The Two Addies: Maternity and Language in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 36; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02722010609481402
ISSN1943-9954
Autores Tópico(s)Canadian Identity and History
ResumoIn a 1973 interview with Graeme Gibson, Alice Munro declares that writers who first excited me were the writers of the American South, because I felt there a country being depicted that was like my own.... I mean the part of the country I come from is absolutely Gothic (248). While influence studies for Munro have flowed toward Eudora Welty, there are reasons beyond gothic similarity to justify a focus on Munro and William Faulkner together: both writers are often linked to issues of form (Faulkner as modernist, Munro as realist); both have been characterized by critics as more pointedly regional than national in their respective American and Canadian contexts; and both have been recognized as especially focused on maternity. Add to this the resonance in Lives of Girls and Women and As I Lay Dying between two mothers named Addie and two daughters named Del(l), as well as a focus in both novels on the relationship between maternity and language, and one wonders why they have not been compared more often. (1) Without making a specific claim that the correspondences are intentional, I do contend that the treatments of maternity and language in these two novels are worth examining together. Katherine Henninger observes that in Faulkner's work the tension between men's desire to have women represent collectivity, and women's desire to assume the perceived power of individualism is embodied in the battle for control of bodily (26). Indeed, the same could be said of Munro's work. Both novels feature a mother named Addie, who aspires to life beyond the farm, and a sexually active teenage daughter named Del(l). Faulkner's provocative image of a mother speaking from her coffin five days after her death demonstrates a physically constrained mother whose relationship to language silences her. This maternal figure has been seen by Magdalene Redekop as rewritten into a clown figure in Munro's work, as though it might be better to clown than to be like a corpse (64). Redekop argues that Munro's novel portrays female reproduction as dangerous, but does so with a twist of irreverence. Mother figures that range from mock mothers to dolls undermine overly fearful or sentimental portraits (both observations that have been made about Faulkner's portrayals of women) (2) for a steelier, more realistic picture of motherhood. It is tempting to interpret Munro's revision of motherhood as a depiction of female triumph impossible in a Faulknerian fictional world. However, a number of critics have noted in Munro's work a lingering sense that life continues to be restrictive for mothers. I make the case that Faulkner's metaphor emphasizes physical constraints, while Munro's clown metaphor focuses more on psychological pressures. As a result, both novels can be seen as tracing the contours of containment for mothers in their respective societies. The two Addies are similarly striking for the disempowerment they experience as mothers in their relationship to language. Before arguing the similarities between these two texts, I would like to acknowledge important differences. First, they were written in very different cultural, social, and historical times. Faulkner wrote at the end of a decade that ratified the 19th Amendment and gave women the right to vote, but the political and social environment remained bleak for American women seeking control over their own reproductive capacities. As a female citizen of the rural South, Addie Bundren would have belonged to the category of women with the highest fertility rates in the nation (an average of 6.3 children each) and as a result would have lived with the most debilitating consequences of compromised knowledge about reproductive control (Bergman 397-398). This ignorance was openly enforced by the Comstock Act of 1873, a law that, as James Reed explains, made it a misdemeanor to give away or sell any information on contraception (107). Resisting this repressive trend were first-wave feminists in the 1920s, who agitated for women's autonomy over their reproductive capacities: In 1918 [Margaret] Sanger successfully appealed the decision which had shut down her birth-control clinic, and 5 years later, she opened another. …
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