In
this revealing dialogue, Addie is speaking and ties up many of the
loose ends the reader has struggle to make sense of thus far. First,
Addie recalls her experiences as a schoolteacher. She hated being a
teacher and took her only pleasure as a teacher when punishing the
students. Addie then describes for the reader just how she ended up
with a man like Anse. Faulkner frames Addie’s discussion of
Anse and their marriage with the line "And so I took Anse."
(1595) She describes how she felt after Cash was born: that he
violated her aloneness (something Anse never could do). (1596) The
love between mother and son was very strong, something both of them
experienced. "Cash did not need to say it [the word love] to me
nor I to him." She describes how she knew how useless words
were, and her belief that they were only made up by those who don’t
know what they meant. However, far from comforting Addie, as one
would expect, Cash’s love made her only more acutely aware of
her aloneness.
Darl, the second born, was an unwanted child, but Addie gave him to
Anse because she felt it was her duty. (1597) Furious at Anse for
getting her pregnant again, she plotted her secret revenge by telling
Anse to bury her in Jefferson.
Twice in her narrative Addie talks about how her father told her that
life was just preparing to be dead a long time. (1594, 1597) She
describes how Anse dies to her very early in their marriage and
alludes to the passion she found and then lost during her adulterous
summer with Whitfield. She had Jewel as a result of the affair and
delivered him herself before “preparing to clean her house”
(in preparation to die). (1597-1598) Although Addie viewed Jewel as
her punishment for her sin, she also called him her “cross”
and “salvation” in a conversation with Cora recalled in a
later chapter. Jewel was always her favorite child because he
reminded her of the passions she had felt with Whitfield.
Nearing the end of her dialogue, Addie describes having her last two
children, Dewey Dell and Vardaman. She says that she had Dewey Dell
to cancel out Jewel and Vardaman to replace the child Anse did not
have. She once again talks about her hate of words and writes off
Cora’s remarks about sin and salvation by calling them just
words. "Because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to
them salvation is just words too." (1598)
This chapter clears up a lot of confusion an adds another layer to
Faulkner’s work. We can gain a perspective on Darl’s
emotional stability by looking at his experiences with his mother.
Addie never loved him and considered him as no hers, but Anse’s.
This emotional abuse of Darl could very easily explain Darl’s
developing madness. We also learn in this chapter why Addie was so
bent on being buried in Jefferson, in addition to this understanding,
we are giving a bit of knowledge hidden from even the characters of
this novel: Addie’s only reason for insisting on being buried
is revenge, she had no real desire to be buried in Jefferson.
Addie’s dialogue reveals very important insight. All other
sections in this book offer outside opinions about Addie, but through
her dialogue, we are able to see, for a moment, the world from her
perspective. Her dialogue reveals Addie as a woman who wanted to be
in other people’s lives, but desperately wanted her aloneness.
She is a woman of conflict. She wants to be a lone but she wants to
be known. She punished her students to make them aware of her, but
she married Anse so she wouldn’t have to feel real love. It is
possibly too easy to characterize Addie as simply mean-spirited; she
does hurt people, but usually through desperation and lack of any
other way to express herself. I see Addie as a desperate woman who
did not belong to country life with Anse. One other important
revelation offered about Addie is her attitude towards life and
death. She twice recalls her fathers words that life is just getting
ready to stay dead, Faulkner is obviously showing us that this is the
way she thinks and this probably characterizes her outlook on life.
This
chapter shows us how many of the characters are related on a deeper
level. Addie tells us, in her own words, just how she ended up with a
man so queer as Anse. We understand through Addie’s confession
that Jewel is a bastard child, which can help up to understand Darl’s
taunting later in the novel. (1611)
One
thing that stuck out to me during my reading of Addie’s
dialogue was Addie desperateness. I don’t know if Faulkner
wrote this chapter with the intention to lead the reader to sympathy,
but after several readings, that is where I found myself. As already
discussed, Addie is a desperate woman. The word choices and key
phrases support this. I found it interesting that Addie never talks
about her aloneness being “cured”, “broken”,
or “entered,” but rather, Faulkner uses the word
“violated”. Addie was desperate to find someone to enter
her aloneness, but she was also desperate to keep people out, hence
the word “violate”.
