Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, pregnancy termination, and death.

The novel sets up the consistent idea that motherhood is a sacrifice of self that culminates in exhaustion and the wish for an early death. The protagonist, Addie, believes that after she has given Anse five children—four with him and one outside of their marriage—she has done her duty by him and life, and “could get ready to die” (107).

Addie is not alone in being what Anse repeatedly terms a “well and hale” countrywoman who survives the toil of farm life in addition to multiple childbirths, and then suddenly dies (22). Vernon Tull relates that his own mother died similarly:

[N]ever a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed nightgown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes (17).

At this point, Tull’s mother said she was tired, then she died. The ceremony of putting on an unworn decorative nightgown and going to bed in daytime enables Tull’s mother to find an autonomy in dying that eluded her in a life devoted to the care of others.