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 Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire

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: Tennessee Williams

Respond: A Streetcar Named Desire

One of the most riveting and tragic subplots in Tennessee Williams’s classic play A Streetcar Named Desire involves the pregnant Stella’s suffering at the hands of her abusive husband, Stanley. Despite the urging of her sister Blanche to leave Stanley, Stella feels trapped due to her lack of economic means and opportunities for women in the 40s.

Tennessee Williams, full-length portrait, walking, at service for Dylan Thomas, facing front.
  1. Although Stella does not leave on a journey, we can analyze the pain of trying to support her pregnancy in an abusive household as its own journey to retain some form of bodily and reproductive autonomy. Create your own map of Stella’s attempts to express her need 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. What similar barriers did both Stella and Dewey encounter?
  3. Consider how both endured physical and sexual abuse from men in positions of power and that they are both southern women living in relative poverty. What do their experiences tell us about the nature of women’s bodily autonomy in this time in American history?

Teaching Resources