Addie’s Bell Toll
By
Penelope Stickney
Dr. Rashidah Muhammad
Engl 850
December 7, 2000
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Addie’s Bell Toll
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was first published in 1930. A unique style of literature, it combines the voices and inner monologues of fifteen different speakers in fifty-nine pieces of separate yet intertextual writing that overlaps and intertwines yet never connects in common dialogue. Through these soliloquies and interpretations of events the reader learns of the last days and life of the Bundren matriarch, Addie. Talked about, observed, and reminisced, Addie is the central character of the novel who never speaks--never shares her thoughts until about two-thirds into the book, long after she dies. What is Faulkner’s intention in presenting the story in this format? Perhaps it is through this subtle use of symbolism that Faulkner shows that although the Bundrens live and work closely together, they never connect or truly communicate as a family. Even though they report conversation and work side by side, their dysfunctional relationships become the cause of Addie’s decision to lie down and die. And, as Faulkner weaves the plot, he uses this arrangement as a frame for the Modern Existentialist theory that individuals must choose to live their lives to the fullest, that relationships support the fullness of living, and intimacy with others is necessary to life. As a philosophical movement, existentialism emphasizes individual existence, freedom, and choice. For Addie, the absence of relationships symbolically equates with death; therefore, her decision to die is rational. She is and has always lived among the dead.
Addie’s life reflected: “the loneliness of the one in mourning is like the suffering of one critically ill” (qtd. in Sproule). In this statement, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the Father of Modern Existentialism, suggests that the depths of despair and loneliness
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(mental anguish) are as unmanageable and as unyielding as a terminal illness (physical turmoil). There is no way out of the physical turmoil of an illness unto death; likewise, mental anguish can be as debilitating. Therefore, as one is to the other, there is no escape from either. Consequently, if true intense loneliness and unregenerate illness are one, then Addie Bundren spent most of her life critically ill even though those around her never sensed her anguish. Cora, a townswoman and the closest female friend that Addie had, observes, “She lived, a lonely woman, lonely with her pride, trying to make folks believe different, hiding the fact that they [Addie’s family] just suffered her,[…] hiding her pride and her broken heart” (Faulkner 22-23).
For many years of her life, Addie struggled against despair. Placed in life as a woman, Addie was robbed of her individuality and given few options. The simple fact that she was born a woman placed her in a situation that did not allow individuality, and Addie reveals that throughout her life she passionately desired to embrace something more than her limited options. As a child she was controlled by the words of her father; as a school teacher those words continued to haunt her and she took to beating the children: “I would look forward to the times when [the school children] faulted, so I could whip them” (170); as a wife she is subject to the emptiness of her relationship with her husband: “Anse...had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words a long time. I knew that that word was just like the others: just a shape to fill a lack“ (172); and in mid-life she chose to give up and die. It is then she completes her life’s circle. She lived her life to die, as her father instructed. “The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead for a long time” (169).
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Trapped in a preordained existence, she searches for her individuality, the true essence of self, and finds that the lifestyle that holds her and the words she believes to lack meaning cannot control her. Choosing to find life, she creates her own meaning for life and follows the path of her father as release from the nineteenth century social climate. “Women...are subject to social influences that attempt to rob them of their awareness of their own freedom, and they must overcome these constraints through courageous self-assertion,” taught Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), the great female existentialist philosopher (Velesquez 262). In her work, The Second Sex, de Beauvoir argues that “in our male-dominated society, men define women wholly in terms of men’s own nature: a woman is simply ‘the other.’ The nonmale one who relates to the male. Women […] who accept this role […] become mere things for men” (262). This was the environment Addie chose to escape from, and she chose to leave it by dying. Tull, a neighbor, reflects:
“She’s a-going.” […] “Her mind is set on it.”
It’s a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived
to be seventy and more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since
her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her […] and laid
down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. “You will have to
look out for pa the best you can,” she said. “I’m tired.” (30)
This piece foreshadowing Addie’s death reflects what de Beauvoir knew, and as Addie was aware, that intense feelings should not be ignored; they need to be taken
seriously and life must be passionately lived in the present or the person is not truly alive.
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Life cannot be postponed. Kierkegaard taught, “Anguish reaches its full maturity when
the child becomes aware that he will be able to choose what he wants to do with his life” (qtd. in “What“). He believed that each person is unique and that each person must find a truth he is willing to live and die for; Addie chose her truth. When standing at her deathbed, Doctor Peabody observed,
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of
the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the
minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the
fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant
or family moving out of a single tenement or town. (Faulkner 43-44)
What her father taught her in life Addie expected to have in death. In her passion to find purpose, she took the “leap of faith,” significant to Kierkegaard’s philosophy, and followed her ancestors. But there is irony to her choice in dying: even in death she is separated from the truth that she ignored in others and thought that she alone understood.
As a link toward understanding Addie and the family and friends introduced in the novel, a study of existentialism will reveal steps toward the passion Addie earnestly desired for her life and for those around her. This analysis is based on Kierkegaard’s three “Stadia” or stages along life’s way. The first Stadia is the Aesthetic, the level of existence where one becomes and remains chiefly a spectator. Included here are the Epicurean Hedonists, those who remain chiefly interested in pursuing those that like to follow the arts. The people in this primary category remain spectators to others creative
genius. As an example, Addie’s husband Anse steps forward. Interested in the young
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schoolteacher, he drives past “the school house three or four times before [Addie]
learns that he is driving four miles out of his way to do it” (170). As a potential suitor, Anse finds it difficult to connect with Addie in any way other than that of an observer. Therefore, he drives passed the schoolhouse to look at her until one day she speaks to him.
And so I looked up that day and saw Anse standing there in his Sunday
clothes, turning his hat round and round in his hands, I said:
“If you’ve got any womanfolks, why in the world don’t they make you get
your hair cut?”
“I ain’t got none,” he said. Then he said suddenly, driving his eyes at me like
two hounds in a strange yard: “That’s what I come to see you about.”
“And make you hold your shoulders up,” I said. “You haven’t got any? But you’ve got a house. […]” He just looked at me, turning the hat in his hands. “A new house,” I said. “Are you going to get married?”
And he said again, holding his eyes to mine: “That’s what I come to see you about.” (171)
Anse gambles that Addie as a young, single, intelligent woman is probably ready to leave the life of the maiden schoolteacher for marriage. And although Addie may not fully reflect the definition of “creative genius” in modern terms, she is, nevertheless, the closest marriage-available person to that description in the county. To demonstrate Addie’s intellectual distinction, Faulkner composes her soliloquy in a form different than the others; it is poetic and intuitively philosophical. As an example of her poetics, Addie
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reflects: “[…] the words that are not deeds, that are just the gaps in people’s lacks, coming down like the cries of the geese out of the wild darkness in the old terrible nights, fumbling at the deeds like orphans to whom are pointed out in a crowd two faces and told, That is your father, your mother” (174). Regarding the affair with Reverend Whitfield later in her marriage, Addie’ description is metaphorical: “I would never again see him coming swift and secret to me in the woods dressed in sin like a gallant garment already blowing aside with the speed of his secret coming” (175). Anse may not be a true epicurean hedonist according to the current interpretation of the phrase, but he watches and pursues Addie, the talented intellectual.
Another aspect of his personality, Anse created within himself the illusion that he cannot work. This character trait is further developed in the second leg of Kierkegaard’s first Stadia as that of the Abstract Intellectual, whose head is in the clouds but remains divorced from the details of human existence that get down and dirty. Kierkegaard observed about the culture of his day, "Let others complain that our age is wicked. I complain that it is paltry. It lacks passion” (qtd. in Sproule). This lament refers to those who pass their time on the sidelines, who remain personally and existentially uninvolved with the great cares of human existence. Not only unconcerned about life and those around him, Faulkner presents Anse “as almost subhuman in his inability to sweat and suffer” (Cox 1). Having always lived in Mississippi, Anse understands the dripping humidity of the seasons but is so convinced that he will die if he sweats that his children and his neighbors do his work for him. “[Anse] is long armed, even if he is spindling.
Except for the lack of sweat. You could tell [the shirt] ain’t been else’s but Anse’s that
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way without no mistake” (Faulkner 32).
What is amazing is that his manipulation of others to accomplish his work is common knowledge, even though Anse himself doesn’t appear to realize that he is doing anything unusual or that his attitude toward the physical labor necessary for life is inconveniencing his neighbors. Cora’s husband Tull acknowledges this when Anse is determined to bury Addie in her family town of Jefferson. Tull says of Anse, “It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get on something that will make the most trouble for everyone he knows” (89). Anse’s impervious attitude and actions prove that he can transcend his environment and the work will still be completed; he is so uninvolved with work and with life that he impedes the lives of others who do his work for him--his family and neighbors--who come to his aid without comment or complaint but recognize that he is a “lazy man, a man that hates moving” (114). Even Jewel blindly says, “He ain’t never been beholden to no man” (116).
Anse’s daughter, Dewey Dell, is another character lost to this first stage. She is caught in the throes of the man’s world and absently gazes, seemingly unattached to the events around her. “[…] and then I found that girl watching me. If her eyes had a been pistols, I wouldn’t be talking now. I be dog if they didn’t blaze at me,” neighbor Samson observes of Dewey Dell (115). Dewey Dell has her mother’s gift of language, but lacks her mother’s guidance and teaching, so her gifts remain undeveloped. Even so, she contributes this metaphor: “That’s what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events […]” (121). When she realizes she is pregnant, she reflects her poetic response, “I feel
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like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” (64). But she has no gift of conversation with
others, and when in town, she is only a backwoods country girl to the sophisticated drug store clerk, MacGowan. “Them country people. Half the time they don’t know what they want, and the balance of the time they can’t tell it to you” (243). Dewey Dell had been sent to the drug store by her boy friend Lafe to get something to induce an abortion, and she ends up with a handful of sugar pills only after she takes “the rest of the treatment […] in the cellar” with MacGowan (248). To reflect de Beauvoir, Dewey Dell has become one of the “mere things for men.”
The second stage of existentialism Kierkegaard called “the Ethical Stage.” In this level people live on the basis of conscience and are concerned with the values of good and evil, with value and justice (Sproule), but lack a direct connection to the reality of human existence and the passionate depth of its cravings. Those characters in this stage include those helping, supporting, and observing the Bundrens. They are the neighbors who visit Addie’s side at her deathbed and offer counsel and circumstantial observation; they are the neighbors with information, advice, and lodging as the Bundren family carries Addie’s body to her resting-place.