Family dysfunction in As I lay dying

¶ … Dying: Five critical perspectives on William Faulkner's novel

Ted Atkinson of The Faulkner Journal views William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I Lay Dying as a historical as well as an artistic product. The novel portrays the children and other surviving family members of Addie Bundren taking their mother to be buried in a coffin one of her sons, Cash, fashioned with his own hands. The Great Depression illustrated the failure of American aspirations of autonomy, thus the novel portrays an enmeshed family structure through the use of its multiple perspectives. According to Atkinson, Cash's half-brother Jewel sees Cash's construction of the coffin as an extension of Cash's privileged relationship with his mother, a relationship his half-brother implicitly envies. Jewel deflates the construction of the coffin in his rhetoric: "It's like when he was a little boy and she says if she had some fertilizer she would try to raise some flowers and he taken the bread pan and brought it back from the barn full of dung" (Atkinson 2005, p.4). Faulkner's use of a multifaceted perspective shows Jewel's jealousy of Cash's social role and evident skill at carpentry: sibling jealousy of Cash's skill and perceived status in the family relative to Addie are intertwined. The boy's monetary names and their reliance upon the mother after death also show the failed promise of money and autonomy.

The time period during which Faulkner was characterized by a great deal of insecurity about Southern culture, which was undergoing a profound shift, according to Cheryl Lester: "When Faulkner published As I Lay Dying in 1930, the modernization of the South had already begun to propel a spatial and social dislocation that would amount by century's end to the departure from the region of not only 29 million Southerners" but also the influx of Northern culture into the South, as the nation gradually became more connected by radio, cars, and railroads (Lester 2005, p.1). For Lester, the novel is a novel of migration and the ambiguous benefits of Southern culture and traditions: when Addie demands that her family lay her body "to rest forty miles away, in Jefferson, where her relatives are buried" her "request places a burden on her family, who subsist on limited means as small farmers and occasional wage laborers in rural Northern Mississippi in the late 1920s" (Lester 2005, p.1). The burden upon the family of social obligations is a heavy one: they must honor the past and custom, but Addie's body becomes a heavy weight to bear, just as the ties that bind them together are heavy and strangle one another, physically, emotionally, and economically.