Readers can also infer that this is his first interaction with a woman, which will veer him away from his country raising. Byron's parents raised him in a way, like the rest of the community of Jefferson, to take pity on her, not to get involved and become in the middle of it. This ideal is crucial because this was the environment that Byron grew up in, and falling in love with a pregnant woman is one of the city temptations that he learned to avoid in his childhood. Faulkner uses this quote to stress the importance of the “Agrarian Ideal” that was a prominent belief in the South, which states that the country is a place where a family will flourish on a small living and escape the temptations of the city. He fell in love contrary to all the tradition of his austere and jealous country raising which demands in the object physical inviolability” (Faulkner 49). The introduction passage to Byron and Lena’s first interaction begins with, “Then Byron fell in love.

Byron’s choice of helping a pregnant woman opposes the morals that he was brought up in.

Byron becomes more of a social outcast in the Jefferson community after his initial interaction with Lena.īyron goes against social norms for Lena and becomes naive that she will accept him and fall deeply in love. Beard, the owner of a boardinghouse that Byron stays at, judge and condemn Byron for the continuous choices that he makes. As a result, Gail Hightower, a retired minister who was also shunned out by the Jefferson community, and Mrs. By tangling himself into Lena’s situation, Byron goes against the social norms that he was brought up with. Byron, already a social outcast as a result of his self-inflicted isolation and obsessiveness with his work, gets involved with Lena and claims to fall in love with her. In William Faulkner’s Light in August Lena Grove, a woman who is on the search for the father of her unborn child, meets Byron Bunch at a planing mill, mistaking him for her boyfriend. Unlike today’s society, women during that time period were looked down upon for being pregnant out of wedlock and shunned out of society. One of the key beliefs that were prominent in the South was the “Agrarian Ideal”, in which Americans could successfully thrive on small farms and escape the temptation of the city. Faulkner’s Idea on Social Outcasting in Light in August

Light in August by William Faulkner