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Surrealism and Welty’s Early Years in New York1

Stephen M. Fuller

in Eudora Welty and Surrealism

This chapter establishes Eudora Welty’s “Place in Fiction,” and how it announced her subscription to a parallel view with regard to fiction. Most of the stories collected in A Curtain of Green ... More

This chapter establishes Eudora Welty’s “Place in Fiction,” and how it announced her subscription to a parallel view with regard to fiction. Most of the stories collected in A Curtain of Green demonstrate defiance of the tyranny of actuality, and illustrate Welty’s shuttling between actuality and abstraction. It also shows the early orientation of Welty’s artistic prejudices, which would guide her during much of her career. Over the years, Welty’s view of imaginative transformation and the strategies required to realize the principle would develop and intensify, but in this first volume of short stories she holds to her fundamental conviction that fiction’s point of view should glow, illuminating the surreality of the waking life in dream and vice versa.Less

Feeling in the Light: Race, Fear, and Desire in Eudora Welty’s Popular Front Fiction

Christin Marie Taylor

in Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South

Much of Eudora Welty’s writing during the Popular Front era shows a writer with an eye turned toward black workers and their centrality in southern American life, from the ordinary everyday to major ... More

Much of Eudora Welty’s writing during the Popular Front era shows a writer with an eye turned toward black workers and their centrality in southern American life, from the ordinary everyday to major political events. Welty’s use of fear and desire reconfigures discourses about black workers, including myths of rape in the midst of Popular Front anti-lynching efforts. With the case of Scottsboro and others whispering in the background, her interrelated vignettes and short fiction engage the failures of the New Deal to address the painful occurrences of lynching and labor oppression experienced by African Americans. The Golden Apples (1949) and other short stories offer a sense of racial terror, fear, and desire —feelings that not only challenged perceptions of blackness but also questioned the role of white feminine agency.Less

“The Whole Heart Of Fiction”: Eudora Welty Inside the Closed Society

Jonathan W. Gray

in Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination: Innocence by Association

This chapter focuses on the writer Eudora Welty, and how she published very little between 1955 and 1970, a period that coincides with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement as the dominant ... More

This chapter focuses on the writer Eudora Welty, and how she published very little between 1955 and 1970, a period that coincides with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement as the dominant political and social thought in the United States. The only manuscript Welty produced within the period, which was also a trying time in her life, was a brief children’s story called The Shoe Bird. Welty could not focus on her writing because of her demanding mother, who drove away the homecare nurses that Welty hired, and it was only when Welty was able to free herself from her familial duties that she was able to get back to writing. When she did, she produced her two finest novels: Losing Battles and The Optimist’s Daughter.Less

Specters on Staircases: Race, Property, and the Gothic in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Sarah Gilbreath Ford

Harriet Pollack (ed.)

in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

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 ... More

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

On Welty’s Use of Allusion: Expectations and Their Revision in “The Wide Net,” The Robber Bridegroom, and “At The Landing”

Harriet Pollack

in The Past Is Not Dead: Essays from the Southern Quarterly

This chapter explores Eudora Welty’s use of allusions in her work. It first maps out the process characteristically initiated by Welty’s allusions, and then examines the specific uses she makes of ... More

This chapter explores Eudora Welty’s use of allusions in her work. It first maps out the process characteristically initiated by Welty’s allusions, and then examines the specific uses she makes of that process in three allusive fictions: “The Wide Net,” The Robber Bridegroom, and its story double, “At The Landing”.Less

Eudora Welty and the Problem of Crusading

Jordan J. Dominy

in Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America

This chapter considers Eudora Welty’s essay, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” and her story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” together. In the former, Welty claims that writers cannot and should not ... More

This chapter considers Eudora Welty’s essay, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” and her story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” together. In the former, Welty claims that writers cannot and should not through their work get involved in political activism, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Yet the latter is a quickly written and published fictional account of the assassination of Medgar Evers told from the first-person perspective of the killer, which has unavoidable political content. The chapter contextualizes Welty’s story with details regarding Evers’s mandated Jackson, Mississippi television appearance to show the immediate, real world sociopolitical engagement of literature. Hence, Welty’s story marks a return of racial politics to southern literature that are no longer avoidable, despite Welty’s own pleas to refrain from political crusading.Less

Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

Noel Polk

in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. ... More

Generations of southern writers and readers after William Faulkner have adopted his vision, seeing “The South” through his eyes rather than through their own or struggling against that vision. Writers such as Walker Percy and Barry Hannah, who deal with a more urban world than Faulkner does, have occasionally had a hard time with many traditional critics who believe that they represent a decline in “southern literature.” These are the same critics who have too often lumped Eudora Welty and Faulkner together, who have argued that their literary strengths lie directly in their roots in the South. One of Faulkner’s most intimate works, the quasi-autobiographical “Mississippi” (1953), depicts his attempts to grapple with the problems and pressures his native land had caused for him, as well as his reconciliation with past and present Mississippi. The questions of how and why love is better than hate, reconciliation better than alienation, are also present in Welty in general, and in her novel The Golden Apples in particular. However, Welty’s responses to such questions are quite different from those of Faulkner.Less

Introduction

M. Thomas Inge (ed.)

in The Dixie Limited: Writers on William Faulkner and His Influence

This book examines what William Faulkner has meant to his fellow writers both in the United States and abroad. Few modern authors, except perhaps James Joyce, have had so profound an influence ... More

This book examines what William Faulkner has meant to his fellow writers both in the United States and abroad. Few modern authors, except perhaps James Joyce, have had so profound an influence throughout the world as has Faulkner. He has been called a “writer's writer,” one who is held up as a preceptor and model for other writers to emulate. Novelists, playwrights, and poets have expressed their varying opinions on the value of Faulkner's example as a creative writer. This book contains essays, articles, reviews, letters, and interviews published over the last eight decades by novelists, poets, and dramatists about Faulkner, his fiction, and the power of his accomplishment. These include Donald Davidson, Stephen Vincent Benét, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, and Gabriel García Márquez.Less

Specters on Staircases in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Sarah Gilbreath Ford

in Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic

This chapter examines parallel scenes in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), where a character rushes into a ... More

This chapter examines parallel scenes in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), where a character rushes into a haunted house seeking to climb the stairs only to be thwarted by a seemingly supernatural African American woman. These scenes signify the women’s contradictory roles as powerless property and powerful specters. Treated as property, the women do not just haunt the houses, they haunt as houses; they are conflated with the legal property of white families, even after the end of slavery. The women’s status as housekeepers, however, allows them a “keeping,” or possession of property, that provides them the power as specters to block the outsiders, who want to transgress the boundary of time to travel back into the past. Legal possession established by property rights confronts spectral possession signified by haunting.Less

Documentary of the 1930s

in Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel up to World War II

This chapter discusses the incorporation of documentary techniques in writing of the thirties. It examines the work of Eudora Welty, a writer who cross-applied photographic and cinematic methods in ... More

This chapter discusses the incorporation of documentary techniques in writing of the thirties. It examines the work of Eudora Welty, a writer who cross-applied photographic and cinematic methods in her fiction; Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing (1935), a novel about Depression America told in the present tense; two documentaries by John Dos Passos, which were produced to support the democratic front in the Spanish Civil War – Spain in Flames (1937) and The Spanish Earth (1937); the documentary You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a collaboration between the Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell and the Fortune photographer Margaret Bourke-White; and James Agee, one of the most famous documentary authors of this period, whose works combined interest in film, photography, fiction, and reportage.Less

“First Love”: Gesture and the Emergence of Desire in Eudora Welty

Kevin Ohi

in Inceptions: Literary Beginnings and Contingencies of Form

Eudora Welty’s strange and beautiful story “First Love” pairs two stories of love’s emergence from loss: the main character’s dawning love for Aaron Burr, who must leave him behind, and his love for ... More

Eudora Welty’s strange and beautiful story “First Love” pairs two stories of love’s emergence from loss: the main character’s dawning love for Aaron Burr, who must leave him behind, and his love for his parents, from whom he has been separated in a raid. Joel, described as deaf and mute, falls in love with a great orator—for, the story tells us, one of his gestures. Turning to theories of gesture in Giorgio Agamben, Werner Hamacher, and others, the chapter links the emergence of desire to what these accounts suggest is the potentiality inherent in gesture: language, or proto-language, that expresses nothing other than itself, than its own happening. Welty’s own enigmatic language, where one is perhaps never sure whether any given statement is literal or figurative, embodies this language-turned-to-gesture and makes the events of the story difficult to distinguish from the taking place of its language—a recursive structure that the chapter suggests is the story’s rendering of the fathomless initiations, the abyssal temporalities, of the interval of queer becoming and inception. For the story never tells us what Joel becomes; it leaves Joel (and us) in what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls the “interval” of the queer child.Less

Water, Wanderers, and Weddings: Going to Naples and to No Place

Noel Polk

in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

This chapter examines the persistence of outsiders, rootless wanderers, hitchhikers, the lonely, inarticulate and frustrated, the unloved and the unlovely, in Eudora Welty’s fiction. It also ... More

This chapter examines the persistence of outsiders, rootless wanderers, hitchhikers, the lonely, inarticulate and frustrated, the unloved and the unlovely, in Eudora Welty’s fiction. It also considers scenes where land and water meet, from Delta Wedding to “The Bride of the Innisfallen,” “Going to Naples,” “Circe,” and “No Place for You, My Love.” In addition, the chapter discusses the connection between traveling and family as well as familial violence against women in Welty’s works.Less

Southern Womanhood and “The High Cost of Living and Dying in Dixie”

Mary Weaks-Baxter

in Leaving the South: Border Crossing Narratives and the Remaking of Southern Identity

This chapter looks at the border as a gendered site within the context of Southern womanhood. If, as Kristeva says of woman, “the biological fate that causes us to be the site of the species chains ... More

This chapter looks at the border as a gendered site within the context of Southern womanhood. If, as Kristeva says of woman, “the biological fate that causes us to be the site of the species chains us to space,” then the South not only lays claim to women’s bodies but also contains them. Reflecting on ways gender impacts border narratives by women, the chapter focuses on autobiographical writings by Arnow, Abbott, Hurston, Scott, and Welty to examine ways Southern women look to the horizon to claim it, struggle with firmly engrained models of Southern womanhood, and attempt to break free from these patterns. Considering texts within the historical context of the representation of woman as symbolic border guard of nations and communities, and as who needs “saving” when outside aggressors threaten, the chapter reflects on the implications of crossing borders when women’s bodies are literally used to define the line.Less

The Ponderable Heart

Noel Polk

in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

This chapter offers a reading of Eudora Welty’s novel Ponder Heart, arguing that it is her oddest book and that it is a deliberate collection of every tawdry cliché of southern literature. It ... More

This chapter offers a reading of Eudora Welty’s novel Ponder Heart, arguing that it is her oddest book and that it is a deliberate collection of every tawdry cliché of southern literature. It contends that the novel does not feel like parody because it does not protect itself through the distances of irony which characterize modernist narratives. The chapter also considers a scene from one of Welty’s earliest short stories, “Magic”—the image of the family in their living room—and, finally, examines how Welty presents some grimmer realities about domestic violence.Less

White Folks: Literature’s Uncanny, Unhomely Folklore of Whiteness

Shelley Ingram

in Implied Nowhere: Absence in Folklore Studies

This chapter looks at moments of constructed uncanniness and unhomeliness in Russell Banks’s Affliction and Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, two American novels in which whiteness is inextricably linked ... More

This chapter looks at moments of constructed uncanniness and unhomeliness in Russell Banks’s Affliction and Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, two American novels in which whiteness is inextricably linked to the creation, through acceptance or rejection, of folk groups. Using critical race theory, this chapter argues that the tendency to exempt the literature of white writers from dominant conversations about folklore and literature helps reaffirm a dangerous hierarchical system of power in which whiteness is marked as absence. It argues through a close read of fiction that whiteness is not absent—instead, it is an identity which is guarded and negotiated through negotiations of folk groups. Banks and Welty both construct a whiteness that has stability and variation, that reacts to the presence of a folk Other, and that becomes part of a vernacular language of identity for those inside, outside, and on the borders of their groups.Less

Modernist Bluebeard

Casie E. Hermansson

in Bluebeard: A Reader's Guide to the English Tradition

This chapter examines English modernist versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” and how the authors used the story to comment on feminism. It looks at the emergence of ... More

This chapter examines English modernist versions of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale, “Bluebeard,” and how the authors used the story to comment on feminism. It looks at the emergence of detective fiction during the years of World War I and influenza pandemic of 1918, and the strain of misogyny evident in the crime stories about Bluebeard. The chapter discusses the works of three women writers who explicitly addressed the Bluebeard story as a vehicle to comment on gender relations and to issue a modernist challenge to the traditional narrative: Beatrix Potter’s novella Sister Anne (1932), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short story “Bluebeard’s Daughter” in The Cat’s Cradle-Book (1940), and Eudora Welty’s novella The Robber Bridegroom (1942). It also discusses modern film versions of Bluebeard such as In Love from a Stranger (1937) and Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), as well as the so-called “Bluebeard cycle” of films including Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), Spellbound (1945), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Secret Beyond the Door (1948).Less

A Philosophy of Life

Louise Westling

in The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language

This chapter introduces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as implicitly ecological, developing within the context of phenomenology initiated by Husserl and further expanded by Heidegger. Describing ... More

This chapter introduces Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as implicitly ecological, developing within the context of phenomenology initiated by Husserl and further expanded by Heidegger. Describing Merleau-Ponty’s distinctive focus on the body in Phenomenology of Perception and his ontology of dynamic intertwining or chiasm in The Visible and the Invisible, the discussion places particular emphasis on his lifelong engagement with modern science and its culmination in the Nature lectures in which he explored the philosophical consequences of twentieth-century science. The chapter concludes with analysis of literary explorations of embodiment by Eudora Welty and W.H. Auden.Less