Eudora Welty's Personal Epic: Autobiography, Art, and Classical Myth

The importance of fairy tale, legend, and myth, especially many aspects of classical myth, to the creation and understanding of fiction by Eudora Welty has been long recognized and widely accepted. Many of her works have been read in mythical terms, in particular her short fiction cycle The Golden Apples (1949); yet only a few critical efforts have extended the perspectives of myth to her entire canon, and even fewer have considered Classicism as central to her overall accomplishments.¹ Welty's work is vital to the contemporary transformation of the twentieth-century American and southern literary pantheon, so earlier considerations of her classical connections focus on feminine, if not feminist, retellings of ancient narratives. Although recent readings of Welty's fiction by way of female myths reveal much of its subtle beauty and cultural complexity, more may be discovered by re-reading her canon within the full contexts of the Classicism that informed the origins, accomplishments, and traditions of the Southern Renaissance.²

Certainly, feminist readers are right to contrast Welty's use of the Classics with that of her more traditional male role models such as William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren as well as with their modernist mentors such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. The classical intertextualities that form her fictions are employed more on the model of female modernists such as Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, or, closer to home, Katherine Anne Porter and Caroline Gordon. Yet Welty's fictional canon might be read as her Modernist epic of the self, much in the terms that Alan Williamson applied to Allen Tate's poetic oeuvre by defining this contemporary variant of the epic tradition as "that particularly modern form which views historical material entirely through the glass of private sensibility, fragmenting it as a series of lyrics rather than presenting it as a whole, as narrative" (714). Lyrical narratives rather than poetic lyrics are the individual aspects of her personal vision, while her canon is united in a quest for fulfillment as a woman and as an artist. These two aspects of Welty's art share much with male and female precursors alike in her recreation of American, southern, and Mississippi history by autobiographical, artistic, and classical means.

Although Eudora Welty did not have the rigorous classical training of academic colleagues learned in Greek and Latin in the Southern Renaissance, such as Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, her formal and informal education in the Classics was still substantial. Her memoir, One Writer's Beginnings (1984), recalls her immersion in mythical material almost from the time she began to read; certainly it dated from the sixth or seventh birthday when doting parents presented her with Every Child's Story Book, a compilation of "fairy tales . . . myths and legends . . . [and] history" (One Writer's Beginnings 8). English lessons at Jefferson Davis School and later French and Latin classes at Jackson Central High School confirmed the young Eudora's love for words and stories. Her high school Latin was strong enough to excuse her from assignments in order to tutor her less proficient classmates (Waldron 11). The Classics were still the center of college preparation in the early 1920s, and Central High's honoraries were organized around classical themes; for example, the club book in Welty's senior year was The Aeneid (Waldron 12). English, French, and Latin were once more her favorite classes at nearby Mississippi State College for Women, where Welty studied for two years before transferring to complete a degree in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1929 with a creative thesis, now lost (Waldron 41).

Evidently, the writer returned often to her favorite books in all three literatures and languages, or in translations, to mark transitions in her career (Waldron 183). For example, after completing The Golden Apples, her book most fully structured by classical allusion, Welty reread Homer's Odyssey in preparation for her first trip to Europe in 1949 by way of Italy and the Mediterranean (Marrs 145). An interesting byproduct of her reading and her travel is her somewhat...