Family Dysfunction, Poverty, and Sexuality in As I Lay Dying

Introduction

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying presents the story of the poor and dysfunctional Bundren family in Mississippi as they transport the body of their deceased wife and mother, Addie, from their home to a town a day's ride away for burial. The novel is told through a series of narratives from different characters who take part in the story, including family members and townsfolk. The stream-of-consciousness style of storytelling relays an intriguing blend of honesty, brutality, and strangeness that is characteristic of many of Faulkner's tales of the South. Each chapter presents a piece of a puzzle that must be assembled in the reader's mind in order to produce a clear picture of the action, the characters' motives, and the novel's universal themes.

Once the reading is completed, the picture that emerges is distinctly clear. It is one of a deeply disturbing family dynamic in which every member of the Bundren family perpetuates some particular contribution to an overall family sickness. The reasons for this dysfunction are numerous, but sexuality and poverty are perhaps the most important. These factors affect all of the family members in one way or another, but the children are particularly and negatively affected.

In this paper, the dynamic of the Bundren family's dysfunction will be analyzed in order to show how each person in the family responded to what might be called the life of the family. The characters will be discussed in turn, following a brief plot exposition, and their contributions to the story as narrators and to the action as actors will be summarized in order to show how Faulkner depicted a group of people related not only by familial ties but also by a kind of universal meanness and pettiness that offers little hope for salvation in the midst of their collective struggle. Following this summary, the social and sexual themes in the novel will be discussed in order to show how Faulkner constructed the story as a kind of descent into hell for the deceased woman who, due to her station in life and through the past actions of herself and her family, seems to receive exactly what she has earned. These themes play an important role in driving the family dysfunction.

Basic Family Structure

The Bundren family includes seven people. The mother, Addie, is the deceased who serves as the namesake "I" in the novel's title. The father, Anse, is her lifelong partner, but theirs has been a partnership built on something other than love and trust. Cash is the eldest child, a son known at the novel's opening to be a skilled carpenter. Darl is the second eldest child, also a son, and it is he who seems to be the most articulate and sensitive member of the family. Jewel is the third son — a bastard offspring of Addie and the family's minister — and is considered by most people to be a self-centered hothead. Next in age comes Dewey Dell, the family's only daughter, who is revealed to be pregnant as the novel opens. Finally, there is Vardaman, the baby of the family, an innocent and imaginative child who has not yet reached full maturity.

The basic family structure is a critical element in Faulkner's construction of the story's overall meaning. By developing the story so that the family is dominated — in number, at least — by men, Faulkner suggests a patriarchal ordering of the family. By showing the father to be a manipulative, freeloading, selfish man — described by one townsfolk narrator as "a lazy man, who hates moving" (114) — he suggests that the family's problems are caused largely by the father. Wadlington (1992) argues that this is largely true, as the family's economic problems lie at the center of their trouble, and the master of the house is an economic incompetent. However, as the tale unfolds and the three older brothers display characteristics of sons who were never shown proper love and acceptance by their mother, a psychological interpretation of the novel also becomes possible — one suggesting that the dead woman, having rejected her children and her role as mother, is the true source of the dysfunction.