The Problem of Time in Welty's Delta Wedding

THE PROBLEM OF TIME IN WELTY'S DELTA WEDDING Douglas Messerli" Perhaps more than any other of Eudora Welty's novels Delta Wedding, published in 1946, most clearly presents her preoccupation with time. However, the characters central to this novel, especially those who are blood members of the Fairchild clan, seem to be oblivious to time and its effects. As Louis Rubin notes of characters in all of Welty's works, "they do not contend with time; instead they pretend that it does not exist."1 But this pretense is misleading, for the Welty characters who are "intruders" in the Delta home of the Fairchilds are very much aware of the problem of time and even within the pretense the Fairchilds, in their moments of separate awareness, relate differently to time. As a group, however, the Fairchilds resist time and, for that matter, anything outside of themselves. Like the Renfros of Losing Battles, the Fairchilds are one of those large Mississippi families of Welty's fiction whose love is boundless to those within the family structure, but who simultaneously use that active love as a shield to protect themselves from the world at large. The Fairchilds of Delta Wedding have almost succeeded in realizing Sutpen's dream in Faulkner'sAbsalom, Absalom! of creating a cosmos peopled by sons, daughters, uncles, aunts and other relatives who in their similarity of appearance, ideology, and emotional temper repeat one another over and over again, insuring in that repetition—in that complete oneness—a sort of immortality for each member of the clan. In their insularity death is not observed. In the homes at Shellmound and the Grove, portraits of the Fairchild greatgrandparents , the Delta settlers, hang imposingly, seeming as alive for Laura McRaven and Robbie Reid as is all the past for the Fairchild Aunt Shannon, who in her dialogues with the dead confuses past names and events with present, and for whom "boys and men, girls and ladies all, the old and theyoung of the Delta kin—even the dead and the living . . .—were alike—no gap opened between them."2 But the Fairchilds are not primarily a family which remembers the past for that would entail the recognition of change and of difference, "Douglas Messerli teaches at the University of Maryland. He has published Djuna Barnes: A Bibliography and Index to Periodical Fiction as well as a number of scholarly essays. He is currently working on a biography of Djuna Barnes. 228Douglas Messerli and would destroy the type of immortality made possible by the uniformity of the family and its descendente. For the most part the Fairchilds live without a past or a future. They are a people caught up in present action to such a degree that the flux of time seems to stand still. As Laura, the newly motherless cousin who comes to live with them, observes: They were never too busy for anything, they were generously and almost seriously of the moment: the past (even Laura's arrival today was past now) was a private, dull matter that would be forgotten except by aunts. Laura from her earliest memory had heard how they "never seemed to change at all" (p. 15). However, as Laura suspects, the Delta family is not free in its actions ("Laura was certain that they were compelled—their favorite word" [p. 15]), and for a young girl whose journey from Jackson up to the Delta plantation presages the journey she must make mentally to partake of the insular Fairchild love, this compulsion to act, this uncontrollable whirl of quick and instant fluctuations which in its oblivousness to time seems to exclude her, is rather frightening. Her ties are not yet severed with the past. As Welty suggests, unlike the Fairchilds, "Laura remembered everything" (p. 7). As an outsider Laura is very much aware of time and the separation from loved ones that time can cause, a heavy burden of awareness for a nine year old. As she arrives at the Fairchild home, she vomits, demonstrating her fears of the awesome struggle to re-enter a world where she is loved. To Laura that love is still unconditional, a love that she innately understands in...