Reflection Essay

            Throughout the three main essays assigned this quarter I was satisfied with my performance. I continue to be satisfied with most, however I am not at all proud of my second essay. The assignments came earlier than my understanding of the textbook Critical Practice and therefore my original draft deviated greatly from the assignment. I am very satisfied and proud of my rewrite of the first draft. I think that I do a much better job at tying Anderson into my essay. The first final draft was without a cognitive thread between my claim and Imagined Communities, but I believe I fixed that greatly in the rewrite. I am confident that my final essay on As I Lay Dying was rewritten quite well, though I do admit it could benefit from better transitioning phrases, in more than a couple sections it could benefit from any transitioning phrase.

            In the first essay focusing on text as context in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” I demonstrated Poe’s manipulation of syntax and language to create pace, emulating the narrators anxiety and thereby interpolating the reader into the mind of the narrator. The analysis was analytical, citing specific passages and breaking them apart line by line to explain how, “Poe uses the increasing speed of the crowd in front of the hotel to illustrate the narrators growing interest in the scene. As the, ‘throng momently increased,’ the narrator is finished with the newspaper, beginning to look around, and by the time the lamps are lit he is, ‘filled… with a delicious novelty of emotion,’ and cannot turn away from the window.” I inserted brief summaries of the passages I exemplified, but did not summarize the entire story, which was perhaps to my paper’s detriment, or reveal the ending, which I do not think pertinent to my analysis. The paper is grammatically sound, as well it should be, and now follows MLA format.

            My revisions directly reflect the notes I was given by peers and instructor, including a completely rewritten connection to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. My original paper was somewhat half-assed in connection to Anderson because I had not fully grasped Anderson’s claims, my brain bombarded with readjusting to school life, and was not realizing the connections to the implications of Poe as pre-modern. In the rewrite I submitted recently I believe I made a solid claim to Poe’s modernity and how that ties in to Anderson’s argument that modernity resulted from and is influenced by mass print, thus increasing the imaginariness of national boundaries. Rewriting the conclusion also helped in polishing paragraph transitions since the conclusion is now an extension of my main claim.

            The second essay was a bit rougher. I began with a misconstrued idea of the assignment and wrote about the ethical implications of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” from the serialized Return of Sherlock Holmes. However, it gave me a solid foundation for my rewrite because most ethics are, by definition, ideologies in practice. With that said, I obviously failed at constructing an interpretation of the ideologies of women, marriage and sexuality that I found so blatantly obvious in the story. Perhaps I was “too close” to accurately detail them, thus leaving the reader to read between my lines and draw their own assumptions and interpretations of my claim. What is worse, in my hurry to finish my rewrite I allowed three horrendous grammatical errors to remain as a result of reconstructing sentences without fixing the gerunds within them. Furthermore, I have a combination of military and prior learning experience – professors who had specific salutation guidelines, and high school MLA – habits that keep getting in the way of meeting current MLA guidelines for the format of the byline and title segment.

            I did find this to be the most difficult of all of the essays because I found Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice a mind numbing barrage of theories and references, which now that it has been explained through Tom Foster’s lecture and the printout of critical modes provided by Brian Gutierrez makes much more sense. Because of my initial confusion I did not know how to approach the assignment. My peers who read the paper did not provide me with any constructive feedback, so I think there was confusion or assumed ambiguity of the assignment shared with other students. I probably could have completed a more polished rewrite if I had dropped Post-colonial Literature sooner, thus freeing time that could have been spent studying Belsey and visiting my professors during their office hours. As a whole, I do not feel satisfied with my performance in this essay as I do not feel my claim was illustrated sufficiently. If given another chance at a rewrite I would spend more time discussing the interrogative text and how the scenes I chose to analyze interpolate the reader into the ideologies I suggest are subliminally obvious.

            The third, and final essay, in which we joined the critical conversation by performing an analysis of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in conversation with another critic, went quite well in my opinion. As it turned out I could not find any critic who demonstrated a psychoanalytic interpretation of AILD as an illustration of the stages of grief. I had briefly discussed this in my discussion section after another student claimed that the characters do not grieve. After that I did a search for critical analysis of grief in AILD and I could not find any as thorough as what I was planning, so I felt as though I was on the right track to tackling an interpretation that had not been done before. I am very satisfied with my paper over all. I took all of my peer and instructor critiques to heart and did my absolute best to rewrite the essay in three very different incarnations before finally resolving to an interpretation that had a clear focus: Cash as the poster-boy for grief.

            In my analysis I presented an introduction that used Belsey to argue the validity and importance of psychoanalytic critique, which Belsey claims is important because language is our first introduction to society, culture, and how to be a part of them. With Belsey’s claim providing me with a strong purpose I set out to explain how AILD illustrates the five stages of grief using Cash as the star example and bringing a few of the other characters into fold, as necessary, to illustrate how grief can manifest itself in ways that are unhealthy. I mostly drew from psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to support my interpretation of the five stages of grief in AILD, but I also brought in claims from Olga W. Vickery. I conversed with Vickery’s claims, expanding them in support of my argument. Perhaps the only flaw of my essay is rough transitions between paragraphs, but I think the structure of my claims within paragraphs are solid and well establishes my claims and support for my interpretations. The essay is grammatically correct and does take formal academic tone and utilizes academic language.

           

           

Essay 3 Final Draft

As I Lay Dying: A Template for Grief

            Psychoanalytic interpretations of literature are important to culture because they often open our eyes to the cause and effect of things we read, and even experience, but are sitting too closely to understand in context. All literature is threaded with psychoanalytical concepts because we cannot write about human interactions without emulating some form of psychological response. In Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice she claims that in order to “participate in the society into which a child is born, to be able to act deliberately within the social formation… [it] must submit… to the discipline of the signifying systems of culture, among which the supreme example is language” (56). Thus, by applying knowledge gained through literature as a template to which one should or should not adhere to, we gain better understanding not only of literature, but our own human interactions. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is a perfect example of how a piece of literature can have so many facets and the various psychological responses contained therein represent different responses to grief.

            Before using As I Lay Dying as a template for grief we must first have a basic understanding of the five stages of grief as described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book about terminally ill patients and their families, On Death and Dying. The first stage of grief is Denial and Isolation, in which a person denies what is to be grieved, often isolating their self from those around them whom may serve to help in the grieving process (Kübler-Ross 34). Denial, “functions as a buffer after unexpected shocking news, allows the patient to collect himself and, with time, mobilize other, less radical defenses” (Kübler-Ross 35). Those in the denial stage have begun the grief process, but cannot actually grieve because they have not acknowledged what is there to grieve. Anger is usually a quick replacement for denial, resulting from a person’s acknowledgement of the reality of the situation and allowing one’s self to begin the grieving process (Kübler-Ross 44). When one tires of anger they begin Bargaining, often with god and/or immediate loved ones (Kübler-Ross 72). This stage of grief manifests itself in false promises and by finding a replacement for what was lost as an attempt to, “postpone the inevitable” (Kübler-Ross 73), but can also result in power-struggle between family and/or friends. There comes a point when one acknowledges they have nothing to bargain or realizes the replacement is not sufficient. At this point loss is fully realized, and Depression occurs (Kübler-Ross 75). The fifth stage of grief, in which one finally attains the ability to move beyond grief and into Acceptance is when the healing process begins (Kübler-Ross 99).

            Only one character in the novel exemplifies the stages of grief, reaching acceptance with the type of resolution and personal growth that psychologists hope for in grief counseling. Cash Bundren is the eldest son, an experienced introverted carpenter, easily commanded in the beginning of the novel as his silent building of Addie’s coffin suggests. Cash’s brief denial is illustrated by his first narrative, in which he itemizes the building of Addie’s coffin without elaborating on his relationship with Addie or showing any emotional connection to her whatsoever (Faulkner 48). This half page narrative does not provide any emotional language to interpret; therefore his denial is illustrated by omission of his emotions. After Addie’s death and completion of the coffin Cash becomes more vocal and his narratives slowly become more cognitive. This reflects Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s description of denial as, “a temporary state of shock from which [a patient] recuperates gradually” (37).

            Each of the other Bundrens represents a unique and unhealthy manifestation of the stages of grief as they are confronted by Addie’s death and funeral, “events which are by no means identical” (Vickery 237) because each influences the characters grief separately, but illicit similar responses. Therefore we can use them as examples of how grief can become unhealthy and cumbersome. The fact that Addie’s death occurs slowly is important to shaping how the Bundrens grieve because her death does not come as a shock. For this reason most of the Bundrens are able to move quickly through denial, or skip it altogether as is the case for Darl. Anse however, who does not appear to grieve at all, is likely in denial throughout the entire novel and is never seen reaching acceptance. One explanation for his lack of grief is his blatant selfishness, lack of care, and rejection of personal responsibility; however he also bargains for replacement of the loss through his search for a new wife and teeth. By settling into these replacements Anse denies himself the personal growth that comes from acceptance. Dewey Dell, like Anse, has a stagnant relationship with denial, but hers borders on anger. Dewey Dell uses this anger like a blanket to mask any emotional response she may have to Addie’s death. Darl is the only other character in the novel who knows that Dewey Dell is pregnant, therefore her anger towards Darl is not only an agent of her denial of Addie’s death, but also a result of denying her pregnancy, which she is also grieving.

            The error in Cash’s grief is a result of his docile nature, which limits his capacity for anger. He is never seen getting angry, which, in terms of grief, could be an indication that his emotions will at some point erupt, but they never do. Upon moving the coffin containing Addie’s body Cash expresses his opinion that the coffin won’t balance (Faulkner 56), but his narrative ends mid-sentence. Once again Cash’s emotions are omitted from his narrative, suggesting that he is hiding them even from himself. In contrast, Jewel Bundren beats his horse because he is upset about the loss of his mother; this transference of the emotional response to Addie’s death onto his horse is an excellent illustration of how a griever can allow their anger to get the better of them.

            In the river-crossing scene Cash takes the lead, finally asserting himself as the elder brother, signifying his transition into the next stage of grief. Cash blames himself for not having “suspicioned” the condition of the bridge and inspected it prior to their journey (Faulkner 83). At this point his anger is internalized and bargaining is illustrated by his assertion of power over Jewel and Darl in assuming responsibility for how to traverse the sunken bridge. Cash’s desire to stay with the wagon and release Jewel and Darl is an example of, “the wish for punishment because of excessive guilt” (Kübler-Ross 74), a common concern of patients in the bargaining stage. After the failed attempt to successfully drive the wagon across the bridge with Addie’s coffin Cash is silenced by the pain of his broken leg and internalized anger and guilt for failure of his assumed responsibility (Faulkner 93).

            The final illustration of Cash’s denial comes just after the river-crossing scene, when he expresses his last unfinished thought, “I told them that if they wanted it to tote and ride on a balance they would have to” (Faulkner 95). This brief omission of his emotions and ideas completes his gradual recuperation from denial. It is only after denial has been abandoned completely that one can settle into depression (Kübler-Ross 75). His silence from the pain of his broken leg allows him to retreat into a mild depression. I argue that Cash finds his silent depression contemplative and healing: “An understanding person will have no difficulty in eliciting the cause of the depression and in alleviating some of the unrealistic guilt or shame which often accompanies depression” (Kübler-Ross 76). Leaving Armistid’s home Cash is back to his usual docile and polite self, void of emotion, accepting his penance, “it don’t bother none” (Faulkner 113). Thus he has found the necessary comfort in brief depression to contemplate the loss of his mother and changes in his family dynamic that will result from that loss allowing him to transition into acceptance and settle into his new role as elder brother and assume the responsibility of patriarch.

            A perfect example of how grief can result in crippling depression is illustrated by Darl’s manifestation of grief, the slow and steady decline of mental faculty resulting in depressive psychosis. At the beginning of the novel Darl is the most intelligent character whose perception is matched by no other character, but after Addie dies he becomes combative, angry, and irrational. In the first scene of the funeral procession, when the Bundrens have arrived in town, Darl is just sitting in the wagon laughing (61) and progressively, this already strange character, grows ever stranger. After burning down the Gillespies’ barn (126) he begins to speak in third person and upon entering Jefferson they are approached by police (137). His siblings give him up to be institutionalized, sitting at a window on the train, heading to Jackson, thinking in third person, mumbling, “yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes” (146). As a war veteran it is possible that Darl was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome prior to Addie’s death. Nevertheless, her death was the tipping point to sending Darl into deep depression resulting in institutionalization.

            From Cash’s first narrative, the itemized list which demonstrates his brief denial, to his last few narratives in which he is seen as patriarch and grounding force for his siblings, Cash is the only character who truly grows and comes to accept the loss of his mother and Darl. He sympathizes with Darl’s burning of the Gillespies’ barn and when the police arrest Darl, Cash is the only one who remains calm and convinces him to go quietly (Faulkner 137). “This increase in sensitivity and perception makes Cash the only character in the novel who achieves his full humanity in which reason and intuition, words and action merge into a single though complex response” (Vickery 242). During the stages of grief people often act in ways that are uncharacteristic for them: they become silent, isolative, lash out in anger, become abusive to the things they love. Grief can manifest in ways that make our actions seem illogical and extreme. Through acceptance we reconnect with ourselves and begin a stage of self-improvement. At the end of the novel Cash emerges a very docile, logical person whose ability to accept and influence the changes around him affect his siblings positively. In this sense Cash represents exactly what the five stages of grief strive to achieve: a resolute acceptance of loss that results in personal growth.

Bibliography

Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. Methuen & Co. Ltd. New York, USA. Second Edition. 1987

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying Norton Critical Ed. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2010

Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. Macmillan, New York. 1969

Vickery, Olga W. “The Dimensions of Consiousness” As I Lay Dying Norton Critical Ed. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2010

AILD Extra Credit

T.H. Adamowski “‘Meet Mrs Bundren’: As I Lay Dying – Gentility, Tact, and Psychoanalysis”

Summary of the Claim:

            This essay explains the errors of many psychoanalytic critiques of literature are taking a stance as a “Big Nurse” or isolating the themes of a text into a single, finite interpretation (206). Adamowski posits Anse is a hero, “a triumphant father” for contradicting the oedipal notions of AILD by allowing Addie to die and introducing his new wife at the end of the story. He claims that there is a ménage a trios in the novel between Addie, a fusion of two sons (Cash and Jewel), and “a father who is not a buffoon” (209).

Keywords:

            Psychoanalysis, Freudian, Freud, oedipal, pre-oedipal concern, dialectic

Methodology:

            Structuralist; Binary of: words vs. actions = Anse vs. Addie

Sub Claims:

I.         The phrase “Meet Mrs Bundren” and the scene from which it emerges are pivotal to interpreting Anse as a heroic figure.

A.        This scene marks the completion of a cycle.

B.        This also suggests the family’s movement away from Addie’s ideals and into a “calculating, materialistic approach to life,” illustrated by the new Mrs. Bundren’s clearly visible difference from Addie (208)

C.        “… the ringing affirmation that mocks the pathos of the novel’s title in its reference to another Mrs. Bundren” (209)

II.         The serial structure of the novel insists on “sheer individuality of experience” reflected in the “brutal irony of the various personal motives”.

A.        The corpse and journey to Jefferson being the only thing uniting the Bundrens (210)

III.         What Addie calls her aloneness is her distinctiveness from Others (210).

A.        She uses Cash to fill that aloneness “the flowing-together, in one stream of, of her blood with that of the Other” (210), and after the betrayal of Darl’s birth she finds more fulfillment in Jewel who becomes the replacement of this connection (211).

B.        Dewey Dell and Vardaman are then penance for the sin that brought Jewel (212).

C.        Addie’s bond with Cash and Jewel is carried on by Cash’s building of the coffin and Jewel rescuing of her “from fire and flood” (212)

D.        Darl presents a new form of Otherness through his clairvoyance, “banished from his mother’s side, he is at the margins of existence and must therefore learn to see from afar” (212).

IV.         The dialectic of difference and identity that emerges with the oral stages of child development is illustrated by AILD’s “intensely concerned... matter of closeness and separation in the relationship of mother and child” (216)

A.        Cash and Jewel exist “firmly” within Addie’s “wordless love” (216).

B.        Dewey Dell’s child within her as her own “sense of aloneness… arises out of violation.” Darl’s clairvoyance is a violation of this aloneness (216).

i.         Dewey Dell’s desire to “violate the violation” is a “radical form of Addie’s manner of distancing herself from unwanted children” and a “general aspect” of sadism (217).

ii.        The theme of sadism is carried on by Vardaman’s drilling of holes into the coffin and accidentally into Addie’s face.

C.        Two conclusions to be drawn from this section.

iii.      “First, the indication of oral themes are not limited to Addie, but are general to the novel, and they are accompanied by valences both positive and negative: intimacy with her / distance from her; violence done to her / violence done by her (or as a result of her request for burial in Jefferson)” (217).

iv.      Second, “these themes remain unintelligible to us, for AILD is not written by, about, or for teething infants.”

a.        Because of this we must draw on the “oedipal forces that are likely to generate them and thus make the early intelligible by reference to the late” (217).

D.        These oedipal and pre-oedipal themes, closeness and separation, are used as “a masking of some more urgent matter that is being expressed through them” (218).

V.         Anse’s actions, though the result of “poverty and ignorance” are in the best interest of himself and his family (219).

A.        He did need new teeth.

B.        The family did need a new team to continue the journey.

C.        Encasing Cash’s leg in cement was the best he knew.

v.        What emerges from these actions is an oedipal hatred of the father (220)

VI.         Given the oedipal claims thus far, proof of incest is required to fortify the claim (220).

A.        Sadistic closeness Jewel seeks with the horse, is related to Addie (221)

B.        Darl’s clairvoyant understanding of Dewey Dell, is incestuous because he seeks closeness with Dewey Dell who is viewed as a replacement for Addie.

vi.      At one point Darl even draws attention to her breasts.

vii.     Dewey Dells obvious rejection of and hatred toward Darl’s affections.

C.        Tripartite relationship of Whitfield/Addie/Jewel

viii.   In which Whitfield is “both necessary and dispensable” (222).

VII.         “What needs to be examined now is the nature of this oedipal anguish that leads to oral camouflage and to visions of the primal scene where no father is to be seen…” (223): Castration anxiety

A.        Darl loses his sense of reason

B.        Jewel loses his horse

C.        Vardaman loses his fish

D.        Cash loses his leg

ix.       Peabody suggests penalty by saw-blade (225)

Conclusion:

             “Thus we have a bold recasting by which orality reveals the most terrible and tedious of oedipal fears: oral separation (or loss) in place of that separation from one’s body of one’s phallus. But the loss of horse, reason, fish, and leg gives the lie to the displacement. In fact, there may be an even bolder recasting than this, for the omnipresent Mrs. Bundren is a strangely unfeminine woman… ‘And so I took Anse’… In the phallic woman of As I Lay Dying we have, at last, found the father who is no buffoon and whom, like God, we had detected only in his effects. He is the phallus of Addie, Addie-as-Phallus. No Wonder that she – that he, that it – must be gouged with an augur, that buzzards circle her, or that Darl tries to burn her ‘alive’ in her coffin. One practices such forms of sadism-castration so as not to have castration practiced on oneself… We may see when the primal scene surges out of Darl’s delirium that there is a woman out of whom there comes, in whom there is, a beast, a pig… Anse, teeth in mouth, comes grinning at the end… and we notice that Mrs. Bundren is with his again, and that she is slightly degraded now in keeping with her husband’s good fortune. She is still not quite feminine, however, but rather duck-shaped now, and with hard-looking pop eyes” (225-6).

Adamowski, T.H. “‘Meet Mrs. Bundren’: As I Lay Dying – Gentility, Tact, and Psychoanalysis.” University of Toronto Quarterly 49.3 (1980): 205-227