Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Woman is the source and sustainer of virtue and also a primary source of evil. It can be one or the other; because she is, as man is not, always a little beyond good and evil. With his powerful natural drive and instinct for the concrete and personal, he doesn't need to agonize over his decisions. There is no code to master, no initiation to undergo. For this reason he has access to a wisdom veiled to man; and man's codes, good or bad, are always, in their formal abstraction, a little absurd in his eyes. . . 1In “As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner all roads lead to Addie. As Diane York Blaine rightly observes: “The title informs us that this is her story.”2 It is very surprising, then, that Addie, the center of the novel, has been so scorned by the lack of criticism of her since the first half of the century . . The reason for this is self-reflexively connected to Addie's dilemma in the book. Just as Addie is unable to define herself through anything other than words that represent the oppressive patriarchal society she opposes, early criticism evaluated her only in these terms, focusing less on Addie's issues. first-person narrative and more about what the other characters in the novel (the men) had to say about her. However, the social and political changes of the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to feminist criticism, which was at least partially able to break out of the patriarchal infrastructure and evaluate it according to a new set of values, providing a new vision of its character and therefore , to the novel as a whole. There is a notable lack of initial criticism regarding Addi...... middle of paper ......(Beyond) SexualDifference (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press) 1990, p. 154. Trinity Papers '02-'03 07/24/02 12:40 PM Page 8788 Alice Affleck25 Diana York Blaine, “Addie's Abjection and Other Myths” MississippiQuarterly, vol.47, summer 1994, p. 403.26 Mark Hewson, “'My children came from me alone': Maternal Influence in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying,” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 53, Fall 2000, p.551.27 Doreen Fowler, “Matricide and the Mother's Revenge” The FaulknerJournal 4: (1-2), Fall 1988-Spring 1989, p. 113.28 Jill Bergman “'That Was the Answer': Sexuality and Motherhood in As Ilay Dying” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 49, I. 3, summer 1996, p. 393.29 Mark Hewson, “'My children came from me alone': Maternal Influence in AsI Lay Dying,” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 53, autumn 2000, p. 551.30 Ibidem, p. 553.