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120 4 HYPNOTIZED LIKE SWAMP BUTTERFLIES IN DELTA WEDDING Virginia Woolf’s spirit permeates almost every page of Delta Wedding. Laboring to transform a long short story,“Delta Cousins,”into her first fulllength novel,1 Welty drew technical and thematic inspiration from Woolf— particularly from To the Lighthouse, a novel Welty claimed “opened the door” and so astonished her when she first read it that she “couldn’t sleep or eat”(Kuehl 75).Welty deeply venerated Woolf, a passion that John Crowe Ransom detected in his review of Delta Wedding, where he claimed that Welty “resembles Virginia Woolf more than does any other novelist of my acquaintance” (504). This assessment was later echoed by Ruth M. Vande Kieft in her inaugural book-length study of Welty (76). However, these passing remarks were not thoroughly elaborated until the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when Louise Westling’s Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens, Michael Kreyling’s Author and Agent, and Suzan Harrison’s Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf together developed a forceful case for Delta Wedding’s debt to the Bloomsbury writer. Westling’s and Harrison’s analyses supply cogent examinations premised on correspondences between plots, characters , themes, genres, and styles that demonstrate a clear line of influence, but neither commentator explicitly addresses Welty and Woolf’s deployment of visually charged language, the primary means by which Welty creates and sustains her surreal literary effects. Of the analyses cited, only Kreyling’s includes a discussion of Welty’s and Woolf’s use of visual language. He advances the claim for inheritance by observing that Welty revised “Delta Cousins” into Delta Wedding in the context of her “rereading of Woolf in the Spring of 1944” (Author 108). Employed by the New York Times Review of Books in the summer of that year, Welty reviewed Woolf’s posthumous publication, A Haunted House hypnotized like swamp butterflies in delta wedding 121 and Other Stories, noting what Kreyling defines as the “primarily visual” quality of Woolf’s prose. Indeed, the review, entitled “Mirrors for Reality,” teems with comparisons of writing and painting, anticipating Welty’s statements documenting her own artistic philosophy in“Writing and Analyzing a Story” and “Place in Fiction.”According to the review,Woolf’s stories act like “spider webs” that collect “living morsels in the form of palpitating moments of time” to reveal“instantaneous perceptions” and“brief visions.” Her prose transforms “[t]he scent, the gesture, the breath on the lips, the sound of the hour striking in the clock, the rippling texture of the surface in the moving air” into the “colored reflections of the abstract world of the spirit, the matter that mirrored the reality.” Moreover, Welty concentrates on Woolf’s technical decision to represent “palpitating life” through the device of the remove, formalizing materiality indirectly, as if “seen in a mirror.” Welty cautions,“perhaps this treatment is given to a view of life which may well be too intense for us not to watch it through a remove of some kind.” Woolf’s frame, then, shows its subject remotely represented, with a level of obliquity that “gives its own dimensions to objects in view, and elongation, foreshortening, superimposition are all instruments of the complicated vision which wants to look at truth” (26). This focus upon obliquity—or the strategy of the remove—leads to Welty’s consideration of Woolf’s work in the context of impressionism: “And in the delineation of character and in detail she makes one think of painting.We are likely to see profile and full face and reflection and dream-image simultaneously” (27). Having zeroed in on one of the stories in the collection for closer consideration , she concludes by supplying a pellucid examination that anatomizes Woolf’s sighting of her subject and the subjectivity of sight: Here, like a technique of a technique, is the writer writing before her own eyes. Here are her word-pictures and word-sketches, mounting as if of themselves, in lists, parentheses, impatient naming of brief participants, all spaces filling with trees, colors, streets, furniture, seasons, objects on a table; choices of deed and character made, as they arise, before the eye; the helpless and magical building up and developing of a moment or scene along the way and its dissolving and ironical elimination which progress with the journey. A world complete with all its people and its objects the writer draws up about the twitching Minnie, as if compelled, desiring to see in this...

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