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Though Anse\'s wife, Addie, is given only one monologue, her presence, even in death, dominates the novel. Born and raised in Jefferson, her father taught her that the purpose of living is to prepare for death. Her parents were dead and she was teaching school when she met Anse. She married him--\"I took Anse,\" she said--in hopes of making the sort of intense, violent contact with another person that would give her life meaning.
Anse couldn\'t provide that experience. He could only talk about it--not the same thing at all, Addie points out. Cash, her firstborn, does penetrate the circle of solitude around her, and she loves him. Her attitude toward her children, whether love, hostility, or indifference, helps them define themselves and their response to her death.
About ten years after Darl\'s birth, she has a passionate affair with a preacher named Whitfield, who fathers her favorite son, Jewel. She makes amends to Anse by having two more children.
Despite her negative qualities, Addie may be visualized as a life force. She craves passionate encounters, violations of her \"aloneness.\" Some readers have identified her with the myth of Demeter, the major goddess of fertility, and her daughter, Persephone, goddess of spring and thus also of fertility.
Other readers stress the barrenness of her life--her father\'s destructive teachings, her loneliness, her vengefulness, her rejection of Darl and her indifference toward Dewey Dell and Vardaman. These readers feel that Faulkner may be turning the Demeter-Persephone myth on its head, making Addie in death as well as in life a sort of goddess of infertility.
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