Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition

Water, Wanderers, and Weddings: Going to Naples and to No Place

133 Water, Wanderers, and Weddings Going to Naples and to No Place Jane Austen needed very little space, very limited material, to work with; asking for little seems immoderate to us. Given: a household in the country, then add its valuable neighbor—and there, under her hands, is the full presence of the world. As if coming in response to a call for good sense, life is at hand and astir and in strong vocal power. At once there is convenient and constant communication between those two houses. The day, the week, the season fill to repletion with news, arrivals, speculation, and fresh strawberries , with tumult and crises, and the succeeding invitations. Everybody doing everything together—what mastery she has over the scene, the family scene! The dinner parties, the walking parties, the dances, picnics, concerts, excursions to Lyme Regis and sojourns at Bath, all give their testimony to Jane Austen’s ardent belief—which our century’s city-dwellers find odd— that the unit of everything worth knowing in life is in the family, that family relationships are the natural basis of all other relationships. (“The Radiance of Jane Austen,” Eye 6–7). I n “Moon Lake,” Easter, Nina, and Jinny Love approach an old boat hidden in the vines in a forbidden part of the shore. To get to it they have to transgress a barbed wire fence, fight their way through Water, Wanderers, Weddings: Going to Naples and to No Place 134 fierce vines, and tromp through treacherous mud. As they near the boat they see a snake drop off into the water, perhaps another one swimming in it; even though she can’t swim, Easter jumps eagerly into the old boat and trails her fingertips into the surface of the mysterious waters. Jinny Love is fearful: her “long oval face” goes “vacant” when she sees Easter, the boat, the lake: “I don’t choose to sit myself in a leaky boat,” she says: “I choose the land” (Stories 427), whereon she plants herself firmly, building a sand castle over her foot, keeping safe from the “stobs in the lake” that she fears would upset them if they take a boat ride (428). Nina works hard for the ride: “Firming her feet in the sucking, minnowy mud, [she] put[s] her weight against the boat” and pushes away from the shore, “determined to free it.” The land struggles to hold her back: “Soon her legs were half hidden, the mud like some awful kiss pulled at her toes. . . . Roots laced her feet, knotty and streaming” (428). When she finally pushes the boat free, she and Jinny Love get in. Welty sexualizes the scene with the snakes, the stobs, and Nina’s meditation on a pear, “beautiful, symmetrical, clean pears with thin skins . . . with snow-white flesh so juicy and tender that to eat one baptized the whole face, and so delicate that while you urgently ate the first half, the second half was already beginning to turn brown. . . . She even went through the rhyme, ‘Pear tree by the garden gate, How much longer must I wait?’—thinking it was the pears that asked it, not the picker” (428–29). All three girls are on the verge of adolescence, Easter getting there ahead of Nina and Jinny Love, and the scene displays their varying attitudes toward the changes that are coming, the mixture of eagerness and anxiety . The scene closes when, all three in the boat, they discover that it is chained to the land: they are not yet ready to float free on the complex depths of adolescence and adulthood. Moon Lake offers possibility, change, romance, escape: it’s where Miss Moody, in a boat in the middle of the lake, goes to “hug” her dates. But it’s also mysterious, treacherous: “If they let their feet go down, the invisible bottom of the lake felt like soft, knee-deep fur. The sharp hard knobs came up where least expected. . . . The alligators had been beaten out of this lake, but it was said that water snakes—pilots—were swimming here and there. . . .These were the chances of getting sucked under, of being bitten, and of dying three miles away from home” (415). Water, Wanderers, Weddings: Going to Naples and to No Place 135 Mrs. Gruenwald warns the campers against letting “the stobs and cypress roots break your legs” and the girls with parents want “the...