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.

Basic Plot Structure

In order to discuss the characters fully, an understanding of the novel's action is required. This is due to the fact that the style of storytelling Faulkner employs is non-linear and experimental. There is a definite flow of events, but because of the multiple narratives and narrators, it is impossible to describe any one character in detail without outlining what all of the characters — including the townsfolk — have said about events. The story is told through a kind of rumor mill, with each character adding his or her portion, so that an eventual whole gradually becomes clear. The part of the story of primary interest here is only that which shows how each family member moved the action forward; other characters will not be discussed at length.

As the novel opens, Addie is very ill and near death. Cash builds her a coffin just outside her bedroom window. Darl and Jewel leave town to make a delivery for a neighbor. Vardaman catches a fish, kills and cleans it, and later associates his dead mother with the fish. Cash completes the coffin and the family places the dead woman inside. Troubled because he cannot see his mother through the box, Vardaman bores holes in the coffin lid, inadvertently drilling through the dead woman's face. Dewey Dell barely mourns her mother, consumed as she is by worry over her own pregnancy. A funeral is held, and the men stand on the porch talking rather than going inside to participate. Darl and Jewel return and find buzzards circling overhead, which tells them their mother is dead — though Darl had already known this through a kind of vision of her death. Darl taunts Jewel by telling him not to worry, that the buzzards are circling not because his beloved horse is dead but because their mother is dead.

Addie had made Anse promise to bury her in the town of Jefferson, requiring the family to haul the coffin across the Mississippi countryside. Anse is willing to do this partly because he also wants to get a new set of teeth while they are in town. The family loads the coffin on a wagon largely through Jewel's effort, as Cash has broken his leg at work and the others seem to care little. Jewel refuses to ride in the wagon and instead follows on his horse.

When the Bundrens reach a bridge they are told it is impassable due to flooding. They attempt to cross at a ford, only to have the wagon overturned. The coffin is knocked out, the family's mules drown, and Cash breaks his leg again. Jewel saves the coffin, and the family searches the riverbanks for Cash's tools.

A brief interlude — narrated by the dead woman herself — reveals that Jewel is the illegitimate son of Addie and the family's reverend. A veterinarian sets Cash's leg. To buy new mules, Anse mortgages his farm equipment, takes money Cash had been saving for a record player, and trades away Jewel's horse. The journey continues. In the next town, Dewey Dell attempts to obtain an abortion but is denied by the pharmacist. Darl fashions a cement cast for Cash's leg that eventually so irritates the leg that it threatens to become gangrenous; the family ultimately resorts to chipping the cement away. As the family stops for the night, Darl attempts to burn down the barn where the wagon is being kept, hoping to end the journey and incinerate the mother's coffin. Jewel rescues the mules and then risks his own life to retrieve the coffin.

Finally the family arrives in Jefferson and buries the mother. They decide to have Darl committed to a mental institution because doing so will relieve them of having to pay for the barn he burned. Dewey Dell makes a second attempt to obtain an abortion, only to be tricked by a pharmacist into having sex in exchange for a fake cure. As the novel ends, the family loads back into the wagon to begin the journey home. Anse appears wearing a new set of teeth and introduces the children to his new wife — a woman he met while borrowing shovels to bury Addie.

Conclusion

Darl has odd visionary abilities and, perhaps because of this, he is the most sensitive and articulate Bundren. He narrates more passages than any other child, and perhaps it is this role as spokesperson that ultimately drives him mad. His fate — commitment to a mental institution engineered by his own family to avoid a financial liability — is the novel's bleakest encapsulation of the Bundren dynamic. In a family governed by pettiness, economic desperation, and broken love, the one member most capable of perceiving and articulating the truth is silenced and discarded.

Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is, in the end, a portrait of a family that was never truly a family. Addie's emotional withdrawal, Anse's relentless self-interest, and the social forces of poverty and sexual exploitation that press upon the younger generation combine to produce a household in which each member is fundamentally alone. The long journey to Jefferson — undertaken nominally to honor a dying wish but in practice serving each character's private agenda — is less a funeral procession than a slow exposure of everything the Bundrens lack. As scholars have noted, the novel's power lies precisely in Faulkner's refusal to offer redemption: the mother is buried, the family endures, and the cycle of dysfunction continues, now with a new wife installed before the earth has settled on the old one.