Mississippi Quarterly (review)

Published just in time to be distributed at the Eudora Welty Centenary Conference in Jackson this past April (2009), the Eudora Welty Centennial Supplement of the Mississippi Quarterly throws down the gauntlet to critics who have dismissed Welty as conservative, provincial, genteel, and nostalgic. The nine essays collected here by guest editor Pearl Amelia McHaney celebrate a writer far more daring and experimental than the diffident and politically disengaged spinster/obedient daughter portrayed by critics and journalists like Carolyn Heilbrun, Ann Waldron, and Claudia Roth Pierpont. Rather, the figure of Eudora Welty that emerges in these essays, as in the updated scholarly checklist from 1986 to 2008 and the long chronology of awards and honors won over her career, reveals a writer of dazzling narrative gifts, thoroughly engaged with her world’s most vexing political and philosophical issues and with the most experimental and avant-garde currents of twentieth-century literature and art. These essays together also do a real service in pointing out new directions being taken in Welty studies, especially in topics related to gender and sexuality, performance studies, critical race theory, memory, and postmodernism. Above all, what these essays argue is that Welty scholars have a great deal of work to do in reconstructing the cultural context of Welty’s fiction and nonfiction, whether that context be the culture of segregation in which she lived most of her life or the avant-garde art of Britain and Europe with which she quietly but firmly allied herself.

The most successful of the essays here arguing for Welty’s adventurous and adversarial credentials—by Tenley Gwen Bank, Deborah Clarke, Rebecca Mark, Suzanne Marrs, David McWhirter, Dina Smith, and Danièle Pitavy-Souques—are also those that are most interdisciplinary and the most willing to venture far afield from the more conventional corridors of literary criticism. Indeed, Marrs suggests in the issue’s opening essay, which serves as an introduction of sorts, that modernist art provided Welty with something like an adversary vocabulary for articulating the rage that Mississippi politics, embodied by the likes of Theodore Bilbo and Ross Barnett, provoked in her. Pablo Picasso’s double-sided profiles reminded her of segregationist duplicity, she told friends, and reading E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India seemed to evoke all too readily the harm wrought by Bilbo’s racist demagoguery. But nowhere was Welty more emphatic in her condemnation of segregation and racism than in her 1940 story “Powerhouse,” portraying a black jazz musician taking command of a white audience and thereby destroying all the stereotypes bolstering white supremacy. Marrs reads this story as arguably Welty’s most devastating condemnation of racism and segregation in a career that began with sensitive photographs of Mississippi African Americans in a white-dominated world—and it is highly significant that just as Powerhouse turns to jazz and the blues to undermine stereotypic assumptions of his white audiences, Welty herself resorted to the armory of twentieth-century art, literature, and music to unsettle, disrupt, and redefine acts of reading and readership itself.

In probably the best essay in the issue, McWhirter produces a compelling reading of the 1942 story “The Wide Net” as a critique and revision of high modernist narratives of masculine rites produced by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, stories of “men without women” seeking manhood in flights from sexuality and maternal reproduction. McWhirter offers a thoroughly persuasive overview of those fishing and hunting stories, particularly Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” as scripts for purifying and consolidating masculinity against the intrusion and threat of female sexuality and argues that Welty’s story parodies and restages those masculine rituals from a late modernist perspective distinctly critical of those high modernist tropes of archetype, myth, and ritual.

McWhirter’s essay captures the carnivalesque quality defining the best of Welty’s early work, as does, for that matter, the most daring and risk-taking essay in the issue, Mark’s own venture into performance art in her radical rereading of “Keela, the Outcast Indian...