Eudora Welty Research Fellowship, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Summer 2012

My current research is focused on the figure of the ugly woman in southern literature. In the work of Eudora Welty, I am intrigued by the variety of female characters that run the gamut from the outrageously grotesque to the more mundanely ugly—those who lack the physical beauty so often connected to traditional ideals of southern womanhood. When I started my research in the Welty archive, my intention was to focus primarily on the drafts of the A Curtain of Green stories as well as selected correspondence. I had been interested in the stories in that specific collection for the variety of images of ugly women that appear throughout. My hope was to compare the published edition of the stories with the manuscripts and drafts in the archive to see how these descriptions evolved over the course of Welty’s writing process. In her correspondence, I hoped to find evidence of Welty’s own thoughts on physical appearance or perhaps even ugliness. I was familiar with the story of Welty once telling Reynolds Price, “You don’t know what it’s like to live behind this face,” as well as the story of Katherine Anne Porter telling her, “You’ll never know what it means to be a beautiful woman” (qtd. in Marrs 566). Given these tantalizing comments, I hoped to find similar statements in her correspondence.

While plenty has been written about the role of the grotesque in the work of southern writers such as Welty, much less has been written specifically about ugliness. Further, scholars often conflate categories such as ugly, grotesque, abject, and freakish, categories that I think should be differentiated from each other, while keeping in mind how they might inform each other. Going into this project, it was my working hypothesis that the frequent appearance of ugly women in the work of southern women writers—especially that of Welty—signals a challenge to idealized notions of southern womanhood, those rooted in nineteenth-century models of unattainable virtue. Ugliness in this work often functions as a physical embodiment of a history of sexuality and violence.

Sarah Gleeson-White claims that A Curtain of Green and Other Stories is the text in which Welty is most concerned with ugliness, so that was my focus in looking through her manuscripts. I did, however, look at others, including the stories from The Wide Net collection and the unpublished story “The Alterations” (a suggestion made by several people during the discussion after my presentation at the Archivestalk, which I found to be quite helpful). It has been my contention that, in quite a bit of Welty’s work, ugliness does more than simply form a challenge to traditional gender roles. Rather, I think that in Welty’s work, ugliness “catches” the reader, so to speak. Scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Elaine Scarry, who write about what makes someone’s appearance freakish or “stareable,” often characterize such visages as “catching” the viewer’s attention (Scarry 29; Garland-Thomson 3). Images are stareable because they don’t fit our expectations, and so they require the viewer to come up with a story to explain what has happened. While plenty has been written about the Medusa imagery throughout Welty’s work—imagery that can certainly be characterized as ugly—and the subsequent theme of petrifaction, my reading of the Medusa imagery is that it thematizes this petrifying effect in these texts. Such petrifaction occurs not only between characters in stories—such as between the narrator of “A Memory” and the fat woman on the beach—but also between the reader and the text, as one is faced with what can be discomfiting imagery.

A big surprise for me in reading the drafts of these stories was discovering that many of the markers that signify this kind of intersubjective space—between characters as well as between the reader and text—were not present in early drafts. For example, in “Why I Live at the P. O,” it is not until a later draft that Mr. Whitaker’s “Pose Yourself” business appears: earlier, he is...