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Crisis of Love : Women's Strategies in Eudora Welty's Fiction

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Crisis of Love : Women's Strategies in Eudora Welty's Fiction CRISIS OF LOVE: WOMEN'S STRATEGIES IN EUDORA WELTY'S FICTION By HERBERT J . PHELAN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1993 UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES For my mother and in memory of my father . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author is indebted to his mother, whose support, both moral and financial, allowed him to complete this dissertation. Professors Anne Goodwyn Jones and Andrew Gordon of the University of Florida were especially helpful in providing suggestions and critical comments that greatly facilitated the writing of this present study. Special thanks must go to typist Cathline Bridges- Liveoak, whose kindness and generosity toward the author during the final preparation of this disseration are greatly appreciated iii TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT v CHAPTERS 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Notes 8 2 AMBIVALENT RELATIONSHIPS: WOMEN AND THE GODLIKE MALE 9 Notes 59 3 ONLY SECOND BEST: THE ELIMINATION OF THE GODLIKE MALE 62 Notes 80 4 AFTER THE WEDDING: PORTRAYALS OF MARRIED WOMEN 81 Notes 120 5 TRAPPED IN A LOVING FAMILY: WOMEN AND THE EXTENDED FAMILY IN DELTA WEDDING AND LOSING BATTLES 123 Notes 145 6 THE SINGLE WOMAN'S SEARCH FOR PERSONAL SATISFACTION: WOMEN WHO FAIL 147 Notes 180 7 THE SINGLE WOMAN'S SEARCH FOR PERSONAL SATISFACTION: WOMEN WHO SUCCEED 182 Notes 237 8 CONCLUSION 241 WORKS CITED 25 9 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 263 IV Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy CRISIS OF LOVE: WOMEN'S STRATEGIES IN EUDORA WELTY ' S FICTION By Herbert J. Phelan August 1993 Chairman: Anne Goodwyn Jones Major Department: English This study of Eudora Welty's fiction explores two themes that have not received adequate critical attention in the past: first, it analyzes four basic strategies that her women characters use in an attempt to achieve a sense of personal satisfaction in their lives and, second, it stresses the importance that religious motifs, primarily death-and-rebirth rituals and mystical experiences, play in the strategies of her most "successful" women characters. The four women's strategies that most occupied Welty's creative attention during her career are (1) pursuing a godlike man, (2) marrying, (3) living within an extended family, and (4) attempting to find personal satisfaction on their own. Welty deals with each of these strategies either by writing a group of stories that reveals various possible results inherent in each or by presenting women characters V in a single novel whose experiences in using one of these strategies are almost diametrically opposed. In other words, Welty seems to be weighing the possibilities for success or failure that each strategy affords a woman. This study reveals that early in her career Welty concentrated most of her creative energies on depicting women who use one of the first three strategies- -all of which require that they become involved with a man. Later, however, Welty begins depicting in depth women artists who attempt to find personal satisfaction without becoming involved in close personal relationships with anyone. Furthermore, two of these women who succeed do so only after they have undergone both a ritualistic death and rebirth and have had a mystical or quasi-mystical experience. Therefore, it is necessary to view these women's experiences in light of certain religious theories, particularly those set forth by Mircea Eliade and William James. This study concludes by arguing that Welty fundamentally distrusts close personal relationships of any kind, viewing them as traps that more often than not inhibit a woman from reaching her full potential as a human being, and that she ends her career to date by privileging strong, independent women who attempt to achieve a sense of personal satisfaction on their own. VI ' CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In an interview with Robert Van Gelder (1942) , Eudora Welty remarked that her early attempts at short-story writing "were awful." She explained: I'm from Jackson, Miss., and never had been much of anywhere else, but the action in my stories took place in Paris. They were awful. I remember the first line in one of them: 'Monsieur Boule deposited a delicate dagger in Mademoiselle's left side and departed with a poised immediacy. This, of course, makes no sense at all. I loved the 'poised immediacy' so much that I've remembered the whole sentence. (Prenshaw, Conversations 1) We shall no doubt have to take Welty 's word that the story was "awful,"* but one thing that strikes the reader of her fiction is that the opening sentence of this aborted short story seems to suggest that almost from the beginning of her writing career Welty has been interested in the potential for male violence toward women that resides just beneath the surface of female/male relationships. In fact, a similar incident occurs in one of her earliest published stories, "Flowers for Marjorie" (1937), when Howard murders his wife, Marjorie, by plunging a butcher knife "under her breast" ( Collected Stories 102) because he feels she is too happy 1 2 being pregnant while he suffers the emotional turmoil of being unemployed and unable to find work. Although Welty so far has written only two other works in which a man murders a woman ( The Robber Bridegroom [1942] and "The Demonstrators" [1966]), she quite often explores female/male relationships in which the potential for love is thwarted because the man causes the woman emotional and sometimes physical pain in one way or another. In her comment on a similar theme in the stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Welty reveals an anguished sensitivity toward the inability, or refusal, of many people to love one another, though in this instance her comments are directed toward human beings in general who fail to treat one another lovingly. All the stories she [Porter] has written are moral stories about love and the hate that is love's twin, love's imposter and enemy and death. Rejection, betrayal, desertion, theft roam the pages of her stories as they roam the world. The madam kicking the girl in "Magic" and the rest of the brutality in the characters' treat- ment of one another infects their relation- ships; the protests they make from the weakness of false dreams or the laying down with a cold cloth over the eyes, on up to towering rages- -all this is a way of showing to the inward eye : Look at what you are doing to human love. ( Eve 33-34) Welty uses strong nouns in the above passage ("rejection," "betrayal," "desertion," "theft," "brutality") to express her reaction to Porter's treatment of "human love." These words might well be used to describe the treatment that some women receive at the hands of others in 3 her own works- -usually , in fact, from men. For example, Jenny Lockhart in "At the Landing" (1943) is raped and deserted by her lover, and then raped again by a gang of fishermen; Miss Sabina in "Asphodel" (1942) and Snowdie MacLain in The Golden Apples (1949) are repeatedly deserted and betrayed by their philandering husbands; and Miss Eckhart in The Golden Apples and Miss Julia Mortimer in Losing Battles (1970) are rejected by many members of their communities who do not appreciate the importance of what these two teachers are trying to teach them. Other women, such as Ellie Morgan in "The Key" (1941) and Ruby Fisher in "A Piece of News" (1937) , fail to achieve fully satisfying relationships with their husbands because of either their inability to express their needs to them or their husbands' inability to respond to their needs, or both. Given her well-known reluctance to discuss her private life,^ we can only speculate about the psychological motives underlying Welty's lifelong fascination with the theme of failed love, but some passages in her essay "The Little Store" (1975) suggest that this fascination may have had its origin in her childhood. The essay recounts her delight in going to the "Little Store" near her family's house in Jackson, Mississippi, on errands for her mother, and in doing business with the friendly grocer, Mr. Sessions (a pseudonym) , who owned it. She recalls that even though the Sessionses lived in a room above the store, she seldom saw them together as a family. Then, one day, the whole family suddenly vanished: "There was some act of violence. The shock to the neighborhood traveled to the children, of course; but I couldn't find out from my parents what had happened" ( Eve 334) . Whatever happened Welty never says; but she does recall what the experience meant to her: We weren't being sent to the neighborhood grocery for facts of life, or death. But of course those are what we were on the track of, anyway. With the loaf of bread and the Cracker Jack prize, I was bringing home intimations for pride and disgrace, and rumors and early news of people coming to hurt one another, while others practiced for joy--storing up a portion for myself of the human mystery. ( Eve 334-35) Whether this experience influenced Welty' s fictional treatment of family violence is impossible to prove. But that the disappearance of the Sessions family was an influential event in her life seems beyond doubt, for in this essay, published some fifty years or so after the event, Welty recalls an incident in which people who should have loved one another come instead to hurt one another. But if in much of her fiction Welty expresses her concern about how people violate one another, she nevertheless realizes that most people need other people, and that relationships, especially within a family, can often be nurturing.
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