asked to resign, and… he refused,” leading to empty congregations (69). After being locked out of the church and officially resigning, Hightower then refused to leave town, leading to the townspeople inflicting violence on him, including broken windows and beatings (72).
Hightower’s refusal to leave Jefferson after these scandalous events and their violent aftermaths highlights his attachment to the town and inability to leave the place which has such a strong connection to his ancestry and history. Even though leaving Jefferson would have seemingly been the easier option, physical and emotional torture by the townspeople was an easier burden to bear than parting with his ancestry and past to start over and create a new life for himself.
He also presents a sense of dignity by refusing to run away from the stigma that he faced, creating an identity for himself as one of personal pride rather than one determined by other people in Jefferson. As the minister and then ex-minister of Jefferson, Hightower, rightfully so, becomes the moral center of the novel who is steadfast in his values of ancestry despite the tumultuous events that happen in his life.
Even with though he is presented throughout the novel by the townspeople who interact with him, as an outcast, and as obsessed with the past, Hightower is presented in the beginning of Chapter 3 (pages 60-62) to introduce the complex elements of his morality that surface in the climax of the novel through his part in major events including the delivery of Lena’s baby and the death of Christmas in his kitchen. He, like others in Jefferson, is a monomaniac, obsessed with the past and his connection to ancestry.
