Eudora Welty: life and literary works

Eudora Welty

Analyzing Several of Eudora Welty's Fictional Works and Her Memoir One Writer's Beginnings from a Perspective of Historical Criticism

This essay analyzes, through the perspective of historical criticism, the novel The Optimist's Daughter (1972), three short stories from The Collected Short Stories of Eudora Welty (1982) and other sources, and the memoir One Writer's Beginnings (1984) written by the American writer Eudora Welty (1909-2001). This essay seeks to illustrate, then, how Eudora Welty's Jackson, Mississippi upbringing; home life, and, subsequently, her early professional years as a photographer and writer during the Great Depression, inflected Welty's later short story and other writing, and her overall artistic and literary viewpoint(s). Works by Eudora Welty to be examined, in addition to Welty's memoir One Writer's Beginnings (1982) include The Optimist's Daughter, and the short stories "Death of a Traveling Salesman" (1936)"Why I Live at the P.O." (1941) and "The Worn Path (1941)."

Eudora Welty is best known for her tragicomic yet poignant, and quite often emotionally unsettling short stories depicting society and everyday life within in the early-to-mid 20th century American South. Historical criticism of such literary works considers factors including when and where the literary works are written; by whom, and under what circumstances, e.g., social; economic; geographical, etc. In particular, considerations of historical criticism typically include facts about an author's life and status; the larger history surrounding an author and his or her work, and the intellectual paradigms available to an author and/or to his or her readers.

As a Mississippi-born writer, Eudora Welty is also an acknowledged master of the Southern regional short story. Stylistically, Welty writes in a unique, often ironically (and sometimes poignantly) humorous way. Her subject matter is often about small-town American Southern life and ways. In this manner, Welty frequently captures distinct regional ways and eccentricities, e.g., unique Southern American locales and peoples, as well as regional attitudes and practices. As Welty recalled in a videotaped interview and reading ("Eudora Welty," The Writer in America Series, 1980), she was fascinated, from her earliest childhood, with the entertaining and often gossipy stories that her mother and other neighborhood women told each other; with conversational patterns in general; and with the unique regional nuances of Southern speech. This early interest in what others said and how they said it provided Welty, she further recalled, with the keen listening skills, early on in life, that later gave her a good ear for dialogue in her written fiction.

As Welty also recalls, within her personal memoir, One Writer's Beginnings (1982), the future author was fascinated, even as a very small child, with books and everything about them, e.g., the feel of the pages, the look of the print, the binding, from her earliest years, before she could even read. One of her favorite places as a child was the public library in Jackson, and she would do anything to be able to read (Welty, One Writer's Beginnings).

Welty's mother in particular, who also loved books and reading, and loved reading fiction in particular, supported Eudora's wish to become a writer, as did her father. But Eudora Welty's father, an insurance executive, whom, as the author recalls, did not think much of either the reading or the writing of fiction (Welty, One Writer's Beginnings) also considered it important that Eudora should have a more secure profession, by which she could always make a living (One Writer's Beginnings). That, then, was how Eudora Welty came, first, to attend the Mississippi State College for Women in her own home state, and later to transfer to the University of Wisconsin, her father's alma mater and a university known for its quality liberal arts education (One Writer's Beginnings).

Later, Eudora Welty also attended (with her father's blessing since it would lead to a steadily-paying career) the business college of Columbia University in New York, with plans to become an advertising copywriter ("Eudora Welty," The Writer in America Series, 1980; Welty, One Writer's Beginnings, 1982). That, in fact, might well have become Welty's profession as a writer, had this early plan not instead been interrupted by hard economic realities of the Great Depression, and the fact that as Welty herself put it "nobody was paying anyone to write copy" (The Writer in America Series).

Instead, Eudora Welty's first paying job turned out to be "for the state office of the Works Process Administration [WPA] as a publicity agent... Traveling over the whole of Mississippi, writing news stories for county papers, taking pictures, I saw my home state close at hand" (Welty, One Writer's Beginnings, 1982, p. 84). As the article "Eudora Welty" (Wikipedia, May 15, 2006) also states, of the author's life during this period, "During the 1930s, Welty worked as a photographer for the Works Progress Administration. This job sent her all over the state of Mississippi taking photographs of people from all economic and social classes." As Eudora Welty herself further recalls, of her experience as a photographer, in particular, during these years of the Depression, "The camera was a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know" (Welty). In her video interview within The Writer in America Series (1980), Eudora Welty also shares, for the camera and the audience, one of her own favorite photographs taken for the WPA during that period, a black and white picture of three little boys standing in a crowd at a county fair in Mississippi. The little boys are all watching a magician who is "about to saw a lady in half," Welty explains. One of the little boys "believes"; another "doesn't believe," and the third one "is just beginning to wonder. That's what I love about this one, the three states" ("Eudora Welty," The Writer in America Series), the author says.

In analyzing Eudora Welty's fictional works, one also sees the author's emotional perceptiveness and continual artistic sensitivity to her characters' various changing states of mind, as these develop within her short stories and also as they vary, quite often about the exact same subject, among her various characters. Within her fiction, Eudora also often shows and describes, ingeniously, how particular states of mind develop and grow.

For example, in the first-ever published short story by Eudora Welty, "Death of a Traveling Salesman," its main character is R.J Bowman, a traveling salesman for a Mississippi shoe company, who seems to carry with him, as he drives from one shoe-selling location to another, a sort of emotional obliviousness about his own personal desires and needs. Within this story, however, Bowman, after covering the same exact sales territory for over a decade, suddenly, inexplicably, becomes lost, on his way to a town called Beulah. At this same time, the lost shoe salesman is also beginning to feel sick. Unwilling to seek help, though, or even admit, to himself that he is lost, R.J. Bowman also suddenly finds his car dangerously approaching the precipice of a steep ravine.

Realizing his car is about to roll off any minute, Bowman quickly takes his wares from his car, just barely in time before the car slides off the edge of the ravine. Luckily for Bowman, his car, as it turns out, has only fallen into some grapevines. However, the lost shoe salesman now he has no choice but to seek help freeing his car from below the ravine.

Coming to a house, Bowman asks the young woman who lives there and her older husband, Sonny, if they will help him to lift his car back onto the road. Sonny gladly assists him. Then, after spending some unanticipated time with Sonny and his wife, Bowman understands, in an unexpected personal epiphany, what is missing from his own lonely, peripatetic life: a home and a family of his own. Bowman's becoming lost, then, and in an area that should be familiar to him, also creates the possibility for his finding, quite by surprise, a new outlook and state of mind, about all that is missing from his life. According to the article "Eudora Welty" (Mississippi Writers' Page, March 29, 2006), in "Eudora Welty's first published short story, "Death of a Traveling Salesman, "Bowman... suddenly understands... his... loneliness and the relationship between the older man and the girl who have rescued him... This crucial moment augurs the "fruitful" subject that permeates Welty's fiction: the intimate and often strange relationships within families." One of the hallmarks of Welty's fictional works, in general, is the changing of peoples' m minds; plans; outlooks; minds, etc., based on new input and/or on unforeseen and surprising circumstances.

Another of Welty's short stories, entitled "Why I Live at the P.O." reflects both Eudora Welty's personal familiarity with and understanding of small-town life, and the encroachment of people's lives on one another within a tightly-knit (in this case, a too tightly-knit) community. "Why I Live at the P.O." is narrated by the elder of two sisters, who is called simply "Sister" throughout the story. "Sister," as she tells us, has, as the story opens, is looking back on events of the recent past, having just moved into the town's post office (i.e., the "P.O." Of this story's title). Sister has been driven to take up residence here by family discord. From here, we then learn, mostly implicitly, just how deep indeed the domestic discord (i.e., in today's psychological parlance, "dysfunctional" behavior) in Sister's family runs. As Choard points out, of this story: "Sister's move to the P.O. is presented as the result of a disruptive event: the return of the Prodigal Sister, Stella-Rondo, which interferes with the established, allegedly peaceful, order" ("Ties that Bind"). All circumstances and previously-existing character viewpoints are in fact abruptly altered, and much for the worse in this family, by Stella Rondo's and the child's sudden and unexpected appearance.

However, the exact trouble that has driven Sister here to the P.O., as Sister also tells us, began not so much with the mere return home of Stella Rondo, and Shirley T, but instead, with Sister's own comment to the rest of the family that Shirley T. strongly resembles Papa-Daddy. As Sister states: "she was the spit-image of Papa-Daddy if he cut off his beard." That seemingly off-hand comment immediately fuels enough tension for the rest of the family to now make Sister so uncomfortable continuing to liver at home that she feels forced to move to the P.O., the only place she can go to be away from them, at least physically, in the tiny town of China Grove (although this, too, is problematic, since Papa-Daddy owns the town, and was the one who secured Sister's present job in the P.O. For her in the first place).

The household tension itself had come to a head earlier, as Sister tells us early in the story, when Uncle Rondo "threw a whole five-cent package of some unsold one-inch firecrackers from the store as hard as he could into my bedroom and they every one went off." From this, Sister now gets the idea, loud and clear, that she is no longer welcome there. This also raises several puzzling questions for the reader, while encouraging us to look at the situation Welty describes from not just Sister's perspective, but from the various perspectives of other family members as well, in order to be able to understand the story at all. For example, we must now ask ourselves as readers, why are they now so angry at Sister, over a seemingly innocent, merely conversational remark? Why does the whole family seem so similar in their outspoken eccentricity? Who, for that matter, might Sister's and Stella Rondo's own father be? And what is Uncle Rondo's exact relationship to them all?

Sister does not reach any real epiphany in this story, however, or even the beginnings of physical, economic, or psychological independence. IN fact, as Welty continually implies to us, with increasing clarity (and poignancy) as the story progresses, it is the incestuous circumstances of the family itself that make the story what it is, and that in fact make the story creatively possible at all. After all (and even more tragicomically) Sister's new home at the P.O. is, after all, still entirely subsidized by her inbred family. In a small Southern town like China Grove, as Eudora starkly and vividly illustrates within this story, it is difficult indeed to escape either one's past or one's future.

Sister would have no job as China Grove's Postmistress, if it had not been arranged by Papa-Daddy, the man she flees. Sister's family is also "the main people in China Grove" and most mail that supports the post office is either for or from them. Sister has no possessions. Her exodus therefore promises to be similar, though shorter, than Stella Rondo's. In a small town like China Grove, as Welty implies, it is impossible for Sister to avoid her family. If Shirley T. is in fact Papa-Daddy's progeny (this would explain why Papa-Daddy feels so threatened by Sister's casual joke about cutting off his beard to make the resemblance clear to all), it is clear as well why Sister, now given the tangible evidence of Shirley T. To underscore Papa-Daddy's incestuous capability, wishes to create as much physical distance between herself and Papa-Daddy as possible. Still, she will likely return home soon. Within this (overtly, at least) comical story, the dark probability of incest still manages to poke through from between the lines, clearly and ominously. There is, then (as Welty, still mischievously even at the end, implies) more to this family (and story) than meets the eye. The reader may feel free to become amused, but perhaps not too amused: Sister's deceptively light-hearted narrative voice only emphasizes, rather than mitigates, her continuing vulnerability.

Like a child playing house, Sister now plays at being independent in her new domicile (with property from others). She buys nothing new for herself that has not been owned by her family. Thus, Sister simply transfers her former living arrangements to the P.O. She is physically removed from her family; yet she is still tied to them. As The Art Bin suggests, "Though the story is comic, its underlying themes are complex, concerning the tensions between family affiliation and independence, the relative nature of truth, and the insularity and uniqueness of life in a small southern community" ("Eudora: How a Southern Writer Came to Lend her Name to a Computer Program"). Existentially, Sister has not yet reached adulthood; instead she is a troubled adolescent, just trying to survive. The undertone of the story is about one sister's efforts standing up for, and to potentially protect herself in ways her younger sister may not have done, or have been able to do.

The story is also about communication - on many levels, i.e., the bantering but dead-serious quarrels, and all sorts of symbols of outside freedom- radios, letters, post offices-which in this story serve, ironically, to constrict the narrator. Eudora Welty deals, often, with the effects of communication: the words we say, the situations and meanings we perceive, what remains unspoken, to convey Sister's true motivations and fears. Here, the insular small town environment is more than just a setting- it represents the restrictive boundaries within which Sister must try to safely survive.

Choard notes, of Welty's early professional background as a professional WPA photographer and how that experience informs Welty's writing: "As a photographer, Welty had adopted the habit of never looking directly at her subject: instead, she used a type of camera where the viewfinder was placed in front of her, below her eyes. This indirect approach enabled her to catch the most spontaneous expressions, the most genuine poses. The oblique might thus paradoxically be the most direct route to reach the truth [sic]"(p. 247).

A third short story by Eudora Welty, "A Worn Path," opens with an elderly Southern African-American woman's going into town to buy medicine for her ailing grandson, and encountering numerous obstacles along the way. The title "The Worn Path," much like the traveling salesman's becoming lost in "Death of a Traveling Salesman," serves as a metaphor for something deeper within the story: the "worn path" of the main character, Phoenix's, own life. Phoenix, like the traveling salesman, also experiences memory loss as an obstacle in the completion of her trip into town. Clad in a "dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen..." Phoenix is old, weak, and fragile, yet determined, whatever obstacles she encounters, to complete her mission. Moreover, according to Welty, Phoenix Jackson even possesses a "worn path" of a face, and "Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles..."

Along the way, Phoenix faces down various wild animals along her path, telling them: "... out of my way, all you foxes, owls, beetles, jack rabbits, and coons... Don't let none of those come running my direction, I got a long way (Welty, "The Worn Path")" Traversing a long steep hill, next, her dress becomes caught in some bushes.

Then she must cross a creek, using a log for a raft, slip through barbed-wire, and pick herself up, with a strange man's help, from a ditch into which she has fallen.

Next, however, this man points his gun at her. But then, however, after questioning the reason for her journey, he finally sends her on her way, giving her a nickel, thereby underscoring the idea (as is typical within Welty's fiction) that appearances or assumptions quite often do not foreshadow true realities and outcomes. At last, when Phoenix finally reaches town after her long and arduous trek, she has forgotten why she came in the first place. This poignant but comical twist, too, is characteristic of Welty's ironic, often tragicomic style.

In Eudora Welty's novel The Optimist's Daughter (1972) the author explores the literary theme of the sustaining power of friendships, and in particular, the way friendships can disappear but then reappear, with surprising strength, within a small Mississippi Town. The story focuses on he main character, Laurel McKelva Hand, and a circle of old friends that she still calls her "bridesmaids" In the fictional Mount Salus community, the importance of lasting friendships is clear, especially upon the death of her father.