Term Paper on "Eudora Welty Analyzing"

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Eudora Welty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another of Welty's short stories, entitled "Why I Live at the P.O." reflects both Eudora Welty's personal familiarity with and understanding of small-town life, and the encroachment of people's lives on one another within a tightly-knit (in this case, a too tightly-knit) community. "Why I Live at the P.O." is narrated by the elder of two sisters, who is called simply "Sister" throughout the story. "Sister," as she tells us, has, as the story opens, is looking back on events of the recent past,… READ MORE

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