"Put Banner on the map!": Knowledge, Power, and Colonialism in Welty's Losing Battles

In a 1977 discussion with Eudora Welty about the importance of place in southern life and fiction, interviewer Jean Todd Freeman mentioned the map printed in the front pages of Delta Wedding.¹ Welty responded by commenting, "Well, that was just done as a decoration by Doubleday. But maps—they're of the essence. I drew my own map for Losing Battles" ("Interview" 180). Despite its importance to Welty, thus far there has been little critical discussion of the significance of the Losing Battles map. The map that Welty places in the front pages of the novel focuses on Banner and its surrounding community, highlighting locations that are central to the novel's events and stories, such as the home of Granny Vaughn and the Renfros, Banner Top, the Bywy River, and the saw mill track. Directional North is indicated at the top of the map, but the map also orients Banner in relation to surrounding communities that play a large role in the family's memories and stories with arrows pointing in the directions of Ludlow, Alliance, and Foxtown. The focus of the Losing Battles map is noteworthy when considered in the context of the Beecham-Renfro memories of their education and specifically of the map of the world that Miss Julia Mortimer "kept ... hanging up year in, year out" (712). When the schoolroom map is mentioned at the reunion, the family's immediate response is to recall that "we're not on it" and repeat in chorus Miss Julia's exhortations to "Put Banner on the map!" (712).

In this essay, I use postcolonial theories of cartography and education to investigate the role of maps in Losing Battles and, more broadly, the relationship between the construction of knowledge and power in the novel. I argue that the absence of Banner from the schoolroom map is emblematic of the absence of the Banner community's insights and ways of knowing from the teaching philosophy of Miss Julia Mortimer and the educational system she represents. Particularly illuminating as a springboard for my study is the scholarship of cartographer J. B. Harley, who maintains that "Both in the selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles of representation, maps are a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations" (278). Other theorists have built upon Harley's insights in examining how oftentimes official "maps have stood at odds with individual memories, with drastic consequences for individuals struggling to reconcile lived experience with cartographic narratives" (Mallot 261). In analyzing how South Asian postcolonial writers have utilized creatively envisioned maps within novels, J. Edward Mallot asserts, "If maps were once the weapons of the imperial project, they can also serve as tools for a postcolonial future; to do so, however, they must accept and appropriate the undeniable intersections between memory and place" (283). The characteristics that Mallot identifies in the maps of postcolonial novelists are equally present in the Losing Battles map. In the context of the territorial struggle over land, power, and knowledge depicted in the novel, Welty's choices to literally "Put Banner on the map" in the opening pages of Losing Battles and to validate the community's ways of knowing throughout the text have major implications that merit further study.

Michael Kreyling and other scholars have discussed the limitations of readings of Losing Battles proposed by those "who believe the novel to be a case made on behalf of Mortimerism, the passionate dedication to education as the remedy for all the hardship and ignorance that numbered the days of the rural Southern farmer in the modern world" (639). As yet, however, there has been little extended exploration of Miss Julia's educational methods and their significance in the social and political landscape of the novel, although the political implications of Welty's novel have been recognized. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw notes that

As she worked on the writing of Losing Battles over fifteen years, from "a long story about the country" completed by...