Eudora Welty's "A Memory

Eudora Welty -- a Memory

There are several relevant themes in this short story. One powerful theme used by Welty in A Memory is very clear from the beginning: a vivid memory is not a list of scenes from the past, but instead memory can become a living, forceful part of the here and now. Her truthful recollections seem as alive as though she could actually be catapulted back to that beach scene. The recounting of the memories captures perfectly her youthful biases and naivete -- and brings out a sense of honesty that is perhaps not possible during adolescence. Another theme is that life is lived in stages and as a young person in possession of a lively imagination, every moment in a person's experience has a heightened significance well beyond its actual impact and reality. She offers those heightened moments in a waterfall of youthful recollections and symbolism relating to how she felt years ago. A third theme touches on her emerging sexuality, which the reader encounters regarding her trauma over her first menstrual cycle (juxtaposed with the boy's nose bleed in Latin class) (p. 93).

A writer as talented as Welty can use a short story like this one to present the idealism -- and juxtaposed with idealism, the narrowness that a lack of life experiences brings to bear -- of a young child blended with the mature approach that the passing years provide. And one of the themes is certainly that events outside the youthful experience are seen as intrusions into her blissful young life.

Welty is very committed to recreating the innocence of that young girl on the beach; it is an idealistic portrayal (based apparently on a dream) but it is also a highly personal recounting of the fears that the writer recalls from her youth. One can safely assume that this short story is to a significant degree autobiographical, and so the themes readers encounter are a tapestry of youthful fears and idealism -- and biases -- from the perspective of a mature writer who painstakingly looks back with a vivid sense of recall. The writer recalls that every bird flying above has some symbolic meaning for her; every leaf the spins on its way from the tree to the ground carries some message. The boy she thinks she loves is nothing more than desire and a daydream -- albeit the daydream is in part based on her emerging female sexuality.

Whether the bathers were real or not is beside the point. The theme of that adolescent is based on that child's world, which may not be open to new ideas. She presents this narrowness (it is typical of youthful creative people to find anything radically apart from their safe little world as disgusting). Hence, "I felt a necessity for absolute conformity to my ideas in any happening I witnessed" (p. 149). And obviously the bathers' dream at her beach did not fit into her idealized view of what people should be like. The bathers were "…a group of loud, squirming, ill-assorted people…thrown together only by the most confused accident" (p. 152). The mature writer recalls that scene on the beach and the adolescent hated the vulgarity; it was like "…a wreath of steam rising from the wet sand" (p. 154). But that was just a dream -- or a nightmare.