A common thought during the Great Depression was that “Poor Land” made “Poor People.” William Faulkner agrees with this statement in his novel “As I Lay Dying” (1930): The Bundren family each narrate a piece of the story from their own point of view—and it is because of this narrative frame that the reader is able to dive deep into each character’s mind and catch a glimpse of how their poor land has made each of them poor people.
“As I Lay Dying” is the narration of the Bundren family’s journey from New Hope to Jefferson. They embark on this journey to fulfill Addie Bundren’s death wish: to be buried with her family. Early in the book, Addie dies, and the journey begins. However, during the journey Addie (who is dead) speaks to the reader—and it is here when the reader understands why the Bundren family is so complex.
Addie married Anse Bundren for his land. She was a school teacher who hated her job, and he seemed like a good catch because he owned a small piece of land. Being from “poor land,” having no parents alive, Addie decides to marry Anse—but she does not love him; in fact, she despises them. She teaches herself that words like “love” are worthless, and lives her life awaiting her death. Having been brought up in a poor land, Addie knows of nothing else but a poor life—and hence becomes another “poor person.”
This idea is reinforced when she describes her children and her reactions toward them: She does not consider herself mother to Cash nor Darl; she states that she “gave Anse the children,” and says that she “did not ask for them.” Even Cora Tull told her that she “was not a true mother.” She refused her breast to Cash and Darl after their time was up; however, with Jewel, her “love child” (she had a child out of wedlock, with the Reverend Whitfield), “there was only the milk, warm and calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence…” So, Addie had Jewel for herself; then she “gave Anse Dewey Dell to negative Jewel,” and then she gave him “Vardaman to replace the child [she] had robbed him of.” Had she not been a “poor people,” she would have been brought up to love, not only love in the word form, but love in the feeling form.
It would be easy to blame all the poorness on the mother and wife, Addie, having only read her chapter. However, throughout the novel Anse shows his signs of poorness, having lived all his life in poor land. Anse is a farmer who has “a little property,” and a “good honest name.” Anse is very rapidly depicted as the “anti-hero,” the character who does everything to get the bigger and better end of any circumstance. For instance, he makes his son Cash make the coffin for his mother; persuades Jewel and Darl to work to get $3.00 extra while their mother is dying (claiming that he himself cannot work, for he is allergic to sweat); convinces his neighbors to help him when he needs them (for example, getting the team of mules, food and housing while on the journey, and the spades while in Jefferson) using the argument of “good Christians;” makes Cash, Darl and Jewel transport the coffin across the river; sells Jewel’s horse to purchase a team of mules; and ends up stealing Dewey Dell’s $10.00.
Anse’s poor mentality has made him a poor person; one who finds the need to carry his wife’s dead body from one town to another, in a journey that lasts long enough for the body to rot, stink, and attract buzzards. However, Addie is not much better than he is: She was getting her revenge by asking Anse to promise to take her “back to Jefferson when [she] died.”
Had this couple not lived in poor land, they might not have grown to be such poor people. Poorness in “As I Lay Dying” is not only seen in economical poverty, but in intellectual, social and emotional poverty: During the journey, when Cash breaks his leg only a few miles out of Jefferson, Anse’s solution is to cover his leg with cement; Peabody says it best when he says that he would “be damned if the man that’d let Anse Bundren treat him with raw cement aint got more spare legs.” This shows Anse’s intellectual poverty—not even adding some kind of cream or gel to Cash’s leg before applying the cement; the Bundren’s social poverty is depicted when they stop at Grummet’s hardware store, and the marshall approaches the wagon parked in front, and requests that Anse remove that dead body from the town—a body which has been dead for more that eight days, and whose stench saturates the city until the Bundrens reach Jefferson; finally, the emotional poverty of the Bundrens is shown through the children, mostly, and their lack of a clear mother figure: Vardaman’s mother is a fish; Jewel’s mother is a horse; Darl’s mother is “is not”; and Cash’s mother is a wooden plank. This, of course, relative to a mother who did not have children for herself, but rather gave them all to Anse.
Throughout the novel, Faulkner goes around and around the idea of poor land making poor people. The Bundrens are an example of poor land making poor people, in more than one generation.
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