October 28, 2016 - 15:12
One of the most prominent features of the novel Getting Mother’s Body by Suzan-Lori Parks is that it is strikingly similar to As I Lay Dying, the famous stream of consciousness novel by William Faulkner. The stories are, in fact, almost identical. It is quite bold to model your debut novel after a so famous and widely critiqued novel, and the reasoning behind such a choice is not quite certain. However, Parks’ modeling of her own story after Faulkner’s serves to highlight the motivation that drives Billy Beede to change her fate, as well as the struggles that the Beede family must endure due to their race.
When considered only in terms of characters and circumstances, Parks’ story seems largely unoriginal when compared to Faulkner’s. The family featured prominently in As I Lay Dying is the Bundren family: poor, white, uneducated, and living in rural Mississippi. The Beedes, like the Bundrens, are down on their luck and have little to no money to spare. The Bundrens are also incredibly isolated and looked down upon, much like the Beedes. Throughout the novel, Parks makes continuous and blatantly obvious comparisons between both families. The plots of both novels are almost the same as well: A poor, outcast family takes a journey to bury, in the case of the Bundrens, or uncover, in the case of the Beedes, the mother of one of the main characters, who is in desperate need of an abortion. However, there are some differences between two of the main characters in both novels, Dewey Dell and Billy Beede.
Despite the strong connection that both Billy Beede and Dewey Dell share by being unmarried, pregnant women, the parallelism of As I Lay Dying strongly emphasizes Billy’s strength and determination in any situation. Dewey Dell, the adolescent girl in Faulkner’s novel, is also seeking an abortion. However, she does not seek out her own opportunities. She is simply dragged along for the ride with her family. When her abortion doesn’t go as planned, she does not attempt to fix her situation; she simply hopes that everything will work out in the end. Billy is in direct contrast to Dewey Dell. Even in situations when it seems as if there is simply no hope, Billy finds a way to get things done.
When trying to buy a dress for her alleged wedding with Snipes, Billy quickly decides that she must have the prettiest dress in Mrs. Jackson’s shop. Although she only has $63, she resolves that she will get the best dress. Dill acknowledges Billy’s determination, by casually remarking, “…By hook or crook Billy got herself a dress. Mighta got herself two or three dresses.” (Parks, 35) Billy is the one that steals Dill’s car, the one that comes up with the idea to get money in order to make it to LaJunta. In contrast to Dewey Dell, Billy Beede is an incredibly motivated and resourceful woman, and will do whatever it takes to make sure that her future works out according to plan.
The ending of the novel also makes this remarkably clear. In contrast to Faulkner’s work, Parks’ novel ends quite happily, and with all loose ends tied up in pretty bows. This, again, highlights Billy’s determination to make her future brighter than the expectations everyone has of her. Throughout the novel, she is looked down upon as a helpless, unmarried, pregnant woman. She desires to be different than her mother, but it is clear to her family and friends that she is similar to her mother in many ways. However, the positive, and unexpected, ending to the novel in which she keeps the baby and marries Laz signifies her determination to improve her life and shows her maturation into a woman who is quite different from her mother. Her life is not determined by just fate, a concept that is extremely Faulknerian, but by the amount of work and effort that she puts into it.
Although Faulkner’s story helps to highlight the more positive characteristics of one of the characters, it also serves to point out how race affects the Beede family. One of the most striking examples of how race increases the struggles of the Beede family is when they are stopped by a police officer while on the road. He tells himself that he could just give Homer, the man driving the car, a warning and let him be on his way, but that the Sheriff would kill him if he just did that: “I could just let them on their way with a speeding ticket. But Sheriff wouldn’t never let me hear the end of it. If I was to let them go there’d be plenty of laughs and talkings behind my back.” (Parks, 163) Thus, he decides to take both Homer and Roosevelt into the station, and put them in a jail cell. The Sheriff is significantly meaner than the police officer, and makes them stay in the jail cell for an entire night, to see if anyone calls so the crime can be pinned onto Homer or Teddy.
Although the police officer that arrested them doesn’t really want to arrest them, he does so anyway, out of fear of being reprimanded by his superior officer. One man’s extreme racial prejudice, in this case the Sheriff’s, affects the actions of men who don’t actually experience racial prejudice to that extent.
Billy Beede also experiences racial prejudice first hand when she and Homer stop at a gas station on the way to LaJunta. Billy announces that is going to pick up some sandwiches, to which the gas station attendant loudly declares: “Rude don’t serve—well, you know, you’d best be getting food someplace else.” (Parks, 187) Billy is then greeted by a sign detailing exactly what the gas station attendant just said, but in much crueler language. During the time that Billy is distracted by going into the gas station store, Homer has a sexual encounter with the female gas station attendant. On the gas station attendant’s part, it seems to be an act motivated by her husband’s extreme prejudice and racism. She doesn’t get along well with her husband, and performing sexual acts on a man who her husband hates can be seen as a small act of revenge. This is very similar to the situation with the police officer, in that not everybody who is white is racist, but that there still are extremely prejudiced individuals around, and often other individuals will base their actions off of the prejudiced feelings of others.
The Bundrens also encounter struggles on their journey, but no struggles appear just because of their race. If we keep As I Lay Dying and the experiences of the Bundrens in the back of our mind while reading Parks’ novel, the role that race plays becomes elevated to a new level. The Beedes do not just have bad luck, like the Bundrens do; they are also victims of the extreme prejudice and racism of America in the 1960s.
The severity of the Beede situation is also highlighted through the increased realism of a plot similar to the one in As I Lay Dying. Throughout As I Lay Dying, we, as readers, are struck by the sheer improbability of the situation. It almost seems impossible for a family to be subject to so much bad luck, or, quite possibly in the case of the Bundrens, bad reasoning. By paralleling her own novel with Faulkner’s, Parks almost seems to insist, inadvertently, perhaps, that situations like this do actually occur, and did occur in the past. Unfortunately, history is often times remembered, but not remembered to its fullest extent; we tend to remember the facts, but not the severe implications. Using this parallelism, Parks forces us to recognize the horror of the past.
Regardless of the strong similarities between As I Lay Dying and Getting Mother’s Body, Parks’ novel stands on its own, and is a well-written novel in its own right. Her skillful development of characters and her integration of history into the novel are characteristics unique to her work, which complement the novel as a whole. The parallelism between her work and Faulkner’s simply serves to elevate some of the most important character traits as well as the historical context and implications. Parks, in her talk at Bryn Mawr College on October 20, 2016, stated that we simply cannot get away from history; it’s all around us, with every breath we take, we inhale some of the same air Alexander the Great did. Even here, at Bryn Mawr, we can’t escape the history that is around us. Our dorms are engraved with names of countless women before us, our “chamber of secrets” used to be the tunnels that servants walked through. Parks does the same with her writing that we do here at the college: she integrates the old with the new, the past with the present, and breathes new life into stories that were once thought to be obsolete.
References:
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930.
Parks, Suzan-Lori. Getting Mother’s Body. Random House, 2003.