Aild - Spatial Form

Spatial Form in Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying"Author(s): Betty AlldredgeReviewed work(s):Source: The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Fall, 1978), pp. 3-19Published by: University of North Carolina PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20077601 .

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Spatial Form in Faulkner's

As I Lay Dying By Betty Alldredge

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is a novel of human con

sciousness, a novel in which character presentation is the dominant

structural element rather than traditional plot or narrative. It is an ex

ample of what Joseph Frank terms "spatial" form as distinguished from the novel which proceeds in linear or chronological time and

derives its unity from narrative plot.1 We must recognize this spatial form and also that the novel requires "reflexive" reading to fully com

prehend both the nontemporal focus of Addie Bundren as central to

any reading of the novel and the ironic perspective Faulkner presents

through multiple point of view.

By "reflexive" reading, I mean that quality of reading which Frank

discusses, one which forces the reader to hold juxtaposed images

suspended in the mind until the total work has been read and then

allows the emergence of a total thematic image. Frank suggests that

reflexive reading provides a link connecting the aesthetic development of modern poetry with similar experiments in the modern novel,

primarily in the work of such writers as Flaubert, Eliot, Pound, Proust, Barnes and Joyce. As he indicates in his important essay, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," if the poem is to be one vast image, whose individual components are to be apprehended as a unity, it is

'Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," The Widening Gyre: Crisis and

Mastery in Modern Literature (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Univ. Press, 1963),

pp. 3-62.



4 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

necessary to undermine the inherent consecutiveness of language,

breaking the reader's normal expectancy pattern of a sequence and

forcing him to perceive the elements of a poem "juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time." As Frank says, the reader must

"reorient" his attitude toward language:

Aesthetic form in modern poetry, then, is based on the

space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in the reader's attitude toward language. Since the primary reference of any word-group is to something inside the

poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive. The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word^groups that have no comprehensive relation to each other when read con

secutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and im mediate reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference

temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.2

Reflexive reference, then, is the connecting link from modern

poetry to the modern novel. In modern poetry the reader is almost

forced to read reflexively to get any literal sense, while readers of a

novel are led to expect narrative sequence by the "deceptive normali

ty" of language within a "unit of meaning." This is the point at

which we have difficulty in making the transfer of the spatial concept to the novel. As Frank indicates, the novel with its larger unit of mean

ing (scene, episode) can preserve coherent sequence within a unit and

break up only the time flow of the narrative.

As Leon Edel stresses in his study of the Benjy section of The Sound

and the Fury, a new way of reading is necessary for this kind of fiction.

Edel's reply to those critics who attempted to convert Benjy's story to

chronological narrative rather than experiencing his consciousness as

presented, is applicable to those critics of As I Lay Dying who do not

recognize the spatial form of the novel and attempt to convert it to

linear narrative. Edel says: "Indeed, when an author elects to tell us a

story in this fashion, it would seem logical to follow him in his

2Frank, p. 13.



AS I LAY DYING 5

premises and not to construct new ones. In accepting the material in

its scrambled state and seeking to understand it, we are invited by Faulkner to place ourselves within the angle of vision or perception of

Benjy; we are involved with point of view."* In As I Lay Dying, we

are placed within the perception of multiple narrators and are remov

ed from linear or quantitative time. Most of the tension of the novel, as well as the irony, is derived from the marked contrast between exter

nal events and internal reality for the several characters.4 For instance,

both bizarre humor and disgust are provided by the townspeople's reactions to a rotting corpse being hauled through a country town,

whereas the internal views of the proceedings are intensely serious and

quite logical in the minds of the separate members of the Bundren

clan. The reader must hold all of these disparate viewpoints in jux

taposition in order to read the novel as one multiple image. The skeletal narrative structure of As I Lay Dying is constituted by

the hauling ofthat rotting corpse?i.e., the funeral journey of Addie Bundren?but the importance of the narrative progression for an

understanding of the work is relatively minor. Here, as in the poetry of

Pound's Cantos or Eliot's Waste Land (as Frank explains), or in Joyce's

Ulysses, syntactical sequence is given up for a structure which depends on the perception of relationships between disconnected word

groups.5 Frank's point is that to be properly understood, these word

groups must be juxtaposed with one another and perceived simultaneously. While scenes follow one another in this novel, their

meaning does not depend on sequential relationship but on their rela

tion to the total image which is the work. The deliberate discon

nectedness which Frank asserts is the unity which ties together the

poems and novels he discusses, I believe is also Faulkner's unity in As I

Lay Dying. In this kind of unity, time becomes fluid. Faulkner's sense of time is

Bergsonian, as Robert Nadeau and earlier critics have observed, in the sense of seeing life as a continuous process. Nadeau relates Bergson's

3Leon Edel, The Modern Psychological Novel {New York: Grossett and Dunlap, 1964),

p. 164.

4William J. Handy, "As I Lay Dying: Faulkner's Inner Reporter." Kenyon Review, 21

(Summer 1959). 437 51. Reprinted in William J. Handy. Modern Fiction: A Formalist

Approach (Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 75 93.

'Frank, pp. 3-62.




view of the flow of life creating individual existences out of itself to a

similar view of life being presented in As I Lay Dying.61 believe it is in

this Bergsonian sense that the title of the novel functions; in other

words, Addie Bundren's entire life may be seen as "dying," as a part of the process of living. Addie is dedicated to living because the

"reason for living is getting ready to stay dead a long time." Out of

Addie's living and her dying, when she is no longer physically able to

go on, are created the other characters of the story. She is central to the

novel.

In As I Lay Dying, then, an understanding of Addie Bundren and

her relationships, or lack of them, with the remainder of the Bundren

family is essential to any understanding of the inner conflicts in her

children; yet the viewpoint section of Addie's consciousness is placed towards the end of the novel. The novel, therefore, must be read

reflexively, and the earlier and later scenes must be read in juxtapos tion with the Addie section if one is to understand such complexities as the conflict between Darl and Jewel, Dad's obsession with his

brother, and why Darl can say, "I cannot love my mother because I

have no mother."

The presentation of Addie is not directly related to the action taking

place in the narrative. As William Handy says, "The single section

which Faulkner assigns to the consciousness of Addie has no location

within the unfolding events of the story. It is the voice of one giving an

account of her life, explaining and justifying her action in an existence

which is no longer capable of action."7 However, it is Addie who is at

the root of the psychological problems in her children, and it is her

death which is the catalyst for the action of the narrative.

Although the action in the story is about Addie's death and funeral

procession, Faulkner's concern is more with the quality of living or

non-living of the characters; he is concerned with isolation and aliena

tion; he is concerned with the sometimes bizarre attempts to break

through that alienation to real communication with other human be

ings in a meaningful relationship; and he is concerned with the ironic

contrast between the external and internal lives of human beings.

6Robert L. Nadeau, "The Morality of Act: A Study of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying,"

Mosaic, 6 (1973), 23-25.

7Handy, p. 89



AS I LAY DYING 7

Michael Millgate makes a perceptive statement about Faulkner's con cern with these themes in the drawing together of the multiple view

points radiating from Addie:

Here the concern with the many faces of truth merges with, and is eventually superseded by, the examination of the many meanings of experience?specifically, of the

widely divergent purposes which the various members of the Bundren family hope

to achieve in the course of their joint expedition

to Jefferson. Regarded in this light, the

multiplicity of viewpoints, which is much more marked than in The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom and

which may give an initial appearance of fragmentation,

begins to appear

as a means both of dramatizing diversity and of focusing it upon a single course of action. A further

focusing effect is achieved by the way in which the rela

tionships within the Bundren family radiate about Addie, the mother, as both their physical and symbolic

core. Ad die's powerful personality and the principle of family uni ty which she embodies have long held the family together and continue to hold it at least until her body has been buried, and it is entirely natural that she should not only occupy the foreground of the novel throughout but become, in effect, the battlefield on which her husband and her children?especially Jewel and Darl?fight out their personal rivalries and antagonisms.8

Thus there is marked ironic contrast between the dying Addie hud dled under the quilts, as seen by various characters in these multiple viewpoints, and the vital woman whom Faulkner presents to us in Ad die's consciousness. Her confession is in technique the internal

monologue, not unlike that of Joyce's Molly Bloom in her values and in her honesty, her vitality, and her desire to experience life to the fullest. The difference is that Molly's soliloquy is an affirmation to continue life, while Addie is no longer capable of going on. As

Peabody says, "He (Anse) has wore her out at last."9 We soon become aware of Addie's values?that there is no conven

?Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (New York, 1963), pp. 107-108.

^William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York: Modern Library, 1967), p. 40. Subse

quent references to this novel are to this edition.




tionalized language to disguise her hate or her attempts at "seizing the day." Addie is hungry for life and is convinced that the only way to live meaningfully is to share that life completely with another. She

is also acutely aware of the difference between abstractions and con

crete experience. As Olga Vickery says, "She concludes that any ex

perience?love, marriage, motherhood, bereavement?can be either

an intensely felt reality or a mere conventional form of speech and

behavior."10 This conviction is most clearly expressed when she is

thinking about Cora, a woman who lives almost entirely by words of

religious clich?: "I would think how words go straight up in a thin

line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth,

clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the

same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love

and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor

feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words" (166). The blindness of others, particularly of her husband

Anse, to her desire for life and her conviction that the abstraction of

words prevents real "doing," blocks Addie from fulfillment as a wife.

The monologue which presents Addie's stream of consciousness

moves in a pattern of chronological experiences of her life, moving from an early scene when she was a young schoolteacher through her

marriage and the births of Cash, then Darl, her affair with Whitfield, and the births of Jewel, Dewey Dell and Vardaman. The viewpoint section is framed by the admonition of her father to live, which she

does not understand until after the birth of Jewel. She begins her remembering with the time when she was a teacher,

young, bursting with physical and spiritual vitality, and hungry for

life: "In the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left

with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them. It

would be quiet there then, with the water bubbling up and away and

the sun slanting quiet in the trees and the quiet smelling of damp and

rotting leaves and new earth; especially in the early spring, for it was

worst then" (161). Her hate of the pupils is not hate of the children

themselves but a teacher's frustration at their withdrawal into isolation

10Olga Vickery, ' 'The Dimensions of Consciousness,

' ' The Novels of William Faulkner,

A Critical Interpretation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1964), p. 53.



AS I LAY DYING 9

which she was unable to penetrate except through the experience of

administering physical punishment: "I would look forward to the

times when they faulted, so I could whip them" (162). There is no

cruelty or sadism, but a real, if bizarre, communication?a way to

touch lives, to mix their blood. For Addie, experience must be shared to be real: "Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever .... I knew that it had been, not that they had dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another by words like spiders

dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could

my blood and their blood flow as one stream" (164). She is almost completely isolated from this sharing she craves until

the birth of her children?and never more isolated than when she is

with Anse who lives in his own childlike world. Unlike Clarissa

Dalloway, who drew back from sharing, she craves complete com

munion. Ironically, however, both women are partners in mar

riages which lack communication. Anse Bundren has absolutely no

comprehension of the real Addie and makes no attempt to reach her.

"And so I took Anse," Addie recalls. There is no empty talk of love

from the Addie who is brutally honest with herself. She was young, it was spring, and she is filled with obvious sexual desire as well as

idealistic yearning for a communion of souls. So she reached out for

life, expecting marriage to be fulfilling both physically and spiritually,

only to be completely disappointed. Arise is childlike, completely self

centered like the children in Addie's school, seeing everything in terms of his own well-being, completely unaware of Addie's needs. To

Anse, she is no more than a strong pack-horse.

Addie is the only character in the novel with an awareness of the

quality of life lived by human beings. She is profoundly aware of the

death-in-life quality of Anse's existence:

He did not know that he was dead, then. Sometimes I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold

molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until




the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape pro foundly without life like an empty door frame .... (165)

Almost immediately one senses that Addie's fulfillment is to come

through motherhood, not a man-woman relationship: "So I took

Anse. And when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terri

ble and that this [motherhood] was the answer to it." Her aloneness

had never been violated until Cash came, "not even by Anse in the

nights." She further indicates her acceptance of Cash: "My aloneness

had been violated and then made whole again by the violation: time,

Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle" (164). It is ironic that Addie says "words are no good" following the birth

of Cash because Faulkner objectifies a lack in Cash, a suffering from an

almost complete inability to communicate. He is a man spiritually boxed in by numbered lists and exact measurements. His opening

viewpoint section reveals a man whose response to his mother's

impending death is in terms of his own need for recognition of his

craftsmanship, as when a little boy he had brought in a box of dung for her flowerbeds. Addie is not "ma" or even "Addie" but a "dead

body" or "animal magnetism."

12. So I made it on the bevel. 13. It makes a neater job. (78)

Yet in Cash there is an acceptance of himself, at least in a limited

way, through his pride in his carpentry, an acceptance echoed by his

family and neighbors. He does have a "caring" relationship with

brothers Jewel and Darl. The section of Cash's consciousness which

Faulkner gives us after Darl has been committed to the asylum in

Jackson appears to be a development of a more sensitive awareness,

but in inner reality it is the product of an overwhelming need to justify what he has done to Darl. He has had a closeness with Darl?"It's

because me and him was born close together ..." (224)?which only

intensifies his feeling of guilt for what he did or felt he had to do. On

ly the quality of this relationship can force the enigmatic Cash to cry out the reasons for sending Darl away. His need, like Addie's, is to

justify and explain his actions.

When Addie found that she was pregnant with Darl, she felt a sense



AS I LAY DYING 11

of outrage at being impregnated by Anse, and a sense of betrayal of

her own being, with the result that she rejects Darl: "Then I found

that I had Darl. At first I would not believe it. Then I believed that I

would kill Anse. It was as though he had tricked me .... but then I

realized that I had been tricked by words older than Anse or love, and

that the same word had tricked Anse, too, and that my revenge would

be that he would never know I was taking revenge" (164). At this

point Addie decided to spiritually divorce Anse and exacted from him

a promise to take her body to Jefferson when she died. Addie's

revenge is undertaken not because of any overwhelming need to be

buried in Jefferson with her ancestors, but rather to force Anse to

move?"She knows that Anse who lives by words will remain consis

tent with his ways. The irony is that those ways have been responsible not only for Addie's situation but for the tragic lives of those children

whom her feelings toward her husband had obliged her to

repudiate."11

It is both ironic and tragic that Addie causes her son Darl to suffer

from-complete alienation and isolation, the very qualities which Addie

has spent her life trying to break through. If she was failed by Anse, she also fails Darl. She completely shuts him out from her affections.

His is a "world of consciousness exclusively,"12 and we see later that

Darl completely loses contact with external reality. His extreme sen

sitivity and ability to penetrate the minds of others are the result of the

rejection by his mother. Out of his terrible need for recognition and

affection develops an acuity which makes others uncomfortable in his

presence. He knows that Jewel is not Anse's son and taunts Jewel with

it. He also knows that Jewel's relationship with his horse, with his

alternate cursing and caressing, parallels Jewel's relationship with

Addie and the horse becomes a surrogate for her. Because of his

desperate obsession with Jewel, Darl constantly manipulates other

people and the action of the novel to destroy Addie's coffin and thus

destroy Jewel. He manipulates Jewel away from his mother's death

bed, he deserts the wagon to destroy her in the river crossing, and he

sets fire to the barn. His concern in the barn burning is not an heroic

?Handy, p. 93.

"Vickery, p. 58.




attempt to stop the travesty of the funeral journey as some critics sug

gest, but a quite understandable deliberate attempt to thwart Jewel.

Dewey Dell is also uncomfortable with Darl. She knows that Darl is aware of her pregnancy and murders him in fantasy. Both Dewey Dell and Jewel attack Darl savagely in Jefferson when he is being carted off to the insane asylum because he can see into their inner selves and

because he taunts them?"Jewel," I say, "do you know that Addie Bundren is going to die?"?and to Dewey Dell?"You want her to

die so you can get to town: is that it?"

William Handy, in his article "Faulkner's Inner Reporter," ex

plains the development of Darl's sensitivity and his obsession with his

half-brother Jewel?"the objectification of his grief and in

completeness":

In a story by D. H. Lawrence, "The Rocking Horse Win

ner," the deep, primal need of a boy for the love of his

mother, a need which her nature is incapable of satisfying, expresses itself in violent and desperate action to remove the obstacles between himself and his mother: her obsessive craving for money. Lawrence's story suggests the

slumbering forces in man's nature?forces which come in to being when psychical development is threatened by the nonfulfillment or a vital need. Love, too, becomes a force,

measurable only because of its absence. The effect on Lawrence's boy and the effect on Darl show remarkable similarities: both withdraw into a lonely isolation and in

trospection; both develop a heightened sensitivity and awareness; in both appears an obsessive preoccupation

with the obstacle that blocks their completeness. For the

boy the embodiment of the obstacle is money; for Darl it is

Jewel, the symbol of his frustration.13

Darl's obstacle and obsession, Jewel, is the center of Addie's life, and there is strong feeling between them; it is Jewel, the son of the

minister Whitfield with whom Addie had a brief affair, who feels her

death most keenly. In this affair Addie is again searching for fulfill

ment and sharing, the same kind of reaching out she did in attemp

ting to communicate with her pupils and with Anse. But Addie also

has a more profound motive: "I believed that I had found it. I believ

^Handy, pp. 86-87.



AS I LAY DYING 13

ed that the reason for living was the duty to the alive, to the terrible

blood, the red bitter blood boiling through the land" (166). There is no self-deception in Addie's remembering the affair, and

when it was over, life went on for her: "Then I would lay with Anse

again?I did not lie to him: I just refused, just as I refused my breast to Cash and Darl after their time was up ... I hid nothing. I tried to

deceive no one. I would not have cared. I merely took the precautions that he thought necessary for his sake, not for my safety, but just as I

wore clothes in the world's face" (167). And "then it was over." And

she adds, "but for me it was not over," referring to her pregnancy

with Jewel, but in a larger sense that life is not over for her. There was

physical but not spiritual communion with Whitfield, and when he is

revealed in the next section of the novel, he is a creature as lacking in

sensitivity as Anse.

But Addie did have Jewel as a result of the relationship, the only one of her children who received her full love and attention. There is

indication of this in her later relationship with Jewel, which is revealed

in Darl's consciousness. Jewel has been working nights to earn the

money to buy his horse, and Addie tries not to let the family realize

that he is her favorite. Addie herself fights against placing one child

before the others, but she is unable to help doing so, and as Darl

recognizes, she hates the deceit it forces her into.

She is unable to hide either her favoritism or Jewel's illegitimacy from Darl. His recognition of the strong attachment between Addie

and Jewel only makes his own emotional plight the more desperate. As

the polar opposite of Darl, Jewel, who has had affection and recogni tion, knows who he is and consequently is free to live?to love as well as hate. At Addie's death, Jewel is able to translate his intense grief in to positive action; his ultimate act of love is the sacrifice of his horse.

He saves her body from both fire and water, recalling Addie's predic tion that he would be her salvation.

At Jewel's birth, Addie had come to the realization that what her

father said was true for her?"the reason for living is getting ready to

stay dead. I knew at last what he meant and that he could not have

known what he meant himself, because a man cannot know anything

about cleaning up the house afterward" (167-68). If we understand by this that the meaning of life is in the living of it, then Addie's actions are consistent with her values. To Addie, living meaningfully is only




through sharing life completely with another, communication with

other human beings, and concrete experience rather than abstract

words. She expresses a definite feeling of peace with the birth of Jewel:

"WithJewel?I lay by the lamp, holding up my own head, watching him cap and suture it before he breathed?the wild blood boiled away and the sound of it ceased. Then there was only the milk, warm and

calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence, getting ready to clean my house" (168). 4

'Cleaning up the house afterward' ' for Addie means childbirth and

rearing children, something which she believes a man could know

nothing about. As we have already seen, the only "violations of her

aloneness" have been the births of Cash and Jewel. Whether a con

scious or purely existential decision, Addie decides at this point that

living for her will be motherhood. As Darl indicates, Addie is a

spiritually alive functioning mother "who had tried to teach us that

deceit was such that, in a world where it was, nothing else could be very bad or very important, not even poverty" (123).

Her method of putting her house in order to get ready to live may seem bizarre, but Addie decides to square things with Anse in her own

way: "I gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then I gave him

Vardaman to replace the child I had robbed him of. And now he has

three children that are his and not mine. And then I could get ready to

die" (168). The third child is Darl, of course, whom she had rejected earlier.

In this paragraph is the only mention in her soliloquy of either

Dewey Dell or Vardaman. There is very little in the section of Addie's consciousness which offers evidence as to any relationship with either of the younger children. The rejection is one of indifference rather

than active love or hate. There is in Dewey Dell a wistful lack of

response to her mother's death, perhaps reflecting this indifference on

Addie's part. Primarily, however Dewey Dell feels her mother's death almost not at all because her simple being is obsessed with her own

pregnancy and the compelling need to get to town to get rid of the

child she cannot admit she is carrying. There is simply no room left in

her for grief: ' 'I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let

her die. I wish I had time to wish I had. It is because in the wild and

outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It's not that I wouldn't and will not it's that it is too soon too soon too soon" (114).



AS I LAY DYING 15

The child Vardaman is profoundly disturbed because of the very

fact of death, which he can neither comprehend nor accept. The many sections of his revealed consciousness are the inarticulate cries of a

small child for help, and his unvoiced questions are the universal ques tions of children faced with death: "It was not my mother. She went

away when the other one laid down in her bed and drew the quilt up. She went away. 'Did she go as far as town?' 'She went further than

town.' 'Did all those rabbits and possums go further than town?' God

made the rabbits and possums. He made the train. Why must He

make a different place for them to go if she is just like the rabbit"

(63). Vardaman has seen his mother die; he is the last person she looks at and the shock shatters the boy. Addie's last look at Vardaman is

presented in a scene in Darl's consciousness (46-51). These last few moments at Addie's deathbed reflect in microcosm the complex rela

tionships and diverse inner realities of the rest of the Bundren family. The scene opens with Pa, Vardaman, and Dewey Dell hovering

around Addie's bed. Dewey Dell says, "It's Jewel she wants"?Jewel

having been manipulated out of the picture by Darl who is seeking to

remove the object of his obsession from the mother. Jewel allows

himself to be removed because he cannot face the death of his beloved

Addie. Addie looks at her husband, "without reproach, without

anything at all, as if her eyes alone are listening to the irrevocable

cessation of his voice. ' ' Dewey Dell, driven by her own intense need to

get to Jefferson, instinctively tries to press Addie back on the bed when she raises herself. "You, Cash," Addie calls to the son who lifts a board for her to see and shapes with his hands a coffin:

' 'For a while

she looks down at him . . . neither with censure nor approba

tion. ' '

Her last look is at Vardaman without even a glance at Pa: "She

looks at Vardaman; her eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them; the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as

though someone had leaned down and blown upon them."

Darl reports a moment of almost awkward tenderness from Anse

after Addie's death, but Anses's last remark negates the act?"God's

will be done," he says. "Now I can get them teeth."

Social comment on women's roles in the twentieth-century rural

South within the novel is implicit in Addie's conscious revelation of the quality of her experience in living and dying. It is clear from com

ments by her neighbors that she is admired and respected and possibly




envied but not liked nor loved. Addie is from Jefferson; she is "town

folk"?at once alienated from the redneck rural area in which she lives

both by reason of her origin and by her intelligence and formal educa

tion. "Rich town ladies" are hated and mistrusted by the farm

women, especially Cora Tull. Early in Addie's monologue when she relates telling Anse that she has people in Jefferson, "His face fell a lit

tle," reflecting his disturbance over this news. Addie's reason for mar

rying a man like Anse without considering his values is made clear by her honest admission that she was not in love?she was hungry for life, for sexual experience.

Addie's attitude toward that sexual experience differs from that of

the other characters in the novel. Her attitude is perhaps too idealistic, but she justifies it with her whole being. She anticipates sexual ex

perience as total communion. Anse's attitude is more tuned to pro

creation of the sons he needs to work the farm?" 'Nonsense,' Anse

said, 'you and me aint nigh done chapping yet, with just two'

(165). Cora's attitude in procreating is that she is doing her duty toward God. Addie's only daughter, Dewey Dell, has quite a different stance from that of her mother toward sex. She takes no responsibility for the sexual act itself with Lafe: "And so it was because I could not

help it" (26)?because her picking sack was full when she reached the

end of the row conveniently near the woods. She also will not accept her pregnancy as the consequence of sexual experience. She is, of

course, faced with the stigma of an illegitimate birth because Lafe

gives her ten dollars for an abortion in lieu of a marriage proposal. Lafe's action justifies her desperate search to rid herself of the unborn

child she is carrying. Her ignorance is cruelly abused by the young "town" man in the drug store where she seeks to buy some

magic po

tion to bring an abortion.

In Addie's case, the birth of her illegitimate son Jewel is celebrated

with warmth and love. In fairness to Dewey Dell's situation, however, Addie can give birth to Jewel without social stigma because she is mar

ried, empty as that marriage is. Ironically, although the mores of socie

ty do protect Addie, she herself does not seem to be concerned with

the conventional morality which surrounds her. She practices no deceit

in her affair with Whitfield; he is a hypocrite who is concerned with

conventional standards. Any deceit on Addie's part is for his protec



AS I LAY DYING 17

tion: "I hid nothing. I tried to deceive no one. I would not have cared.

I merely took the precautions that he thought necessary for his sake, not for my safety, but just as I wore clothes in the world's face" (167). For the second time in her life she seeks an ideal experience of com

plete communion. For the second time she is disappointed, but Addie

Bundren is not defeated, as some critics see her.

Sally R. Page, in a recent book dealing with Faulkner's women

characters, sees Addie's idealism as a reversal of the usual male-female

role in Faulkner's work. As she notes, the usual pattern is that the

idealist (as Quentin in The Sound and the Fury) is destroyed and the

compromisers (Mrs. Compson and Jason) survive. In As I Lay Dying,

Page calls Addie "an idealist whose desire for the achievement of an

inner vision of perfect union and fulfillment within human reality drives her ultimately to a rejection of reality, of humanity, and of life

itself. "l4Although Page recognizes that Addie fulfills her expected role as wife and mother, she believes that Addie is destroyed. While

Addie does indeed die and Anse Bundren survives, it is the quality of

life which Faulkner is presenting as admirable and desirable in Addie

rather than its duration. She brings up her children with integrity and

honesty; she is forced into deceit only because of her strong love for

Jewel which she is powerless to change. In the midst of an empty marriage from which she cannot physical

ly escape, Addie Bundren makes a courageous decision to be herself and at the same time not to ask Anse for more than he is capable of

giving. She recognizes that his life lacks quality of experience and that he is truly dead though physically alive: "I did not even ask him for what he could have given me: not Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled. / would be I; I would let him be the shape and echo of his word. That was more than he asked, because he could not have asked for that and been Anse, using himself so with a word" (166; the italics are mine). Addie creates her own life out of

motherhood. In a rural farm world of the 1920's, in a life of poverty and physical isolation, actual divorce was an impossibility, so Addie Bundren did what she had to: she divorced Anse spiritually and lived

"Sally R. Page, Faulkner*s Women: Characterization and Meaning (Deland, Florida:

Everett/Edwards, 1972), p. 112.




her life on her own terms. As Robert Slabey says, "Addie has the

'courage to be' [Paul Tillich], but Anse does not."15

Ironically, however, Addie's decision to give her physical and emo

tional strength to motherhood ultimately causes emotional problems for her sons. Her very powerful personality does not give her sons the

freedom to move away from a normal adolescent attachment to her

and to move out to attachment to other women. The three older boys remain adolescent in emotional strength even though physically grown

men. This latent Oedipal attachment is made evident by means of the

voices of the Tull daughters who are obviously attracted to Darl and

Jewel Bundren. In a presentation within the consciousness of Vernon

Tull, reported dialogue of the daughters reveals their concern: After

the death of Addie Bundren, Eula says, "

'I reckon Cash and Darl can

get married now,'Eula says .... 'What about Jewel?'Kate says. 'He

can, too,' Eula says" (32). Sons Jewel and Cash survive the death of

Addie, but Darl, whose need is so great for the love his mother cannot

give him, is destroyed. His very identity depends on Addie's existence

and with her death, she no longer is and consequently Darl no longer is. The irony of the situation is intense because she had rejected him

before his birth.

Faulkner's use of the consciousness of both Vernon and Cora Tull to

emphasize this kind of ironic truth about the sons of Addie Bundren

also presents these surface characters (the Tulls) as understandable

"grotesques" in their own need for sons and the envy and jealousy Cora feels for Addie.

Faulkner presents all of his characters without condemnation in

their limited capacities of freedom to live. Addie, having been failed

by Anse, realizes that Anse also has been tricked by words and does

not reproach him. The only judgment made in Addie's consciousness

is her harsh judgment of herself. The section of her revealed con

sciousness shows her inability to love all of her children equally because of what Anse has done to her and her hate of the deceit it

forces her into. It reveals a great deal which enables the reader to

understand her inner tensions and those of her children, especially Darl.

15Robert M. Slabey, "As I Lay Dying as an Existential Novel," Bucknell Review, 11

(December 1963), p. 22.



AS I LAY DYING 19

We can understand the actions of the children as we can understand

Addie's forcing Anse to promise to take her body to Jefferson. It is her

revenge for his failing her and the consequent destruction of her

spiritual life as a wife. When Addie is finally decently laid in the

ground, after the grotesquely tragic and ludicrous journey to Jefferson, it is in her wedding dress, symbolic of her spiritual virginity, her

aloneness never having been violated and made whole by Anse or

Whitfield. Addie's fulfillment comes through motherhood which

"was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the

ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it

or not."



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