As I Lay Dying
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places"My aloneness had been violated...by time, by love, by Anse"(172). With these words, Addie Bundren describes a common theme in the South. Many women become trapped in an unsatisfactory life, and then drained, both physically and emotionally, by the people in their environment. In As I Lay Dying (1930), William Faulkner creates Addie and this theme of the novel through imagery, figurative language, and details, both before and after she dies. From the day she decides to "take Anse" (170) as her husband, Addie begins her lifelong journey of losing herself. That day, Addie realizes that "my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day," (172) until the day that she dies. After sh
After her soul is gone from this world, Addie's family continues to mistreat her body. "She lived, a lonely woman, lonely with her pride. The dysfunction of the Bundren family does not cease with Addie's death, and as they carry her away, the casket breaks free from the hands of her sons and tumbles down the hill as if it cannot get away from the Bundren house fast enough. " One might think that Addie's husband would realize the gravity of the situation, but once again her entire family reveals their true nature of selfishness. The Bundrens seem oblivious to the abuse they inflict on their mother's body, just like they are oblivious to the smell of her rotting flesh. She did not experience love as a child, and longs to be loved and appreciated, but her husband and children cannot give such emotion. They cart her across the county for eight days, her body smelling like "a piece of rotten cheese"(203). Once she realizes this, she feels as if "he had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper screen and struck me in the back through it" (172). She does not enjoy being a wife and mother because her family cannot meet her needs. and she was not cold in the coffin before they were carting her forty miles away to bury her, flouting the will of God to do it"(23). He says, "Making me pay for it, when she was well and hale as ere a woman ever were. When Addie finally escapes her terrible life, she has been married for thirty years and raised five children.
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William Faulkner,
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Lay Dying,
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