Addie, in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, is shown to be a hardened, hard-working, unloving woman, wife and mother who sees life as a matter of fulfilling a woman's duties to her husband and children, and little else. She is an unsympathetic character, but she is so clearly and completely trapped by her social and familial circumstances that it is hard to judge her. She accepts life as it is given to her by others, never considers that life is anything but a series of duties to her family, feels nothing in her conscience about her failure or inability to love, and must at least be given credit for holding her family together until she dies, even though the family is a group of deeply troubled individuals.
Addie's monologue shows her to be bitterly determined to defend herself and her life to the very end. She feels that she has done just what society taught her to do--hold her family together through hard work and harsh doses of reality about how difficult life is. She is angry, miserable, and cynical, but she makes clear that she has become the way she is in large part because of her father and the lessons he taught her about life, lessons she then passed along to her children. "I could just remember how ny father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time." Recalling her daughter Cora's effort to get her to pray, repent and save her soul, Addie says, "salvation is just words." About her children, she writes, "In the afternoon when school was out, and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them." In other words, she will do everything she sees as the duty of a mother, but she does not feel that loving them is a part of that duty, no more than it was a part of her father's duty to her.
Addie is the center of the family, the book, and much of the accounts of her children. Tul...