As I Lay Dying

Bodies that have been marked by sickness, poverty, injury, and manual labor are consistent and important motifs throughout the novel. Given the characters’ poverty and interdependence, their bodies become less a marker of personal agency than symptomatic of what life and others have done to them. Generally, those with more intact bodies, such as Jewel, have greater autonomy and status, whereas those with more weathered bodies, like Anse and Cash, feel inferior.

The marked body at the heart of the novel is Addie’s. Her dying body is described in vivid detail by Cora: “her face is wasted away so that the bones draw just under the skin in white lines. Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks.” (5). Here, the process of exhaustion is visible in Addie’s becoming a skeleton without light in her eyes. The image of candles that are about to be put out, also expresses Addie’s volition to no longer live. In an attempt to contain this gruesome image, Dewey Dell dresses Addie in the opulent wedding dress with “a flare-out bottom” that she wore when she came over from Jefferson to marry Anse (53). The dress which Addie will wear on her return to Jefferson marks her change from a lush, fertile bride to an emaciated corpse, which will further putrefy.