Preface

Throughout As I Lay Dying, Dewey Dell confronts an unwanted pregnancy and struggles with barriers to medical treatment. Reproductive and bodily autonomy are common themes in the American literary canon. This learning module compares Dewey Dell’s journey to a similar fight for bodily and reproductive autonomy in Ernest Hemingway’s Story “Hills Like White Elephants”.

Using the Digital Yoknapatawpha Event Search tool, students will analyze how gender and class form barriers to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy.

This learning module has also been tailored for pairings with similar journeys in other classic texts, including:

Activities

1. Charting Dewey Dell’s Journey

Explore: Dewey Dell’s Journey

Walkthrough: Character in Event Keyword Search

The event search function allows users to search for events based on very specific conditions. In this instance, the search is utilized to find events where a specific character, Dewey Dell, is present and which also include keywords related to Health and Illness > Abortion.

The Digital Yoknapatawpha editors manually entered these keywords were for each event. They are fundamentally interpretive.

Instructions
  1. From the DY Main Menu, choose
    • Search
    • Events
  2. On the Events Page
    • Set Text to As I Lay Dying
    • Type Character Dewey Dell
    • Set Character to Present
    • Set Cultural Issues to Health and Illness
    • Set sub-menu to Abortion
  3. Click “Search”
    • The search generates a list of events keyworded with the selected terms
  4. Click on each highlighted passage
    • A record description window will pop-up
  5. Read the description of the event and the location.
  6. Take notes on how the event and location could be related to Dewey Dell’s struggle for bodily and reproductive autonomy.

Respond: Quote Analysis

After you have reviewed the events of As I Lay Dying highlighted in the search above, consider how they tell the story of Dewey Dell’s struggle for bodily and reproductive autonomy.
  1. Choose three quotes from As I Lay Dying:
    • One quote that best explains Dewey Dell’s main problem
    • One that best demonstrates her attempt to gain reproductive and bodily autonomy
    • One that illustrates the results of her endeavor
  2. For each quote, briefly explain why you picked it and what it tells you about bodily and reproductive autonomy.
  3. The keywords are interpretive and by no means exhaustive. Are there any other scenes about her pregnancy not listed on the DY site that you would add to her journey?

Respond: Short Response

Now that you have surveyed the notable events and places that make up Dewey Dell’s struggle for bodily and reproductive autonomy, examine the barriers she faced.

Write a short response to the following interrelated questions:

  • What kinds of barriers did she experience and how did they affect her?
  • How may her identity as a poor, rural teenager have contributed to the adversity she faced?
  • What does Dewey Dell’s experience teach us about reproductive and bodily autonomy in Faulkner’s era?

2. Pairing: Ernest Hemingway

Respond: "Hills Like White Elephants"

In “Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway depicts a conversation between a young couple at a bar in Spain as they consider an abortion. Using his famous iceberg model in which all subtext and exposition are erased, Hemingway gives us only the surface level of the problem and we must piece together the plot and character motivations from the dialog and the sparse description.

Ernest Hemingway seated at typewriter
  1. Many of Hemingway’s stories are about journeys in faraway lands, but in this story, the characters are confined to the bar as they discuss what they want to do about the female protagonist’s pregnancy. They avoid talking directly about the issue and try to come to an agreement by subtly dancing around it and using euphemisms. We can read the dialog like a journey as the characters try to navigate each other’s needs and feelings. Create your own map of the protagonist’s quest for bodily autonomy using three key passages:
    • One that explains her main problem
    • One that best demonstrates her attempts to assert herself
    • One that illustrates the results of her endeavor
  2. How does her attempt to express her need for bodily autonomy compare to Dewey Dell’s attempts to discuss the same with the pharmacists in her story?
  3. What kinds of similar barriers did both women encounter?
  4. What do their experiences tell us about the nature of women’s bodily autonomy in this time in American history?

Teaching Resources