Two Outlets for a Paper on Faulkner

I am still very interested in submitting my paper to the BYU English Symposium. After attending, I know that it would be a great way for me to start small and learn how to present my ideas to a group of peers and professors. The English Symposium also accepts a wide variety of papers, which will give me a lot of freedom with what I want to say in my paper.

However, I also found a call for papers for May 1st. It is the Southern Writers/Southern Writing Graduate Student Conference located in Mississippi. The graduate students are putting on this conference and calling critical and creative works focused primarily on Southern writers. If I submit my paper to this conference, I will have to focus more on the Southern nature of As I Lay Dying and how that affects Faulkner's portrayal of the family. The conference is on the 17th-19th of June. I think this would be a good way to focus my writing.

...

I just saw Kate's comment on my most recent post, and she gave me a great outlet for my paper that I hadn't found yet! It's the CFP Faulkner and Print Culture Conference, and submissions are due in January. I will definitely be considering how I can tie my paper into one of the topics suggested in the information for this conference! Thanks, Kate!

Wrapping Up

Have you ever seen the "I Love Lucy" episode where Lucy and Ethel work in a chocolate factory for a day? Their job is to wrap every single chocolate on the conveyor belt, and in the beginning, it's a piece of cake. They begin wrapping the chocolates lackadaisically. Then, the conveyor belt gets faster...and faster...and faster, until eventually, this happens:

dzturbinbhavior.blogspot.com

Feast your eyes on the end of semester for a college student.

This is how I feel about all of the information, feedback, and research I've collected. It's all precious as chocolate. But with so much information and so little time, I think I'm ready to stop the conveyor belt and wrap everything up neatly.

I've made connections with many characters in Alice in Wonderland, I've begun to analyze the characters in As I Lay Dying, I've found useful background information about Faulkner through an enthusiast, I've found some Aristotelian ideas, I've found some present-day applications--time to narrow down, zero in, flesh out, and organize.

Wish me luck!

When You Give a Girl a Library...

Public Domain CCO / Pixabay

All I had to do was browse the Faulkner section of the library, and it was like themes of family, childhood, and parenthood started to launch themselves at me. Needless to say, I found several new sources for both Faulkner and Carroll's portrayals of authority and themes of family in their works. I couldn't help but check just a few out to take home with me...I feel a bit like a literary hoarder.

At any rate, here is a new and improved list of sources:
 
THESIS: Just as Alice is ridiculously scorned, mislead, and reprimanded by the authority figures in her journey through Wonderland, the offspring of Addie Bundren represent the precarious condition of children that do not have reliable authority figures in their lives in the novel As I Lay Dying. Lewis Carroll and William Faulkner's works identify the damage caused to children by dysfunctional family environments and autocratic adults.

To Overcome Authority

This is a pretty naked overview of my aspirations for my paper. However, during the past couple of weeks, I have fallen in love with FEEDBACK! So, if anyone is willing, take the time to read the following mini-paper, I'd love to have a conversation about the ideas I'm presenting!

Question: What is the effect of ignorant parenting on children and can they overcome it?

Depriving Childhood Through Authority

In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the Bundren children are dwindling in poverty, selfishness, and animosity. However, in each child’s narration of the story, there can be found deep insight into human nature, which contains more prudence and virtue than that of their parents. Still, they are at the mercy of their father and recently deceased mother. Similarly, Lewis Carroll’s character, Alice, journeys into Wonderland and finds herself succumbing to the whims of various adults. Just as Alice is ridiculously scorned, mislead, and reprimanded by the authority figures in her journey through Wonderland, the offspring of Addie Bundren represent the precarious condition of children that do not have reliable authority figures in their lives in the novel As I Lay Dying. Lewis Carroll and William Faulkner's works identify the damage caused to children by dysfunctional family environments and autocratic adults.

Newborn Research Paper

Since As I Lay Dying and Alice in Wonderland are so different, I decided to write down some key areas of both books on which my paper is focusing. Then, I just wrote down the facts. I was definitely happy with my results, and it is going to make it a lot easier for me to compare these two, vastly dissimilar works.

Turns out, it's the selfishness and ego-centrism of the adults that negatively affects the children.

So...

Here is my developing research paper for As I Lay Dying and Alice in Wonderland. Let me know what you think so far! And if you have any ideas for me/sources to share, don't be shy!

Depriving Childhood Through Authority

The Effects of Parenting on Children: The Bundrens

Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. (125)

In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the Bundren children are dwindling in poverty, selfishness, and animosity. However, in each child’s narration of the story, there can be found deep insight into human nature, which contains more prudence and virtue than that of their parents. Yet, they are at the mercy of their father, Anse, whose lazy nature causes them to work harder than necessary, and whose stubbornness brings about injury, pain, and mental instability. They are also at the mercy of their mother, Addie, whose dying wish to be buried in the town of her people instigates their terrible and tragic journey from one town to the next.

What is the effect of these parents’ selfishness and manipulation on their children? Do the actions of Anse and Addie Bundren cause problems such as anger, passivity, despondence, and mental illness in their children?

I plan on contacting people who have reviewed As I Lay Dying on Goodreads, as well as contacting people who have blogged about this book, and topics about the affects of specific types of parenting.

"Children Have More Sense:" Evidence in the Text

Whenever I sit on the couch, get snuggled in my blanket, and open As I Lay Dying, I immediately regret not first grabbing a pencil. There is so much verbal gold in this book, and it makes me go a little highlight-happy.

One such passage is a brief comment from the character, Vernon Tull. He says,

Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him (125). –Tull

This will support my thesis as a statement of insight from a minor character. This shows Faulkner’s focus on children and their value. This shows that adults should not manipulate children in the way that Anse has manipulated his, because his children are significantly wiser than he.

They are two passages that stand out to me from Addie Bundren’s chapter, Anse Bundren’s wife and mother to five children. She has already died in this part of the novel, but her commentary gives us insight into what kind of mother she was and how damaging that has been to her family. 

I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. And when I would have to look at them day after day, each with his and her secret and selfish thought, and blood strange to each other blood and strange to mine, and think that this seemed to be the only way I could get ready to stay dead, I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: 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. (155) –Addie

I will talk about how people parent the way they have been parented. Addie’s father was emotionally abusive, so she becomes abusive as well.
 

When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride. I knew that it had been, not that they had dirty noses, but that we had had to use one another by words like spiders dangling by their mouths from a beam, swinging and twisting and never touching, and that only through the blows of the switch could my blood and their blood flow as one stream. I knew that it had been, not that my aloneness had to be violated over and over each day, but that it had never been violated until Cash came. Not even by Anse in the nights. (158) –Addie

This is Addie’s attitude toward motherhood. I am still analyzing, however, whether this is completely negative, or partly positive. Addie wants her aloneness to be violated. That’s what she was seeking when she tried to make her students “aware” of her by whipping them. So, does that mean that she loves being a mother?

Words: Inadequate and Plentiful

Creative Commons License 2.0 / Jeffery Wright

I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like the time period, the setting, or the strange and tragic plot. 

I had to read As I Lay Dying for my AP Literature class during my senior year of high school, and it was a struggle. In that class, we would read the book first, and try not to discuss it in too much detail until the date upon which everyone should have finished (which I didn't do). Then, we would begin together. Our teacher would take the black and white print and transform it into a compendium of literary genius and philosophical insight. 

Through our discussion, what at first was an incomprehensible string of “is’s” and “is nots” in a paragraph narrated by the apparently insane character, Darl, slowly developed into a deeply profound and unsettling thought process about the reality of human existence. Reminiscent of Descartes’s “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore, I am”), Darl comes to the conclusion,

And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is. (Faulkner 72)

I must be honest and say that most of this is over my head. However, Faulkner’s mastery of the English language—his bold use of stream of consciousness and his manipulation of verbs into nouns—affected me then and deeply affects me now. In this way, language is magic.