After the chaotic fording scene, and bookended by both of the novel’s religious characters, is Addie Bundren’s singular monologue. The Bundren matriarch has been silent up until her death, so prior to this chapter her character is solely comprised of impressions related by her children, husband, and neighbors. Addie’s monologue divulges her rather sadistic attitude towards the children she used to teach; she broods over the spring days after class had ended, when she would retreat to the spring “where I could be quiet and hate them” (169). This first image provides an important introduction to Addie as a character: Her ostensible contempt for children establishes her as a woman in rebellion against the traditional definitions and expectations of womanhood. Rather than being defined by her role as a teacher, as a wife, or as a mother, Addie champions her independence and endeavors to preserve her identity from what she perceives as cloying, reductionist social labels.
She laments that “words are no good” and “don’t ever fit what they are trying to say at” (171). Anse’s love is meaningless–love being a word that “was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack”–and she attributes his “death” or loss of identity to his complacency and his conformity to the assigned label of father/husband. Addie’s affair with Whitfield further solidifies her disillusionment with labels, as they exchange the facade of piety for the facade of sinfulness with no real consequence besides the birth of Jewel, whose paternity both refuse to reveal.
In addition to the words sin, love, and fear, Addie’s frequent mentions of blood and milk are also culturally coded. Both are associated with the female body but have very different connotations. When Addie describes striking the school children for misbehaving, she relishes “Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever” (170). She associates her affair with Whitfield to a duty she has to “the terrible blood, the red bitter flood boiling through the land” (174). When nursing Jewel, she imagines herself being condemned to motherhood: “The wild blood boiled away and the sound of it ceased. Then there was only the milk, warm and calm, and I lying calm in the slow silence” (176). Blood, representative in a religious context of the female body’s “pollution,” seems Addie’s governing humor; it is expressive of her femininity as well as her challenge to cleanliness and order. The transition from the “wild blood” to “milk, warm and calm” signals her acceptance of the role as mother (additionally, she extends a metaphor from earlier about cleaning her house, symbolizing perhaps the female obligation to produce children before “getting ready to stay dead”). Milk–a cultural signifier of life–ironically portends death (both death of her identity and literal death) for Addie.
The content of Addie’s monologue also imbues its own placement within the narrative with meaning: she interjects between the hollow words of Cora and Whitfield, calling attention to the subjectivity of each chapters’ perspective and implicating the other narrators in the deceptive power of words.
Lovely post! I especially appreciate your careful reading of the way “blood” and “milk” are culturally coded here, and how their values seem to be crossed in Addie, for whom blood is a gateway to freedom and self, and how milk, as you put it, “ironically portends death.” It’s fitting that her trajectory is largely plotted alongside these two elemental substances–in that arduous plane of “doing” that she clings to in favor of an easier transcendence that, as you also note, frames her own central narrative. Superb close reading here!