As I Lay Dying Addie Boundren Character Analysis

In As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Addie Bundren is portrayed as a sadistic middle aged women who feels inferior in the 1920’s sexist society she was born into, affecting her actions and feelings towards her husband and children. After a rough childhood composed of beatings, she projects her feelings of inferiority onto other children and feels a great lack of control in her life as a women ,stating that her “aloneness had been violated” with her marriage to Anse and the birth of her first child, Cash. It is at this point that she realizes her life is stuck to the vessels of being a wife and mother, two roles that she resents immensely. The society Addie lives in contributed to her apathetic personality by showing her learned helplessness

When describing how she came to be with her husband, she apathetically states, “And so I took Anse,” later saying, “I saw him pass the school house three or four times before I learned that he was driving four miles out of his way to do it.” These statements show that it seems as if she believed she had no other choice, destined to marry Anse, knowing it would have to happen at some time in her life. Addie lets things happen to her without second thought, and this behavior defines all of her decisions including the birth of her children, where she insisted, “I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them.” Her father’s words also echoe in her actions and personality; her father “used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.” The truth rings in these words for Addie after the birth of her first child, Cash, when she thinks, “ I knew that living was terrible and that this was the answer to it.” After this realization, she lives on assuring herself that words were empty and meaningless, recluding to a life of melancholy and routine actions in which she awaits death and regrets ever being “planted” by her