Emotions

Hello classmates of Modern Literature,

I know it is late, but do to some family dysfunctions of my own I was kept busy all weekend and I now have a free moment. The theme of my weekend however, fits very well into my blog post for this week; family.

Chapter five in The Rhetoric of Fiction is about the reader's emotions and beliefs. As I Lay Dying is centered around family, however it is not the traditional family that everyone believed in the 1930s and most people still find the structure of it shocking, because the family breaks many of the beliefs people have when they think of a family.

The first instance this appears is when we discover from Cora that Anse does not have any sweat stains on his shirt. Anse is the father and husband of the household so he is supposed to be the main bread winner of the family. There are some households where that is still true today. The fact that Anse does not work to help keep the family with a way to survive and leaves it all on the children. He is supposed to be the family's back bone, and instead he stabs them in the back on multiple occasions. The occurrences continue throughout the novel by how he treats his family and they just keep coming one after the other after the other. I will list them in order of birth from Addie and then working all the way to Vardamen.

Anse starts by violating Addie. He forced her into a marriage that led directly to children when that was not at all what she wanted. A husband is supposed to be protecting of his wife, the place where she always feels safe, but instead he does the opposite. He makes her feel unsafe and disgusted. He sends her to the point of wanting to kill her, and it was only to have the children to do the work so he no longer had too. Even the one good thing he says he will do for Addie is not even for her. A husband is supposed to mourn after his wife's death, and yet he is only concerned about the new teeth that await him in Jefferson. After not even a day of burying his wife, he has already remarried another woman. Anse only came to Jefferson to fulfill his own selfish reason so that he could get what he wants as well as someone else to do all the work around the house again.

When it comes to Cash, Anse is beyond awful to him. When Cash breaks his leg in the river while trying to save the wagon, Anse refuses to take him to Dr. Peabody because it will cost him to much money. Instead he makes a concrete cast to set Cash's leg in. Even when Cash's leg turns black from the lack of blood flow, Anse still remains unconcerned and only has cool water poured over the concrete to lessen the swelling. I don't know about anyone else, by my natural, parental instincts are telling me that this boy needs to get to the hospital and no matter how bad it gets, Anse refused because he does not want to pay. On top of putting Cash's leg on the line, he also places Cash's livelihood on the line when he sells Cash's carpentry tools. Those were not his to take, but that is all Anse does, takes from those who he won't owe anything too.

Jewel is used by Anse and he is not even Anse's son. He sells Jewel's horse out from under him without waiting to ask for his permission. If it had been a horse Anse had bought for him for a birthday or some sort of celebration, I could understand that, but Jewel worked many long nights in the pitch black to earn this horse. He put his blood, sweat, and tears into earning that horse on his own and it is swept out from under him without a second thought. This does not just violate the views that we have of a father figure, but how a decent human being should ask.

Dewey Dell is one that I feel extremely bad for, she had ten dollars set aside for to help her start the next part of her life. It would either buy a marriage certificate to start a life with her lover, or relieve her of the uncertainty of her unborn child. Anse steals the money from Dewey Dell to buy his own marriage certificate not even a day after they bury Addie. Anse places his own happiness over the happiness of his own daughter, who he is supposed to protect.

Anse is the perfect example of how the reader reacts emotionally to parts of the book and how it affects the entire story line. If you do not like someone in the beginning then it affects how you view them through the rest of the novel and that dislike increases until you hate them and builds from there.