Anse and The New Mrs. Bundren

       So I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around this ending to As I Lay Dying, which was not at all what I was expecting it to be. This whole epic journey thing didn't really feel all that heroic throughout the book because of Anse being so useless the whole time and everyone seeming kind of casual in their narration, but now that we have this dismal image of the family sitting on the wagon and realize the journey is over, it does feel like this was a pretty significant trip. We talked in class a lot about whether we could feel happy for Anse that he managed to succeed against the odds and overcame the bridge collapsing and all the people criticizing him. Since we know Addie didn't love Anse, the fact that he's remarrying so soon can be sort of overlooked, but what makes me not really respect Anse is the fact that he's basically destroyed his living family by going on this trip, which is a lot more important than the last wishes of his dead family (if we can even say that was his main reason for going to town now). Jewel has lost his horse, Cash lost the use of a leg, Dewey Dell lost her money aside to getting raped and still refusing to tell anyone she's pregnant, Darl is in an insane asylum where they'll possibly never see him again, and Vardaman thinks his mother is a fish and didn't even get the train car he wanted. It's very hypocritical of Anse because he kept saying to respect the dead, yet he's the one who uses his wife's death to help himself out while screwing over his kids. I'm trying to picture what the reaction would be from the family after Anse announces the new Mrs. Bundren. I feel like Jewel would flip the wagon over and move to Texas somehow. Dewey Dell would be angry knowing it was largely her (well, Lafe's) money that went into buying the teeth, and she'd be feeling totally hopeless and confused. Vardaman would not understand that he has a new mother, and Cash would give up on Anse but keep his cool because he wants that music player.
       Even more I think what the trip home would be like for this new Mrs. Bundren, who can't have any idea what she's gotten into. We don't even know anything about her, but she must be a little crazy if she agreed to marry Anse. Still, what will she think when she hears Vardaman's mother is actually a fish, Jewel's a horse, her fiancé set Cash's leg in concrete, and Darl is being carted off to Jackson? What will she think of their smelly wagon? Does she know they have to cross a flooded river to get home? That Anse doesn't do anything but rub his knees and watch his children work? Will she notice Dewey Dell is pregnant? Will she beat the younger children like Addie did? It doesn't seem like Anse really knows how to fall in love with people, judging by the proposal scene we get from Addie, so he can't really want a new wife because he'll get lonely, but instead because he wants someone to take care of the house and help do the work for him. Or maybe Anse's new teeth will give him a sense of confidence and he will actually take some charge around his house. It's likely he'll have more kids on the way so I sure hope he gets his act together. Whatever Anse did to win over the new Mrs. Bundren, I doubt her new life will be quite so great. Especially after hearing the way Moseley and MacGowan talked down about country folks when they noticed Dewey Dell looking so out of place, it seems weird to have a city woman leaving with the Bundrens to go to the country. Anse has managed to destroy his old family in the hopes of having a better new one, and I don't really like him for it.

Dewey Dell

       I think Dewey Dell is my favorite character in As I Lay Dying. I mean Cash is definitely more likable and Vardaman is funnier and crazier, but Dewey Dell got my attention from the beginning because she actually had a plot line and something urgent happening in her life. At the beginning of the novel, I was rather confused and not particularly interested in any of the other characters. Cash was just sawing away, Anse was philosophizing about roads, Jewel was playing with horses, Vardaman was being crazy and thinking about fish, and Darl just never connected with me at all because he narrated other people's stories and didn't talk about himself. I didn't even pick up on what happened to Dewey Dell at first, but once she started to tell you more about it, it quickly became the more troubling and intriguing story line than transporting the body of a dead woman we hadn't met (at the beginning). Because Anse was depicted as so clueless and lazy and out of it, I pitied him a little bit, but I couldn't really grasp his grief for Addie; there was always a little bit of humor in it. While Dewey Dell's narrative style is much harder to follow, it's difficult to call it funny because of the serious predicament she is in. I think part of Dewey Dell's craziness comes from having this secret that she can't tell anyone, and its physical and emotional weight is mixing her up and keeping her tied down and lost within her own feelings. The reader doesn't really get actual narration out of her, they get glimpses into her head and see her confusion and fear about what to do, and the way she becomes aware of nature and birth and life, such as the cow she seems to bond with in the barn.

       To me, Dewey Dell never came across as plain stupid in the book. She's scared, she's panicked, she's lost, but I don't think Faulkner means for her to be stupid because he makes her story tragic enough that we can't laugh at it. She obviously doesn't know a lot of things and has not been educated well, even in the functions of her own body. Perhaps "powerless to alter her fate" is true of her, but I have trouble viewing her as quite so utterly incompetent and naive. I think she knows what's happening and she knows roughly what she has to do to fix it. She knows she can't tell anyone because at this time that would not have gone down well, and she also questions a few times whether they'd kill Lafe, which it doesn't really sound like she wants. But she does tell the people she needs to tell: the shop keepers, and even though she doesn't quite have the vocabulary to articulate her problem, they figure it out. I don't think she knew exactly what sort of fix they were going to give her, because it's a little unclear if she knew it was illegal or not, and she fell for MacGowan's mention of an "operation." So she clearly isn't the brightest. But I don't know, there's something about Dewey Dell that makes me not want to think that. I mean it doesn't seem like Addie is the sort of mother who would have explained much to Dewey Dell, especially not about love, and I can't ever imagine having to talk to any male member of the Bundren family about anything female-related, they're all kind of gross and creepy (except maybe Cash). While she doesn't really have a choice, I think she is quite determined and courageous to be trying this out alone and clueless. She thinks up a way to bring along her Sunday clothes and $10 that seems to fool everyone but Darl for most of the trip. The end of As I Lay Dying has left me a little unsatisfied because we have no idea what's going to happen to her! Is she going to find Lafe again? Is she going to have to tell her family? Will the new Mrs. Bundren be someone she can share her secret with? I'm not entirely sure what our conclusion was about Faulkner's portrayal of women, because while the women weren't particularly positive, the men certainly weren't either, but I think it's true that with Dewey Dell the reader is supposed to feel bad for her, not judge her too much for her lack of worldly knowledge, and understand that the life of a country woman at this time, especially in the Bundren family, would have been tough.

The Man of Constant Sorrow

       I really enjoyed the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou and I thought it not only made the movie more interesting to watch, but also provided more connections to  Homer's The Odyssey. In The Odyssey we saw a lot of bards and the telling of stories through songs, which is really well portrayed in the music of O Brother Where Art Thou, especially in the main song "Man of Constant Sorrow." I thought this song was really fun because it was sort of silly in the movie, but it is also an incredibly good song to summarize Odysseus' struggles. I looked up the lyrics and here's one verse I think pretty perfectly summarizes Odysseus' journey:
"For six long years I've been in trouble
No pleasures here on earth I found
For in this world I'm bound to ramble
I have no friends to help me now."

Especially the last 2 lines of this really remind me of Odysseus constantly having to restart and "ramble" and always losing his crew or the blessing of any friends that try to help him. I also liked the lines "Maybe your friends think I'm just a stranger, My face you never will see no more" because it speaks to all the characters in the book that doubted Odysseus' return at one point or another, which was most of the characters since he'd been gone 20 years. 

While reading The Odyssey, I was a little put off by how gruesome the slaughter in the hall was, and although O Brother, Where Art Thou paid homage to that scene with the little brawl Everett and Penny's fiance had, I thought the real slaughter in the hall scene was when Everett and his friends win the love of the public by revealing themselves as the Soggy Bottom Boys. I think it was kind of funny that the way Everett wins back Penny is through this song as opposed to fighting people (as we saw in the film, he is not a very good fighter!). It's like he's still sort of a mess, but she'll marry him again because he's famous now and she knows he can actually do something. There was a lot of great music in this movie and especially this song and the idea that Everett won back his respect through singing, really made it an enjoyable story for me.