Addie Bundren: Breaking the Literary Mold

Addie Bundren is dead, and yet, it is only now that she actually has a voice. William Faulkner’s 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying, is literally the story of Addie’s last moments of life, but the fact that the majority of the novel’s events (and particularly the chapter containing Addie’s monologue about her life and thoughts) all occur after she has died appears to show her as a stifled, trapped woman. However, Addie is not a literary monster as so many critics have claimed, nor was she as innocent and stifled as others have argued. Rather, she represents exactly what Fetterley and Gilbert and Gubar argue for: she is the ultimate combination of the angel and monster, as well as a roundly developed character to which women (and men) can relate.

In “The Madwoman in the Attic,” Gilbert and Gubar assert that women throughout literary history have been portrayed as either the delicate ‘angel in the house’ who “has no story of her own but gives ‘advice and consolation’ to others” (815) or as the dangerous female monster, as aberrations “who are only committed to their own private ends” and who “are accidents of nature [and] deformities meant to repel” (820). The male (and sometimes female) writers who utilize this side of the dichotomous representation of women intentionally or inadvertently create women who “negatively reinforc[e] those messages of submissiveness conveyed by their angelic sisters” (820). Gilbert and Gubar argue that “women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been “killed” into art” and they must also “kill” the angel’s opposite: the monster (812). Addie Bundren is the embodiment of this murder of the angel and the monster. Rather than develop a flat or single-minded character as this dying matriarch, Faulkner manages to stay within the bounds of certain conventions while boldly breaking out of others. Where Gilbert and Gubar assert that the female character is a fragmented and subjugated one, Faulkner creates a woman who fits neatly into her role as wife and mother while simultaneously breaking out of that role after she dies by admitting her hatred of the confinements inherent in that role.

Furthermore, she does not hate her husband and most of children simply because they confine her as a woman, but instead because they confine her as a human, and this is an entirely unconventional means of portraying womanhood. Initially, Addie is shown to be a violent, death-obsessed single schoolteacher. She would “look forward to the times when [the students] faulted, so [she] could whip them” (Faulkner 170), and yet, she experiences extreme and intense love for her firstborn son. She hates the children for not being hers, and then she hates her own children for being hers. Although these traits seem rather unbecoming of a woman and a mother, and thus, seem to be in line with Gilbert and Gubar’s argument regarding women in literature, Addie’s possession of these traits and reasons for her actions ultimately reveal her to be more a complicated individual than an evil woman.

Indeed, Addie is a character to whom most of us do not want to relate. She is dark and complicated and brutally honest about her views on life and its disappointments. Fetterley argues in "On the Politics of Literature" that because “American literature is male” and lacks any rounded or fully developed female characters, “the female reader is co-opted into participation in an experience from which she is explicitly excluded; she is asked to identify with a selfhood that defines itself in opposition to her; she is required to identify against herself” (Handout). On the surface, As I Lay Dying appears to uphold this state of literary affairs—Cora Tull is a one-dimensional, ignorant woman, Dewey Dell is obsessed with aborting her unwanted pregnancy, and Addie is dead. But unlike these first two women, Faulkner presents Addie not only as the novel’s central character and the basis for the reference in the title, he also develops her character more fully and directly than any of the others. Although her opinions are harsh, and her actions are morally unsound at times, she is no Dame Van Winkle, she is no monster, and she is certainly no angel. Addie is not bound by any single fragmented or stereotyped identity. Instead she is seen through many perspectives and presented as the amalgamation of them all in addition to her own perception of herself.

Hence, Fetterley’s assertion that women will only be able to reinvent, rewrite, and re-relate to American literature once they have raised consciousness is essential in reading the impact and significance of the character of Addie Bundren. Instead of simply leaving off that Addie is dead and unimportant, or dead and silenced, or trapped by social convention and thus a victim of the male gaze (all of which imply that we have not revised our vision and perception of women in literature), it is imperative that we see her as representative of the human race. She is a woman but she is also soul-sick. She is an idealist who is trapped in a realist world—the world of family and love and children. She made a life-choice and was not satisfied by it. If this character were male there would be no question about his actions and motivations; it is only because she is female that critics desire to suffocate, silence, or reduce her to being yet another partial person. Instead of doing what so many authors have done and what Gilbert, Gubar, and Fetterley object to, critics can very well avoid subjugating Addie and thus see her as a the well-rounded, significant, whole person that she is. In effect, she is the equivalent of the Rip Van Winkle or Nick Carraway: she, just like them, can “speak for us all” (Fetterley, handout).

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 812-825.

Fetterley, Judith. “On the Politics of Literature.” (Handout from1st ed. of: Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan).