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It? She. Her. Woman. Not a category, not a sex, not one of two sexes, a human female creature, but an infinity. = ∞. walker percy, LANCELOT In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner’s polyvocal narrative of the death and burial of the poor white matriarch Addie Bundren, Addie ruminates on the measures of her domestic sacrifices: “The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a . . . . It was not that I could think of myself as no longer unvirgin, because I was three now. . . . I gave Anse the children. . . . That was my duty to him, and that duty I fulfilled. I would be I” (165–66). The most illustrative moment in this passage, and perhaps in all of Addie’s narrative, is the long, purposefully blank textual space to signify the shape and substance of her virgin body. The implication seems to be that purity, while culturally mandated, renders the southern woman an empty vessel; having not yet produced anything of social value, her body is of no discernible worth and is essentially invisible. She is simply nothing, a zero represented here as a textual absence. But in the years following her marriage, Addie becomes “I” in flat mathematical terms: the expectation of bearing children accomplished, she is no longer zero but “three now.” Reproduction is her “duty” to her husband, but it is also figured as an inescapable obligation to herself: if her identity can be realized 94 Chapter Three The Measures of Love: Southern Belles and Working Girls in Frances Newman, Anita Loos, and Katherine Anne Porter The Measures of Love 95 and made visible only by “giving” Anse children and perpetuating the family line, then she has no choice but to keep on giving. Faulkner transmutes into a metaphor of domestic economy the profound spiritual sacrifice of the southern woman who must be zero, and who then must give away still more of her body in order to create and preserve an idyll of familial harmony. What happens, then, when the new woman of the twentieth century’s apparently New South deigns to harness her own inclinations instead? Addie does makes a clear separation between “duty” and desire by engaging in an extramarital liaison that produces Jewel, a quantity she then labors to balance mathematically out of existence by the production of additional, legitimate children. By naming the boy after a gem, Addie indicates none too subtly that he represents something precious and beyond both the dollar economy and domestic duty evoked by his legitimate brother “Cash.” In Faulkner’s vision of earthy feminine desire and its brief, erotic triumph over conjugal duty, certainly, following one’s heart’s desire is more romantically compelling than grudgingly fulfilling social and domestic obligation. But we simply cannot forget that Addie, remote as she is from the elite realm of belles and bloodlines, is nevertheless purposefully, emphatically , and necessarily nothing, akin to a proper virgin waiting to be married, and that she “would be I” only by giving herself and her virginity away to her husband, and, further, that she can be “three” only by giving away even more in the form of babies.1 If the children represent quotients of value reflective of participation in a cash economy, precious alternative desire yields results no better than the textual blank space—in Addie’s case, death. As Zora Neale Hurston’s critique of romantic love in “The Gilded Six-Bits” makes clear, a woman’s gold is her ability to win, please, and fulfill a man; without his presence and aid, both economic and emotional, she is virtually nothing, a useless waste on her way to death. This assessment is perhaps reminiscent of extreme , reactionary feminist critiques of male patriarchy; but such intensity characterizes the psychological calculations of self-worth and integrity in southern women’s writing in the first half of the twentieth century—particularly in works by women who are considered, and who often considered themselves to be, early feminists. While this period witnessed unprecedented social and economic progress not just for the region but for its women, it is curious that the priorities of domestic sacrifice and subjection return with such haunting force at precisely this point. As do the African American southerners yearning to manufacture social and economic autonomy in a barely postslavery world, these women find themselves stymied in their attempts to locate value and satisfaction apart from the husbands...

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