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.
Marc Hewson of The Mississippi Quarterly offers a feminist reading of the book. The...
By mourning her and contemplating their relationships with her, Cash, Darl, Jewel, and Vardaman learn to emulate her and adopt her suspicion of patriarchal constructs" (Hewson 2000, p.1). Addie ties her boys to the land and their common mother, even in death. Her maternity is a source of self-realization and identity for herself and her sons. The piecemeal nature of the work exemplifies how all of her sons make up different pieces of Addie, who lives on in all of them.
However, Cinda Gault offers a 'reverse' feminist understanding of the text: according to Gault,
