The Stories of Welty by Eudora Welty

First published:A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, 1941; The Wide Net and Other Stories, 1943; The Golden Apples, 1949; The Bride of the Innisfallen, 1955; The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, 1980

Critical Evaluation

Eudora Welty is one of the best contemporary writers of short stories. A writer of novels as well, her reputation has been built upon her short fiction, especially that of her early collections, A CURTAIN OF GREEN AND OTHER STORIES, and THE WIDE NET AND OTHER STORIES. Although somewhat restricted in setting, her short stories have demonstrated a wide variety in subject matter, ranging from the treatment of sideshow freaks in “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” to that of the improvisations of a jazz musician in “Powerhouse.” There is also a wide variety in moods, from the broad humor of “Why I Live at the P.O.” and “Petrified Man” to the ironic and grim horror of “Flowers for Marjorie,” from the fantasy of “Asphodel” to the devastatingly prosaic quality of “No Place for You, My Love.” There is also a wide variety in time, for although most of the stories are set in the present, some like “First Love,” “A Still Moment,” and “The Burning” go back to the times of Aaron Burr, Audubon, and the Civil War.

However wide the variety of theme, mood, and time, the first thing that strikes the reader is Welty’s absolute control over all her material. She is a master craftsman, and when her stories fail, as they sometimes do, it is often because her virtuosity as craftsman and experimenter overshadows the material on which she is operating. She has an uncanny ability to create a mood and setting for a story in a few sentences. “The Whistle” and “The Key” reveal in their opening paragraphs all there is to know about the story. Nothing is wasted, and all is used to make clearer the inevitable epiphany that occurs in her stories. Perhaps it is her interest in photography and painting that has sharpened this gift of observation. Her ear seems as sharp as her eye; the beauty parlor gossip in “Petrified Man” echoes diction, cadence, and tone brilliantly. The story called “A Memory” is a good illustration of this control, as the girl on the beach seems to be enacting Welty’s own creative process. The girl makes frames out of her fingers and observes the world through them. Whereas the girl cannot include the disordered and grotesque in her framing vision, Welty is able to confine and fix all of life in her frame. An order is given to every “still moment” that her artistry captures, and the purely formal delight the reader experiences is one of the great pleasures her short stories afford.

There is, however, more than a caught moment in her stories. What gives them their solidity is that there is a caught place as well. Although her stories are mostly set in the present, they cannot really be called contemporary. For example, none of her stories in her first two collections has anything to do with World War II, although they were published at its height. The only sense in which the present is contemporary is that she has chosen to write of the contemporary South, more specifically the region of Mississippi. In THE BRIDE OF THE INNISFALLEN, in particular, she has moved outside the South for her settings, and this move has not produced better work. In this volume, stories such as “Kin” and “No Place for You, My Love,” which are set in the South, tend to be the best ones. This strong sense of place is closely tied to Welty’s artistic control. It is the concrete reality to which her lyrical flights and moves toward fantasy must always return. Welty herself seems aware of the importance of place, and she has written an article called “Place in Fiction” that throws much light upon her own fictional achievements.

Moving inside this frame of artistic control and place, her short fiction reveals certain views and themes that seem to be characteristic of the stories as a whole. They are often an exploration of what it means to be isolated and set apart. In story after story, the leading character seems set apart or cut off from his world. His isolation is often marked by a peculiar grotesque quality, as if the spiritual and emotional separateness were symbolized by physical abnormality. Her stories are thus peopled with deaf mutes, Ellie and Albert in “The Key” or Joel Mayes in “First Love”; by deformed blacks, Keela in “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden”; by the feebleminded, Lily Daw in “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies”; by the very old and very small, Phoenix Jackson in “A Worn Path” or Solomon in “Livvie”; by the very young and very fat, Gabriella in “Going to Naples”; and by the frustrated and insane, Clytie in “Clytie” and Miss Theo in “The Burning.”

Yet those who are isolated are most often people who seem more valuable than the world that isolates them. The reason is that Welty treats their separateness with sympathy and even with love. The isolation is what allows her to get inside her characters and, once inside, their shared isolation, with the reader and with the author, becomes a thing of beauty. Welty is very close to Sherwood Anderson in this aspect of her fiction. The “truth” in the grotesque is the special theme of WINESBURG, OHIO, and the beauty, if not the truth, is the very thing Welty focuses upon. Because the abnormality is lovingly handled, the characters are invested with a certain beauty and mystery. Mr. Marblehall has a secret second life, with a second wife and child in another part of town. Ellie and Albert share a speechless communication that sets them apart from the others in the waiting room in “The Key,” a communication that moves over into love as they discover the key on the floor. This mystery is often connected with a certain ritual, as it is in Phoenix Jackson’s long trek along the “worn path” to get medicine for her grandson. Phoenix is as old as the land itself, yet the mysterious force that keeps her going, and over which she seems to have little control, gives her life a singular sort of beauty for those who see her life in its entirety and not in its isolation. Mystery is closely related to the lyrical quality as well as the ritualistic and almost mythical. As the couple in “The Whistle” silently burn all their furniture while the whistle blown when a freeze threatens is sounding outside, one senses the elegiac beauty created in their wordless act and the beauty revealed as this action enables them to speak with each other.

At times, the beauty is revealed by the fact of isolation. At other times, it comes as a result of the pathos created by the attempt to reach beyond the isolation. In other words, there are those cut off in place and those cut off from place. R. J. Bowman, in Welty’s first published story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” is an example of the latter. An outsider by occupation as well as nature, Bowman is a rootless salesman who stumbles onto a family in the middle of nowhere, Sonny and his pregnant wife, and in their prelapsarian, timeless familial bond of love, he sees all that his life has not been. Precisely because he sees, he achieves a certain human dignity even as he dies, somewhat ironically, of a heart attack. His heart fails but also succeeds. The same pathos is achieved in the treatment of Harris, another traveling salesman who in “The Hitch-Hikers” wishes people would call him “you” rather than “he.” Then there is the Eastern businessman in “No Place for You, My Love” who travels south out of New Orleans with another stranger to the place, an unnamed woman, but goes to the end of the road and returns without ever knowing why he went or where.

As opposed to these figures cut off from place, there are those cut off in place, and these are more tragically and also more comically treated. There is, on the comic side, the humorously paranoic narrator of “Why I Live at the P.O.” who escapes the isolation of living with her family by going to live at the post office. The tragic statement of the familial sort of isolation is found in the person of Clytie, who is so hounded by her family and the demands they make on her that she is driven to suicide. There are all the characters living in Morgana in THE GOLDEN APPLES who feel the need to escape but who also know that there is no escape.

Indeed, it can be said that most of these characters who are caught in their isolation are torn by two forces and move toward a tenuous sort of resolution. Most often it is a movement from innocence to experience, the kind symbolized in “Livvie,” in which the young black wife whose old husband, Solomon, is on his deathbed, moves from her sheltered existence to the flashy world of Cash McCord, the fieldhand who offers her all the pleasures of the world. The same conflict and process is present in Jennie in “At the Landing,” when her quest for Floyd leads her from her sheltered home to the shack along the river where she is raped by Floyd’s fellow fishermen. Yet her innocence seems to prevail, even as she is raped. The innocents are the blessed in Welty’s fiction, and if to the world their innocence takes on a grotesque quality, they appear to be normal in the loving world of the inner heart that Welty explores so well.

Closely related to this theme of innocence and experience is the theme and structural device of the dream versus the reality, and the fusion that sometimes remains at the heart of life in general and life in Welty’s fiction in particular. Although this is a theme and structural device employed more fully in Welty’s later work, especially in “Music from Spain” in THE GOLDEN APPLES, it can be seen in such early stories as “The Purple Hat,” “Flowers for Marjorie,” “Powerhouse,” and “Old Mr. Marblehall.” At times, when the dream is submitted to the reality, there is a shock, as in “Flowers for Marjorie” or “At the Landing”; but at other times, the dream and the reality seem inseparable, as in “The Purple Hat” and “Powerhouse,” whose improvisations on the theme of his wife’s death seem both real and unreal to the reader. What remains true is that most often it is the dream, the lyrical quality in which it is expressed, and the innocence that gives it birth that is beautiful. “Reality” is never beautiful in itself but is made so by its contact with the dream and the characters who reveal or embody it.

With such emphasis given to man in his particular environment, there is not much attention given to his place in the universe. Although there is little metaphysical speculation in Welty’s stories, the presence of the universe and its reality is sometimes disturbingly felt. When perceived, the universe is at best indifferent and, more often than not, seemingly malevolent. Man is sometimes measured by his reaction to it, as in “The Whistle,” where the warmth generated by the couple and their fire is equal to the chilling force of the unseasonal weather, but when special attention is drawn from man to the universe, man stands in a somewhat defeated posture.

Bibliography

Champion, Laurie. The Critical Response to Eudora Welty’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Gygax, Franziska. Serious Daring from Within: Female Narrative Strategies in Eudora Welty’s Novels. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Gretlund, Jan Nordby. Eudora Welty’s Aesthetics of Place. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.

Gretlund, Jan Nordby, and Karl-Heinz Westarp, eds. The Late Novels of Eudora Welty. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.

Johnston, Carol Ann. Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1997.

Kreyling, Michael. Understanding Eudora Welty. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

McHaney, Pearl Amelia, ed. Eudora Welty: Writers’ Reflections upon First Reading Welty. Athens, Ga.: Hill Street Press, 1999.

Montgomery, Marion. Eudora Welty and Walker Percy: The Concept of Home in Their Lives and Literature. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004.

Waldron, Ann. Eudora: A Writer’s Life. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

Weston, Ruth D. Gothic Traditions and Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.