Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Davis 29 October 1993
Earth, Fertility, and Family in
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the Bundren’s are at once dependent on and nearly ruined by the
land. The land is responsible for their livelihood as farmers, but it also stretches a treacherous
fortymiles to the burial ground of Addie, the Bundren matriarch. The Bundrens emerge from
the dust and trudge through the mud to return Addie to the land whence she came. Her family
is embedded in the earth; in many ways they are a part of the land, as much worn down as the
paths they tread, as much susceptible to rain as the roads they follow. The land, for the
Bundrens, is life. It is responsible for their way of life, their food, their mentality, their
hardships. The men of the family are in constant conflict with the land, as they get swallowed in
the dust and trudge through the mud. The two Bundren women — Addie and Dewey Dell —
however, are much more attuned to the chthonian elements around them. Addie believes
herself to be eternally united with the land, while Dewey Dell nearly transcends herself as a
fertile Earth goddess. The story of the Bundrens in As I Lay Dying is the story of the land.
The first words of the novel initiate this connection. The Bundren boys are ingrained
into the ways of the earth. Their life is the routine of many generations before them. Men have
carved their days into the landscape. Darl describes how “Jewel and [he] come up from the
field, following the path” (3). Darl repeatedly emphasizes his relation to the land, describing the
contours of the paths and his relation to them. “The path runs straight as a plumbline, worn
smooth by feet and baked brickhard by July” and it continues around and through the field,
“worn so by feet in fading precision” (3). The men who have walked these paths shape the land,
just as they are shaped by it.
The Bundren’s farm, one comes to understand, is covered in the dry dust of summer.
The earth, before Addie dies, is dry and sterile. As Addie’s death looms, the other Bundrens
find themselves barren without the fertility of the mother figure, who lies cold in bed, watching
Eliot’s “Wasteland,” one might see Addie’s death as a sacrifice to some fertility god. She, fertile
mother, must pass through sterility and die before the land can be replenished with lifegiving
rain. Tull is quick to observe the “mighty dry weather” that accompanies the last days of
Addie’s life, but also forecasts, “It’s fixing to rain this night” (34). Falconer twists this
convention, however, by using the rain as a device to subvert the burial of the dead.
In so doing, Faulkner closely associates the sky with the earth. The Bundren’s ability to
cross the land is contingent on the mood of the sky above. As the rain falls, it will muddy their
way, disrupting their progress. The Bundrens desire clear weather so they could make the
funereal procession in relative peace. Anse Bundren does not feel as unified with the land as his
wife. His association with the land is a very limited and provincial one. It ends with the paths
Anse believes that he, created “up and down ways” is made “to stay put” (36). Anse is already
loathe to move, and even before the rain comes cusses, “Durn that road” (35). Despite Anse’s
reluctance, it seems that this journey is the sacrifice he needs to make, in order to bring some
degree of prosperity and fertility back to his family. The birthdeath / springwinter cycle
would seem incomplete to the reader, and perhaps to Anse, if he did not make the trip to plant
his wife in the ground.
Next to Addie and Dewey Dell, it is Darl who seems closest to the Earth. His narrative
is perhaps most essential to the text, and he character seems almost essential to the land as it is
depicted in the novel. Several observers of Darl notice his close connection to the land, and it is
he who begins the story with a description of the paths he follows through the fields. Unlike his
father, Darl seems to encompass much more of the land than just the local fields. His scope
extends beyond the property, and the earth seems to occupy his body. Dewey Dell, herself
nearly a part of the land, describes Darl as he “that sits at the supper table with his eyes gone
further than the food and the lamp, full of the land dug out his skull and the holes filled with
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distance beyond the land” (27). Anse sees this same quality in his son, seeing Darl “with eyes
full of the land” (36). Cora Tull notes Darl’s affection for his mother (21), and suggests that Darl
is closer to her than any of the other sons.
leaves him somewhere between the land (of his father and Addie) and the sea (his fishmother).
The land for Vardaman is mostly sterile, because it lacks the warmth of his biological mother,
Addie. The land for him is a dustbowl, absorbing everything around it. The dust wraps around
brought on by the aridity around him. As he rages at the death of Addie, he narrates his
tantrum, “I run in the dust. I cannot see, running in the sucking dust...I strike, the stick hitting
into the ground, bouncing, striking into the dust and then into the air again and the dust sucking
down the road faster than if a car was in it” (55). Vardaman, perhaps to young even to generate
a seed of his own, is a fish out of water, surrounded by the dust, trapped on “the yellow road
neither of earth nor water” (49).
For her own part, Dewey Dell seems free of this ambiguity, and is wholly earth. Like
Darl, she notices “green rows of cotton in the wild earth,” (3, 122) one of the few signs of growth
on the apparently barren farm. She fills in for the once maternal, now withered Addie, with a
renewed fertility. Dewey Dell, pregnant by accident, carries inside her the New Hope of the
next generation. Her belly, occupied by an unwanted baby, is akin to the land being cleaned by
the flooding rains. At the time, both are undesired and stressful, but as time passes, they will be
responsible for a brightness, a growing. Early in the novel, however, Dewey is unconvinced of
either her or the earth’s potential for regeneration, but still manages to find some comfort in her
surroundings. “The dead air shapes the dead earth in the dead darkness,” she observes, “further
away than seeing shapes the dead earth. It lies dead and warm upon me, touching me naked
through my clothes” (6364). And from this, perhaps worrying over the possibility of her
pregnancy, the reader is given a glimpse of Dewey Dell as Earth mother. “I feel like a wet seed
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wild in the hot blind earth” (64). Dewey is the only character for whom the earth is not entirely
sterile and dry. She is the chance for rebirth.
Her ruminations here anticipate the post mortem narration of Addie Bundren, who also
finds solace removed from the men, left alone with the nature. In the days gone by, when she
was a fertile women, wary of words, but a willing wife nonetheless, Addie would sit among the
“rotting leaves and the new earth,” where she could “be quiet and hate” the men who
dominated her life, and who worked the land but were unable to share her communion with it.
The men did not understand the land, nor did they understand her. Despite her feelings to this
effect, she marries Anse because he “got a house and a good farm” (171). The latter is the only
trait she at all respects in her husband. In the dark solitude, Addie is removed from all this,
communicating now only with the land and “hearing the dark land talking the voiceless
speech.” Her ability to associate with this land echoes in her discussion of her children by Anse.
She believes that she, not the farmer, was the fertile one, as though the land, not Anse, were the
father. “He was dead...I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the land that was now my blood
and flesh” (173). She reiterates her feeling of sole dominion over several of the children. “My
children were of me alone, of the wild blood boiling along the earth, of me and all that lived”
(175). Addie does not seem to include her husband among “all that lived,” and prefers to
consider herself the fruitful earth mother. This telluridic tradition she leaves to Darl, to some
extent, but more directly imbues it in her daughter, Dewey Dell, the reluctant earth mother.
But before Dewey can actualize that fertility, her mother must be buried. This mission
— to bury the mother to pass fertility onto the daughter — is the force behind the plot. It is what
pushes the team across the bridge and through the current. Over the course of this mission, the
land goes from one extreme to the other, from parched dust to flooded mud. The latter is the
washing away of an impotent land and its replenishing with abundant seed. At the time of the
flood, however, it is difficult to see the hopes for renewal. Anse laments the ceaseless toiling of
the farmer, who works the land but never seems to gain a reward. “It ain’t the hard working
man, the farmer who profits,” (110) he says. But he rationalizes this sentiment with a
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rudimentary Christianity: “It’s because there’s a reward up above, where they cant take their
autos and such” (110). Anse seems to be indicating here that there is an innate goodness in
either the land itself or in the activity of living off the land, and he expects God to reward him
for his diligence and hard work. In Anse’s mind. The land, no matter how sterile, offers Anse an
opportunity for redemption, from replenishment in heaven above.
The greatest obstacle for the Bundrens comes as they attempt to cross the river. This
removal from the earth cripples their mission. Having spent so many years with the certainty of
the ground beneath them, removal from that foundation throws them into disarray. While
crossing the bridge, Tull and the Bundrens long for “something tame like the hard earth that we
becomes a struggle from the raging water to any land at all. The Bundrens, removed from the
land they were nearly a part of, are almost consumed like the mules, whose “role up out of the
water in succession, turning completely over, their legs stiffly extended as when they had lost
contact with the earth” (149). The quest for solid, fertile ground drove the Bundrens forward,
despite all this, and they reach the other side, although are badly shaken.
After reaching their destination, the Bundrens are prepared to renew their fertility. The
pregnant, though unwilling, Dewey Dell attempts to stifle her pregnancy, but is in all likelihood,
unsuccessful in her attempts. In time, she will bear the next generation of Bundren blood. At
the same time, Anse Bundren buries his wife and, too, is prepared to reinvigorate the blood of
his family with “a kind of duckshaped woman all dressed up,” (260), the new Mrs Bundren.
The story of the Bundren’s ends with this replenishment of the family, whose cycle no doubt will
continue from dust to dust, but who for some time will enjoy the growth after the flood.
2026 words
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