- Eudora Welty’s “A Curtain of Green”: Overcoming Melancholia through Writing
“A Curtain of Green,” the title story of Eudora Welty’s first collection, may not be one of Welty’s best known short stories, and readers may easily overlook it due to the other more memorable works in Welty’s 1941 collection. Welty admits that the reason the short story was chosen as the title for the book was because it “was the only story that there wasn’t a strong feeling about from everybody” (“Fiction” 18). Yet the story is equally as complex and well written as the others. Welty sets the majority of the stories in A Curtain of Green in the late nineteen-twenties to early nineteen-forties South, and the title story is no exception. Scholars who have analyzed the link between Welty and the time period in which she was writing contribute greatly to Welty studies and to the interpretation of “A Curtain of Green.”1 However, using a different approach and viewing Welty from a feminist perspective, the reader can gain new insight into the actions of Mrs. Larkin, the main character in the story. Mrs. Larkin’s garden-work exemplifies what Hélène Cixous calls écriture feminine.2 It is through her gardening as écriture feminine that Mrs. Larkin is able to break through the state of melancholia that has plagued her for over a year.
Cixous calls women to writing when she states: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies—the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text—as into history—by her own movement” (“Laugh” 2039). The writing that Cixous demands of women should not be limited only to the confines of pen and paper—those are the demands of writing as defined by the patriarchy. Women must find additional ways to write their bodies. Cixous explains, “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded—which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist” (2046). Since there is no defined feminine writing, women are able to think outside the restrictions of paper and pen and are free to write creatively through other means. Alice Walker writes in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens of her mother as an artist; she explains that her mother [End Page 21] used her garden and flowers to express herself and her own concept of beauty. She states, “I notice that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye” (241). Much like Walker’s mother, Welty’s mother created art through her garden. Suzanne Marrs quotes Chestina Welty, saying, “creating a garden is much like painting a picture or writing a poem, and artists and poets often make lovely gardens. But sometimes we less articulate folks, who can neither paint pictures nor write poems, yet feel the need of expressing ourselves, find a garden a happy medium” (One 6). Marrs also draws the correlation between Chestina Welty’s work in her garden and Eudora Welty’s fiction writing (6). Cheryll Burgess sees gardening as comparable to writing when she says, “Mrs. Larkin, in the title story, ‘cutting, separating, thinning and tying back … the clumps of flowers and bushes and vines,’ parallels in her gardening the task of a writer: editing, organizing, deleting, and controlling her words and sentences and paragraphs” (134). Just as Walker’s and Welty’s mothers created art through their flower gardens, Mrs. Larkin can be seen as an artist working diligently to write her body by creating art in her garden.
Mrs. Larkin’s neighbors understand neither Mrs. Larkin nor the arrangement of her garden. Since the death of her husband, Mrs. Larkin has lost herself; she serves as the “stranger on display” to the various women in the neighborhood who stare down at her in disgust (for...