My research paper will explore a reading of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf from the perspective of the experience of the pandemic within the novel.  Clearly a much more subtle presence than the war, according to Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, the “era’s viral catastrophe has been hidden since its arrival, drowned out by its overwhelming scope, by the broader ways outbreaks of disease are often muted, and by the way the human-inflicted violence of the time consumed cultural and literary attention” (2).  The cited author argues that deaths from disease are measured differently from casualties of war.  This resonates strongly at present, when deaths each day from COVID 19 can equal the number of fatalities on the one day of September 11 although the numbers carry completely different connotations.  It is only when pandemic deaths are compared to deaths in all recent wars combined that the gravity is felt.  How are Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway more similar if compared in this context̅—one being a victim of an external enemy and the other a victim of an internal one?  What is the connection between pandemic and modernism?

AILD’s title is derived from Book XI of the Odyssey: “As I lay dying the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” What aspects of the Homeric epic (as well as aspects of Vergil’s Aeneid) do we see in AILD—and how can we compare the journey to Jefferson to Odysseus’s (and/or Aeneas’s) journey? Additionally, how can Joseph Campbell’s outline of the monomyth (hero’s journey) be applied to the progression of the novel itself? Does the novel follow the template of the monomyth—can we deem it an epic? Who is the hero of the story, and what are the tribulations they face? Knowing that Faulkner took the title from the Odyssey, I’m interested in seeing if we can trace the scattered events of AILD to the often rigid narrative pattern of the hero’s journey laid out by Joseph Campbell.

How does Woolf handle plot and narrative in “Mrs. Dalloway” and why does she do this? A frequent criticism of Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” I’ve seen is that “nothing happens” in the novel which I disagree with, but I do understand why some people would think this way. This is a frequent criticism of literature that I enjoy, for example, I have seen the same criticism put forth about Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”. In “Mrs. Dalloway”, Woolf uses a stream of conscious type of narrative style to move fluidly from character to character and explore each one in-depth. Woolf employs this type of narrative technique to portray her characters’ interior where they engage with personal complexes in conjunction with cultural issues ranging from World War 1 to the precursor form of feminism that existed when Woolf was working on the novel.

How does intertextuality function within Mrs. Dalloway? What does it mean when Clarissa says she had, in her youth, “Othello’s feelings . . . as strongly as Shakespeare” (35) for Sally Seaton as she gets ready for a dinner at which she will be in attendance? Why are the characters in Septimus’s story reading and rereading Antony & Cleopatra? And how might these moments be read given Woolf’s own riffs on Shakespeare and her construction of Shakespeare’s sister?

Throughout What Maisie Knew, the titular character constantly stays silent while absorbing information from the people around her, but was this silence a negative contribution? How could her silence be seen as more of a problem than a solution? Was she really just a troubled child, or a willing catalyst to the novel’s chaos?

In William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South, John T. Matthews highlights how the modernist author “figures out the connection between the abuse of women and the abuse of agricultural laborers” during “the migration of this country’s agricultural work force to the cities” under “global capitalism” in a “Depression-era context” (Hubbs 461, 463).  A persistent lament throughout As I Lay Dying (1930) references this blunt reality in which families “like the Bundren [or the Tulls], “stayed in rural areas and continued to pursue farming,” even while they were aware of the changes brought about by “the sociocultural era called modernity,” as John T. Matthews explains extensively in “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age” (Hubbs 461).  “Agriculture in Faulkner’s oeuvre is, under both slavery and the later sharecropping system, an exploitative regime that benefits the few through the sweat of the many,” describes Jolene Hubbs in her article titled “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism” (Hubbs 472).  In fact, “Faulkner’s sweat economy[1] counters a makebelieve vision of the South that was deployed by conservative movements whose interests were served by [the] evocation of a system defined by leisure labor” (Hubbs 473).  The southern author presents the contrasting notion by “explor[ing] rural white poverty in one of his most formally innovative texts: AILD” (Hubbs 473).  The Bundrens, who are immersed in “a confluence of forms of statis―spatial, temporal, and social” are “frozen,” a state that affects the women even more harshly than the men because they are responsible for childbearing and house chores as well as field work (Hubbs 462).  The Burdens live on a small cotton farm on a hill in Yoknapatawpha, a forty-mile road trip by mule to Jefferson, where townspeople “regard rural poor whites” as “obsolete” (Hubbs 465).  Although it seems that there is no way of escaping the oppressive, confining and exhausting environment of the farm, Faulkner’s females such as Addie Bundren, who will be the focus of these brief comments, expand their interiority to resist the pressure forced on their minds and bodies as well as develop a personal connection to death in order to terminate their lives whenever they decide they have had enough (Hubbs 463-4).

Death is more an act of will than a natural cause, as unrelenting work leads to a depletion of energy which evokes the desire to be over with life.  For instance, Mr. Tull relates the story of his mother on these terms: “Some women, I mind my mammy lived to be seventy and more.  Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went that lace-trimmed night gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes.  You all will have to look out for pa the best you can, she said.  I’m tired,” and, as simple as that, she passed away that same night (AILD 30).  When Doctor Peabody sees Addie on her deathbed, he realizes that there is nothing he can do to prevent Addie’s death as she is determined to seek relief from the hardships of the world.  The doctor has no doubt that Anse is the cause of Addie’s decision to die young, although her passing is not as quick as Tull’s mother: “He [Anse] has wore her [Addie] out at last” and “Addie’s long dying reminds Dr. Peabody of a regional fate: hangs on too long” as the tension between the rural and the modern symbolizes (AILD 41, Matthew 148).  Dying is an act of rebellion against male domination and control, which Tull’s mother and Addie stand against, even at the cost of their lives.

Inflicting abuse and being a victim of it can be intertwined to the point that it becomes difficult to discern where one starts and where the other ends.  Addie endures the abuse of her husband and Anse complains of the treatment given by town folks who not only take economic advantage of small farmers but also “look down upon” them in a way that “resonates with Evan Watkins’s formulation of obsolescence” (Hubbs 464, 465).  According to Watkins, “obsolescence is not at all a survival from the past” but rather something produced by and integral to the conditions of dominance in the present” (Hubbs 465).  Anse perceives and complains about this when, for instance, he refers to the devastating effect of the roads on him, the head of the Bundren clan (Hubbs 465).  At another point Anse reflects: “Nowhere in this sinful world can an honest, hardworking man profit.  It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off of them that sweats” (AILD 110).  Even though Anse himself does not sweat as others (family and neighbors) do it for him, it “does not undermine its validity” as he “vents working-class resentment” (Hubbs 472, Matthew 146).  As John T. Matthews clearly explains, Anse is blind to the root of the problem, which is “a national economic system that historically positioned Southern agriculture as a colonized source of raw material for the Northern metropolises of global industrial and commercial empire” (146).  The fact that the Bundrens’ father finds a replacement for Addie hours after her burial speaks to his detachment from emotions, his concern with labor and his mastery over words as he uses them to manipulate others into toiling for him.  Just as the North colonized the South, the men colonize the women in a relentless chain in which the strongest apparently take advantage of the weakest who silently resist.

Expanding one’s interiority can be understood as a tactic of passive resistance against the oppressor.  Addie, who has been working as a teacher, sees Anse as a springboard to escape loneliness, sexual desire, destitution, and her job with children that she really hates.  The fact that he owns a property must have been a determining factor in her acceptance of his proposal of marriage.  However, after giving birth to her second child she becomes aware of her mistake, withdrawing from the outside world as she expands and explores her interiority.  Praying, writing, thinking, singing, silencing and imagining are activities that, even if soundlessly performed, can spark an effective defense, as countless stories from concentration camps and other forms of imprisonment have revealed.  Some of these coping mechanisms are the only tools at hand that Addie can employ as she tries to survive her entrapment within a world full of words without meaning and with a husband who is focused solely on himself, treating her as a child-bearing machine that can also be made to work the land on his behalf and for free.  In order to “recover a sense of her own self,” Addie gets involved in an affair with Rev. Whitfield in hopes that she can validate her identity by claiming “I would be I” as she simultaneously denies Anse (AILD 174, Matthew 151).  In the face of adversity (as this relationship does not work either), Addie retreats to her inner self where she develops a silent way of communicating that counters the empty meaning of words until she passes away.  Then, from inside the casket built by Cash and through the holes punched by Vardaman, Addie’s corpse starts talking aloud, from the perspective of someone with a life cut short, having left this earth with certain things unsaid (AILD 174).

Revenge is a way to rebel against subjugation.  Addie asks her husband to bury her among her own flesh and blood in Jefferson, a modern town whose inhabitants believe themselves to be better than the “archaic,” “poor whites” such as the Bundrens, whose path from rural to civic life of the town is compared to “a piece of rotten cheese coming to an ant-hill” (AILD 22, 203 and Hubbs 462).  Although the trip to Jefferson is undertaken “as a pretext of honoring” Addie’s request (every member of the family has their own desires about embarking on that journey), Addie’s last wish stands as a postmortem act of uprising against the patriarchal system that robbed her of her life (Matthews 150). 

Women oversee the domestic chores but are not spared from working the land as well.  The statements “It’s a hard life on women” and “it’s a hard life they have” are declared by two male characters representing the rural and urban realms, Vernon and Moseley, respectively, and clear up any doubt about women’s constant labor (AILD 30, 202).  Rural life encompasses tasks that go from giving a “hair cut” to attending the chickens to cooking and baking for a large family, as recognized by Cora who recalls that “[t]here’s not a woman in this section could ever bake [like] Addie Bundren” (AILD 8).  These arduous routines that females endure lead the matriarch to exhaustion and to secretly seek revenge (AILD 33). 

Although Addie is disempowered and oppressed, she knows that “the value of resistance is the reclaiming of the sacred and significant self” (167).  Faulkner “offers in As I lay Dying a social and economic critique of the society he depicts,” a society based on the brutal force of Western colonialism (Hubbs 462).  “Addie understands that a discourse of masculine power long precedes her arrival and is responsible for insisting that she yield to its authority” (Matthew 151).  Once aware of the impossibility of winning against this power structure in life she harnesses the omnipotence of death to defeat her oppressor, her physical body no longer his territorial possession and her corpse speaking words which have acquired a new meaning―the meaning of that left unsaid in life.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage International Edition, 1990.

Hubbs, Jolene. “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3, pp. 461-475. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26476776.

Matthews, John T. William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Singapore: Wiley-

Blackwell, 2012.

—“As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age.” Duke University Press, vol. 19, no. 1, JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/303451.

[1]   Sweat economy is defined as “a system for recognizing the work that inheres in objects in order to stave off the dissociation of the laborer from the fruits of his or her labor” (Hubbs 471). 

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is narrated in the perspective of each character. In such a style, readers are able to see what each character thinks and feels, their beliefs and values included. Through this, we notice some disparities in terms of existential beliefs; some characters are more optimistic or pessimistic than others. In terms of optimism, Cora’s strong faith in God allows her to keep up a positive attitude. Contrasting her positivity is Anse, who does believe in God yet feels as if the world of man acts to spite him.

We first see an example of this when Cora has baked cakes for Miss Lawington, who suddenly decided she no longer wanted them. Instead of reacting in outrage at the hard work and materials put into her dessert, Cora instead shakes it off. She says “I reckon she never had no use for them now…Maybe I can sell them at the bazaar Saturday” (Faulkner 10). Kate, her daughter, chides her after the event transpires, persisting that “she ought to taken those cakes anyway” (10). She sees it as an injustice in terms of their status, complaining that “rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks can’t” (10). Cora seems completely unbothered by status, nor is she bothered by the work she has done as she does not believe it has yet gone to waste, she can sell the cakes at a bazaar. She puts faith in God and believes it was his will to change the mind of Miss Lawington, as a result, she believes it is not her place to question his decree. 

In contrast to Cora, Anse Bundren takes on a more negative perspective in life. He appears rather pessimistic, he first blames the road for his bad luck and Addie Bundren’s death. He thinks of the road “A-laying there, right up to my door, where every bad luck that comes and goes is bound to find it. I told Addie it wasn’t any luck living on a road when it come by here” (27). He does not take very well to the idea of a road being laid in front of his house, he prefers to be left alone right where he is with his family but complains “every bad luck prowling can find it and come straight to my door, charging me taxes on top of it” (26). It is evident that Anse is afraid of change, he likes the world as he has always known it. In terms of religion, unlike Cora, who sees every challenge as a will of God, Anse believes that man betrays God: “Did you ever know Him to set a road down by a house?…because it’s always men can’t rest till they gets the house set where everybody that passes in a wagon can spit in the doorway” (26). He could assume that God willed man to place a road by his house but, simply because he does not like change he complains that this act is the insulting fault of man. He views the passage of people before his home to bear the intent they wish to “spit in the doorway”. 

Overall, there is not only a contrast between positivity and negativity, but interpretations on religion. Both characters display their feelings toward people outside of their family. Cora, on the one hand, sees every “challenge” as a will by God, she sees the positive in everything and the refusal of Miss Lawington to accept the cakes is God’s will, and she sees it is not her place to question his decree. Anse, on the other hand, blames acts of man for his struggles. He could see the road as a test or a sign from God, however he molds religion to fit his own emotions, therefore it is an insult by man to Anse and his family.

As I reread AILD I’m picking up more and more on the themes of social hierarchy and assumption (or perhaps illusion would be a better word.) I noticed two particular things this time around, though I’m not sure if I’ve already written about these in some capacity. The first is Anse’s characteristics as opposed to our modern business values.

Anse’s characteristics are horrible, don’t get me wrong, but they would also be very welcome on Wall Street. Think about it, he delegates all his work to his children and his wife, a leadership quality that is praised in business, he uses his mastery of microeconomics (welfare economics) to find his new wife later in the novel. At the beginning, by waiting till the last minute to pay for the doctor to visit Addie, he kills her. Even if the doctor could have eased her suffering she would not have been able to return to work. Intentionally or unintentionally he kills Addie, his ‘asset’ in order to replace her with a new one. In accounting this is called depreciation of an asset and expected cost to replace, the expected cost is the cost of a set of new teeth. From an accounting standpoint Anse is getting rid of the sunk cost asset and upgrading. By no measure of the imagination is Anse a good person; he is not evil though. Because he was born with the farm as his only asset instead of a trust fund he could not advance in the world yet by using his manipulative and micro economic skills he maintains the life he has. If he were born with a Vanderbilt inheritance I’m sure he would be able to at least maintain it and not squander it like many heirs do. He might even be a scrooge about it and lobby for taxes to be lowered. My second focus is on Cara.

Cara opens the book up to the social hierarchy that exists within this community. Often when looking from the outside in on a community the nuances of that community’s differing beliefs and social standings are overlooked and instead outsiders paint with a wide brush. Through the differing perspectives we as readers are opened to the nuances of this world. Cara in particular opens the door to analyzing the social hierarchies and ladders that exist within this community. While she is not rich or from town like other more urban characters in the novel she finds another form of putting herself ‘above’ others and that is through her supposed faith and piety in the christian church.

By putting herself on this ‘peacocking piety’ pedestal we can see how even when a community has little to nothing there will still be ways people self stratify. However, the methods of which they judge themselves against others will differ. For Cara the method is clearly religious but for Darl it is his philosophical bend and for Jewel it is his craftsmanship and devotion to his mother. There will always be a way a person differentiates themselves from others to view themselves as above, it is simply most evident in Cara’s chapter. 

Here’s a side rant no one asked for. Even the second time around Cara is a character I truly hate. I grew up in a Roman Catholic family, raised by a devout grandmother who dragged my sister and I to church and religion classes every week. Through the church (and her constant extra involvement in church events and gatherings) I got to know several women who were and probably still are exactly like Cara in their self glorifying martyrdom and ‘piety’. They put themselves on a pedestal of perfection through religion and supposed devotion while denying it (the self created pedestal) exists. They look down on everyone below them because they think they are closer to God than any other sinner. They often (at least one woman I remember) are awful mothers who pretend their home life is perfect and should be envied when really she favored one child over another so heavily that child developed serious mental issues and had to move to another state to get away from them. This is the same woman who refused to associate with anyone who was not a christian. They want to be envied even if they turn a blind eye to the true evil happening in front of them. The head of the religious studies program (a different woman in the same church) either didn’t pay enough attention to know or ignored that the head priest was/is a pedophile for years. Cara reminds me of these women and it irks me to my bones. Cara is truly the Phyllis Schlafly of this book. Side rant over.

Just wanted to point out that the “pot is light” as they say in poker circles. Please submit your posts ASAP, unless you’re taking your skip.

On another note, Elizaveta speculated on the title in her excellent post. I should have covered this so wanted to do so now. The title comes from Homer’s ODYSSEY, when Odysseus travels to the underworld and meets his comrade Agamemnon, who has been murdered and his body disrespected by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover. The title would seem to speak to proprieties around death and dying and their violations, in ways that become increasingly clear in the novel!

I’ll also mention that, like Joyce’s Ulysses, Faulkner’s novel might be seen as a modernist take on the epic, with life and death and love and betrayal, with a perilous journey in which nature itself seems pitted against the heroes. But of course in modernist fashion, the realism and earnestness of the narrative mode is undercut in all kinds of ways…