As I Lay Dying

Bodies that have been marked by sickness, poverty, injury, and manual labor are consistent and important motifs throughout the novel. Given the characters’ poverty and interdependence, their bodies become less a marker of personal agency than symptomatic of what life and others have done to them. Generally, those with more intact bodies, such as Jewel, have greater autonomy and status, whereas those with more weathered bodies, like Anse and Cash, feel inferior.

The marked body at the heart of the novel is Addie’s. Her dying body is described in vivid detail by Cora: “her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the skin in white lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks.” (5). Here, the process of exhaustion is visible in Addie’s becoming a skeleton without light in her eyes. The image of candles that are about to be put out, also expresses Addie’s volition to no longer live. In an attempt to contain this gruesome image, Dewey Dell dresses Addie in the opulent wedding dress with “a flare-out bottom” that she wore when she came over from Jefferson to marry Anse (53). The dress which Addie will wear on her return to Jefferson marks her change from a lush, fertile bride to an emaciated corpse, which will further putrefy. The trip comes full circle when Anse buries the degraded corpse of one bride and returns home with a lively-bodied new wife. Thus, Anse and the male exploitation he represents is the means of tiring out women’s bodies; while the notion that there are always more brides to replace the ones that have become exhausted indicates that women’s bodies are interchangeable in this patriarchal society.

Anse’s body is also exhausted and bent out of shape from excessive manual labor. Aside from the fact that all his teeth have fallen out, Anse has been hunchbacked since his youth and is conscious of having a physicality that does not suit his notions of himself as a man or a patriarch. Anse’s humbled physique is conveyed in Darl’s description of how “the shirt across pa’s hump is faded lighter than the rest of it” but has no sweat-stains as Anse is afraid of sweating after the traumatic experience of almost sweating to death because he worked too long in the sun (10). A big motive in Anse’s getting to town after 12 years’ absence, is the fixing of his teeth, and with it the replenishment of his virility. Cash notes how the operation “made him look a foot taller, kind of holding his head up, hangdog and proud too” (162).

Still, Anse’s repaired body has come at the expense of Cash’s. When Cash injures his leg further on the dangerous mule crossing, Anse determines that this time, his son’s need for rest and paid medical care will not interfere with his own advancement. He thus takes the cheaper option of carting Cash along on the journey and treating his leg with raw cement. While Anse’s treatment of Cash is selfish and sadistic, Cash’s comically placid temperament means that he does not overly mind the notion of not being able to walk or use his body to the full extent. Instead, he looks forward to a winter of listening to records on the graphophone while the others work.