Hunter College Libraries Blog

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence, are two of my favorite twentieth century novels. Both have been challenged for sexual content, although anyone who has read either would be hard pressed to recall any memorable passages of the sort.

As I Lay Dying has also been challenged for questioning the existence of God. While this charge is undeniable, the Book of Job does likewise but has not been similarly challenged to my knowledge. In either case, challengers have missed the larger themes both have in common which make them essential reading. Each book explores the ways families negotiate a world of poverty while trying to maintain some semblance of dignity in the process. Faulkner’s book, set, as usual, in Mississippi, relates the saga of the Bundren family as they set out to bury the family matriarch in the distant town of Jefferson. Through multiple narratives the reader experiences this journey from the viewpoint of various family members as they traipse from town to town with a putrefying corpse and the larger burden of their own psyches.

Sons and Lovers is set in an English mining town and follows the travails of Gertrude Morel and her two sons, William and Paul. Both William and Paul yearn to escape the brute world of domestic violence they experience with their miner father, but neither can find meaningful relationships with women other than their suffering mother. While their aspirations of middle class respectability may differ markedly from those of the less articulate Bundren family, both families strive for a degree of respectability and domestic peace that seems to invariably elude them. Both families are deeply marked by the influence of a family matriarch, with accompanying emotions of love, admiration, and resentment.

The widower in As I Lay Dying sees his wife’s death as an opportunity to pick up a pair of false teeth when he arrives in Jefferson, while her daughter plans on discreetly having an abortion when they arrive in town and her son Cash worries if the coffin he has made will withstand the journey to the gravesite. The mother in Lawrence’s work is strident in her attempts to remove her sons from a life in the mines, and is both heartbroken and baffled when neither meets the happiness she expects them to find when they break successfully into the middle class. These are characters and families the book banners might well have identified with, but that is asking a breadth of imagination and empathy that a heart bent on censorship would find far too taxing for its narrow confines.