Eudora Welty's Mothers and Daughters
by
Helen R. McLane
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the
College of Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
Florida Atlantic University
Boca Raton, Florida
April 1989 Eudora Welty's Mothers and Daughters
by
Helen R. McLane
This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Ann Peyton, Department of English. It was submitted to the faculty of the College of Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.
As-s±stant D n, College of Humanities
Chair erson, Department of English Dea~ ge ~f li::::rtf. J'AJ
Date I
ii ABSTRACT
Author: Helen R. McLane
Title: Eudora Welty's Mothers and Daughters
Institution: Florida Atlantic University
Degree: Master of Arts
Year: 1989
In Eudora Welty's works, the importance of the mother- daughter relationship lies in its ability to expand the reader's understanding of the individual's search for enlightenment. As a wanderer acts and reacts to people and events, she is most often influenced by her mother, or mother-like figures, and other pairs around her.
Welty's bonded women represent the historical, religious, psychological, and sociological studies of this interwoven human relationship; her characters are subtly crafted to develop a myriad of close and, at the same time, distant bonds. Welty emphasizes the mothers and daughters of Losing Battles, Delta Wedding, and The Optimist's Daughter though Virgie of The Golden
Apples represents the strongest point for the conclusion that the mother-daughter relationship supports and enhances Welty's works.
iii Table of Contents
Chapter I Introduction ...... 1
Chapter II The Mother-Daughter Relationship:
A Support for The Golden Apples ...... 4
Chapter III Mothers and Daughters:
Those Around Virgie ...... 16
Chapter IV Virgie Rainey: The Need for Her Mother . . 38
Chapter V Conclusion . • • • • • • 48
Works Cited . • . . . . .50
iv CHAPTER I
Introduction
This essay is a study of three stories from Eudora
Welty's The Golden Apples: "The Shower of Gold," "June
Recital," and "The Wanderers." The strongest connecting
link of the stories is Virgie Rainey because, as Ruth M.
Vande Kieft describes her, she is the "most perceptive and emotionally mature of the wanderers" (Eudora Welty 138).
She brings readers back to The Golden Apples. She demands attention. She is the heart of the work.
Like the human body, The Golden Apples is supported by the mother-daughter attracting-opposing bond, a skeletal system. The work functions by the strength of its individual mothers and daughters, a muscular system. It flourishes with the energy of Virgie Rainey, its heart.
And like The Golden Apples, Virgie is supported by her mothers who emphasize the mother-daughter relationship.
Consequently, this essay looks separately at the mother-daughter relationship, the mothers and daughters of the work, and Virgie as influenced by relationships and individuals.
1 2
The beauty of Virgie is that she progresses not alone but with assistance. The wonderful, mysterious, contra dictory mother-daughter relationships tie Virgie to her mother Katie and also to her teacher Miss Eckhart. But
Welty does not simply present two pairs, she surrounds and mingles them with others who accent the struggles, the confusions, the disasters, and the successes. Mothers and daughters form an interlocking system that enhances Virgie and controls The Golden Apples. Within the work, Welty develops a life in progressing, changing stages.
The life is Virgie's. As seen in the three stories, the three moments of her life resemble the cycle of nature.
The strong mother-daughter bond represents the cycle, which in turn, allows Virgie's stories to become support for the whole of The Golden Apples. The collection of stories, thus, is Virgie's life in three moments.
Outside these stories, Welty creates momentary pieces of characters' lives in Losing Battles, Delta Wedding, and
The Optimist's Daughter. When looking at Welty's mothers and daughters, how can one exclude Ellen Fairchild, Gloria
Renfro, and Laurel McKelva? Though these characters are placed in differently constructed relationships from
Virgie's, they support the attachments and rebellions that unite and repel mothers and daughters. Welty's multiplicity emphasizes the importance of this often over-looked bond: it is "the artist's obligation, not to be 3 overwhelmed by the world, but to include its disparities"
(Fialkowski 66). However, none of the pairs illustrate better this "emotionally close and emotionally distant" bond than Virgie Rainey and her mothers. Critical works outside of literary studies support this connection. For example, Lucy Rose Fischer explains that the purpose for her own sociological study of mothers and daughters is to
"understand the meaning of this apparent contradiction"
(8). This paper highlights Welty's fictional characters who mimic this phenomenon of human life: Virgie embodies this duality. Whether she holds herself back or is held back by others to absorb experiences, she manifests Welty's encompassing theme: the individual's search and discovery of herself and her place in the world. CHAPTER II
The Mother-Daughter Relationship:
A Support for The Golden Apples and Beyond
Why does Eudora Welty not emphasize the father-son relationship in The Golden Apples? Though she includes the interesting grouping of King MacLain and his twin sons
Eugene and Ran, their ties link more at a distance than intimately. Therefore, Welty chooses mothers and daughters because of their endless cyclical nature and their nurtur ing qualities. Carol Pearson describes the heroic quest by gender: "Women seem to linger in the stages that empha size affiliation . . . and men in those that emphasize separateness and opposition" (7). The Golden Apples is a collection of stories that expresses one main character's attempt to mature and continue her search with aid from her mother, the lessons from her teacher, and the interrelated actions of other mothers and daughters around her. This miraculous character is Virgie Rainey. And she is made female for a designed purpose. Welty employs the feminine
4 5 because, as Carol P. Christ emphasizes, "Women's stories had not been told. And without stories there is no articulation of experience" (Diving Deep 1); "Woman's quest seeks a wholeness that unites the dualisms of spirit and body, rational and irrational, nature and freedom, spiritual and social, life and death" (9).
Welty chooses the searcher and her search for The
Golden Apples. By creating a girl who develops into a woman who appears an accomplished yet still struggling wanderer, Welty tells her readers that women can achieve high levels of mental awareness in similar ways to men yet remain unique. Instead of allowing readers to assume her characters have qualities that apply to both sexes, Welty creates females who emphasize the point themselves.
However, in The Golden Apples the search for self is taking place aided and hindered by relationships. Welty crafts these relationships to support and debilitate women more so than men. Undoubtedly, she does not mean to imply that one gender is superior to the other. In emphasizing women, she justifies Nancy Chodorow's claim that "women's mothering has been taken for granted" (3). Welty uses mothers and daughters over fathers and sons for four reasons.
First, Welty dramatizes the fact that "the father is rarely a child's primary parent" (Chodorow 3). No one disputes this claim. The woman bears, nurtures, rears, and 6 disciplines her young children. Since the father participates little, "the woman is the natural nourishing principle," becoming the strongest early connection the child makes (Neumann 283). Virgie's father is seldom mentioned, so that the mother-daughter relationship becomes her foundation.
Second, this early tie is never forgotten. The searcher looking for herself is often led to or finds her own way back to her mother. To understand herself, to understand existence, the wanderer seeks the time before confusions and frustrations. This goal corresponds to the child's time before birth and to the comforting early days in her mother's arms. The woman as mother is the
"quintessential accommodator," forsaking herself for others; yet as "conflict is a necessity," the child must separate to be on her own (Miller 125). She returns to fill necessary fragments for her understanding. Though stepping backward, returning to the mother is often the path to selfhood. Welty uses female characters because
"men cannot provide the kind of return to oneness that women can" (Chodorow 194).
The spiritual importance of the feminine was expressed in the duties early people gave to their women--caring for children, tending small animals, and farming--which elevated these activities beyond everyday "into the mysteries of preservation, formation, nourishment, and 7 transformation" (Neumann 282). Largely, ignorance of human procreation added to the mysteries, and women were revered for giving life (Stone notes anthropologists 125). Women transformed "nature into a higher, spiritual principle"
(Neumann 286). Erich Neumann describes the mother and daughter of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the power that the people saw in the cyclical relationship. Edith Hamilton also describes the importance of Demeter and Persephone
(over the Olympians), not simply because of their link to the earth and crops: "In their hour of grief, men could turn for compassion to the goddess who sorrowed and the goddess who died" (54).
Through this historical, religious understanding of the power of the female body and spirit, readers can accept women as a means of returning to or of finding oneness.
However, women no longer have the mystical power they once had, so that now Welty relies on the mystical inner qualities of the human consciousness. Men and women, therefore, should have similar abilities or chances for success.
Third, culturally men have a more hierarchical role than women. In terms of role reversal, which highlights the mother-daughter relationship, fathers seldom allow their sons or their sons seldom want or are able to change positions and parent their fathers (Fischer 166). There also is no reversal between fathers and daughters. As 8
William J. Stuckey notes of Welty's works, "Fathers, apparently, are too far removed from the power of their daughters" (40), whereas, mothers "practice ' selflessness'" and "suppress their personal ambitions and sacrifice their own interests to attend to others' immediate wants"
(Polatnick 35). This quality in mothers allows daughters to gather power and assume their mothers' positions. Yet
Welty positively pictures this social phenomenon; she enjoys exploring the unique and powerful relationship patterns that role reversal creates.
And fourth, Welty compares the socially advantageous men to the more restricted women because "roaming can be a mental attitude rather than a physical activity" (Stroup
236). Though her male characters wander both physically and mentally, are goals any easier to find for them than for the women who are expected to remain at home? Welty presents to her readers four men who exemplify the need to roam. King and Eugene MacLain who both leave Morgana and who both remain unfulfilled by the end of The Golden
Apples. Welty also develops Ran MacLain's efforts at home.
She even supplies touches of Virgie's father Fate who, according to Old Man Rainey, "traveled around a bit. And settled hereabouts for the adventure of it'' (252).
In opposition to what society says--"Men will do the important work; women will tend to the ' lesser task' of helping other human beings to develop" (Miller 40)--helping 9 another person can greatly enhance the woman's insight into her own life; therefore, she removes or ignores social boundaries. "The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits," Adrienne Rich states.
"The most important thing one woman can do for another," she continues, "is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities" (246).
This is what Welty does in The Golden Apples. She gives Virgie mothers who push and pull. These women influence Virgie with their desires for themselves and for her. Rich says, "This cathexis between mother and daughter--essential, distorted, misused--is the great unwritten story" (225), yet Welty has created pieces of the story. "Asserting that language is a patriarchal institution," Patricia S. Yaeger says Welty's works "insist that this institution can be transcended, that women's writing is an ecstatic possibility, a labor or mystery that can take place in some fruitful void beyond man's experience" (561). The void beyond the male experience must be the mother-daughter relationship, whereas, the void beyond human experience is what all of Welty's wanderers search for.
The beauty of the female experience, the mother with her child, steps beyond role reversal and connections with nature. Many critics have noted the conflict between mothers and daughters. The strange similarities and 10 oppositions place their relationships on several levels at once; "The continuing interdependence between adolescent daughters and their mothers is further affected by the fluidity of the adolescent's own conflicting wishes to grow up and to remain a child" (Cohler 23). The bond creates a
"sense of closeness and lack of individuation" (Cohler 25).
Sheila Kitzinger explains,
In cultures which emphasize individuality and personal achievement, like ours, this sexual identity can make it difficult for them to define themselves as separate from their mothers, and the struggle to break away and be women in their own right results in conflict. (63)
The clash takes women into other modes of thinking, creates times of restlessness, and causes them to look for new relationships or newness in the old ones.
Within each pair of women, there is conflict that extends beyond the mother and daughter as representatives of the cycle of life. For example, Simone de Beauvoir states, "Becoming a mother in her turn, the woman in a sense takes the place of her own mother" (Second Sex 551).
This ability of the woman to create life leads to the idea that "caught up in the great cycle of the species, she affirms life in the teeth of time and death" (554). In the sudy of Welty's works, Peggy Prenshaw observes the "mother who gives us life and with it mortality. Transcendence of death comes from her in nature's promise of a natural renewal, a sexual immortality" ("Woman's World" 48). These 11 ideas lead back to the development of the earth goddess.
Early people saw what women's bodies and what their work with plants and animals produced. Though these ideas have been subverted to male dominion, they have not been lost because of the strength of their truths. Welty promotes "the influence of the Southern physical world"
(Cash 48), the closeness of nature and women's roles. As
Ellen Fairchild rides to a picnic, she sees
the repeating fields, the repeating cycles of seasons and her own life--there was something in the monotony itself that was beautiful, rewarding- perhaps to what was womanly within her. (Delta Wedding 240)
Ellen sees the cycles of the fields, her part of the cycle through childbirth and childrearing; and, though she is only one link in the chain, she is important to the existence of the overall. Though Delta Wedding, which includes many aspects of the supporting and debilitating mother-daughter relationship, represents many lives at different stages of the cycle, it is only a piece of the cycle.
Unlike Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples shows several moments of the cycle. Conscious of "family development for several generations," Sara McAlpin notes that Welty "most often concentrates on family in the present involving, directly and typically, two generations" (480). In three stories, Kati~'s and Virgie's lives are seen as three moments of nature. 12
The Golden Apples opens with "Shower of Gold . " Katie
Rainey narrates with a flood of information about the inhabitants of Morgana and their activities. Katie's gossipy method reminds readers of an earlier oral tradition as she tells people's histories. Katie is a watcher of people.
Only occasionally does she mention her daughter, but
Virgie does appear in this early story of The Golden
Apples. She is Katie's baby who swallowed a button. In placing Virgie briefly in the first story, Welty sets in her readers' minds a beginning. "Shower of Gold" represents newness, springtime. Virgie is a new life.
Already there are mild hints of Virgie's boisterousness and rebellion. Even now the baby girl walks on her own; Katie in the middle of her tale notices Virgie: "There she runs"
( 11) •
Welty takes this mother and daughter through three natural stages noted by Ann Dally as enclosure, extension, and separation (Mothers 4). In "Shower of Gold" Katie lovingly pictures her baby. This scene naturally appears to be the enclosure stage but not for long. Though enclosure is an attractive time for a mother and daughter, the nextstage is necessary in order for them to develop.
Within the few pages of The Golden Apples's beginning story, Virgie and Katie have begun to separate.
The next story, "June Recital," though told by Cassie 13 and Loch Morrison, provides valuable information with hints of Virgie's future. Like Katie, Cassie is a watcher, a linear historian (Messerli 87). She hears Fur Elise, which propels her memory back to her childhood days when she and
Virgie took piano lessons from Miss Eckhart. The title lends itself to those lessons, the competition of talented and beginning musicians, summer time, and youth. "June
Recital" crosses and links childhood and adolescence in that there is so little difference between the two times of life. Actually, too few years and experiences pass for the child, Virgie or Cassie, to change much. Virgie waits.
As Cassie passively watches and remembers, Virgie participates in separations from her mother, her mother like mentor, and the community. When the story closes, she rebels most distinctly from Katie as she is seen with a boy in the old MacLain house; though Miss Eckhart attempts to destroy her old student, Virgie ignores the old woman; and with her head held high Virgie walks through a collection of community women.
Then The Golden Apples ignores Virgie for twenty years until the final story, "The Wanderers." Welty intentionally makes the last story Virgie's, so that the wanderer must wait for her chance to quest through introspection. To tell one's own story is to begin to understand oneself. In contrast, Cassie, perceptive when younger, naturally tells her story earlier. But Virgie 14
waits to gain experiences. She must travel "backward in
order to go forward" (Tiegreen 16). During the previous
times of her life, she is active; in "The Wanderers," she
is passive. Unlike "Shower of Gold," Virgie's story is
quiet, an inner view. Having watched in order to
understand, in order to some day wander on her own, Virgie
reaches her time.
After great transgressing, Virgie remembers some of her
past actions. She supports the idea that "people are the
sum of everything they have ever been and of all the
experiences they have had" (Dally, Mothers 35). Her
reflectiveness links her directly to her mother. "The
Wanderers" contains moments of Katie's thoughts that help
explain her actions and Virgie's and connect their lives.
From extension, Virgie and Katie enter the separation
stage. Katie's death releases her daughter, who can begin
a new life. At this moment readers see that "Shower of
Gold" is not Katie's story, only a tale told by her.
Katie's story is tied to Virgie's; they come to "The
Wanderers" together. This final story is not an ending but
a beginning, a continuation.
"The Wanderers" represents autumn with harvests, maturing, Virgie's middle years, and Katie's final years.
However, Katie's death circles the framework of The Golden
Apples back to Virgie's new life; Virgie never "doubted that all opposites on earth were close together" (265), so 15 that all the outwardly opposing yet attracting mothers and daughters of The Golden Apples add to Virgie's existence as well as to their own. CHAPTER III
Mothers and Daughters of The Golden Apples:
Those Around Virgie
Beyond the bone structure, the supporting mother daughter relationship, The Golden Apples is strengthened by its muscles, the individual mothers and daughters. The women perform roles important not only to themselves and to the story line but to Virgie, who takes in all that circles her. The women add to and take away from her strength.
They are the action.
Welty makes the distinction between paired mothers and daughters and grouped families from The Golden Apples through Delta Wedding, Losing Battles, and The Optimist's
Daughter. The latter three novels focus on families and the ties within each. Individuals emphasize their loneliness but realize that they depend on the other members.
The family remains a strong bond that has gathered strength through human time. On the other hand, two paired individuals do not hold the same immediate response as the family, yet Welty's pairs contain as much insight and
16 17 frustration as her individuals and families. Paired characters cause confusion, demand loyalty, and provide pain and love like groups do. When focusing on a family, she includes single members, their larger group, and their responsibilities to that group. For example, the
Fairchilds and the Renfros are seen together or alone, seldom in small collections. Of Delta Wedding, June L.
Hinton notes that Welty's uses families because
"relationships with others often involve merging with the larger human community; the proud vaunting sense of self may be lost, but the force of the group love is gained"
(124). When Welty shifts attention to mainly separate characters, she brings in to play other individuals to create pairs. For illustration, little is mentioned of the
Rainey family; Virgie is either alone or linked with one other.
The popularity of the alienation theme comes from its truth. Despite human contact people are ultimately alone.
Though the brightness at the end of the day comes from the belief that there may be higher levels of understanding in this world, individuals often conclude that this knowledge can be found through, learned from, or at least more easily obtained in the company of others. Here, Welty develops her characters with either one other character or an entire family.
From this development she moves readers forward along 18
her winding paths to (maybe) some new awareness. Welty
uses what Joseph Campbell describes as the labyrinth motif
where "trails are deliberately confused" (115). He
explains that one's looking for a way out is often through
suggestions made by others, such as teachers (150). Though
Welty intentionally twists the information she supplies,
she does not further block readers' understanding by
cluttering individuals and pairs with families, which would
remove the importance of the bonded relationship. In
contrast, to add pairs to family groupings and individuals
is meant to direct readers' attentions.
Mothers and daughters are coupled and their uniting
finally is what leads Virgie (and others) beyond herself.
For a wanderer to continue with her quest, she must be able
to let go of herself, her belongings, and her familial
ties, so that she may be free. The search requires her
complete vigilance, which must be learned. Virgie's mothers teach her this uniqueness; they develop in her the
taste for more than the moment, for more than the everyday,
unlike families that restrict forcing the individual to
inwardly struggle or to leave the group. With Welty's work there is purpose within relationships because of the wonder of "human interdependence" (Arnold 37).
Within Welty's purpose, women "look to each other for guidance" (Bolsterli 149-50) though they may also find inhibitions and delays from these helpful mothers. For 19
Virgie these women are her natural mother Katie and her spiritual mother Miss Eckhart. The human situation insists upon some sort of reliance on others. The individual struggles against her needs; either she does not want to be alone or needs assistance. But because she needs relation ships, she allows herself to become surrounded or consumed by love. Welty knows that love "creates more problems than it solves, because love entails relationship, and relationship entails responsibility, and responsibility entails a loss of freedom" (Polk 122). Without love there can be no feelings of loss or regret. Emotional responses trigger within the person a time to study herself. Without love there are no adventures.
From reactions to and interactions with other people, the searcher brings the outside information in though what she seeks is inside herself. Each person delves uniquely.
For example, Miss Eckhart "is able to get out of self, out of knowledge, out of reliance on verbal communication, to roam free in the world of music" (Demmin and Curley 244).
But what of Miss Eckhart's old mother, the invalid, the watcher, the non-artist? Considering her small part in
The Golden Apples, what little bit does she add or detract from her daughter? Mrs. Eckhart contributes to the familiar reversed role of appearing daughter-like to her daughter's mother-like role. She depends on her daughter for shelter and financial support. 20
Thus, "it seemed to Cassie that it must, after all,
have been the mother that slapped the daughter" (62). The
slap comes after Mrs. Eckhart disturbs a piano lesson. For
a moment readers know a piece of the old woman: ''she would
scream as though through Virgie Rainey she would scream at
the whole world, at least at all the music in the world''
(62). The mother demonstrates the only way she can that
she, like Virgie, cannot follow or be forced to follow Miss
Eckhart's form of vision through music. No matter how much
power the teacher has, the old mother shows opposition to what is not true for herself.
The physical violence also portrays the daughter's
anger at being denied freedom due to her ties with her mother. "Should daughters forgive mothers (with mothers
under their heel)?" Cassie wonders (61). When the mother
is not forgiven, the daughter holds a deep resentment; this parallels Cassie's own situation. Miss Eckhart resents not being able to wander. But does the old woman hold her daughter back when it is known that questing is to be done mentally more so than physically?
With Miss Eckhart, Welty develops a searcher who is short-sighted and overly caught up in her own problems making it impossible to see and to sympathize with others.
Welty uses Cassie to bring out aspects of Miss Eckhart.
Cassie, knowing intuitively that to search means to let go and that the community refuses to accept the teacher, notes 21
repeatedly of Miss Eckhart, "Everything she did was wrong"
(33). The Golden Apples affirms a person's sight and her ability to trust and follow that sight, yet Welty provides moments in which readers to sense that Miss Eckhart is doomed.
But for the most part, Miss Eckhart is a wanderer, a teacher, an artist. She greatly influences Virgie as well as Cassie. Through her music she attempts to gain control over her own bits of sight and to maintain power over others. "June Recital" sews together two parts, the teacher as "true musician" (51) and as "misguided" searcher
( 31) .
Her power is teaching because a wanderer has no ties and an artist has no obligations. She sees in Virgie the greatest potential and pushes her hardest. Once she realizes Virgie's strength against her, Miss Eckhart becomes obsessive. This delusion is her undoing as Virgie propels herself further away.
Welty's development of Virgie and Miss Eckhart affirms
Ann Dally's three psychological stages of mothering: mothers and daughters go through at least the two stages of enclosure and extension trying to reach the third stage of separation. Extension, though difficult, is simpler than attempting to separate once the bond is made (Mothers 94).
Often the more one draws closer, the stronger the other will push away. Miss Eckhart represents what Nancy Friday 22 calls "impossible love," which means that mothers are
"lonely and want to bind their daughters to them forever"
(23). Although, Miss Eckhart's intentions go from drawing
Virgie in to forcing her away (from Morgana) in hopes that whatever the younger woman experiences will reflect back to her teachings and herself. In other words, she wants to and believes she will become sighted through Virgie's meetings and events: "Virgie brings me good luck!" (The
Golden Apples 42).
But, for Virgie, this part of her life is just a moment, a single part. She is the "most perceptive and emotionally mature of the wanderers," but she is "getting a belated start" (Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty 138). In the meantime, she has already resisted another mother. She turns originally to Miss Eckhart perhaps because Katie
"represents the culture of domesticity, of male centeredness, of conventional expectations" while her teacher "becomes the countervailing figure" (Rich 247).
Rich also notes that the second mother is often an artist or teacher; Miss Eckhart, being both, is the ultimate second mother to run to when one's natural mother is busy or over-involved with her family.
Welty's characters again support psychological studies that "when biological mothers do not parent, other women, rather than men, virtually always take their place"
(Chodorow 3). These women, called substitutes, are often 23 relatives or teachers (Dally, Mothers 110). Helene Deutsch finds that "the woman's narcissistic pride in the product of her body can easily be transferred to the success she achieves through tender care, education, and personal influences in her relation with another woman's child"
(Second Sex 393-94). Welty's example is Miss Eckhart who defines closeness as what she sees as beautiful and uplifting in music, so that she attempts to force music on
Virgie "to protect her daughter from repeating her own fate" (Deutsch 307).
On the other side, because Virgie sees music as only a
"temporary escape" (Evans 100), she will not accept a fate similar to Miss Eckhart's; Virgie is "always wishing for a little more of what had just been" (The Golden Apples 249).
The student seeks more than momentary sight, yet in "June
Recital" she exerts her power as witnessed with the removal of the metronome.
Resembling Virgie and her teacher, Gloria and Miss
Julia of Losing Battles push and pull in order to escape from or influence each other. In the extension stage,
Gloria turns from the only mother figure she has had (until marrying into the Renfro clan). In contrast, "impossible love" and protection of her daughter-student compels Miss
Julia to attempt to control Gloria's career and life. Miss
Julia, like Miss Eckhart, tries to succeed for herself by using her student, yet "no one can truly profit for long at 24 another's expense" (Pearson 2). Miserable, both women leave the world while their "daughters" remain stronger for having known them and for having learned from their mistakes.
Cassie watches the errors Virgie and Miss Eckhart make. Cassie knows there are links between the teacher and student and between opposites, like herself and Virgie, when she thinks that she "was so poor in music, and Virgie so good (the opposite of themselves in other things!) that
Miss Eckhart with her methodical mind might have coupled them on purpose" (The Golden Apples 38). Nevertheless,
Virgie, the talented pianist, drops music; Cassie, second class to Virgie's first, becomes Morgana's piano teacher.
Cassie admits, "She was Cassie in her room, seeing the knowledge and torment beyond her reach" (77).
In "June Recital" Cassie uses verbs without action, like to see, to feel, to know. She is designed to in directly foretell future events for The Golden Apples. By watching and recalling, she plays opposite Virgie's action.
"How much might depend on people's being linked together?"
(63). While she wonders about other people, she too is part of the combining.
Though she does not outwardly admit it, Cassie connects herself as a sibling with Virgie; she confesses that she both loves and hates Virgie. However, Miss
Eckhart does the linking; therefore, she is the 25 inspirational mother of the two girls. Yet Cassie, watching the pairs of Katie and Virgie, Virgie and Miss
Eckhart, Miss Eckhart and old Mrs. Eckhart, questions the relationship between herself and her own mother.
To bring opposing women in the same line of view,
Welty uses other contrasting characteristics, like movement and non-movement. "June Recital" accents forms of walking that through Cassie foreshadow upcoming events. For example, Miss Eckhart is unsteady and "zigzagged" (31);
Loch thinks she is ill like he is. Mrs. Morrison "swayed"
(94), but Virgie clicks her heels, does not try to escape community scrutiny, and cuts a path through the community ladies until she meets and passes her old teacher on the sidewalk (91). Virgie's steadfast walking suggests she will not falter like her teacher and Cassie's mother.
Movement fills "June Recital" because Cassie is a watcher, though her only movements are in her room and the rush from the house. Like Cassie, Mrs. Katie Rainey seldom leaves her house, but slight suggestions force a hint of something else. Early at the recitals, "she trembled with delight, like a performer herself" (71), but "Cassie's mother could not walk across the two yards on time to save her life" (71). Cassie watches other mothers and daughters to discover what they have or to see why hers is unful filling. She remembers "she always lost her mother" but was responded to with "It's you that vanishes, Lady Bug, 26 you that gets away" (53). Throughout Cassie's story, she
feels ignored by her mother. However, her mother "sees
herself as a failed artist" (Yaeger 578), and she feels
trapped by her family when she says, "Child, I could have
sung" (46).
"Should daughters forgive mothers?" Cassie questions.
Though her question arises while she watches Miss Eckhart
and old Mrs. Eckhart, it returns to her life. Cassie's
story continues from "June Recital" to "The Wanderers."
Readers find that Mrs. Morrison remains a dominant force in
her daughter's life as Cassie does not allow her mother's
death. She keeps her alive through ritualized memory by
spelling out "Catherine" in flowers, erecting a large angel
over the grave site, and referring continually to her mother.
The daughter's excessive actions toward her mother can
be explain as Cassie "attempting to bring her mother back
into the communal garden: she does not allow Catherine
Morrison to have a plot of her own in death'' (Yaeger 578-
79). As Welty makes Cassie obsessive, she promotes Dally's
reference to the inability or fear of the inability to
separate from the mother (Mothers 4). Cassie wants to stay
in the enclosure stage and have her mother take care of her. Also, supportive of the Catherine-Cassie relationship, Deutsch notes, "The normal puberal drive to
liberate from such a tie had been intensified into a 27 hostile rejection of the mother. But instead of freedom there came intensified fear of separation" (309). The daughter's actions keep the mother from peace. The result is that Mrs. Morrison continues to wander even in death as
Juba tells Virgie, "I seen that Mrs. Morrison from 'cross the road in long white nightgown, no head atall" (The
Golden Apples 269).
Cassie creates a reality out of dreams, which is noted of human relationship outside of fiction; Dally notes the ease: "The inner is the world of our known and unknown selves. This is fantasy yet it can be more real than any concrete reality" (Mothers 118-19). By assuming nurturing responsibility to her mother's memory, Cassie keeps herself her mother's little girl: "Idealization can be described as a feeling of love toward something or somebody towards whom one actually has feelings of both love and hate. The hate is ignored and so kept from consciousness" (Dally,
Inventing Motherhood 93). Similarly, Cassie admits,
"Virgie was a secret love, as well as her secret hate" (The
Golden Apples 43-44). Unlike her feelings toward Virgie,
Cassie cannot accept any negative feelings toward her mother. The readers put together what Cassie never considered; her thoughts help readers through The Golden
Apples.
Perhaps named for the prophet Cassandra, Cassie recalls Yeats's poem that ties the stories together. 28
Perceptive as a a child and teenager, she advances no further: the poem "ran perfectly through her head, vanishing as it went" (96). She knows she can see but not understand the links between people, things, and events.
She feels the uniting around her but cannot reconcile herself and her own mother. Thus, Cassie proves the importance of the mother-daughter relationship. She has two strikes against her: the mother's unanswered frustrations and the daughter's feelings of neglect.
Because Catherine and Cassie remain in Morgana, they fail to understand that a "false solution to the crisis of identity is never to leave home" (Washburn 27). Neither are willing to give of or to themselves; therefore, neither can forgive the other nor move on from her predicament.
The Golden Apples is filled with struggling paired women while Welty's other works focus on the individual versus the family. The family is no more valuable a lesson than pairs; it is simply another example of what the lonely individual gets herself into. Again mothers within the the family circle help and hinder their daughters. Applying to searchers either in a tight bond or in an enclosed group,
"characters need to reach into the quiet center of themselves and ~wonder' about life, that each needs to discover his own ~ mystery'" (Stroup 53).
Unlike the inner world of The Golden Apples, Losing 29
Battles is set with a family reunion full of talkative
relatives. Welty uses excessive conversation to force
readers to seek their own way through the chatter to find
the possibly enlightening undercurrent: "Part of the
reason that they talk is to communicate, but part of the
reason is to dissemble, to mask, to hide" (Rubin, William
Elliott 214). Gloria symbolizes the inner conflict of
uncovering one's questions, searching for one's truth.
Gloria represents Welty's only fighting opposition to
the family. All others may see the suffocating bond and may attempt to free themselves, but more often they see the
family as fundamentally important to their existence. Most characters wrap themselves tightly into the family's folds, except Gloria who actually resembles what is revealed from her background. She is an orphan who was raised under the power of the success-seeking, opinionated teacher Miss
Julia. Throughout Losing Battles Gloria wants the independence she learned from her teacher while she talks about "family ties" and says that her husband Jack "has got family piled all over him" (162). She wants "separateness despite intimate contact" (Marrs 707): she wants both an individual's separation from others and a single family's separation from the extended family. Pulling away from her past, ironically she has begun a family of her own. She demands, "Some day yet we'll move to ourselves" (415). She wants what she rejects; she wants a family on her own 30 terms. Losing Battles, different from The Golden Apples, emphasizes the family and the physical continuation of the cycle with Gloria's daughter Lady May.
Despite her stubbornness the Renfros continue, without a slip in the beat of their lives, to believe that the family is the foundation for each individual. They induct
Gloria as Jack says, "You're one of the family now" (Losing
Battles 301). Granny reminds them, "We're all part of it together or ought to be" (332), which can be viewed two ways. All are part of the family as each person is support for the unit, and all are part of the larger world as each person tries to understand and accept her responsibilities.
However, each person has moments where she loses sight of the group. For instance, Granny appears steady, committed to the family, yet she becomes frantic: "My children have deserted me" (342). The closeness of others can cause the individual to feel secure and at the same time unprotected.
Surrounded by the clan's reunion, Gloria does get caught up into the flow of the group. She relates her life under Miss Julia's power yet remembers fond moments: "I thought I might even be hers" because "What else would I have ever thought I could be a teacher?" (303). With the focus on the orphan and her parent, Losing Battles supports the importance of the mother-daughter relationship. Miss
Julia, through the memory of others, sees herself as an abandoned mother: "Year in, year out, my children at Banner 31
School took up the cause of the other side and held fort against me" (288). Miss Julia, like Miss Eckhart, is
"feared and shunned" by the community for her tremendous grief (Rubin, William Elliott 224). Though Miss Julia is buried like a member of the family, she is not. She remains outside the circle when Losing Battles closes. But for Gloria, Miss Julia's passing announces the young woman's time to explore. Similarly, as Granny goes off to bed, Gloria takes the matriarch's rocking chair. One generation moves on for another.
Unlike the struggling individuals of Losing Battles,
Delta Wedding has separate people also in a family but no members (with the exception of Robbie Reid, who like Gloria marries into the family) refuses the connection with the
Fairchild whole. Of Welty's families, Louise Y. Gossett describes the group's power:
Its members, willingly or unwillingly, are rooted deep in their connections with others. The power of the family to hold lives together and to direct them has persisted as a standard by which to judge the acts of individuals. (103-104)
Though the family directs its members, the controlling voice of Delta Wedding is Ellen's, who is "the center of consciousness . . . most balanced . . . most mature and objectively 'reliable'" (Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty 99).
She is planted firmly in the middle of the family that she has produced.
As a relation through marriage to the Fairchilds, 32
Ellen does not at all times appear a part of the family's
circle but as one inside. McAlpin notes that there are
"finely calculates degrees of being inside and outside the
family" (485). This position slightly opposed to the
family depicts Ellen as having an understanding of her
station not simply as "mother to the world" (Delta Wedding
70). Her maternal instincts have acted as a catalyst for
her to reach her inner calmness.
As M. E. Bradford sees the family whole (201), McAlpin
notes that the family prevents "its members from coming to
the kind of realization gradually gained by Ellen" (492).
Along with her position inside the group, her life's experiences have refined her intuitive powers. Ellen leads or directs her daughters. Welty gives glimpses of paired women, so that "even within the same family, a mother may have different kinds of relationships with each of several daughters" (Fischer 196). As Louise Westling notes, "The
interactions between Ellen and her various daughters continues to shift the novel's perspectives among women and girls as they reflect upon the human relationships of courtship, marriage, and family" (70). Ellen has several unique young women with whom she interacts: Shelley the
loner, Dabney about to marry, India out-going and intuitive, and Bluet the toddler. Along with her daughters, Ellen watches others, such as "funny in the head" cousin Maureen, the girl in the woods, and visiting 33 cousin Laura.
Laura, another strong consciousness in Delta Wedding, supports Ellen's nurturing. Ellen's natural daughters have their singular moments of reflection, but they cannot separate from the family for long periods. Like the talking Renfros in Losing Battles, the Fairchild family chatters and prevents its members from solitary reflection.
Laura, like Ellen, plays opposite the talkative group.
Much of what readers know about Laura comes from her contemplative times. She experiences these instances because she is unusual compared to the Fairchilds.
She is an orphan and a newcomer to the family. Laura knows that the family is "truly caring" but at the same time "restrictive and diminishing" (McAlpin 484). One moment she is playing with her cousins and the next they have run off and left her. Still, Laura wants to be part of the family.
For the remainder of Delta Wedding, she tries to fit in whether as a part of the wedding or as a permanent member of the Fairchilds. In the same way that Cassie
Morrison's acts make readers understand "the nature of the predicament" (Warren 161), alienated Laura discovers it herself. Ellen, with memories of her own mother, helps
Laura come to this final understanding. Counterpart to
Ellen's scene with the fields, Laura "felt part of her cousins' lives--part of it all" (242). This realization 34 comes after she decides to return to live with her father.
Her "trustworthiness of sight" (Vande Kieft, Eudora Welty
81) has brought her, though young and inexperienced, to know that she will have her memories and will always be part of the family. She knows that Shellmound is a place
for renewal but that she must return home, to the "real" world (Westling 93).
Welty also employs elements of nature to reinforce mothers and daughters. Ellen sees her own cycle as "a momentary pulse beat in the changeless rhythm" (Westling
92). Despite another pregnancy, her autumn approaches suggesting her daughters' springs.
Delta Wedding supports the idea that mothers help and hinder their daughters' lives, though the paths women
"follow are determined by their own choice or by force of circumstances" (Kerr 133). Ellen predominantly helps
Laura, but Welty inserts contrasting pairs as in her other works. Within The Optimist's Daughter, Welty unfolds a daughter and her family's painful past. Through unpleasant memories, the daughter comes to accept and to grow from her experiences.
In The Optimist's Daughter the daughter is Laurel and the optimist is her father. She comes home for him but ultimately recognizes the anger and division between her parents. During her stay, she returns to her mother and journeys to a momentary oneness by comprehending both her 35 mother and father. She allows her family's past to be truthful and to become a part of memory not disrupting the present.
Laurel dislikes Fay, her father's second wife; like her mother, she misplaces her own anger to her father.
From the platform of her childhood home, she sees all the influential lives. She searches through the Judge's study, her mother's locked-away desk, and her parents', now Fay's, bedroom. The more she wanders through the house the more she becomes angry. By the sound of her own voice, she pairs with her mother Becky: "recited in her mother's voice" (153). The sound takes her back to her mother's death bed; Becky "had died without speaking a word, keeping everything to herself, in exile and humiliation" (157).
Becky's problems are her "self knowledge and strength"
(Watkins 436).
It is Becky's anger which forces Laurel to understand her own. Once there is understanding, there can be forgiveness (similarly, Cassie never understands because she cannot forgive) and finally healing of the individual.
Therefore, Laurel learns from her mother's mistake.
Consequently, Laurel must not only forgive her mother but her father and Fay. For her the transcending moment comes from a deep dream in which she and her long-deceased husband Philip
were looking down from a great elevation and all 36
they saw was at the point of coming together, the bare trees marching in from the horizon, the rivers moving into one, and as he touched her arm she looked looked up with him and saw the long, ragged, pencil-faint line of birds within the crystal of the zenith, flying in a V of their own, following the same course down. All they could see was sky, water, birds, light, and confluence. (The Optimist's Daughter 186)
Like all people, Laurel is the sum of all the experiences she has had (Dally, Mothers 35). She moves "beyond judgment to acceptance of Fay through her understanding that Fay and Becky were each, in their own way, necessary to her father" (Randisi 149), therefore, necessary to herself. Once the past is safe in memory, she says to Fay,
"I know you aren't anything to the past. You can't do anything to it now" (207). Laurel, with help, has freed herself; "Through her mother's grief, Laurel has reached her own" (Westling 108).
The individual does not know what the family wants or expects unless there is communication. Even beyond communication, the single wanderer must ask herself thorough questions about her own and others' problems before attempting to discover answers. Laurel digs deeply into her subconscious not to figure out Becky but to come to terms with the anger. Once the anger is elevated, she can name it, accept it for herself, and accept it in others. Laurel, like Virgie, comes to understand her mother through memory. The acceptance of anger is the acceptance of conflict, opposites, such as life and death. 37
This knowledge triggers rebirth despite death and allows for individuation.
The strongest example of Welty's use of separation versus connection is the mother-daughter relationship, which naturally supports that "for the over-whelming majority" of polled mothers "it was mothers and daughters who were close, a bond that for many women was due to their closer identification with their girls" (Genevie and
Margolies 289). Within Welty's works, the mother-daughter relationship goes beyond close identification and into the complex give-and-take of humans as isolated journeyers within confusing, stifling social groupings. Each mother and daughter in The Optimist's Daughter, Delta Wedding,
Losing Battles, and The Golden Apples illustrates the important contributions she makes to the other and to herself. In The Golden Apples Virgie's and Katie's effects on the other and the self ultimately lead to visionary moments for both. CHAPTER IV
Virgie Rainey:
The Need for Her Mother
Welty takes Virgie Rainey on a journey which the reader can follow. Before her audience, Welty sets a challenge: here is one way to see the beauty of life; read and attempt to feel the oneness within reach. The journey resembles human life as it is able to enlighten the reader with "the essential portion" that "spills over from the story into our lives, enabling us to make connections"
(Vande Kieft, "Eudora Welty: Question of Meaning" 37).
Through mothers and daughters in Welty's works, the reader can tie together the human situation of being alone and of being part of a union. Lowry Pei suggests that "to be a self in The Golden Apples is be alone, inaccessible, to lack ties to other human beings" (428). In addition,
Pei says that the reader sees the stories as "someone's view of the world--and the reader must experience that other subjectivity thinking thoughts he does not necessari ly understand" (415). But in searching through Welty's coupled women, the reader discovers that these characters
38 39 are both alone, being in different human bodies, and
associated, having been in the same body or in connecting
situations at one time, thus, perpetuating their special bond. To continue her meandering, the viewer of The
Golden Apples needs only to follow Welty's mothers and daughters and find her own path.
Because of the limited time in The Optimist's Daugh ter, Laurel must travel mostly in one direction. As
Laurel's quest takes her "from connections with the mother through trials of initiations to an understanding of oneself and one's relation to the universe" (Prenshaw,
"Women's World" 64), she step-by-step advances to a conflu ence of herself, her parents, and the world, although her memories and dreams transcend linear thought.
Welty's works of limited time--The Optimist's Daugh ter, Delta Wedding, and Losing Battles--are seen as single moments of life: "Participation in the family and the community makes it possible to shut out the consciousness of time and mortality" (Rubin, Faraway Country 136), which applies to Laurel as well as Gloria Renfro and Laura
McRaven. Their stories revolve around single eye-opening moments that they somehow manage with their families nearby. However, Virgie explores throughout her life and has many glimpses beyond herself. Her time, limited as any mortal's, is augmented, so that she takes steps forward and backward in the three frames of her life. Thus, The Golden 40
Apples is a life in pieces (as opposed to a piece of a life). Virgie's activities appear the ''typical hero's progression as a cone or three-dimensional spiral, in which it is possible to move forward while frequently circling back" (Pearson 13).
Though Virgie is aware of her distance, she cannot help but be connected to others. The paradox of the quest is that the searcher is alone and yet seeks a form of togetherness. In The Golden Apples Virgie moves from one point of life to another by means of the people and events she encounters. By far the strongest influences come from women who act in the roles of mothers and daughters. Of these Katie stands as the most vigorous though she predomi nantly appears unencumbered with a quest while Virgie, excessive. Katie and Virgie deceptively resemble an opposing relationship; they resist and yet combine to reinforce each other. They epitomize the mother-daughter relationship.
Through these natural conflicting stages of life,
Virgie and Katie represent the natural cycle which is seen in the three stories "Shower of Gold," "June Recital," and
"The Wanderers." Each tale appears different from its antecedent because "mother-daughter relationships do change" (Fischer 196). But perhaps the most compelling events happen in the three moments of "The Wanderers."
In the final story, life now asks that Katie and 41
Virgie go beyond their separate, opposing spheres to accept
each other, to extend a helping hand to the other. As
Welty takes from life around her, she places her mothers
and daughters in realistic relationship settings: "The
greatest rewards and satisfactions of adult life, and also
probably the greatest suffering, are found in those who
continue to mature into middle age and beyond" (Dally,
Mothers 20). As "parents are the 'watchers' of their
children" (Washburn 127), "The Wanderers" opens with the
mother waiting for the daughter.
Katie gathers from memory her frustrations, "'It's a
wonder, though,' she thought, -A blessed wonder to see the
child mind'" (The Golden Apples 234). Yet Virgie, soothing
her mother as one would a child, "bent and gave her mother
her evening kiss" (234) Now, Virgie is accommodating,
supportive. This wanderer is transformed from her early
days as an active adolescent into these middle years as a
passive, thinking adult; she becomes "the artist" who "is
both performer and audience, watched and watcher" (Pitavy
Souques 115). The beginning of "The Wanderers," like the
entirety of "Shower of Gold," is made up of Katie's ram
blings including glimpses of her daughter. Yet the mother
has moved beyond the talkative early stage to an inner
roaming. Katie opens "The Wanderers," as she opens The
Golden Apples, except that her final thoughts equate to the mythical flash of one's life before one's eyes. She thinks 42 faster and faster and even remembers back to her own mother. With her death comes Virgie's inward struggles.
For the first time, Virgie is alone to make her own deci sions.
Except for the time she left horne, Virgie has always been with Katie. Alfred Appel, Jr. justly insists that wanderers need "discipline and control" (231), so that
Virgie's years at horne provide the strength she needs. The time away and return prove important early elements to her development. Through Virgie and Katie, Welty incorporates the clash and separation that occur between mothers and daughters, especially as explained by Chodorow (135).
Though Virgie follows this pattern, she only briefly leaves her mother and Morgana. When she returns, "she began to run toward it . . . so little had she had to go away with and now to bring back--the lightness made it easier" (The Golden Apples 265). As a teenager she is too inexperienced to survive alone. Yet, when she encounters
Katie, she is met with "You're back at the right time to milk for me" (265). Times have changed. Katie exerts
"indirect control" in the form of possessiveness (Neisser
82). She now expects Virgie to settle down and to do some work. The mother and daughter reverse roles as Virgie becomes Katie's supporter.
This vital time allows Virgie the luxury of "absorbing the events around her'' (Pugh 449). Welty's aim is to put 43
Virgie under Katie's power to emphasize the lessons learned from the mother-daughter bond. The lessons culminate in a vision of oneness with nature. And in "The Wanderers" the first vision or second important stage is Katie's.
"The Wanderers" is the autumn of life and yet Welty's references emphasize that "the autumn of a woman's life is far richer than the spring if only she becomes aware in time, and harvests the ripening fruit" (Castilleja 150).
While Virgie fans her mother, Katie "was thinking rapidly to herself" (The Golden Apples 235). She recalls her own special moments of sight by comparing herself to Miss
Snowdie MacLain, who "never got a real good look at life.
. • . Not the kind of look I got, and away back when I was twelve year old or so. Like something was put to my eye"
(226). Despite lifelong mundane duties, even "the most ordinary can pluck a grape or a fig from time to time"
(Skaggs 227). Quickly Katie realizes, "Mistake. Never
Virgie at all. It was me, the bride--with more than they guessed. Why, Virgie go away, it was me" (236).
With this insight Katie becomes, as Dally describes,
"the mother who has strong feelings of enclosure and extension and yet who manages to achieve the stage of separation is likely to be the best mother of all" (Mothers
96). How can the daughter progress if the mother does not?
With death there is rebirth, continuation. Katie allows
Virgie's choice of a different life. Virgie "brings 44 together the threads of the whole, not to fix them, but to arrange them in new ways, building ' new life' out of
Morgana's old experiences" (MacKethan 188). Immediately after Katie passes, readers know that Virgie "was not much afraid of death, either of its delay or its surprise" (The
Golden Apples 236). Virgie's acceptance supports Welty's use of death in the way that Beauvoir explains, "There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question" ("A Very Easy Death" 38). Virgie explores her own life; when the mother finds peace, paths open for the daughter. Katie's "life seems extraordinarily com plete" (Skaggs 222). Juba tells Virgie about Katie's ghost, "Her lyin' up big on a stuff davenport like in a store window, three four us fannin' her" (268), so that
Virgie does not dwell on her mother but turns to herself.
Virgie and Katie become Welty's special characters,
"characters who develop the most certain vision transcend reason; they do not settle on some absolute set of princi ples'' (Phillips 11). Virgie and Katie rise above the pettiness that keeps Cassie and her mother prisoners. Both pairs counterbalance through their contrasting ghosts and daughters' lives, so that they stabilize The Golden Apples.
For example, because "communal and ritualistic values are more important to the family than any individual's aspira tions for freedom and self-fulfillment" (Prenshaw, "Eudora 45
Welty" 471), Cassie does not break away but remains tied to rituals meant to hold onto her mother.
Virgie, on the other hand, accepts her past as memory and moves beyond desperate feelings of aloneness, so that the third important stage of "The Wanderers" is the daugh- ter's vision. Virgie walks around the ceremonies and civilities of her mother's funeral searching for something.
During a ritual at the river, she acknowledges, "All was one warmth, air, water, and her own body. All seemed one weight, one matter" (The Golden Apples 248). Later, in a dream she remembers the river, and she awakens to her search:
she knew that now at the river, where she has been before on moonlit nights in autumn, drunken and sleepless, mist lay on the water and filled the trees, and from the eyes to the moon would be a cone, a long silent horn, of white light. It was a connection visible as the hair is in air, between the self and the moon, to make the self feel the child a daughter far, far back. (The Golden Apples 267)
John A. Allen explains that the "mother and daughter are the complementary elements of a whole feminine personality, a whole self" (16). He derives this from studying Virgie as "a virgin goddess she is self-sufficient" ( 16) .
Others outside of literary criticism also note the power of the virgin goddess who is "under the dominion of no one"
(Castilleja 92). Though Welty may have named Virgie for the virgin goddess, more likely Virgie represents the virgin of the search, which suggests she cannot tell her 46
story at any earlier stage. Here again, Virgie and Cassie
oppose each other to balance The Golden Apples. Cassie's
physical virginity becomes subverted to Virgie's spiritual.
Though Welty does not emphasize sexually active or inactive
women, she creates the differences to juxtapose characters.
Once Katie is gone, Virgie can express the mother in
herself. Perhaps this newness comes from the essence of
Katie. Virgie accepts herself; she reaches "loving one
self" that "means recognizing one's needs and being able to
accept conflict, separation, and change" (Washburn 61).
As Virgie affirms her mother, she also remembers,
understands, and accepts her teacher, whom she "had come
near to loving" (The Golden Apples 276). By discovering a
"new sympathy for the dilemma of her outcast tutor"
(Devlin, Eudora Welty's Chronicles 172), Virgie rises above
the binding connection. She frees herself only after
releasing both mothers "with an act of love" (Jones 187).
Thus, they contribute to her decision.
Without prolonged consideration, Virgie leaves Morgana
using the same path to MacLain that she had used many times
before but then "only to turn around and go right back"
(The Golden Apples 272). For wanderers, "in order to be
free they must strike out on their own" (McMillen 112).
After all that has happened, she understands, "it had not mattered about her direction" (275), nor her age, nor her
gender. All that remains important is that she must go. 47
Virgie is not maturing late. The Golden Apples "lets
everything filter through the consciousness of Virgie • . .
bringing her to an awareness of her own actions" (Bryant
31). She accepts her need to roam without guilt. Before
starting out, she needs the many elements that she consumes
from her mothers. Like Katie, Virgie thinks backward. She
hesitates after seeing a man she knows: "Was it to him she
had come, backward to protection? She'd have had to come
backward, not simply stand still" (The Golden Apples 274).
She becomes "absolutely and thoroughly alone, past tragedy,
past wanting" (Rubin, Faraway Country 149). Despite "a
horror in life" (275), she and a beggar woman spend a quiet
moment
listening to the magical percussion, the world beating in their ears. They heard through falling rain the running of the horse and bear, the stroke of the leopard, the dragon's crusty slither, and the glimmer and the trumpet of the swan. (The Golden Apples 277)
With strangely child-like qualities reminiscent of Katie
and the musical elements doubling back to Miss Eckhart,
Virgie begins her new life leaving The Golden Apples open-ended. She has matured enough to bring the duality of
separate mothers together within herself and of conflicting
sides of herself into a single hopeful sight, yet she can watch the world as if seeing it for the first time. A wanderer needs clear eyes that allow new visions their moment. "Take your time, Virgie" (264). CHAPTER V
Conclusion
"As we discover," Welty points out in her auto biography, "we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge" (One Writer's Beginnings 112). With her mothers and daughters, Welty creates examples of lives coming together in The Golden Apples. As her symbols
"occur naturally" (Bunting 56), so do her characters.
Welty states openly that "men and women are different," but continues, "I don't mean to say that they're not equally important. But they're different. That's the wonderful thing about life" (Brans 339). Her female characters, paradoxically similar and different, blend to describe the wonderful and not-so wonderful parts of life.
Welty intentionally chooses mothers and daughters who naturally double, oppose, and combine. As Fischer sets out to prove that the human mother-daughter relationship changes but "is not a simple process of development in one direction" (197), Welty draws from "real" life in order to make readers search the maze as her women search. These
48 49 characters stand out as carefully crafted parts of a whole when they separately seek a unity with their own oneness through experiences they have with other people. Under standably, questing for oneself while surrounded by others often leads to conflicting interests and clash means the wanderer must solve the problem before continuing. Because she combines contrasting elements in her works, Welty
"wants us to see that smallest gesture, to participate in her vision of things as intensely meaningful" (Warren 169).
Eudora Welty asks, "In writing, do we try to solve this mystery? No. . . . we rediscover the mystery" (The
Eye of the Story 137). With the aid of Virgie Rainey and her mothers, readers may find their own questions and begin to see the mystery. Works Cited
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