Aloneness Made Whole Again by the Violation
Equally I Lay Dying | Sections 39–41 | Summary
Summary
In these sections, the reader hears from Cora, Addie, and Whitfield, each focusing on the topic of sin. Section 39 begins with Cora remembering a conversation she has with Addie in the past. Cora interrupts her own story, remembering another time in the past when Brother Whitfield, who is the local minister, singles out Addie and wrestles with her soul, which Cora calls vain.
Section 39: Cora
During their conversation, Cora and Addie talk nearly God and sin. Addie says she knows what her sins are, but Cora chastises Addie, proverb, "Who are you lot, to say what is a sin and not a sin?" Addie over again says she knows her ain sin and she deserves her punishment, and Cora calls her vain for believing so. Cora criticizes Addie for not listening to their minister: "Not fifty-fifty after Brother Whitfield, a godly homo if ever one breathed God's breath, prayed for y'all and strove as never a man could except him." Then Cora reflects on what she believes is Addie'due south merely sin: "being fractional to Precious stone ... in preference to Darl." Cora'south mind wanders back to their conversation in which Addie almost confesses the truth about Jewel, but instead, Addie says, Jewel "is my cantankerous and he volition exist my salvation. He will salve me from the water and from the burn. Even though I have laid downward my life, he volition save me." Cora takes Addie's words, at get-go, to be well-nigh God, but when she realizes Addie is talking almost Gem, Cora gets down on her knees and prays for Addie, who she believes has spoken sacrilege.
Section xl: Addie
Addie's spirit speaks to tell readers near her marriage to Anse, which starts off as a way to escape her job as a teacher, which she hates. She confesses how she would whip students to make herself feel like she existed to someone. Addie mentions that her begetter once said the reason for living is "to become gear up to stay dead a long time." Instruction to Addie is then intolerable, information technology makes her hate her male parent "for having ever planted me." Then when Anse comes forth to woo her, she marries him. At first Anse, and Cash, her first child, make her happy. She finds dearest and maternity overwhelming, but she likewise experiences a feeling of honey across expression: "My aloneness had been violated and then fabricated whole again by the violation: time, Anse, love, what you will, outside the circle."
Addie's happiness does non last. Having Darl makes her experience tricked past Anse. In fact, she feels "tricked by words older than Anse or love," and decides "that my revenge would be that he would never know I was taking revenge." This motivates Addie to ask Anse to bury her in Jefferson when she dies. Anse tells her she is non going to dice still because they are not done having children. Addie'south response: "He did not know that he was expressionless, and so." Addie moves on to describe her matter with Whitfield and what she really thinks of Cora Tull; she is someone who does not know the departure between words and deeds. Two months later her affair ends with Whitfield, Addie discovers she is pregnant with Jewel. She falls in honey with her new kid, but decides so to "get ready to clean my firm." And so she "gives" Anse a new infant, Dewey Dell, as a way to cancel out the birth of Jewel, then Vardaman, for the child she "stole" from Anse. Addie says afterward that Anse has "3 children that are his and not mine." Now Addie is ready to die.
Department 41: Whitfield
When Whitfield finds out Addie is dying, he says he wrestles with Satan all night and wakes up to the enormity of his sin. He rushes to Anse's subcontract to confess his affair with Addie considering he believes it is what God wants him to practice. The span is out, and then Whitfield must swim his horse across. Whitfield prays, "Only let me not perish earlier I have begged the forgiveness of the man whom I betrayed." When he does not die crossing the river on his horse, he feels God has forgiven him and he has been apple-pie. A sense of peace comes over him. He all the same plans to confess his affair with Addie, though. When Whitfield arrives, however, Addie is dead, and she has died without confessing. Whitfield prays again, "I have sinned, O Lord. Thousand knowest the extent of my remorse and the volition of my spirit." Believing God has been merciful and accepted "the will for the deed," he decides not to confess.
Analysis
Addie's presence in the text has been overwhelming. She is the focus of each character's activeness, although they also have ulterior motives for their behavior. As the novel progresses, her body becomes increasingly important to the action, an omnipresent fact that dictates their reception if not their beliefs. It also mimics the fascination the characters have with their ain bodies: Anse's hunchback and missing teeth, Greenbacks's broken leg, Jewel's sinuous course, and Dewey Dell'due south pregnancy. Only Darl and Vardaman are disembodied, both by a sort of innocence. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Addie narrates her own section of the text. She is, in many respects, the most pregnant character in the novel.
Readers who are expecting a mothering figure may be shocked by Addie. She is a deeply angry person who despises several of her own children near equally much every bit the schoolchildren she once taught. She only learned what love was when she had Greenbacks, and that experience was negated for her by Darl, as though the intensity of her relationship to all of these others both external to herself and then intimately tied to her trunk was simply also much to endure. Although she was attracted to Anse in one case, she learned to hate him and sought revenge on him both past cheating on him and past insisting she be buried with her people in Jefferson. She sought and gained redemption by giving him 2 more than children.
While Addie may not be the nurturing mother readers are expecting, her character has been foretold by the others. Dewey Dell's anger, as well as Precious stone'southward, runs straight and clean from their female parent's claret. She shares Vardaman's intuition, shown in the manner she finds comfort in the leap "with the water bubbling up and away and the lord's day slanting serenity in the trees," and Darl's imaginative and existential understanding of the universe: "after a while I could see the give-and-take every bit a shape, a vessel, and I would sentinel [Anse] liquefy and period into it." And Cash's sense of duty and right catamenia from her mathematical insistence on the children she took from Anse and the children she gave him.
In comparison with Addie's section, Cora's is petty, Whitfield'due south is pompous, and both are hypocritical. The reader has previously seen how Cora represents a religious bespeak of view that is superficial and self-serving. Addie searches for a deeper life feel, trying to sympathise the meaning of life, death, and love. Cora's narration is significant merely in its role as a foil to Addie'southward. Cora preaches to Addie nigh her difficult lot in the world, sin, and redemption, and considers Addie's responses immoral. Addie's own narrative shows how trite Cora's world vision is. In i sense, Cora'due south narrative serves every bit a warning to any reader who would endeavour to read the text too literally or accept the characters at face value. However, the novel'southward spiritual truths run deep. Addie virtually confesses to Cora that Precious stone is Whitfield's son; instead, she says Jewel is her cantankerous and conservancy who volition save her from h2o and fire. The reader has already seen half of the prophecy come truthful and should anticipate the remainder.
Whitfield preaches his section in a self-righteous vocalisation, meant to absolve himself of both the first sin of sleeping with Addie when he was supposed to be wrestling with her soul for its eternal salvation, and the ongoing sin of cant by not telling Anse he was harboring a bastard kid in Jewel. Similar Addie, he crosses the river while information technology is bloated, just he does so without the burden of her family, a brunt she always had to carry. And so, although he comes to her abode, saying, "God's grace upon this firm," it is unlikely that any universal being "will have the will for the deed."
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