This paper discusses homoerotic desire as a literary tool in Faulkner’s `Light in August`, `The Sound and the Fury`, and `Absalom, Absalom!`.
This paper focuses, not on Faulkner’s potential bisexuality, but on the textual examples within Faulkner’s novels to demonstrate the use of homosexuality in exploring the themes of male homosocial pressures and homosexuality. The author points out that William Faulkner also uses blacks, women, the insane, and the mentally retarded as launching pads for Faulknerian creativity; and, despite being guilty of measures of racism and misogyny, he has an agenda, which is more progressive and egalitarian than his time and place dictated. The paper relates that homoerotic desire in Faulkner’s work provides character layering, which adds motive, validity, and realism, and homoeroticism provides frameworks and parallels. Many literary examples.
The author created concepts of gayness to stimulate notions of anti-homophobia in Hightower, Joe Christmas, and Percy Grimm. Light in August concludes with the castration of Christmas by Grimm, which is a focus on the white Southern male’s sexual crisis regarding black males, Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell (LA 464). But a homoerotic subtext also is at play in this moment (Duvall, 62). Hightower exclaims that Christmas was with him on the night of the murder and Grimm furiously states, Has every preacher and old maid in Jefferson taken their pants down to the yellowbellied son of a bitch (LA 464). Christmas becomes doubly threatening to Grimm; in addition to violating the taboo against miscegenation, Christmas (as well as Hightower) is perceived as a pervert.