As I Lay Dying Addie Boundren Character Analysis

In As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Addie Bundren is portrayed as a sadistic middle aged women who feels inferior in the 1920’s sexist society she was born into, affecting her actions and feelings towards her husband and children. After a rough childhood composed of beatings, she projects her feelings of inferiority onto other children and feels a great lack of control in her life as a women ,stating that her “aloneness had been violated” with her marriage to Anse and the birth of her first child, Cash. It is at this point that she realizes her life is stuck to the vessels of being a wife and mother, two roles that she resents immensely.

The society Addie lives in contributed to her apathetic personality by showing her learned helplessness

as a women. The job she holds as a schoolteacher even though she loathes children shows this concept by demonstrating that a women had few choices in that time period, leaving her no other option. Struggling to be noticed as an individual and haunted by her past, she beats the children, stating,” When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh.. and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me!” Addie’s roles as a mother and wife are what she resents the most because of the limitations they bring to her, and her affair with Whitfield was her way of revolting against these. The product of her affair, Jewel, was Addies prized possession, her item of value that she saw as a small symbol of her once fleeting freedom. Addie shows this by referring to Jewel as her only real child, stating that now Anse had “three children that are his and not mine” after the birth of Vardaman (Addie discounts Dewey Dell because she is a women.)
Distant and sadistic, Addie’s traits sprawl not only from her views on society, but also from her dependence on fate to control her actions and her fathers disheartening words in which she finds truth in later in life.

When describing how she came to be with her husband, she apathetically states, “And so I took Anse,” later saying, “I saw him pass the school house three or four times before I learned that he was driving four miles out of his way to do it.” These statements show that it seems as if she believed she had no other choice, destined to marry Anse, knowing it would have to happen at some time in her life. Addie lets things happen to her without second thought, and this behavior defines all of her decisions including the birth of her children, where she insisted, “I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them.” Her father’s words also echoe in her actions and personality; her father “used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.” The truth rings in these words for Addie after the birth of her first child, Cash, when she thinks, “ I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it.” After this realization, she lives on assuring herself that words were empty and meaningless, recluding to a life of melancholy and routine actions in which she awaits death and regrets ever being “planted” by her

father.
Addie constantly refers to her feelings about words and their irrelevance, assuring herself in her thoughts that words are “no good” and that “words don’t ever fit what they are trying to say at.” She feels as if words are not powerful enough to express the true meaning behind them, stating that she knew “fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who had never had the pride.” For Addie Bundren, actions are the only useful way of conveying anything, but she knows that to communicate she must use the empty valves that prove meaningless. As Cora Tull views Addie as callous and tells her she is “blind to sin” and most pray, Addie simply comes to the conclusion that because sin is just a matter of words, salvation is just a matter of words too. Faulkner uses Addie’s harsh view on life to depict her as different and more abstruse than most of the other characters.
Addie Bundren’s unchanging self throughout As I Lay Dying is a reflection on the seemingly unchanging sexist society in the 1920’s. Addie neither attains not sets any goal or accomplishment, and stays the same bitter, intense character that her husband and neighbors see her as. When scratching the surface of Addie Bundren, one reveals a pessimistic women who abandons the struggle for answers in exchange for a dreary conclusion when answering the question of life; the immediate answer is death.