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197 6 THE WILDNESS OF THE WORLD BEHIND THE LADIES’ VIEW IN THE BRIDE OF THE INNISFALLEN AND OTHER STORIES Long before her return from Europe to the United States in 1950, Welty had built a career out of confronting the wildness that roiled beyond what most women of her generation saw in the world. In fact, for the best part of her adult life—which then numbered forty-one years—her steady stream of fiction had made the dark recesses of human psychology its subject and its home. The 1955 publication of The Bride of the Innisfallen represented a continuation of this pattern. A student of the perverse, the cruel, and the brutal, and a champion of the heroic, the beautiful, and the elegiac, Welty challenged the ruse perpetrated on women whose parents, perhaps like those of the rueful protagonist in “A Memory,” had shown them “nothing in the world which was not strictly coaxed into place like a vine on our garden trellis to be presented to my eyes” (Stories 92). Against this systematic cultivation of women’s ignorance about the world, desire, men, and themselves , she had mounted an assault that fully participated in the revolution of consciousness that André Breton envisaged when he first leveled the institutions of bourgeois life in the “Manifesto of Surrealism,” a broadside underwritten by psychoanalysis and pledging the “resolution of these two states, dream and reality” into a“kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak” (14). Like the fantasist in“A Memory,”Welty used her fiction to enter a “dual life, as observer and dreamer,” and her conviction insisting on the permeability of consciousness produced a body of work that shows a profoundly surrealist sensibility at work (Stories 93). “No Place for You, My Love” opens The Bride of the Innisfallen, presenting an intoxicating tour de force. This subtle yet electrifying story follows two anonymous strangers, a midwestern woman and a northeastern businessman , as they travel “south of South” (Stories 578). In a shabby rented 198 the wildness of the world in the bride of the innisfallen car they drive beyond New Orleans to a landing called Venice, at the “End of the Road” where at last bayou yields to the deep waters of the Gulf (570). Clues to this story’s composition under the influence of surrealism come from Welty’s critical essay, “Writing and Analyzing a Story,” which together with “Place in Fiction” establishes her criteria assessing fiction. In the former article,Welty selected“No Place for You, My Love” for extended examination, claiming that it“was a circumstantial, realistic story in which the reality was mystery” (779). This comment closely echoes similar assertions in the latter essay about the artist’s responsibility to make“reality real” (791) by developing a“cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving its impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader’s illusion ” (791–92). These statements reflect a general principle of surrealism, dictating that the artist has a duty to show reality’s mystery, ideally through the presentation of a powerful vision.When she contends that the narrative “was a circumstantial, realistic story” (“Writing” 779), she discloses only her starting point. The narrative reproduces circumstantial detail using more or less referential language, but it filters its contents through a surreal consciousness. “No Place for You, My Love” supplies an excellent vehicle for the expression of this approach, because it powerfully and persistently imbues whatever the strangers observe with the mood and tenor of their psychological preoccupations and idiosyncrasies. So forcefully does the narrative reflect the psychologies of both figures, in“Writing and Analyzing a Story” Welty argues “there had come to be a sort of third character along on the ride,” adding that this presence represents the relationship “between the two,”as well as the“domain”through which they pass. It also represents the role of “hypnosis”(777), forming the“straining, hallucinatory eyes and ears, the roused-up sentient being of that place.” “No Place for You, My Love” is one of the more prominent examples of a surrealist narrative in all of Welty’s fiction, because almost every line reveals what she calls the story’s “vain courting of imperviousness in the face of exposure.” At the narrative ’s deepest level, she reverses the convention through...

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