American Literature, 1912-1960 ADMDavis 29 October 1993Earth, Fertility, and Family inFaulkner’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 forty-miles 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 plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and

baked brick-hard 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 teh construction of her coffin. Read with

literary traditions in mind, such as those found in 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 life-giving 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 at the edge

of the field. That is home. Beyond that are the roads, roads “for traveling” (36).

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 birth-death / spring-winter 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

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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 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.

Vardaman does not share this closeness. His mother is a fish (84), a problem

which leaves him somewhere between the land (of his father and Addie) and the sea

(his fish-mother). 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 him, sucking up his anger. His

description of the dust is a litany of sterility and blindness, 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,

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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” (63-64). 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 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,

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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 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 had...knowed well” (138). The

journey begins as a trip from sterile land to fertile land, but 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

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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

duck-shaped 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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