“He doesn’t strike me as a family man”: Uncloseting George Fairchild’s Queerness in Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding

In his review-essay “Welty Studies at the Millennium,” Axel Nissen declares, quite rightly, that in order for Welty scholarship to grow and flourish, scholars should strive to discover and explore the rich variety of what he calls “new Weltys” including, but certainly not limited to, “a camp Welty, a queer Welty, a black Welty, a working-class Welty, a lesbian Welty” (318). According to Noel Polk, these manifestations, while difficult to accept, are nevertheless necessary for us to truly understand the width and depth of Welty’s fiction. Polk observes,

By reading her through such so-called “southern” filters as place, humor, race, history, and the grotesque, our critical vocabulary, our cultural assumptions, have protected us from the parts of Welty’s work that might unsettle and threaten us since they are actually subversive of those so-called “values” of family and community—“place”—that are so much a part of what we have been taught to think of as central to “southern” literature.

(19)

I find Nissen’s “queer Welty” conception particularly useful because it both critiques and reimagines the traditional southern family values mentioned by Polk that are also prominent in Welty’s obliquely lighthearted Fairchild family novel, Delta Wedding. In fact, while Delta Wedding contains explorations of numerous fraught terrains such as class, domesticity, feminism, progress, and marriage, one of its most subversive themes is the uncloseting of postwar southern queerness. This article demonstrates how Welty effectively queers one of her preeminent male characters, Delta Wedding’s legendarily “sweet” George Fairchild, in order to depict—and surreptitiously normalize—transgressive sexuality while also critiquing overarching, postwar-American normative family values.

Delta Wedding’s appearance on the literary scene in 1946 coincided with the beginnings of the American Cold War era, a time in which there was growing general acceptance of what Alan Nadel calls the “virtue of conformity—to some sort of religion, to ‘middle-class’ values, to distinct gender roles and rigid courtship rituals,” all of which became public knowledge through “pervasive performances of and allusions to containment narratives” (4). These national containment narratives were ostensibly scripted as part of an overarching ideological campaign by government operatives to both foment constant hyper-vigilance against “commies and queers” and promote a unified, coherent American identity.

The South, however, was also a particular target of these narratives because of its historical exceptionalism and concomitant resistance to “American assimilation.”¹ Americans writ large raised suspicious eyebrows over the South’s regional quirkiness, its laissez-faire attitude toward difference, its defiant separatist ethos, and its tacit acceptance of non-normativity, all of which threatened American ideological cohesiveness. Indeed, as historian John Howard points out, even in uber-conservative postwar-era Mississippi,

homosexuality and gender subordination were acknowledged and accommodated with a pervasive, deflective pretense of ignorance. At mid-century, to be labeled queer meant to be cast as different in any number of more or less threatening ways—from peculiarities of speech, manner, and daily habits to gender and sexual nonconformity.

(xi)

Not surprisingly, this acceptance of difference and non-normativity also found its way into southern literature. William Mark Poteet observes that even the most cursory glance at southern literature of the last century reveals a “plethora of ‘different’ characters, usually a family member who is always considered as much an important part of the family as the ‘normal’ members” (1). More to the point, Poteet adds, “Everybody in the South has a gay uncle—everybody” (1). In Delta Wedding, this particular uncle is George Fairchild, and by portraying him as unashamedly queer, Welty not only reimagines the South as a very queer region, she also defiantly challenges the pervasive ideology coursing through postwar American society.

Susan Donaldson, as well as other Welty scholars ranging from Peggy Whitman Prenshaw to Ann Romines and Louise Westling, points out that the world of Delta Wedding is “peculiarly female” (5).² In addition to its predominating femininity, this world is also decidedly queerly tinged. Indeed, the novel’s female cohort is almost uniformly dominating, creating a...