Addie Bundren

Although Addie Bundren only appears in As I Lay Dying, she is one of the most memorable women characters in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, and in her impact on her children both before and after her death a great example of the role 'absence' plays in Faulkner's world. A former school teacher who came to Frenchman's Bend from Jefferson, Addie is the matriarch of the Bundren family who is lying on her death bed when the narrative begins. Her spiteful wish to be buried in Jefferson initiates and drives the journey at the center of the novel. After she dies she somehow narrates one of the novel's sections; it demonstrates her cruel and sometimes violent detachment from others and explains why she named her third son "Jewel." Cora Tull tells us that "not a woman in this section [of Yoknapatawpha] could ever bake with Addie Bundren" (8).