The South in Eudora Welty's Fiction: A Changing World

THE SOUTH IN EUDORA WELTY'S FICTION: A CHANGING WORLD Charles E. Davis* Eudora Welty has often expressed the belief that fiction must be firmly grounded in "place," a sense of specific locale. Regardless of the universality of her themes or the catholicity of her characters, the foundation of most of her stories is the setting, the culture peculiar to the South in general and Mississippi in particular. Though she does not develop and sustain a single fictional area such as William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, she repeatedly turns to the Delta region of Mississippi to provide that sense of place which is the basis of her work. No matter how unlimited the scope of one of Welty's characters, or how timeless the implications of his actions, he is first a Southerner. As Welty herself explains: "Paradoxically the more narrowly we can examine a fictional character, the greater he is likely to loom up. We must see him set to scale in his proper world to know his size. Place, then, has the most delicate control over character too: by confining character, it defines it."1 In general, readers have tended to underplay Miss Welty's characters' "proper world," the South, and have understandably concentrated on the methods by which she universalizes her themes. In 1944, three years after the appearance of A Curtain of Green, Robert Penn Warren published an article in The Kenyon Review in which he explored the theme of love and separateness in Welty's fiction. Warren's assertion that "the fact of isolation, whatever its nature, provides the basic situation of Miss Welty's fiction"2 has set the tone for themajority of subsequent criticism of Welty's novels and short stories. Critics have emphasized, quite rightly, that it is the frustration and alienation of individual human beings that is of concern in these stories. But in their zeal to protect Welty from charges of regionalism or from unfavorable comparison with her fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, they have often ignored and at times even denied the fact that central to her fiction "Professor Davis, who teaches at the University of North Carolina atGreensboro, has published on various aspects of Southern literature, especially on WiUiam Faulkner and Eudora Welty. He is currendy working on a book on the influence of Southwesternhumor on modern American fiction. 200Charles E. Davis is the persistent theme of the disappearance of the old South and the resultant rise of a new South. One of the most direct voices which reflects this attitude is that of Chester E. Eisinger in Fiction of the Forties: "Like Mrs. McCullers, she [Eudora Welty] shares in the southern tradition of the neo-conservatives, but her attitude toward the shape of southern society is, at best, passive. A defined social scheme is there in her work; it is a given. But it is hardly at the center of her concern as an artist. That center is occupied by an absorptionwith themystery of personality."3 In a perceptive essay concerning Welty's use of various myths in her work, William M. Jones describes certain of her stories as having a "Southern veneer ... so thick that the basic material [provided by mythic parallels] is hardly recognizable."4 Whatever Jones' intention, the word "veneer" implies that the South functions simply as a convenient setting for stories that have little or nothing to do with themes that are themselves distinctly Southern. Criticism of individual novels also indicates this same attitude. In their respective analyses of Delta Wedding, for example, John Hardy, Alfred Appel, and Ruth Vande Kieft all state basically similar postulates: the South as such is no major part of that novel's concern.5 It is clear that these critics are correct in asserting that the thrust of Welty's fiction is directed toward individual lives and that her themes are universal and timeless. But the total tone ofthe criticism to date is faintly apologetic. One may speak of Faulkner's Southern world without fear that he will be charged with regionalism, but Welty's stories continue to be discussed as "transcending locale." Surely her reputation is firmly enough established that there is no need to assert the...