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"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner consists of strange happenings throughout the story. One of the most awkward settings in the book is the relationship between husband and wife that occurred between Anse and Addie Bundren. What is seen in the beginning is that of a wife on her deathbed and a caring husband who wants to make everything better for his wife by making her wishes come true. I soon realized that this was just a masking technique Faulkner used to give us the wrong impression on how things were run.
The novel opens with Addie Bundren who is dying. She tells her husband she wants to be buried in Jefferson, and as a normal loyal husband would do, Anse felt it was his duty to fulfill his wife's request. In reality, Anse is a poor farmer with five children to take care of and a wife who is in charge of the house. Anse is begrudging of everything. Even the cost of a doctor for his dying wife seems like his money would be put to a better use if spent on false teeth. "I never sent for you, " Anse says, "I take you to witness I never sent for you, " he repeats trying to avoid a doctor's fee. At twenty-two Anse becomes sick from working in the sun after which he refuses to work claiming he will die if he ever breaks a sweat again.
Anse becomes lazy, and turns Addie into a baby factory in order to have children to do all the work. There is a need to tend to feel sorry for him because of his laziness and his urge to talk about two measly topics, a farmer's life and complete nonsense. His character seems weak, yet he makes the major decisions around the house. Addie worked as a schoolteacher before getting married to Anse. She hated her pupils and during her teaching career she would sit and contemplate the hate she felt for the children she taught. She simply did not like them and she had wished they would just disappear.
The whole marriage with Anse was not a serious situation. An odd courtship happened to occur, as Anse saw her, asked her to marry him, she accepted and they were wed. That just proves why their relationship ended up being the way it was. Anse did not spend time to get to know her, nor did he even mention the thought of children to her. Their connection seems distant and probably was from the time they met. They knew nothing about each other at all.
If he had known she did not want children, he would not have married her and if she knew how lazy and useless he was; she would not have married him. Addie knew that from the beginning, it was not something she wanted, but she went through with it anyway. Once she had her first child, Cash, she realized how much she despised her life. Addie spent her days working and pouring her sweat and blood into the wellbeing of the family and the housework while Anse lazed around doing completely nothing. Even as a farmer, he was not successful. His laziness forbids him from getting up and doing anything.
The only significance Anse had in his wife's life was producing children. That was the only time they bonded as people. She chooses to have children not only, because Anse wanted children, but because Addie knew how he could not survive by himself. She knew it was her duty to give him these children so that they could take care of him if she had left or died. Anse spent his life with Addie for all the wrong reasons, he only he married she happened to be a good look and well paid women.
Anse thought of her as a machine as a way of life. This is how Addie felt, she worked long hours and got no love or appreciation from her husband, who was supposed to be the one helping her out, her companion for life. They were not a genuine couple; they could survive any situation without each other, which just comes to show that Addie was better off alone. If anything, Anse added burden to her busy and hectic life with making her take care of the house and the children.
Addie still went on with her life doing the same things but she decided the children were her duty being fulfilled to Anse. In result of this, she ended up having an affair with the local minister, Whitfield. She recalls the time when she and him would go and meet secretly in the woods and it would make all the difference. All the pain and hatred she felt at home were forgotten when she was with him. The thought of confusion crossed her mind sometimes when she was alone as well as times when she was with Anse. She wanted someone like Whitfield.
Why did Anse have to be the person she ended up marrying? Addie's cheating was a true sin and she admitted it as a sin, but a sin of happiness to her, something she could be fulfilled with just as her husband was being fulfilled with what she gave him for life. She did not tell Anse about the affair because she refused to, although she found what she was looking for and what was worth living for and that certainly was not Anse. It was not a beginning for her and nor an end when she was seeing Whitfield, it was just something she felt she owed to herself.
Her rendezvous with Whitfield resulted in giving birth to Jewel. She told no one because she felt it was no one's business to know. Although Anse meant nothing to her just like him saying he loved her meant anything, she still felt guilty for what had happened. She did not regret her committed sins, but she felt guilty about Anse being oblivious to everything that had happened. Because of this she gave him what he wanted, what made him happy, another two children. Dewey Dell and Vardaman were Addie's gift to Anse for compensation.
For people to survive they need to see results, they need to see that there is someone there encouraging, caring and loving them for them to be able to go on. When no one cares about someone, it is as if that person is walking down a long road with the same patterns and reaching no where. The marital relationship between Addie and Anse Bundren can be best described as a synthetic one. Both characters want different things in life and they both obviously end up with the wrong way of life. Anse being the farmer who wants children cannot interact with a woman like Addie who enjoys loneliness and despises children. Is Anse sincere in wanting to fulfill his promise to Addie, or is he driven by another motive?
The whole time he was secretly thinking of only of getting another wife in Jefferson. When it becomes necessary to drive the wagon across the river, he proves himself to be undeniably lazy as he makes Cash, Jewel, and Date, (his children) drive the wagon across while he walks over the bridge, as a spectator. Anse is also stubborn; he could have borrowed a team of mules from Mr. Armstid, but he insists that Addie would not have wanted it that way. In truth though Anse uses this to justify trading Jewel's horse for the mules to spare himself the expense. Numerous times in the book he justifies his actions by an interpretation of Addie's will.
Anse not only trades Jewel's horse without asking, but he also steals Cash's money. Later on he lies to his family saying that he spent his savings and Cash's money in the trade. The ending of the book is pretty humorous, when they reach town, the putrescent corpse is buried, the daughter fails in her effort to get an abortion, one son is badly injured, another has gone mad, and at the very end, in a stroke of harsh comedy, and the father suddenly remarries.
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