Not only in reality, but also in the fictional world of literature, women have been silenced since time immemorial. Such is the case in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, a novel that details a family's journey as they travel to bury the family's deceased matriarch, Addie Bundren. Some critics, such as Linda Wagner, disagree, stating that the book is "the story of Addie Bundren and her beloved son Jewel" (74). Marc Hewson agrees with the more positive version of Addie's position, stating that: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Through the process of Addie's monologue and the combined actions and thoughts of her children, the dynamic feminine and maternal principle she maintains negates the impassive character and immutable masculine principle, and Addie herself becomes a possible source of feminine power in the book. (552) But I argue that the first red flag, indicative of her silenced position, should be the fact that she is the deceased character and that this is a sign of a much deeper problem. As Patricia Yaeger notes, "Faulkner places Addie Bundren's corpse on the axis of As I Lay Dying and makes her smell" because she is just another woman on the assembly line of a mass-produced family by Anse Bundren, who simply goes and finds another wife when Addie (61) dies. John Earl Bassett notes that “each member of the family manifests a latent hostility towards Addie” (127). And Cinda Gault notes that there is "a persistent sense that life continues to be restrictive for mothers" and that "Faulkner's corpse metaphor emphasizes physical constraints" (440-441). Yaeger, Bassett, and Gault are all aware that Addie is in a marginalized position, that of someone who has been silenced. Because Addie has been silenced, she is nothing more than a force of nature, which ultimately leads to the disintegration of her family. As a woman, and particularly as a mother, Anse transforms Addie into a simple force of nature because her marginalized position in society causes a buildup of frustration that she takes out on her family and, ultimately, as the literal forces of nature that generate it. they have to face it, it leads to the disintegration of his family. The forced suppression of Addie's autonomy results in a powerless woman. She has no say in how many children she and Anse will have because she is not even allowed to have power over her own body. She describes giving Anse children as her “duty to him” (Faulkner 174). And the way she describes her first pregnancy and Anse's response shows how little say she had in the matter: Then I found out I had Darl. At first I wouldn't believe it. So I thought I was going to kill Anse. It was as if he had deceived me, hidden in a word like a screen of paper and hit me in the back through it. But then I realized that I had been deceived by words older than Anse or love, and that the same word had deceived Anse too, and that my revenge would be that he never knew that I was taking revenge. And when Darl was born, I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew my father had been right, even though he couldn't know he was right, not more than I could have known that I was wrong. “It’s absurd,” said Anse; “You and I aren’t done having fun yet, with just the two of us.” (172-73).Anse does not even consider that Addiedoesn't want to have kids, or maybe she didn't even want to have kids in the first place; he simply tells her that they aren't finished yet. And indeed, that's not the case, as they have two more children together after Darl's birth. Gault notes that “it is after her marriage, but even more so after she becomes a mother, that Addie's physical autonomy is more limited” (444). Her opinion or desire to have children is completely ignored and the number of children the couple has seems to depend entirely on Anse. Addie loses her autonomy in the sense that she no longer has the freedom to decide her own actions - it is now up to Anse to decide. Addie can't rule her own body, Anse decides when they make love. And Addie can't rule her own desires, Anse decides how many children they will have. As a result, Addie is completely helpless: she loses control of herself, both mentally and physically. By marrying Anse, she transforms herself into a completely helpless creature; she is no longer a person, because a person has the autonomy to govern herself, her body, her actions, and her desires. Addie no longer displays any of this, she now displays the traits of a completely passive creature, incapable of governing her own actions or desires and incapable of showing any signs of power. His helpless position begins the process of his fall to a position of mere force of nature. From the start, Addie seems empty, empty. She doesn't have the vivid characteristics that make us human and it's not just because she's dying, it's because someone else took her life: The blanket is pulled up to her chin, as hot as she was, with only her two hands and face out. She is leaning back on the pillow, her head raised to see out the window, and we hear her every time he picks up the adze or the saw. If we were deaf, we could almost look at his face and he could see it. His face is gaunt, so that the bones draw white lines just under the skin. His eyes are like two candles when you watch them flow in the sockets of the iron candlesticks. But eternal and everlasting salvation and grace are not upon her. (Faulkner 8) Her family put her in a bed, allowing her to simply await death and while it is true that it was probably physically impossible for her to move, it is also true that she showed no sign of wanting to do it. stay alive. Indeed, she tells the reader that her father told her that “the reason to live is to prepare to remain dead” and that after having her children, she can “prepare to die” (175- 176). A person who wants to die is a person whose life has disappeared. Addie has lost her will to live. Indeed, she and Jewel each receive only one chapter of the book because, as Wagner says, “Addie and Jewel are…the silent ones” (74). She has been silenced, physically and mentally, by Anse and she no longer has anything to live for; she now exists only as a force of nature, an object against which the Bundren family fights on their journey to bring her to her resting place. A silenced person is a person who is never heard. Addie is never heard because she has lost her autonomy and her voice. As someone without a voice and lacking autonomy, she has lost the traits that make her human: her ability to decide her own life and to be heard and respected by others. What is not human is an object – Addie has become an object. The object she becomes is a force of nature, which the Bundren family fights against as they travel to Jefferson to bury her. Addie's death and its effects finalize her destiny as a simple force of nature. Because she lost herautonomy, because she has lost the capacity to govern herself, she resigns herself to death. Her death completes the transformation desired by Anse: she has lost her humanity, she is nothing more than an object. The object it becomes is a force of nature. His death brings her back to earth and she is part of it: then the wagon overturned, then he and Jewel and the horse all mixed up. Cash came out, still holding the coffin, and I could say nothing more about the horse as it rushed and splashed. I thought Cash had given up and was swimming to get there and I was yelling at Jewel to come back and then all of a sudden he and the horse sank too and I thought they were all leaving. I knew the horse had been dragged out of the ford too, and with that wild horse drowning, that cart and that box all over the place, it was going to be pretty bad, and there I was, standing knee-deep in water , shouting to Anse behind me: “See what you’ve done now? See what you did now? (Faulkner 154). Jewel, Cash, and Darl fight with the coffin as if it were wind, fire, or a storm, a natural force that humans must fight against to achieve their ends. In fact, the narrative is so confusing here, because the coffin, the horse, the wagon, and the people all fall together, that it's hard to tell what exactly is happening other than this: Addie's sons are fighting with his coffin. Lawrence Buell notes that Addie has a "trueful but loyal illegitimate son, Jewel, Addie's trial but also her favorite of the five siblings, whose brute strength saves her coffin from floodwaters and a fire." barn along the way” and the meaning here is that Addie’s identity the coffin had to be saved (94-95). It's almost as if he has a will of his own and acts independently of the members of the Bundren family. Addie is dead at this point, but her coffin is giving her sons a hard time. This illustrates the idea that his corpse in his coffin became a force of nature, much like the floodwaters, fires, and other difficulties the family faces on their journey. As a force of nature, Addie affects her children indirectly, but does not influence them directly. This is where Addie's absence is most apparent: the influence she exerts on her children is entirely indirect. She doesn't talk to them, she doesn't support or encourage them, she only affects them psychologically through her absence. She is criticized by her neighbors for her parenting skills: So when Cora Tull told me that I wasn't a real mother, I thought of the way words string together in a thin, quick, harmless line, and how how terribly the deeds unfold along the way. the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to be able to pass from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who have never sinned, nor loved, nor feared, have for what they have never had and cannot have until until they forget the words. (Faulkner 173-74). Thus, Addie and her neighbors recognize that she is a silent and distant mother. Addie has already determined that words are inadequate, noting that Cora wanted her to pray about her sins "because people for whom sin is just a matter of words, for them salvation is also just a matter of words." words” (176). Bassett agrees that Addie “presents a strong case against empty verbalism and the inability of words to capture the terrors of life, the trial of action” (126). Addie's life is full of terrors because she is marginalized. When you do something long enough, you start to believe in it. Addie remained silent for solong time, because Anse silenced her throughout their marriage, that she is now starting to see the value of silence and she can't understand the value of words. Unfortunately, this is no way to bond with your children. This silence is what separates her from her children, this silence is what transforms her from a human being into a force of nature. According to Bassett, "ultimately, human experience and interaction requires language" and that is the missing link between Addie and her children: language. She lost her language when she married Anse and he was the one who decided when they would have children and how many they should have, regardless of his wishes. She lost her tongue when she lost the ability to govern her own wishes and actions. His tongue is stuck inside her: Sometimes I would lie beside him in the dark, hearing the earth that was now my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I thought about its name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a container, and I watched it liquefy and flow into the container, until the pot remained full and immobile: a meaningful form. Deeply lifeless like an empty door frame; and then I realized that I had forgotten the name of the pot. (Faulkner 173) These are Addie's thoughts as she lies next to her husband; she has them, but she is not able to vocalize them. If her children never hear her vocalize, what do they know about her? What can they know about her? What can we know about a person who never speaks except that there is probably a reason for their silence? There is a reason for Addie's silence and it is this silence that drives a wedge between her and her children. Because she cannot speak to them, she cannot have any direct influence on them. It can only affect them inadvertently and indirectly. Even before she literally dies, she is largely absent from the lives of Cash, Darl, Jewel, Dewey Dell, and Vardaman. Addie's inability to exert influence over her children creates a complete lack of maternal presence that is severely felt by her children. This is evident in her death scene: she lies down and turns her head without even glancing at Dad. She looks at Vardaman; his eyes, the life in them, suddenly rushing to them; the two flames burn for a constant moment. Then they come out as if someone had leaned down and breathed on them. “Mama,” said Dewey Dell; "Mom!" Leaning over the bed, hands slightly raised, the fan still moving as it has for ten days, she begins to get excited. His voice is strong, young, trembling and clear, captivated by its own timbre and volume, the fan still rising and falling steadily, murmuring the useless air. Then she throws herself into Addie Bundren's lap, hugs her, shakes her with the furious strength of young people before suddenly laying on the handful of rotten bones Addie Bundren left behind, shaking the whole bed in a chattering whistle of mattress balls, arms outstretched. and the fan in one hand still fluttered with his exhaling breath in the quilt. (Faulkner 48-49) This is the first sign of the disintegration of a family member following Addie's death. Dewey Dell presents an expected display of emotion, but the rest of his storyline suggests that his ending is not stable; for her, the journey turns into a quest for an abortion and she becomes silent, withdrawn, and ultimately, she is a key player in Darl's violent removal to a mental institution. Hewson suggests that "by mourning her [Addie] and reflecting on their relationships with her, Cash, Darl, Jewel, and Vardaman learn to emulate her and adopt her distrust of others."patriarchal constructions” (552). This view, however, ignores the ending of each of their stories: Cash has a broken leg, Darl ends up in a mental institution, Jewel is silently angry because her father sold his horse, and Vardaman is confused, continually comparing his mother to animals, and seemingly unaware of what really happened. Wagner provides insight into the reaction of one family member, Jewel, and acknowledges that her reaction to losing her mother, both because she died and because she was practically dead when she was still physically alive, is distressing: First, he [Faulkner] makes it clear how upset Jewel is by Addie's impending death: he is harsh with his beloved horse; his voice is "harsh, savage" when he insults Tull for being a "buzzard"; he complains bitterly about the fact that Cash built the coffin under his very window (only Jewel cannot bring herself to say the word coffin): “let it be private,” he cries in anguish. (75)Addie's disappearance, both through her physical death and her marginalization while she was still alive, has harmful effects. Her children clearly feel this absence and all of them, but especially Jewel and Darl, have difficulty coping. Children are the center of a family and if due to their mother's silence they are not functioning effectively, serious problems arise. Examples from Faulkner's text of Addie's felt absence from her children are numerous. They feel this absence because she has lost herself, she has lost her autonomy and as a result, she has nothing to offer them; she cannot be heard by them because she has been silenced. In this sense, there is a direct connection between Addie's marginalized position in society and the downfall of her family members. Because at this point she's just a force of nature, her pent-up energy spills over into her family. As has already been demonstrated, Addie is a silent character. She was silenced by her husband, Anse, and by the conformities of society. This exhausts her to the point that she is about to die and seems to be impatiently waiting for it. The most telling aspect of his pent-up frustration, however, is the fact that it comes to fruition on his family, injuring Cash's leg, driving Darl to insanity and residence in a mental institution, and nearly killing Jewel, his favorite child, in a fire. barn: The sound has become quite peaceful now, just like the sound of the river. We watch through the proscenium of the dissolving door as Jewel runs crouched to the end of the coffin and leans toward it. For a moment he looks at us through the rain of burning hay like a portiere of flaming pearls, and I can see his mouth forming as he calls my name. (221-22)Indeed, the family self-destructs. As a result of Anse's treatment of Addie, Addie has become a marginalized woman, a woman who has no control over her own destiny and no relationship with her children. This disconnect between her and her children and her complete inability to establish a relationship because she has no autonomy destroys her. It destroys her in the sense that it destroys her will to live. This then destroys his family. Some destructive side effects have already been mentioned: injuries, abortions, insanity. But the very essence of Addie's family unit is destroyed on the last page of the novel when Anse says "meet Mrs. Bundren" (261). She's the new Mrs. Bundren, she took Addie's place. As the new Mrs. Bundren, she represents the new Bundren family. The family that Addie was once a part of no longer exists – it died when she died. In the days leading up to and.