Sexual Politics in Welty's "Moon Lake" and "Petrified Man"

SEXUAL POLITICS IN WELTY'S "MOON LAKE" AND "PETRIFIED MAN" Price Caldwell Mississippi State University In 1982 Patricia Yaeger, probably the most influential of the feminist critics of Eudora Welty, asked an important question: How should we read phallic imagery when it is incorporated within women's texts? If the phallus is, as Lacan suggests, the central signifier of patriarchal culture, is the woman writer who gives phallic imagery a prominent place in her fictions reinstating our culture's patriarchal orientations?1 In the case of Eudora Welty, she says, the simple answer to that is no: in "Moon Lake," Welty "explores the ways in which the dominant sex/gender system erases woman's past and endangers her future ." The story "describes the ways in which these young women, barely aware of their own sexuality, begin to adjust to even before they can react against a male-dominated world."2 According to Yaeger, Welty has used phallic imagery to render the whole landscape an image of the dominant patriarchal system. First the orphan Easter, the one self-sufficient female in the story, nearly drowns in the lake Yaeger says has been inscribed with masculine imagery; then she is rescued by the Boy Scout, whose administration of artificial respiration is perceived as a kind of rape. According to Yaeger the episode means that Easter's self-sufficiency is a threat to the masculine order, and therefore she must be brutalized into submission. This "rape," she says, "defines Easter's rite of passage from an active, androgynous life to the stunted and conventional life defined by a masculine hierarchy."3 Citing Gayle Rubin's Lacanian formula, she concludes that "the creation of 'femininity' in women in the course of socialization is an act of psychic brutality that leaves in women an immense resentment of the suppression to which they were subjected."4 The phallus, Yaeger says, is the "mark of privilege which not only validates the repression of woman, but signifies her inferiority to man."5 It is possible that this is true; certainly Yaeger is not alone in this perception. But it needs revision in one important respect: in Welty's stories this evil is not one which has somehow been imposed on modern culture by the patriarchs. Rather, this perception of evil is a sign of the paranoia of the culture out of which it comes. For the culture Eudora Welty describes is matriarchal, not patriarchal, and "Moon Lake" portrays young girls in the process of being socialized as women by women. 172Price Caldwell It does not require a particularly close reading to see that what threatens the little girls is not the "masculine principle" Yaeger says is "inscribed in [the] landscape,"6 for the "inscribing" is done by Mrs. Gruenwald, who tries to turn the real sensuality of the lake into a silly, nearly genderless, "Mr. Dip." "Good morning Mr. Dip, Dip, Dip, with your water just as cold as ice!" sang Mrs. Gruenwald hoarsely. She took them for the dip, for Miss Moody said she couldn't, simply couldn't.7 Comically, Nina Carmichael rejects this metaphoric denial of the sensuous reality of the lake in favor of an equally sexless tea-time metaphor: she thinks of the water as having "the temperature of a just-cooling biscuit, thank Goodness" (p. 343). But Welty describes the lake with strongly erotic imagery that is at least as feminine as it is masculine: "Gee we think you're mighty nice," they sang to Mr. Dip, gasping , pounding their legs in him. If they let their feet go down, the invisible bottom of the lake felt like soft, knee-deep fur. The sharp hard knobs came up where least expected. The Morgana girls of course wore bathing slippers, and the mud loved to suck them off (p. 345). It should be clear that what will cause psychic harm to these girls from Morgana is not their real experience with this sensuous lake but Mrs. Gruenwald's dishonest efforts to remove the sensuousness of it. The only one who is not victimized by this program is Easter, the orphan who has no mother but does have the advantage of not having been...