Addie Bundren's Feminist Perspective of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying Addie Bundren of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying has often been characterized as an unnatural, deprived mother of love and cold whose demands accompanies his family on a miserable journey to bury his body in Jefferson. For a feminist understanding of Addie, we must step outside of traditional patriarchal definitions of “femininity” or “motherhood” that require altruism from others, blame mothers for all family dysfunction, and lead only to negative readings of Addie. She has also been characterized as yet another Faulkner character who is unable to express herself using language. This modernist view of the inexpressibility of the creative spirit does not apply to Addie simply because she is not an artist; she is a woman and a mother, a person whom feminist theorists would call "traditionally silent." Characterizing her using universalizing and humanist terms erases the ways in which her character is marked by her biological sex and the gender roles she is forced to fill. Addie is not a representative of the human race, or even of the female gender, but a single woman trapped in a patriarchal world that represses her desires and silences her; a woman who wishes to find her own identity that is outside of patriarchal constructions and not always definable in relation to the men and children in her life. More importantly, Addie is a character acutely aware of the linguistic and social oppression that traps her in a life she doesn't want. Many feminist/postmodern theorists see language as a patriarchal construct that excludes women. As Jeanie Forte writes, this characterization of language is informed by Lacanian theory, which, in turn, influences...... middle of paper......'s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism." Theater Journal. May 1988. Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex That Is Not One." "A Question of Subjectivity: An Interview." More: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Phelan, Peggy: The Politics of Performance New York: Routledge, 1993. Wadlington, Warwick As I Lay Dying: Stories out of Stories MacMillan International, 1992. Williams, The Women of Faulkner: the myth and the muse Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 1977.