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  • One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty
  • Sarah Ford (bio)
Suzanne Marrs, One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. xix + 280 pp. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Suzanne Marrs begins her comprehensive examination of Eudora Welty's work by discussing Welty's close and complicated relationship with her mother, a relationship containing conflicts that "paradoxically stemmed from the deep love mother and daughter felt for each other" (3). This proves to be an appropriate beginning, as Marrs then broadens her investigation of Welty's world from that of her immediate family and close friends in Jackson to larger cultural forces and historical events. By detailing the context of Welty's fiction, Marrs shows in One Writer's Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty how Welty transforms the events and people around her through her imagination. Imagination, Marrs argues, "thus becomes a subject as well as a source of her stories, a subject and a source drawn from her most profound contemporary experiences" (20).

The contemporary experiences that Marrs investigates shift from chapter to chapter as she examines individual works. At times the context is personal and made up of Welty's individual experiences, her close friends, and family. For example, in the chapter on A Curtain of Green, Marrs details the actual events Welty used in writing her story "A Whistle." While staying at a friend's house in Utica, Mississippi, in the 1930s, Welty heard a whistle warning farmers of an impending freeze. At other times the context is the general historical time period. The chapter on The Robber Bridegroom, for example, details Welty's intense preoccupation with the war in the 1940s while she was writing the work. Concern for the problems caused by fascism finds its way into Welty's examination of nineteenth and early twentieth century Mississippi. Marrs writes, "Welty may or may not have recognized the political relevance of her seemingly apolitical stories. The relevance is there nonetheless and is tribute to the transforming power of her imagination" (55). Examining the context, whether personal or political, always leads Marrs to argue for the primacy of Welty's imagination.

The focus on context in the book at times leads Marrs to support traditional readings of texts as, for example, in her chapter on Losing Battles. Marrs examines the context of the Depression and the influence of agrarian values in the 1930s and concludes, "Thus, in Losing Battles, Welty allies herself with [End Page 137] traditional agrarian values while at the same time she sympathetically depicts modernist opposition to them" (209). The concern with agrarian values in Losing Battles is certainly already part of the scholarship, although Marrs adds ample evidence for this reading in her examination of the context. At other times in the book, the focus on context leads Marrs to suggest new readings, as in her chapter on Delta Wedding. By paying close attention to the context of World War II, Marrs is able to counter the critics of the novel who suggest that it is a nostalgic treatment of a racist southern past. Marrs shows that the emphasis in the book on family, love, and life's beauty is a direct reaction to the devastation of war.

The one possible flaw in this study is that often we could use more connections between the context and the text. For example, the chapter on Delta Wedding ends with an interesting close reading of Partheny's spells contrasted with the white family's dismissal of their dangerous nature, which Marrs sees as an "implicit indictment of racism" (96). She then, however, quickly connects this indictment with the racist atrocities being committed by the Nazis and then too quickly concludes that "Welty portrays the attitudes that along with greater economic opportunity had led many black Mississippians to emigrate northward during the war years and that ironically failed to match the nobility of the American crusade again [sic] Nazism" (96-97). Marrs's close reading of Partheny certainly adds to her argument that Welty's novel answers concerns raised by the war, but the specific connections here are too undeveloped.

The great strength...

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