Addie and Willa Mae

I read As I Lay Dying three years ago, in AP English, and we didn't really talk about it in class, so my memory of it is rather poor. Nevertheless, I thought of it as I read the book jacket of Getting Mother's Body, and as soon as I began reading the book, I could tell that Parks had, to a certain extent, based her novel on Faulkner's. So I looked for connections between the two, and the most obvious one was the dead mother and the journey centered around her body. In As I Lay Dying, even though she spent the entire book either on her deathbed or dead, there was a sense that Addie (the mother,) is directing everything that her family does. When the book begins, one of her sons is building her coffin right outside her window, so that she can make sure it is done right. After her death, her family spends the rest of the book fulfilling a condition that she made when she agreed to marry her husband: that she be buried in her hometown, with the family she came from. Although Addie did not know all the difficulties her family would face in complying with her wish, the one chapter told from her point of view (which appears in the book well after she has already died) made me feel that she had almost planned the whole thing, that her family's misery was her revenge on them and on the world. (I know this sounds strange, but it's a strange book, and I don't remember it well enough to give specific details that would help explain why I felt this way.) What I may remember, though I'm not sure this is correct, is that she hated the roles to which society constrained her--teacher, wife, mother--but she kept up the appearance of performing these roles during her life, only to tear her family apart after her death. In Getting Mother's Body, on the other hand, Willa Mae does as she pleases throughout her life, with little thought given to what was expected of her, and while she is very much present in the other characters' minds after her death, she has no control over them, except through Billy, who had learned from her. In this case, her family's journey is partly for the sake of bringing her home, but their main motivation--to take her jewelry--is a violation of her dying wish, which Dill had already violated almost immediately after she had died. The consequences of this journey, however, are much better, as it brings most of the characters closer together. I'm not really sure what to make of this comparison; I don't even know if it makes sense, but these are my initial thoughts after reading the novel.