Date of Graduation

2025

Degree Type

Dissertation/Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Advisor(s)

Jennifer Moorman

Abstract

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner, was published in 1930 and follows the Bundrens, a poor white farming family, as they transport Addie Bundren’s body across the county to be buried with her kin in the town of Jefferson. Telling the story of a literal journey from the minimally developed countryside to the seat of Yoknapatawpha County, the novel shows how the Bundrens confront modernization, an encounter mediated through the female body of their matriarch. While existing scholarship on As I Lay Dying often emphasizes themes of gender and modernity, few studies apply the thesis advanced by some historians that the South functions as an internal colony of the United States. By situating the Bundren family’s journey across Yoknapatawpha County within the historical context of the modernizing project of the New South, this paper examines how Faulkner's writing about threats to a white rural Southern identity exemplifies the how modernization functioned as a colonial force. As a symbolic site of colonial struggle, Addie Bundren’s female body is central to this analysis, representing white Southern femininity, Southern cultural memory, and gendered and racialized expectations of reproductive labor. Through close readings of key moments in the novel, including the river crossing and characters’ interactions with modern infrastructure and commodities, this paper shows how Faulkner used the Southern Gothic fascination with history and the body to dramatize the encounter between tradition and progress and how that conflict threatened white rural Southern identity.

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