From Book XI
"As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades."
I lay dying upon the earth with the sword in my body and raised my hands to kill the slut of a murderess, but she slipped away from me; she would not even close my lips nor my eyes when I was dying, for there is nothing so cruel and so shameless as a woman when she has fallen into such guilt as hers."--Agamemnon to Odysseus in the Underworld about Clytemnestra who murdered him upon his return from Troy.
I think the most interesting thing about this allusion beside the fact that Addie is compared to a murderess when she is the one who is dead, is the fact that it is an allusion to the Odyssey. I mean, think about it: the Bundrens' trip to bury Addie is an odyssey.
ReplyDeleteGOAL: Bury the coffin <=> Get back to Penelope (Both places are far)
Obstacles: in both cases they are many.
-Addie is like a god inciting a mission => her death and request to be buried in Jefferson are similar to the way the will of the gods shape Ulysses' voyage
- Episode where there is a flood blocking their passage <=> Poseidon unleashing the seas on Ulysses
- Along the way each member of the family is hurt in some way <=> Ulysses looses his companions along the way au fur et a mesure
-vultures that follow coffin <=> mythical creatures that Ulysses meets (for example like Charybdis and Scylla)
-Coffin <=> Ulysses' ship!
So many comparisons!
End:
Both get to where they wanted but there are still troubles that remain:
For Ulysses it is winning back his country and getting rid of all his wife's suitors; as for the Bundrens, Dewey Dell still has to deal with the issue of her pregnancy, Cash is not better, Vardaman is traumatized, etc. plus the story starts all over with Anse getting remarried.
One question then: who is the protagonist in this case? Darl? Addie? Or all of them as an entity on a mission?
Certainly there is a negative female image that emerges. Addie and Dewey Dell endure in a mysoginistic society. Both look at the men with dogs' eyes. The Odyssey the Bundrens undergo to bury Addie, crossing the river Styx into the Underworld where Addie's voice will be heard makes the work Homeric (O Brother, where art thou?). These obstacles they have to overcome along the way definitely are the trials of the journey home, and the buzzards make the voyage that much more monstrous. The question is, also, who is laying dying and whose eyes are left unclosed? The Bundrens refuse to close Addie's eyes to the point that Darl snaps and wants to set fire to the coffin. In that case, she is Agamemnon. But the dying is as much about the living as anything. All of the Bundrens are laying dying as there is constantly a reference to the fact that living is an act that is a movement towards death. So you can flip the allusion around to apply to the Bundrens as well. The ambiguity of the "I" works interestingly that way.
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