My primary source for this research project is William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. When looking for secondary sources on Jstor and Gale Academic Onefile, I used key terms like ‘motherhood’, ‘femininity and sexuality’, as well as ‘womanhood in Faulkner’s works’. An issue I am having is accessing the full chapter of one of my key secondary sources, Bianca Batti’s section in Greenslade’s book Absent Mothers. I found a lot of useful sources in the footnotes of the previously mentioned text, that were published within the last twenty years which will give my paper a more modern perspective regarding ‘regulating the reproductive body’.

Batti, Bianca. “‘Speaking from Beyond the Grave: Abjection and the Maternal Corpses of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body.” Absent Mothers, by Frances Greenslade, Demeter Press, 2017. 

This text presents its readers with various negative portrayals of motherhood in literature, one of them being Addie Bundren. Greenslade dubs these women as absent and uncaring mothers, while Batti highlights her sexual and maternal roles as two that juxtapose each other.

BERGMAN, JILL. “‘this was the answer to it’: Sexuality and Maternity in As I Lay Dying.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3, 1996, p. 393. Gale Academic OneFile

Bergman highlights the narrative of Southern women being viewed only as baby making machines, as she sets the concept of Southern motherhood against the lack of bodily agency possessed by women, the shame they encounter regarding sex for pleasure, as well as the lack of contraception. 

Kincaid, Nanci. “As me and Addie lay dying.” The Southern Review, vol. 30, no. 3, 1994, p. 582+. Gale Academic OneFile.

This work focuses on the religious guilt that surrounds women in Southern culture. Women must be physically beautiful and seductive to get a husband, but they are not allowed to use their femininity for actual pleasure, lest they succumb to ‘sin’ and ‘evil’. Kincaid juxtaposes female innocence and sexuality through Addie in As I Lay Dying. 

Nielsen, Paul S. “What Does Addie Bundren Mean, and How Does She Mean It?” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 25, no. 1, 1992, pp. 33–39. JSTOR, 

This article tackles the meaning behind the singularity of Addie’s narrative, why her point of view was offered to readers so far into the book, and only after we learn about the shortcoming of the family as a whole, as well as what she has to say about herself as a sexual woman and mother. 

Wald, Priscilla. (2000). Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, eds. — “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate. 

This text explores the reasoning behind why so much of the blame within a family is placed on mothers. External and internal pressures including societal and familial obligations weigh heavy on mother’s shoulders, and when they fail to meet the unrealistlcly set expectations, they are labeled as ‘bad mothers’.