As I Lay Dying essays

As I Lay Dying essays Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places My aloneness had been violated...by time, by love, by Anse(172). With these words, Addie Bundren describes a common theme in the South. Many women become trapped in an unsatisfactory life, and then drained, both physically and emotionally, by the people in their environment. In As I Lay Dying (1930), William Faulkner creates Addie and this theme of the novel through imagery, figurative language, and details, both before and after she dies. From the day she decides to take Anse (170) as her husband, Addie begins her lifelong journey of losing herself. That day, Addie realizes that my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day, (172) until the day that she dies. After she marries and gives birth to Cash, Addie knew that living was terrible(171). She does not enjoy being a wife and mother because her family cannot meet her needs. She did not experience love as a child, and longs to be loved and appreciated, but her husband and children cannot give such emotion. Once she realizes this, she feels as if he had tricked me, hidden within a word like within a paper screen and struck me in the back through it (172). While Addie lies on her deathbed, Anse resents her because he must pay for the doctors visit. He says, Making me pay for it, when she was well and hale as ere a woman ever were. One might think that Addies husband would realize the gravity of the situation, but once again her entire family reveals t heir true nature of selfishness. When Addie finally escapes her terrible life, she has been married for thirty years and raised five children. She lived, a lonely woman, lonely with her pride...and she was not cold in the coffin before they were carting her forty miles away to bury her, flouting the will of God to do it(23). The dysfunction of the Bundren family does not cease...