Robbing The Mother: Women in Faulkner

The family's new harmony is a "travesty" and a "mockery" Porter, William , 67 , a violent order that masks the terrible disorder of the patriarchy, its "rule" intact after its "containment" and "silencing" of Addie Roberts Although Parks inverts the object of the Bundrens' funeral journey, making the recovery of Mother the object the Beedes' journey, the Beede family is nevertheless as alienated from Mother as the Bundren family, viewing her life as dysfunctional.

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

June, for instance, observes that "Willa Mae didn't never amount to nothing" Billy, in particular, seems alienated from her mother. She claims Willa Mae was "a liar and a cheat" who got "locked up in jail every time she turned around. Always talking big and never amounting to nothing" 9.

She claims not to mind if Willa Mae's grave is "paved over"" 44 , declaring that "Willa Mae can stay where she's at" once she recovers "the treasure she left me" Billy makes clear her alienation from Mother when she insists that "I ain't no Willa Mae" Indeed, Dill herself was "glad to see her dead" As far as her family and former lover are concerned, that Willa Mae died after attempting a self-administered abortion before abortions were legal and generally available makes her no martyr in the struggle for reproductive rights.

Despite the treasure they believe is buried with her, they see Mother herself as little more than buried trash. As much as they have been alienated from Mother, however, the Beede family sees the treasure buried with Willa Mae's body not as a disruptive force but as a source of restored harmony. They hope her jewelry will provide an abortion for her daughter Billy, a prosthesis for her sister-in-law June cf.

Anse Bundren's false teeth , and new dignity for her brother Teddy. With her body lies a restorative treasure. The family must free her body from the containing grave in order to gain access to that treasure. What the family must come to see is that Willa Mae's body is not the means to restorative treasure but is itself that treasure. In terms of Parks' entire canon, such an imperative is not surprising, for her plays contain a similar theme.

In The America Play, for instance, Brazil observes that the hole he is digging "is our inheritance of sorts" And in the play In the Blood , Hester calls her children her "5 treasures" For its part, Getting Mother's Body repeatedly associates family members with treasure-family members in general, that is, not Willa Mae in particular.

Billy sings her mother's song, declaring, " I'm your jewel, Daddy, I'm your most precious jewel " Comanche Joseph, an employee of Cousin Blood Beede, claims that "family is fortune" , and Blood Beede repeats the assertion: This association of family with treasure leads to the change that makes Getting Mother's Body into Billy Beede's bildungsroman and establishes its response to As I Lay Dying. As I shall argue, Billy Beede, at least, does come to see the black body itself as the treasure that liberates and restores her.

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Though Parks connects her young female protagonist to Faulkner's through her motherless state, her unwed pregnancy, and her journey to seek an abortion, she differentiates Billy Beede from Faulkner's Dewey Dell even at the outset of the novel. In making her the only child of her dead mother, Parks takes her new "Dewey Dell" out of the crowded, masculine Bundren household and gives her the central role Faulkner withholds from his Dewey Dell. The character Parks places in that central role is strikingly different from Faulkner's Dewey Dell in many, though not all, ways.

Surrounded both physically and psychically by four brothers and a loquacious, manipulative father, Dewey Dell Bundren begins her novel an abject pawn in a patriarchal setting. She answers to her father as a servant to a master. With her mother only just dead, she hears her father order her to the kitchen-"Git up, now, and put supper on" 50 -and she does as she is ordered. The druggist Moseley makes explicit how completely the male members of her family own Dewey Dell: They are the ones to ensure that she and Lafe McCallum "take that ten dollars and get married" -that is, that another man takes possession of her and the child she is to birth.

Dewey Dell's annihilation as a subject is most explicit in the dream she reports. In that dream she " couldn't think what I was I couldn't think of my name I couldn't even think I am a girl " Clarke sees Dewey Dell's pregnancy as the agent of her loss of "control over her own life," her loss of "identity" and of "her very being" 45 , but in fact the patriarchy had effected those losses long before her pregnancy.

Drawing the Line

By the end of the novel a second man has used her sexually, and her father has taken the money with which she had hoped to secure an abortion. With an ironic order restored as the Bundren family prepares to return to their farm, Dewey Dell sits on the family wagon ready for the return and for whatever fate her father and brothers will bestow on her when her pregnancy becomes apparent-presumably a fate involving a forced marriage to Lafe McCallum.

Porter rightly observes that Dewey Dell "embodies the state of alienation between herself and the world" William, 75 , for, as Diane Roberts notes, Dewey Dell has attempted no rebellion against that patriarchal world, no "rebellion against the Law of the Father" She remains as abject at the end as she is at the beginning. In her more central role, on the other hand, Billy Beede begins her novel with much of her subject status intact: Billy Beede pays as much or as little attention as she pleases to her family-her foster parents, Roosevelt Teddy and June Flowers Beede.

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June, both foster mother and aunt, observes that she and Billy's uncle Teddy "thought, if we loved Billy the way our mothers and fathers had loved us. But she never was ours no matter what we said or did" Billy is not "ours" because she intends, at least, to be possessed by no one, to belong to no one but herself. Thus she has quit school and quit her job without consulting Teddy and June, and she refuses to discuss her pregnancy with them: June comments that Billy told her that "her monthly weren't my business" When Billy says, "I ain't yr child," she means to assert her independent subjecthood, and she means to guard it.

Dewey Dell and Billy Beede differ as well in their relationships with their lovers. Dewey Dell allows Lafe to determine whether they will have sex, telling him that she will have sex if her cotton "sack is full" at the end of the row she and he are picking and then allowing him to pick into her sack She does as Lafe pleases as surely as she has always done what her father pleases, allowing Lafe to fill her cotton sack to secure his pleasure and thus to fill her uterine sac as well.

Her most telling words about that event are her last ones: She is pregnant, yet she has chosen neither to have sex nor to bear a child. She has no subject status. Billy Beede is another matter altogether. According to her lover Snipes-whose name Billy's Uncle Teddy and others confuse with "Snopes" 48 -the affair began in mutual consent: Snipes asked Billy if she wanted to "go for a ride," Billy agreed, and "we went" Uncle Teddy corroborates Snipes' version of their affair, observing that he had "seen her run across the road without looking" when Snipes drove up 50 , and that other men wish their wives and lovers "would run across the road toward them" as Billy runs to Snipes Billy chooses to have sex and to have it without contraception.

She has, in effect, chosen to become pregnant, and she wishes to marry the man who has impregnated her. But she has not taken into account that man's capacity for manipulative lies, his recognition of what her mother Willa Mae used to call her "Hole," a soft spot, "a lack and a craving" that opens one up for deception and manipulation Though Billy has already begun to recognize that Hole in others, as the novel opens she has not recognized it in herself.

Digging the hole to disinter Mother will bring her to see her own Hole, a Hole planted in her heart and inscribed in her mind by the patriarchy. Billy's Hole comes clear to readers not in her dissimilarities from Dewey Dell but in one telling similarity: Both young women fail to claim such "property" as their own.

And they further fail to guard the independent subjecthood of any children they birth, to see children as something other than property, as human beings deserving their own subject status. In short, Dewey Dell and Billy Beede are both "trapped in the physical" Clarke 43 , accepting their own and their children's commodification within the patriarchal order surrounding them. Only Billy Beede will discover and escape from this Hole. Until that happens, however, the similarity between Dewey Dell and Billy Beede is striking.

For her part, Dewey Dell feels that even her uterus is not her own: Billy seems to feel similarly: She acknowledges, "I think of it with Snipes' face and that makes it easy to hate" Parks uses a minor character to make the point explicit-Myrna, the woman Billy meets on the bus. With her five children all named for her husband Dale, even the daughters, Myrna feels they "belong" neither to her nor to themselves but entirely to her husband: Dale's name is his claim.

Despite the bitterness in her revelations, Myrna has accepted the patriarch's ownership of her body and of her children. Though she has just subverted the patriarch's rule in having an abortion, denying Dale his sixth "piece of Dale," she remains more like a child going behind a parent's back than a revolutionary attempting to change the social order. She has made no claim for full subject status. That Billy's decision to seek an abortion stems from Myrna's suggestion places Billy directly in Myrna's boots. For all her relative independence, at this point Billy still accepts at least a part of the patriarchal order: Parks also uses another character, a major one, to make explicit the commodification of women and children in the prevailing patriarchal order.

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Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner - Deborah Clarke - Google Книги

Jean Wyatt, author of Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction. Interested in this topic? Stay updated with our newsletters: Literary and Cultural Studies. Of the four chapters which follow, two texts are paired in all but the last chapter on Absalom, Absalom! Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.

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