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