Sarah Gilbreath Ford
Harriet Pollack (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781496826145
- eISBN:
- 9781496826190
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496826145.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by ...
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In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by mysterious African American women. This essay explores what is at stake in the portrayals of African American specters standing on staircases and impeding other characters’ desire for knowledge. The gothic energy driving the repetition is the conflation of person and property that happens in slavery, causing these women not just to haunt the houses but to haunt as houses, as the status of property they were assigned because of their race. While this status renders the women in one sense powerless, each uses her situation as property to assert a different kind of possession, thereby becoming powerful specters. As property, the women testify to the horror of slavery. As specters, the women reveal how that horror haunts the present.Less
In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon characters enter haunted houses seeking information only to be confronted on the stairs by mysterious African American women. This essay explores what is at stake in the portrayals of African American specters standing on staircases and impeding other characters’ desire for knowledge. The gothic energy driving the repetition is the conflation of person and property that happens in slavery, causing these women not just to haunt the houses but to haunt as houses, as the status of property they were assigned because of their race. While this status renders the women in one sense powerless, each uses her situation as property to assert a different kind of possession, thereby becoming powerful specters. As property, the women testify to the horror of slavery. As specters, the women reveal how that horror haunts the present.
Sarah Gilbreath Ford
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496814531
- eISBN:
- 9781496814579
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496814531.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This essay explores the challenge of teaching Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding because of its experimental form, subtle allusions, and seeming lack of plot. Given that students are typically adept at ...
More
This essay explores the challenge of teaching Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding because of its experimental form, subtle allusions, and seeming lack of plot. Given that students are typically adept at reading for character, the essay describes a technique of assigning every student a character in the novel to follow. Though rather simple in execution, this strategy has had very positive results. Students became experts on their characters, allowing them a feeling of mastery even on a first reading of the text. When engaging in discussion, the students reenacted and then understood the novel’s experiment in deploying multiple perspectives through free indirect discourse. This technique also works well in other Welty works, such as The Golden Apples.Less
This essay explores the challenge of teaching Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding because of its experimental form, subtle allusions, and seeming lack of plot. Given that students are typically adept at reading for character, the essay describes a technique of assigning every student a character in the novel to follow. Though rather simple in execution, this strategy has had very positive results. Students became experts on their characters, allowing them a feeling of mastery even on a first reading of the text. When engaging in discussion, the students reenacted and then understood the novel’s experiment in deploying multiple perspectives through free indirect discourse. This technique also works well in other Welty works, such as The Golden Apples.
Stephen M. Fuller
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617036736
- eISBN:
- 9781621039143
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617036736.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book surveys Eudora Welty’s fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. It shows how the 1930s witnessed the arrival of surrealism in the United States largely through ...
More
This book surveys Eudora Welty’s fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. It shows how the 1930s witnessed the arrival of surrealism in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. Welty, a frequent traveler to New York City, where the surrealists exhibited, and a keen reader of magazines and newspapers that disseminated their work, absorbed and unconsciously appropriated surrealism’s perspective in her writing. In fact, the first solo exhibition of her photographs in 1936 took place next door to New York’s premier venue for surrealist art. In a series of readings that collectively examine A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, The Wide Net and Other Stories, Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, the book reveals how surrealism profoundly shaped Welty’s striking figurative literature. Yet the influence of the surrealist movement extends beyond questions of style. The study’s interpretations also foreground how Welty’s writing refracted surrealism as a historical phenomena. Scattered throughout her stories are allusions to personalities allied with the movement in the United States, including figures such as Salvador Dali, Elsa Schiaparelli, Caresse Crosby, Wallace Simpson, Cecil Beaton, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Henri Ford. Individuals such as these and others whom surrealism seduced often lead unorthodox and controversial lives that made them natural targets for moral opprobrium. Eschewing such parochialism, Welty borrowed the idiom of surrealism to develop modernized depictions of the South.Less
This book surveys Eudora Welty’s fiction during the most productive period of her long writing life. It shows how the 1930s witnessed the arrival of surrealism in the United States largely through the products of its visual artists. Welty, a frequent traveler to New York City, where the surrealists exhibited, and a keen reader of magazines and newspapers that disseminated their work, absorbed and unconsciously appropriated surrealism’s perspective in her writing. In fact, the first solo exhibition of her photographs in 1936 took place next door to New York’s premier venue for surrealist art. In a series of readings that collectively examine A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, The Wide Net and Other Stories, Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories, the book reveals how surrealism profoundly shaped Welty’s striking figurative literature. Yet the influence of the surrealist movement extends beyond questions of style. The study’s interpretations also foreground how Welty’s writing refracted surrealism as a historical phenomena. Scattered throughout her stories are allusions to personalities allied with the movement in the United States, including figures such as Salvador Dali, Elsa Schiaparelli, Caresse Crosby, Wallace Simpson, Cecil Beaton, Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Henri Ford. Individuals such as these and others whom surrealism seduced often lead unorthodox and controversial lives that made them natural targets for moral opprobrium. Eschewing such parochialism, Welty borrowed the idiom of surrealism to develop modernized depictions of the South.
