In Defense of Addie

As a class, we haven't been kind to Addie. I noticed we easily decided that she was more bad than good - in some cases, all bad - and I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

Up until this point, we hadn't at all gotten a clear picture of Addie, having to formulate our opinions on snippets from Cora (mainly). From the Addie chapter, we find out how she lived her life in this depressing, apathetic limbo, marrying Anse as a way out of the school, bearing children because she feels some sort of duty, dying when she believes she's fulfilled her duty, etc.

Does she love her children? She certainly didn't love Anse. Addie's whole bit with words is that they are grossly inadequate representations of concepts, created in an attempt to convey the concepts to people who don't understand them or haven't experienced them. Addie says that when she had Cash, she and him didn't need to use the word "love," implying that they both understood it because they both loved each other. "Let Anse use it" she says.

But she doesn't seem to have any qualms about abandoning her family and just dying. That statment sounds worse than it actually is, as everybody but Vardaman is full grown, and she had no idea that Dewey Dell was pregnant. Of course, she does have this bizarre mathematical approach to her children, which probably comes from her belief that it is her duty to Anse to have his kids. Perhaps this could be the cause for resentment of her children, that they remind her of Anse? No, she says "My children were of me alone". I don't have an answer, but I don't think that we can just unequivocally say that she didn't love her children.

Nor can we say that she's just "a bad person." Considering we don't know much at all about her from other characters, we are only in a position to pass judgement on her based on information from her chapter. I identified 3 negative traits:

1. She is resigned to being unhappy.
2. She committed adultery (might I add, prompted by a loveless marriage)
3. Her affection for her children in ambiguous.

In regards to her acceptance of her unhappiness, is that really problematic or unexpected? Again, she's so locked into her role as farm-wife that there's no other course for her.

In regards to her children: As a woman in the rural South in the early 1900s, it is basically predetermined that she was going to have to have children. Maybe Addie didn't have a maternal bone in her body to begin with, and assuming that a woman who feels "violated"  by birthing her children, isolated by raising them (this comes from the whole thing where she says her aloneness was made whole again by her children), and no love for the man she bore them to, ought to have no disdain for her kids is really, really harsh.

Especially considering we have spent weeks waffling over the moral character of the perhaps well-intentioned but still useless Anse.

A related side note: The fact that Addie's motives for being buried with her people in Jefferson were vindictive is immaterial to the merit of the trek to town. We have been crediting Anse with wanting to honor his wife's dying wish and his values. It doesn't matter why she wanted to be buried in Jefferson, it matters that Anse is doing it for her. It arguably makes him a better person that he still does it, even though she's doing it to spite him (although this assumes he knows she hated him, which may or may not be the case).

Okay it is time to wrap this post up or nobody will read it. Show some compassion!