Motherhood

In the antebellum and post-antebellum South women were often disenfranchised because of their gender. In particular, white southern women were held to certain gender-bias ideology. They were expected to remain chaste until marriage and once married, maintain household roles in conjunction with bearing and nurturing children. Southern motherhood in William Faulkner’s novels //As I Lay Dying// and //The Sound and the Fury//, is shown in a different light. His novels display motherhood as a grotesque means of repression, however his strong female characters like Addie, Dewey Dell, and Dilsey all rebel against and redefine the traditional norms of southern motherhood. These characters “dissolve the boundaries” (Roberts xiv) and break the mold in which their patriarchal society holds them to.

One of Faulkner’s most fascinating mother figures is //As I Lay Dying//’s, Addie Bundren. First and foremost, it is essential to point out that title reveals that the premise of the story is based on her narrative; she is the one laying dying. Furthermore, on a surface level, the reveal of her narrative in the midst of her dead body being brought to its burial, is surprising. On a deeper level however, this moment is significant in the fact that even though her body is enclosed in the coffin, she still has the power to speak her story. “Minrose Gwin explains ‘From inside the coffin in which patriarchy has sealed her, Addie Bundren rethinks subjectivity as a female space…Her woman’s voice and desires emerge out of that space’ and ‘By making her children extensions of herself, she refuses to validate the masculine dominance which attempts to silence her’” (Hewson 552). Addie’s identity will live on even when the body is gone because her identity still exists amongst her children. Motherhood also allows Addie to be multiple beings. Essentially, this seemingly peculiar placement of Addie’s narrative is essential to the affirmation of her significance as a mother. Without Addie, the novel, the journey, and furthermore the lives of her children would cease to exist.

In essence, the beginning of Addie’s motherhood begins with her proclamation, “And so I took Anse” (170). This statement is proclaiming that she, a southern woman, is actually in a position of authority and choosing to take a man. However, the indifferent and un-excited choice of words of that statement can lead the reader to believe that Addie only chose Anse as a means of escape from her current miserable life as a schoolteacher. Anse is a second option in which she is also dissatisfied with. Once pregnant Addie admits, “when I knew that I had Cash, I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it” (171). Jill Bergman argues, “The discovery of her pregnancy, the ‘natural’ result of her sexual expression, convinces her that life is terrible.” Essentially, motherhood is the inevitable result of having sex without contraception and the inability to freely express oneself sexually, without the burden of motherhood, makes life terrible for Addie. Addie’s unacceptance of motherhood, her desire for sexual freedom, and the un-nurturing ways in which she speaks about most of her children is shocking to the traditional norms of southern motherhood. In addition, as Addie’s narrative progresses, the reader learns of her infidelity with Whitfield and her pregnancy with Jewel as a result. Jewel’s birth becomes not only physical evidence of Addie’s infidelity, but also an interruption to Anse’s “production line” (Holcombe 217). Anse who told Addie, “you and me aint nigh done chapping yet, with just two” (173) now has a son that is not his. In a thwarted way, Addie, somewhat takes pride in the affair and the illegitimate child, Jewel, becomes her salvation for all she has sacrificed in her marriage. Jewel “represents her grandest moment, as well as grandest failure” (Pierce 304). Addie, in conflict with the traditional norms of motherhood, finds solace in these taboos rather than being ashamed of them. After Jewel’s birth, motherhood and producing children becomes a strange formula to Addie in which she “ gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel. Then [she] gave him Vardaman to replace the child [she] had robbed him of. And now he has three children that are his and not [hers]” (176). In this equation, Addie is merely “realiz[ing] that motherhood is a ‘trick’ that disguises from women their role as a perpetual labor source for farm and battlefield” and rather it “is a crude repayment for the basic securities of ‘a house and a good farm,’ a transaction perhaps” (Holcombe 216). In addition, “she realizes her children merely supply the labor that the farm demands reflecting as she does the ‘land that was now my flesh and blood ’(Holcombe 216). In essence, Addie has realized that motherhood has become a means of production in order to fuel a capitalist and patriarchal society. Therefore, her child labors are actually producing laborers of the land she lives on.

When discussing Addie’s fight against the stereotype of southern motherhood, it is important to note that Addie’s narrative is directly after that of her foil, Cora Tull. Cora embodies the stereotypical southern mother. Cora, unlike Addie, is able to accept the societal repressions women are held under. She resumes a position in the kitchen baking cakes, believes “a woman’s place is with her husband and children, alive or dead,” (23) and thus believes that “a woman has no place of her own” (Holcombe 219). In fact, “Cora’s sense of individuality is effaced by her situatedness within the family. Her seeming incorporeality within the novel corresponds to the ideology of maternity to which she prescribes.” Cora is held under the same repressive ideologies as Addie and should sympathize with Addie’s hardship. Instead, Cora would “tell [Addie she] was not a true mother” (173). Furthermore, it is Addie’s untraditional “refusal to capitulate” that highlights Cora and many other southern women’s “unwitting surrender” to societal norms (Holcombe 220).

In addition, Addie’s physical maternal body is essential in the depiction of southern motherhood in Faulkner’s work. Addie’s maternal body is the only body in the novel that experiences birth, pregnancy, childbirth, and death. Addie’s narrative, “as she tells it, is a narrative of pregnancies” (Nielsen 37). For example, in the beginning of her narrative she acknowledges she “hate[s] her father for having ever planted [her]” (170). This line is significant in that Addie pinpoints the beginning of her misery, the beginning of her life, to the paternal that made her. Essentially despair began when she was merely a cell at conception and thus the first pregnancy in which to tell her story. In addition, Jill Bergman argues that this line is also significant because Addie “knows that men's relations to births are different, that while her body ties her to the consequences of sex, the bodies of men allow them to be painlessly free of any consequences. At the end of her affair with Whitfield, she says that for him it was over, but for her it could not be over because she was pregnant with Jewel.” Moreover, the second pregnancy that develops in her narrative is that of her first born, Cash. It is his birth that introduces Addie to motherhood and the “violat[ion]” of her “aloneness” (172). Addie’s narrative allows the reader to see her body function in two somewhat miraculous ways. The first is that her story is being told through a series of pregnancies, which is essentially her body with two lives enclosed and the second in that her physical body, in the novel’s present, is dead and without life. In addition, Heather E. Holcombe notes that, “the stench of Addie’s decaying corpse is Faulkner’s grotesque figuration of maternity as she has experienced it; pregnable and assailable in life, her body befittingly disperses in death. The diffusion of her corporality throughout the novel marks the bodily integrity denied her as a wife and mother” (Holcombe 218). Essentially, Addie’s body is a symbol for the repressive ideology of motherhood; the expectation that women are to simply produce children and accept their loss of selfhood within that role. Likewise, it is also Addie’s body that acts as a means of motion for the Bundren family. Her maternal body gave birth to her children and ultimately her motherhood set their life into motion. In addition, it is her dead body and her strong, adamant, dying wish to be buried with her people in Jefferson, that sets the Bundren family into motion to there. In addition, Addie’s identity continues to live on when her body is gone because she still exists within the lives of her children. Therefore, Addie’s maternal body, dead and alive provides life, movement, and progression for her family.

The theme of motherhood is again explored in //As I Lay Dying’s// character Dewey Dell. Dewey Dell, like Addie, is a female, rebellious towards the ideologies of southern womanhood and motherhood. However, Dewey Dell can be seen as more of a fighter than Addie was. Dewey Dell violates the code of proper southern womanhood by engaging in sex before marriage and as a result, she becomes pregnant. She refers to her pregnancy as “something has happened bad” (58) and becomes so “completely absorbed in her own pregnancy” (Wagner 80). She becomes so obsessed that “she has no time to mourn her mother’s dying” (Wagner 80). The novel’s placement of Dewey Dell’s pregnancy in conjunction with her mother’s dead allows her to “psychological[ly] merge death and childbearing” (Sundquist 298). In addition, the reader learns that Dewey Dell uses her mother’s burial journey into Jefferson to her advantage. Dewey Dell wants an abortion and believes that industrialized towns such as, Mottstown and Jefferson, will have doctors who can give her one. Her determination to get an abortion is a display of her “protest against the enforced maternal status” of women (Holcombe 215). She believes that it is “too soon too soon” (120) for her to birth a child of her own. John Earl Bassett argues that the scene in which Dewey Dell witnesses Vardaman “rise and go to the window and strike the knife into the fish, the blood gushing, hissing like steam…” (121) is a representation of her “desire for an abortion” (Bassett 128). Unfortunately, even though Dewey Dell fights and is persistent in her pursuit of getting an abortion, she ultimately fails. Dewey Dell, like her mother, falls victim to unwanted motherhood. Dewey Dell fails at her attempts of escaping motherhood not only because of her own ignorance, but also because of repressive female ideologies pushed forward by men and their law. For example, Dewey Dell is “ignorance of reproductive processes” which allows her to become pregnant. She is also ignorant of the processes of an abortion, believing that it is something she “could…get at the drugstore” (203) hence her inability to effectively communicate to Moseley what she is looking for. Once Moseley understands that she is looking for an abortion, he refuses because he is “respectable druggist” (202) and that the resolution to her problem would be participating in the patriarchal institution of marriage. In addition, what is perhaps most jarring about this scene is Moseley’s acknowledgement that “it’s a hard life they [women] have”(202) and yet was still unwilling to help her out. Dewey Dell’s second attempt at getting an abortion leads her not only to her defeat, but also to sexual exploitation. MacGowan’s “operation” “down in the cellar” (248) is what ultimately leads Dewey Dell to “her final turn toward enlightenment is bitter as she realizes that the ‘treatment’ she has received from MacGowan ‘aint going to work’ (Bergman). Therefore, her fight against becoming a mother ends with defeat and ultimately her having no choice but to succumb to the repressive ideologies of motherhood.

Comparatively, Faulkner’s //The Sound and the Fury// is another novel that displays southern motherhood in a light different than the traditional ideologies. Throughout the novel the reader encounters two mother figures, Mrs. Compson and her African American servant Dilsey. Mrs. Compson is an over traditional southern woman “who unwittingly contributes to the decline of the Compson family because she insists on old codes of behavior with regard to her status as a Lady in Southern society” (Nussler 581). It is because Mrs. Compson is overly concerned with maintaining the traditional roles of a southern woman that has enough money to afford servants; she is unable to maintain a genuine mother-child relationship with any of her children. In fact, throughout the novel the reader sees Mrs. Compson as voluntarily confined to her bedroom, barking orders, and thus immobile. Ulrike Nussler argues:

Habitually, [her household and maternal duties] is a domain she has neglected because she could afford to have Dilsey and her family. Emotionally cold, Mrs. Compson is too self-centered and class-conscious to be more than just a biological mother to her children.She does not even attempt to take full responsibility for raising them because society permits and encourages her not to do so (579).

Essentially, it is the ideological strictures of southern womanhood that withhold Mrs. Compson from being a loving mother to her children. Furthermore, it can be argued that Mrs. Compson’s absence from her maternal role helps lead to her son’s Quentin’s anxieties and furthermore suicide, her daughter Caddy’s escape, and her other son Benjy’s stay at Jackson. For example, Quentin also admits twice throughout his narrative, “if I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother” (172) an “arresting phrase [in which] abandonment is embedded” (Weinstein 30). In addition, Quentin alludes to his mother’s maternal body, her womb in particular, as a suffocating, “dark place in which he was imprisoned: ‘The dungeon was Mother herself’ (198)” (Weinstein 32). Phillip M. Weinstein argues “no child escapes from this dungeon, and insofar as the dungeon is a womb, no child gets fully born. In place of nourishment she feeds her children repressive ideology, and they sicken on it” (32). Caddy, on the other hand, is unlike her mother in that she does not abide to the ideologies of southern womanhood. Caddy is the opposite of a southern belle; the most obvious reason is that she somewhat openly engages in sexual intercourse before marriage. However, even though Caddy is able to eventually withdraw herself from her family and her mother’s repressive ideologies she, in turn, like Mrs. Compson, is unable to mother her own daughter, Quentin. Lastly, Mrs. Compson’s ideologies become the reason for the fate of Benjy’s future in a psychiatric ward. In fact, “Mrs. Compson is too frozen in time and her feelings…to break the ice with Benjy. She considers him a social disgrace” (Nussler 580). Mrs. Compson is “a mother… too proud for him” (170). Essentially, Mrs. Compson’s ideologies are of greater importance to her than caring for her children, especially Benjy. Instead, Benjy is an embarrassment and hinder to her social status because of his mental disability. Mrs. Compson’s cold-heartedness is a direct result of the standards southern society holds her to. She becomes so consumed with them that she is unable to care for her children. Furthermore her actions, immobility, and unwillingness to change are a component in the Compson family downfall.

Due to Mrs. Compson’s coldness and voluntary withdrawal from motherhood, Dilsey instead, becomes a much more prominent mother figure to the Compson children. Dilsey then becomes “the mammy.” “The mammy as represented in Southern ideology is not a woman, but a symbol of self-sacrificial motherhood, celebrated for denying not only her gender but her race” (Roberts 41). Due to their gender and race, African American women, like Dilsey, were double disenfranchised. Their race excluded them from southern white womanhood standards that women like Mrs. Compson relied so heavily on. In contrast to Mrs. Compson whose presence is shown through fragments of other characters’ narrative, “Dilsey is the most present body in The Sound and the Fury represented by her work of cooking and nursing.” (Roberts 61). As a foil to Mrs. Compson, Dilsey is a much more solid nurturing presence claiming, “I raised all of them and I reckon I can raise one more” (31). When it comes to Benjy, “Dilsey, like Caddy, is a nurturing force, calling Benjy ‘her baby’ even when he is in his thirties... [In fact], it is Dilsey who sees to Benjy’s daily needs [and] never complaining…” (Roberts 63). In addition, Dilsey also has control over household duties that would usually be expected of the mother. In fact, “the kitchen is [Dilsey’s] special domain” (Roberts 59). She claims ownership over the kitchen stating, “You all got to get done and get out of my kitchen” (26). Dilsey is arguably the novel’s strongest character, yet because of her race and gender she is being held under repressive ideologies. Even though she is a free African American, her job as a servant, mocks similar roles to that of a slave in the antebellum south. On the other hand, Dilsey is such a prominent and strong character in her role that it creates tension and somewhat of power struggle between her and the father figure of the Compson family, Jason.

Jason and Dilsey are constantly at odds with one another. Dilsey is so similar to a mother figure that the “relationship is a bitter parody of a conventional marriage: Jason is the breadwinner and masculine disciplinarian while Dilsey is the child minder and cook. The war they wage against each other reflects the power structure of the traditional family…” (Roberts 63). There are various moments within the text where Dilsey goes beyond her role of servant and instead takes the role of mother. For example, when Jason gets enraged and goes to hit his niece Quentin with his belt, Dilsey intervenes and says, “‘You, Jason! Aint you shamed of yourself’” (185). She then turns to Quentin and says, “‘I aint gwine let him…Don’t you worry, honey’”, proceeds to fight Jason, and then says “ef nothing else but hittin somebody wont do you. Hit me.” (185). Even though Dilsey does have this somewhat inclusion and prominent presence within the Compson family, she is not one of them. Ultimately, this is to her benefit as she “seed de beginning” and “de endin” of the Compson family line (297).

In conclusion, the mother figures in Faulkner’s work break the boundaries of ideologies of traditional motherhood. Faulkner’s mother figures, like Mrs. Compson and Cora, are overly concerned with maintaining their ideological roles. However, it is these ideologies that disable Mrs. Compson from becoming a nurturing mother and furthermore plays a major role in the declination of the Compson family. It is also these ideologies that allow Dilsey to take the place of mother within their household. Faulkner’s use of Dilsey as a mother figure, again redefines the norms of southern motherhood. Dilsey not only maintains household duties that of which are normally assigned to the mother of the family, but also the role of raising and nurturing the Compson children. In a topography that is newly adapting to life without slavery and repressive race ideologies are still considered the norm, to have an African American character such as Dilsey take the role as mother to white children is ground-breaking. In addition, Faulkner has characters such as Addie Bundren and Dewey Dell Bundren that refuse the traditional roles of motherhood. Addie, on the one hand, sees motherhood as a consequence of exploring her sexuality as well as a means of production to fuel patriarchal and capitalist society. In addition, she resents most of the men in her life because they will never have to deal with the burdens of motherhood. Likewise, Addie’s maternal body is essential to the progression of the Bundren family and the reason for their movement into a more commercial society. Lastly, Dewey Dell redefines motherhood ideologies because of her fight against becoming one. She, like her mother, explores her sexuality, and as a result, gets pregnant. Dewey Dell’s determination to abort the unborn baby displays her rejection of motherhood. However, the repressive reign, as they did to her mother. Her search for an abortion leads to her being sexually taken advantage of by MacGowan and receiving a false abortion, which in turn, leads to an unwanted life of motherhood. Throughout Faulkner’s writings the theme of motherhood is one that is constantly revisited. However, motherhood in his work is shown in a different light than that of the traditional. In fact, the portrayal of these “strange” mother figures assists in the complexity of Faulkner’s work. Much like Faulkner’s work, Addie, Dewey Dell, and Dilsey break the mold of the traditional.

–Erica Rallo

Works Cited

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