Childbirth+and+Pregnancy

Childbirth, abortion and the issues associated with both are prevalent throughout many of Faulkner’s work.

In //The Sound and the Fury,// Caddie Compson is pregnant with an illegitimate child and in order to hide this fact, she marries Herbert Head. However soon after, he leaves her when realizing the child isn’t his. Her daughter, Quentin is sent to live with her family, and Caddie is scarcely mentioned within the family home. In //As I Lay Dying//, Dewey Dell faces the shame of getting pregnant before marriage, although she manages to keep her pregnancy a secret from everyone but Daryl. Jewel is Addie’s illegitimate child and throughout his life, Addie overcompensates by loving him differently and more fiercely than her other children. In these three novels, Faulkner associates societal shame to pregnancy and childbirth out of wedlock. Perhaps this idea is interlaced with his own personal troubles with having children. Faulkner's first born, Alabama, passed away nine days after her birth on January 20th, 1931. Although Faulkner did have children later on in life, the pain and anguish of losing a child never left him, and that is evident in his novels. A few years after losing Alabama, his childhood best friend went through a similar loss.

The letter Faulkner wrote his dear friend expresses his grief and understanding of what Jimmy and Frances are undergoing. "Human beings are so constituted (and thank God for it) that even grief cannot stay green very long. You will hate to hear this and hate more to believe it, and your very refusal to believe it will give you this comfort: it will help to tide you over into the time when grief will be quiet, and instead of a date on a calendar and a mark on the earth, the child will not be dead at all. It will be a living part of living experience which will last as long as mind and body last, and because of it after a while you can say to yourself 'Because I have suffered, I know that I have been alive. It is suffering which has raised me above the articulated lumps of colored mud which teem the earth. And so long as I have grief, death cannot hurt me". His letter is well composed, and elicits emotions of someone who has gone through the same experience. In //As I lay Dying,// when Addie finally speaks after her death, she talks about how she tried to give Anse another child, to make up for Jewel but that in turn is impossible. Here lies the subtle hints from Faulkner’s own life, no matter how hard he would try, he couldn’t make up for Alabama’s loss.

Doreen Fowler and Campbell McCool // American Literature //, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Dec., 1985), pp. 650-652
 * On Suffering: A Letter from William Faulkner **

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2926360