Losing Battles by Eudora Welty

First published: 1970

Type of plot: Comic and ironic pastoral

Time of work: The 1930’s

Locale: The rural Mississippi hill country

Principal Characters:

• Granny Vaughn, the presiding matriarch of her large family, whose ninetieth birthday is the occasion for the reunion that brings its members together
• Jack Renfro, the hope of the family’s survival, just out of prison to rejoin them
• Beulah Renfro, his mother, who will become the new matriarch of the family
• Miss Julia Mortimer, the community schoolteacher whose values are antagonistic to those of the family
• Gloria Short Renfro, Jack’s wife, who represents the tension between the values of family and the values of Miss Julia
• Judge Moody, a former student of Miss Julia who sent Jack to prison

The Novel

Losing Battles is not an easy novel to read, not because it is philosophically demanding or because it has a complex plot, but rather because of its style (it is written almost entirely in dialogue) and because of the large number of characters (twenty-eight listed in the cast at the front of the book) who populate it and who join in the talk that makes it up. It is precisely the talk and tale-telling of the rural family, however, that constitute the novel’s essence, as it attempts to capture the spirit of a tight-knit oral culture. The plot is so simple as to be nonexistent, even though this, unlike many of Eudora Welty’s earlier works, is a long novel of more than four hundred pages. The action takes place on the day of Granny Vaughn’s ninetieth birthday—the occasion for a reunion of the family that includes the Renfros and the Beechams—and the following day, which is the day of the funeral of the old schoolteacher of the rural area, Miss Julia Mortimer. Indeed, although Miss Julia does not figure in the novel in actuality, her legend and her influence dominate the last half of the book, much as the clan of Granny Vaughn dominates the first half.

The central event which unites these two strands is the return of Jack Renfro, who has just been released from prison; Jack, the oldest son of Beulah Renfro, one of Granny’s grandchildren, is the central hope of the family—an innocent but brave and loving young man who has chosen to stay with the family instead of making his fortune elsewhere. Jack has been in prison because of a fight he had with Curly Stovall, the town storekeeper, over Granny’s gold ring, which Curly took in payment for a family debt. After Jack fights Curly and carries off the safe in which the ring is kept (which is lost on his trip home), he is sent to prison by Judge Moody for “aggravated battery.” The story of Jack’s trial and adventures surrounding his return home from prison is presented in great detail by the symphony of voices of the characters themselves, in such a way that, as is typical of an oral culture, the past blends with the present. On Jack’s way home to the reunion, he helps pull a man’s car out of a ditch, only to find out when he arrives that the man is none other than Judge Moody himself. When Jack returns to undo his Good Samaritan deed, his wife and child barely escape being run over by the judge, who swerves off the road to avoid hitting them; as a result, the judge’s car is stuck in a precarious position perched on the edge of a precipice. Because Jack claims that the judge saved the life of his wife and child, he vows to help him free his car and then brings him and his grumbling wife back to the reunion with him. Jack’s wife, Gloria, is the schoolteacher who has succeeded Miss Julia; she fell in love with Jack when he was one of her overgrown students. She had his child, Lady May, while he was in prison. Gloria is in many ways at the very center of the tension between the rural world of the clan and the sense of progress and ambition that Miss Julia represents. Miss Julia has been set against her star pupil and protégée, who married Jack Renfro and thus became merely a wife and mother in the midst of the clannish backwardness of the rural world. When the clan checks its genealogy in the family Bible, it discovers that Gloria is actually a cousin of Jack and thus she is welcomed into the family much more warmly than when she was considered to be an outsider aligned with the foreign world represented by Miss Julia.

Following the freeing of the judge’s car, a comic masterpiece of description, the novel comes to a close rather quickly with the funeral of Miss Julia. At the end, Jack, Gloria, and Lady May walk off together, presumably to a new life somewhat freed from both factions, with Jack singing “Bringing in the Sheaves” so loudly that “all Banner could hear him and know who he was.”

The Characters

Character and a sense of place are the two most important elements in this pastoral novel, with the wide cast of characters who represent the clan constituting the very sense of place that is Banner, Mississippi, and its rural environs. Although Jack is the central figure in the work, and his return from prison signals that he will carry on the family tradition, Granny herself is always there as the presiding matriarch, prepared to hand down her leadership role to Jack’s mother, Beulah Renfro. Opposing the values represented by Granny and Beulah is Miss Julia Mortimer, the teacher who tries to bring the new values of education and progress into this rural world.

Representing both sides are Judge Moody, Miss Julia’s first protégée, who, although he has aligned himself with the side of progress, has remained to adjudicate the actions of the rural world, and Gloria, Miss Julia’s last protégée, who is caught between Miss Julia’s realm and the realm of the clan. Gloria, however, has her own aims—to be with Jack and their child, Lady May, without the support of Miss Julia’s plans for her as a schoolteacher and also without subsuming herself within the all-encompassing family life of the clan.

The novel focuses not only on a multitude of individual characters but also on character in the ultimate sense—that is, the strength of character to withstand the many losing battles that constitute life. Although the rural people distrust Miss Julia and all she represents, they must admit that she, like themselves, understands the need to endure, and they begrudgingly admire the strength of her character. Although they know that she was “St. George and Ignorance was the dragon,” they also affirm their own values of personal strength and endurance. As Uncle Curtis says, “There ain’t no end to what you can lose and still go on living.”

Critical Context

Losing Battles was published to the great anticipation of those discriminating readers who had valued Welty’s short stories and novels since the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. Few American writers with a relatively small body of work such as Welty’s have been so honored by their literary peers. Although Welty had published several novels before Losing Battles, her reputation rested (and still rests) on her short stories, and only in the 1970’s and 1980’s has she gained a wide readership commensurate with her critical standing.

Losing Battles, her first long novel, is radically different from the style and structure of her short stories. It does not have the tight mythic and symbolic pattern of the stories or their usual metaphoric structure. It is rather epic in intent, focusing less on the individual lives of her Southern grotesques than on the collective life of the culture from which they all spring. Thus, it is diffuse rather than tight; moreover, its attempts to replicate the oral culture which it both celebrates and laments make it seem idiosyncratic and therefore inaccessible to the general reader.

Losing Battles was enthusiastically received by many critics and praised as a masterpiece; some reviewers, however, suggested that it was a masterpiece that would remain largely unread. Misunderstanding the values of the rural culture from which it springs, many critics tended to identify with Miss Julia. They generally saw the family clan as more suffocating than supporting. Indeed, it is difficult to unseat oneself from the modern, print-oriented world of fragmentation and separation and understand the values of the oral world of family unity on which the novel focuses. One not familiar with the culture Welty depicts may find it difficult to understand why the clan sees education as so threatening, why they take it to be an evil, a mystery, a threat. The real issue underlying this fear, however, is the conflict between the concrete world of the family, which is presented as the real natural world, and the world of abstractions propounded by education, which is seen by the folk as artificial.

Welty does not really take sides in this novel, for she understands the absurdity of the dedicated Miss Julia as well as the pettiness of the devoted family; rather, she attempts to present a balanced view of these two worlds, the primitive-mythic and the progressive-modern, locked in a comic-epic battle for survival. The work falls into the tradition of the folktale or tall tale, although it is presented within the conventions of realism—a combination that makes it difficult for the reader to know how to approach it. Because of this generic confusion, it did not gain for Welty the recognition that she had long deserved. That honor was reserved for her next book, The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), which won the Pulitzer Prize and which started a series of celebrations of Welty and her work that extended from Mississippi to New York—a long overdue recognition for a great writer who embodies the simple virtues of her oral culture while having consummately mastered the demands of her writing craft.

Bibliography

Bass, Eben E. “The Languages of Losing Battles.” Studies in American Fiction 21 (Spring, 1993): 67-82. Bass explores the opposing feminine modes of communication which serve the common goal of challenging male authority in Welty’s novel. Bass compares the effectiveness of Julia’s written and bookish modes of communication to Granny Vaughn’s spoken word.

Champion, Laurie, ed. The Critical Response to Eudora Welty’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. In her introduction, Champion presents an overview of the criticism on Welty’s fiction. Five separate essays by different scholars are devoted to various aspects of Losing Battles. Includes a helpful bibliography of works for further reading.

Gray, Richard. “Needing to Talk: Language and Being in Losing Battles.” The Southern Literary Journal 29 (Spring, 1997): 72-86. Gray contends that Welty’s novel is similar in style to Faulkner’s works in that Welty and Faulkner both portray life as a series of dialogue that creates an open-ended chain of discourse with no possibility of finalization. Gray characterizes this style as “folk-speech” and shows that all of Welty’s characters have a need to tell their stories.

Gretlund, Jan Nordby. “Welty’s Losing Battles.” The Explicator 51 (Fall, 1992): 49-50. Gretlund argues that several critics who admire Welty have misinterpreted passages in her works that reflect the dark or evil side of human nature. She uses the example of the instance when 90-year-old Grandma Vaughn invites her 12-year-old grandson into her bed. Gretlund contends that Grandma’s action could have been an innocent mistake.

Kornfeld, Eve. “Reconstructing American Law: The Politics of Narrative and Eudora Welty’s Empathic Vision.” Journal of American Studies 26 (April, 1992): 23-49. Kornfeld examines the contention of some legal scholars that Welty’s novel shows that American law should be reformulated to overcome bias against minorities, women, and the poor. Welty’s book reflects an empathic point of view by having the judge reinterpret the law based on sympathy for a family’s troubles.