Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places “My aloneness had been violated…by time, by love, by Anse”(172). With these words, Addie Bundren describes a common theme in the South. Many women become trapped in an unsatisfactory life, and then drained, both physically and emotionally, by the people in their environment. In As I Lay Dying (1930), William Faulkner creates Addie and this theme of the novel through imagery, figurative language, and details, both before …showed first 75 words of 507 total…

…showed last 75 words of 507 total…on their mother’s body, just like they are oblivious to the smell of her rotting flesh. The burial of Addie is supposedly the “sacred” mission of the entire novel, but when the time actually comes, the event is so trivialized that Faulkner completely neglects the task of writing about it. This is symbolic of the way Addie has been treated since she was a child. “She lived, a lonely woman, lonely with her pride…”(23)