An unusual sublimation of the female: Maternal power over paternal repression in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

This paper aims at analysing William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying through a variety of contemporary reading strategies, especially to identify his famous character Addie Bundren. In the novel, Addie represents Faulkner’s narrative ego, a monstrous-feminine double, who is capable of experiencing and sublimating the paternally repressed desires. In this respect, the major framework will be constructed on Julia Kristeva’s theories of abject and abjection and her rereading of the Lacanian narrative of human subject. Within the scope of traditional Western culture and language, pre-oedipal stage, as identified with the mother, has been treated as a nonverbal, oppositional realm that threatens the subject’s ego and the boundaries constructed through law and language. Unlike the traditional psychoanalytical approaches which conceptualize the maternal register as a threat to subject’s identification process and his incorporation to the Symbolic order, contemporary theorists intersect at the point of investing on the subject’s eternal bound to his pre-oedipal source of existence. Along with Kristeva, theorists with alternative literary perspectives will also be employed. Through several reading strategies based on issues like sexuality, gender or contemporary feministic politics to Grotesque and Surrealist approaches, this study will identify whether Faulkner’s narrative ego in As I Lay Dying inspires a feministic voice for the emancipation and self-realization of marginalized or subordinated subjects of language.